Kem's Robot Worldbuilding Yellhole Apparently

Discussion in 'Your Bijou Blogette' started by Kemmasandi, Sep 5, 2019.

  1. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    I'm yellin about robots again and since the fandom at large still gives me Anxiety I figured I might as well put it here. Might be some occasional stuff some from other fandoms, idk, I am not an Organized Person. I'm mostly doing OC shit everywhere that's not Transformers, but that usually goes on dA.
     
  2. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    And now courtesy of getting distracted for like an hour while I made that post, some basic worldbuilding-y stats shit for Rise. With a map for reference.

    Notes I couldn't fit on the spreadsheet--

    • Types of hive cities -- Flatlands hives are the classic hive city, a big built-up lump of city sticking up from the ground level, built on stable, solid flat land because otherwise you're asking for a catastrophic collapse. Ambiguated hives are spread-out cities with multiple smaller bits of hive; usually built when the underlying geology doesn't allow for a classic hive but there are bits and pieces where the geologists say "Good enough," OR alternatively the property developers don't want to spend money acquiring more land when they could just build up and the local government get dollar signs in their eyes because more people to tax. Hollow-mountain hives are exactly what they sound like, a mountain that's been hollowed out, reinforced, and stuffed full of people. A city with no hive looks like any large high-density human city.
    • Cities with a > next to the total population are those with large Underground populations, which are difficult to get an accurate census result from due to several factors, first among which is that the Imperial Government doesn't really want to spend the money on trying. The total given is the 'official' population; actual population might be much, much larger. (whispers) Like Kaon.
    • Cities claiming to be founded during the Dynasty of Primes were actually built on top of ruins left over from the Cataclysm. Their claim comes from founding charters which took the names of historical cities. Often the ruins in question were not in fact the actual sites of these namesake cities, the charter writers just picked the names for legitimacy points -- particularly when there was already a nearby city which might have laid claim to the land. Tyger Pax and the First City are the only cities known for sure to be built on top of their Dynastic namesakes, because Tyger Pax was the only city in that part of the Dynastic world and the First City has swallowed up the sites of at least five ancient ruins, one of which was definitely the Dynastic First City but no-one's sure if it was the one the charter-makers originally picked or not.
    • Number of Senate districts were set in most cases in the early Golden Age, have largely not been updated to reflect current populations, and have been gerrymandered to hell and back. Senators are theoretically democratically elected, but it's damn near impossible - by design - to vote below a certain caste level even when you're legally allowed to.
    Location-specific notes --
    • Pion started out as like a religious site in the middle of nowhere, became lousy with monks and assorted religious people, which attracted ancillary services to support the monks, but the people providing said ancillary services started wanting to get in on the monks' life because less strenuous labour, so various factions of monks started teaching these postulants religious dogma and sometimes academic stuff as well. Over time this system grew into about seven different 'original' universities and god knows how many other institutions that opened campuses in Pion because That Was Just What You Did. It survives mainly on student revenue, tourism, ripping off the upper classes in the name of Exclusivity, and increasingly frequent bailouts from various governments.
    • Vos is smack-dab in the middle of the Cybertronian equivalent of the Tibetan Plateau and mainly populated by the flight-capable, so it looks kinda like if you took a hollow-mountain hive, turned it inside out and then spread it across an enormous system of intermontane basins and ex-glacial valleys. Not many roads, lots of 'districts' of semi-separate communities built on and into the side of enormous mountains, mainly accessible by air. Who needs to build Towers when you already have mountains?
    • The Cataract looks like it should just be a district of Kaon, being completely surrounded by the Kaoni megacity, but originally it was the other way around -- Kaon started life as a satellite of the Cataract. The two cities still have separate charters and governments because the Cataract is where all the rich people go to pretend they're not living in the middle of the Southern Rust Belt and they don't want to share their shit with Kaon, and it suits Iacon to keep them separate for tax purposes. The only thing the two cities share is a single Alpha Towers clade, the Bladed Thunder.
     
    • Like x 1
    • Winner x 1
  3. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    *lurks down on this thread for the delicious tasty superb worldbuilding*
     
    • Agree x 1
  4. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    :'D

    I got distracted from writing out some stuff about Sentinel Prime and made a new spreadsheet for all the Towers clades. It's very much a work in progress because I'm picking all the clade names by rule of cool and also still trawling TFwiki for relevant bits. Mirage is supposed to be arriving in Rise soonish so it'll probably get more shit around then, lol.

