Intergalactic Summit

To be clear, he was berating YOUR people's beliefes. Not ours.

The Empire is twice the size of the Republic, is the point.

I don't think I need to fear his temper; I'm not planning on doing anything amazingly stupid on Tuesday.

Even if I was, I wouldn't be so idiotic as to advertise it here, of all places.

I'm not going to do anything amazingly stupid because, well, it'd be amazingly stupid—and not just because of the sheer level of futility involved, as I've already outlined. Rather, one of the most liberal possible choices for the Empire has won the throne. I'm optimistic that the new Empress will see that while slavery appears to be an economic windfall, compulsory labor is not actually efficient labor. Free people work harder for themselves than slaves do for their masters. I'm also optimistic that under her rule, the Empire will seek to expand its economic relationships with the Republic and the Federation.

I'm also not looking to do anything amazingly stupid because ultimately, Aldrith is right. If you want to change people, you cannot attack them with anything less than devastating amounts of force. The kind of overwhelming power that leaves them alive only because you choose to. And even then, you will have to burn everything to the ground and rebuild it. It will take generations of work. And there is no power in the cluster right now strong enough to do that to the Amarr Empire unless literally all three of the other empires joined forces to do it.

Even if it were feasible, it remains an option of last resort. Isn't the idea of a vastly more powerful group coming in and brutalizing a people just so they can have their way the very root of what we object to now? How would becoming the thing we hate—the savage, vicious, barbaric conquerors and destroyers of all the good, along with the bad—do anyone any good?

We have to continue to fight the slavers wherever we can, but we also need to work to improve the lot of our people at home. Long before we seek to attack the Empire itself, or kill the Empress as some kind of mad gesture intended to throw the Empire into chaos, we need to exhaust every other option we have to convince the Empire to look at itself and understand what continuing to rely on slave labor, no matter the excuse, is really costing its people in terms of their own spiritual health.

We can't just come at them like a horde of rabid fedo (before you ask, I have never seen one, and don't want to). Being aggressive and hostile makes people defensive. When people get defensive, they resist change, and become even more devoted to things they might have otherwise acknowledged they really weren't benefiting from, just because you want to take it away. Obviously, we all have our moments where something happens, and we react, and those reactions can be intemperate and hot-headed. When it happens, we should cop to it and hope the people we've attacked can understand, and find ways to patch up the rifts that it causes. What we shouldn't be doing is embracing that kind of hot-tempered, violence-before-all-else approach. It won't work. It just makes them oppose our goals harder.

What would quite likely happen is that the Federation would either honor its alliance, causing the State to honor theirs, and plunging 'high-security' space back into the kind of warfare even we 'monsters' in null don't engage in (starving planets, using freighters as near-extinction-level impact masses, etc), or the Federation might take advantage of the Empire's distraction to launch their own war against the State, producing largely the same results.

Meanwhile, the odds are very good that the Great Wildlands would boil over and the Amarr and Matari populations would annhilate one another. The Empire may be larger, but a much higher percentage of Matari are already militarized. More might well strike at the Empire from Federation space.

Either way, it would not leave any of the current Empires even close to 'intact'.

Or rationality and humanity, too.

Destabilizing the Empire would directly endanger his children.

It's widely understood that the immediate effect of ripping all the Minmatar slaves out of the Empire in the short term would the complete and total economic, cultural and industrial collapse of BOTH the Republic and the Empire.

When the Empire collapses it would, likely, take most of its Lord Holders and their families with it. Even if the Empire collapsed into anarcho-feudal satrapies, it would mean that Aldrith and his children and his children's children would likely be consigned to a life of raiding for resources and defending their resources from raiders while the situation boiled and frothed around them.

So, no, Aldrith doesn't see the collapse of his incredibly ancient home nation as an academic detail. The Amarr aren't like us, they like to change at their own pace. The Caldari and Minmatar are quite happy whipping up new nations in a couple of centuries and considering them stable - the Amarr aren't.

If you're going to make peace with them, you need to understand them a bit better. If you intend to beat them, that goes double.

That would be an example of prejudice.

Bigotry is the refusal to accept/tolerate the existence of opinions different from one's own.

If that is the truth then my statements were not directed towards you. I specifically referenced "freedom fighter" types - those who use violence to achieve the end of freeing legal slaves and destabilizing the Amarr Empire. I then used some colorful language in reference to them that was specifically meant to be inflammatory to draw them out so I could verbally beat them a bit more. I've gotten a bit bored during the quiet moments of my vacation here on Mishi, and I wanted something to keep myself occupied and motivated ahead of my return to duty tomorrow. I do not apologize for your misunderstanding, but I do praise you for wanting to stay on your side of the border and do something productive rather than destructive for your people. If only the original poster though like that.

I'll see the ones who do not think like you soon enough, however.

Also known as 'nuclear fusion'.

We also add rocket propulsion systems to the shells to keep them accelerating even after they leave the barrel. We call them 'Gyrojets'.

By the way, you can detonate chemical propellants in space for as long as they are sealed and they also contain molecules of oxygen in them. That's how our small arms function in vacuum. Back in the day, boarding action when it still was a thing involved decompressed bulkheads. To ensure that our shotguns and SMGs still function in those situations, we use chemical propellants whose constituent also included oxygen.

Finally, I seem to recall that the Parliamentary government was for all purpose defunct during the Elder War.