Talk:Mykarian Empire/@comment-3155949-20140108010640/@comment-4799917-20140111010738

The main problem I have with this miniaturizing situation is that you wouldn't just exploit each and every star system one by one. You would set up plants on say a hundred planets, quickly make plants on those, and colonize all the space you can in a few years. Even a low-technology race can claim territory and place ships on their borders before setting up settlements on every single planet. Russia owns the most land in the world - but very little of it is actually cityscape. Siberia is uncontested even though there are virtually no cities in its vast expanse. Same goes for mountain ranges and uninhabitable jungle or desert.

It would be exactly the same for spacefaring empires. Get an idea as to how far you can colonize properly, do all of that. You would most likely hold somewhere around a million systems before even contacting another race if you're lucky. Even with that, there would be a thousand empires in Andromeda alone, and I highly doubt that we're ever going to get that far.

Therefore, I propose an idea - keeping detail although not in ridiculous amounts. One idea on how this would work is you could separate an empire into sections of around one hundred to a couple tens of thousands, which we could refer to as simply "regions," for federal systems "territories" or "provinces," and for feudal systems "kingdoms," "viceroyalties," or "duchies," maybe words in the alien tongue as well. We would create an article for each region, and have an article for the capital system and its planets.

I understand that we want detail, but this would provide just as many articles and settings - if not more - while being far more realistic. If each empire has a cap of 30 systems, you would be lucky to find another habitable world, let alone another race. Even if it is just a bunch of unsettled land, it is claimed. Spain barely built any cities in the time that it took to colonize the entirety of the Spanish Main, only cities for trade and governing viceroyships. If you want multiple settings, you could make many different habitable planets with interesting lifeforms rather than just having the same cityscape over and over on colonized industrial uninhabitable worlds.

While I'm not so sure about the hardness of the sci-fi of this wiki, for the most part it seems to go hand-in-hand with these concepts. (Except for some of the pseudo-magic stuff, I'm personally going to stay away from that.)

It would also allow for the reintroduction of intergalactic empires, since you could write articles on each galaxy they inhabit, along with articles on the arms and their governments. Perhaps this would be going to far for just a small change, but in my opinion, intergalactic empires are far more fun to write and are rather realistic in this sort of sci-fi setting, in the case that they evolved far before any other intelligent lifeforms in the galaxy, laid claim to the entire place, eventually built up over the course of 600 years or so, and laid claim to even more galaxies, enforcing intergalactic borders with powerful ships and space stations, even ringworlds.