    More notes--
    • Towers clades are divided into alpha rank - clades that were given their rank by a Prime - and beta rank - clades that were given their rank by a motion of the Senate. Alphas have certain rights that betas do not, a lot more titles and grants, and tend to be obscenely rich. Betas are usually subordinate to a particular alpha clan, have a lot fewer titles and grants, and also tend to have fewer clade members.
    • Most of the current crop of alphas go back to Nova Prime; a handful can trace their origin to the founding of the Empire. Most beta clades sprouted out of an alpha clade, via beloved servants or secret lovechildren or similar; usually an alpha clade takes a particular liking to some non-Towersmech, and petitions the Senate to raise that mech and their family to the Tier 1 ranking. More rarely, a misbehaving branch of an alpha clade might be demoted and given a new clade name, in a sort of Towers version of "This guy's not with me, I swear." Creation of a beta clade in either fashion is very rare, but in millions of years of history relative rarity counts for little. There are less than 100 alpha clades, but probably ten times that many beta clades.
    • Sentinel Prime was chosen to Ascend to the Primacy from the Guarding Star clade. Legally, he has no link to that clade anymore and it supposed to be an impartial leader, but in practice everyone knows that's bullshit. The Guarding Star were not a powerful clade prior to his Ascension; because of that, he was seen as a choice that would not throw off the Imperial balance of power too badly, as it might have were a mech from the then-dominant clades to be chosen, and also due to certain personal qualities most of the people doing the choosing were pretty confident that they had a decent chance of controlling him...
    • Each clade is loosely associated with a city-state - usually the one where their clade palace is located, but sometimes they move around and the association takes a while to catch up. Certain city-states have therefore ended up lousy with Towers, while others don't even have a beta clade in residence. Why would you choose to live in, say, Rodion, when Iacon is just up the road? (Cost of living aside.) And why would you choose to live in, say, Slaughter City, when literally anywhere else was an option? (And the flight of lesser Towers clades from collapsing economies across Cybertron was a concerning pattern throughout the Age of Rust, but it didn't come out of thin air.)
    • Large rich clades may also maintain branches in several cities -- the Cavalier Sun, for example, have two branches in Iacon (the clade kings and Elita's branch), one in Pion, and one in Praxus. Bladed Thunder, Kaon's only alpha clade, are based in Kaon but maintain a branch in Iacon for the sake of not being left out of the cool kids' club.
     
    • Like x 1
    • Informative x 1
  5. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    *shoves this into my face*

    am i correct in assuming that cybertronian economy in this setting was also not supposed to support QUITE that many alpha and beta clades ? It seems there's been a certain amount of bureaucratic and nobility sprawl that wasn't there (or at least not to the degree currently seen) when the system was established?
     
  6. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Hmmm... yes, more or less? Bear with me, I'm trying to figure out how to word my ideas as I go xD;

    The early Empire was intended to be more of a coalition government than it ended up being. Pre-Golden Age, Cybertronian society was divided into a whole bunch of rival princely states who paid tribute to the Primacy but otherwise ran their own states as they saw fit. When the Empire was founded, the rules of these states became the first Towersmecha - and there was no alpha/beta distinction back then - and their own noble castes became sort of a second-rank nobility, which was eventually folded into Tiers One and Two of the caste system as some of the first beta Towersmecha and a non-noble hereditary governing class. This class had a bit of an identity crisis from the beginning - some of them retained their old titles and roles, but the majority suddenly found themselves stripped of their old roles - these went to the new Alphas instead, or to mecha directly involved with the new government system - and simultaneously were assigned ranks too high to engage themselves in a lot of other occupations... so upper-class Cybertron now had a fuckton of people competing for a limited amount of Proper Jobs, and after that initial period of intense competition a lot of bored rich people with nothing much to fill in their day. Inevitably, this rank became a mess of social jockeying, bribery and fraud, Good Manners and Art being taken deadly serious, and murder most foul.

    Meanwhile, the Primacy and the new Imperial government was hard at work creating a new social order, via an imposed caste system (previously there was a complex class system which allowed for social mobility but especially among the upper classes was seen as a destabilizing influence, perhaps because of the amount of murder and backstabbing that went on among said upper classes...) and a new 'broadstream' of the Mythos, aimed at uniting the populace and eliminating the societal divisions the Quintessons had taken advantage of in the wars. Over time, the government centralized, the old coalition partners lost their power and died out, and that bored lower-government class expanded into an enormous web of bureaucracy and business interests. In the early Golden Age, successive Primes saw this class as a golden egg of potential tax and encouraged their growth, but later in the Age these mecha began to penetrate into the upper-government classes, and used their influence to do what else but avoid paying their taxes. (A time-honored tradition among the upper castes.) This coincided with the beginning of the Age of Rust, in which increasing economic instability, livings costs, and corruption among the governing classes began to rise, thanks to financial mismanagement by successive governments. These effects were exacerbated by the failure of several primary industry focus regions in quick succession. The government found substitutes, and leaned on the various offworld colonies, but these were only temporary solutions; by that time the real issue, economic mismanagement, was endemic.

    So: in theory, the economy should have been able to support the existing upper castes just fine, even if they did have a depressing tendency to heard obscene amounts of wealth -- but it's being constantly chopped off at the knees, underfed, and all the good managers keep getting fired because it makes the owners look bad.

    (This is Elita's main motivation in Rise, incidentally. She thinks the caste system is to blame, and she's partially right - but there's more to it than that.)
     
    • Informative x 1
  7. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    I’m like 90% sure the only reason it hasn’t already collapsed is because they haven’t had any natural disasters or wars or anything like that, so there’s this (fading, it must be said) perception that it’s business as normal, and the people that would like to object to ‘business as normal ‘ have been thoroughly barred from any sort of (legal) platform from which to spread their message. You have to go against the entire Empire to argue against its practices, and given how collectivist Cybertronian society is/was made, doing that is something a lot of people don’t want to even get near.
     
    Last edited: Sep 8, 2019
  8. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Alpha Trion has spent the entire Golden Age screaming internally.
     
  9. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    *popcorns intensely* well that 'no major catastrophe/war' thing is gonna be changing real soon. No wonder things collapses as thoroughly as they, it was a very unstable house of cards disguised as marble building all along
     
  10. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Megatronus, crashing the party:

    [​IMG]
     
    • Winner x 2
  11. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    No yelling about robots today but a friend linked me to this and this regarding BBC America's new The Watch series and oh god I am not filled with confidence
     
    • Agree x 1
  12. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    2.5k words into the next update and I was forced to make a Relevant Meme

    3ant88.jpg
     
  13. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Mlle wanted one too.

    3antf8.jpg

    I was gonna put Megatron's head on the guy but I couldn't find a decent frame of him smiling cutely lmao
     
  14. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    i can't wait to read more of orion's completely oblivious ass. do soudnwave and jazz have made bets on how long it's gonna take him to cotton on yet? Because at the rate he's going, megs is gonna have to physically pick him up, dump on a bed and do the robot equivalent of a striptease before anything's moving forward
     
    • Winner x 1
  15. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Soundwave, gesturing: points to Megs and Orion, makes an obscene gesture, puts a question mark up on his visor screen followed by a clipart-esque timer
    Jazz, tiredly: “Maybe by the heat death of the universe.”

    And Thunderblast and most of Soundwave’s symbionts are off in the corner with the Cybertronian equivalent of popcorn because who needs movies when you have these two dumbasses to watch???
     
    • Agree x 1
    • Winner x 1
  16. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Also I badly want to know what the robot equivalent of a striptease is. For Reasons.
     
  17. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    ...slowly inchwise reveal of sparkchamber? Bit of tempting glow along the edges of it... i totally didn't think about this in depth because of a partially transparent tf OC i'm having who moonlights as an escort

    Actual Striptease if you're rich enough for cloth?
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2019
    • Winner x 1
  18. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Oooh, I like that idea. Fine wirecloth if you can afford it, and expensive offworld stuff if you're really rich. And with the cloth option, putting it on in the first place would probably be part of the fun, haha. And now I'm wondering if I can find an excuse to make Megatronus actually do that at some point, because that would FUN.

    Today's headcanon document: a tentative school year for Orion's studies, because I realised I hadn't figured out how it actually went and it was starting to matter.

    Related Notes:
    • Lack of a defined growing or harvesting period - or even, really, the need to care about one due to having defined academic vs manual labor castes - means it made more sense to me to place holiday periods over winter. I may yet tweak the exact timing of the term start + end to better cover the midwinter points; I just had to put them approximately where they are because I already wrote Orion graduating at the end of autumn/beginning of winter lmao.
    • tbh I should probably figure out what winter actually means as well. The idea is that Cybertron's orbit is heavily elliptical, so seasons are based on how far the planet actually physically is from the sun rather than axial tilt -- although axial tilt plays a role too, so Iacon gets one winter (and part of spring too) where the sun doesn't rise at all and one winter where it kinda just does circuits of the skyline without setting. I dunno how realistic this orbital path is, but fuckit, TFs ain't exactly hard sci-fi.
    • The winters aren't actually the same length; deep winter is proooobably like a quartex longer on either side and high winter is shorter than marked, but the lunes still get marked as what they are because seasons on Cybertron mean not a hell of a lot in practical terms. tbh there are probably completely different terms for them linguistically, but that's getting into conlang territory and I've got too much of that to think about as is lol.
     
  19. Kemmasandi

    Kemmasandi Optimus Prime's disapproving eyebrows

    Slight gripe: I keep trying to read megop fics and damn near every time i either lose interest in the story for no apparent reason or I'm reminded why I stopped reading megop stuff in the first place. It's hard to ship a thing so much but also disagree with many of the people also shipping it on small but important aspects of characterization or whatever. Why do I gotta be so fuckin picky sdkjdgshg
     
    • Witnessed x 1
  20. TheOwlet

    TheOwlet A feathered pillow filled with salt and science

    I will love you forever if you manage to actually include megs stripping omg

    Also now i wanna plot out cybertronian seasons, hnnn
     
  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice