On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Tim <tim@little-possums.net> wrote:

So why should the Vilani species have the one government implied by
your statement "too large to control"?

It doesn't. It stopped growing just short of that point. Although - to go by the fact that the Terrans were able to find enough disaffected provinces to topple the central government - it really didn't, after all.

The people, planets, and
states don't need to be all under the control of the same central
authority.

For most races, they do. Or the race doesn't see itself as safe. A race fighting internally while restricted to one world/system and prior to alien contact is permissible. Doing so after it realizes there are A Lot Of Other Races Out There isn't.

Granted, this is an expansion of the view that Earth will only truly unite after an encounter with an actual alien species. But I think that's a fairly valid view. It's happened historically on a smaller scale often enough, when the "aliens" encountered were just another, slightly-different set of humans.

When it gets "too large", sure it might develop into
separate states, some on friendly terms and others not so much. That
seems perfectly natural.

It is. It's what would happen if the states in question did not consciously curtail their own growth. For instance, the United States stopped at 50 states and a batch of assorted territories. Why? It certainly wasn't *required* to do so. I submit that it did so - at least in part - because getting any bigger seemed too much risk for insufficient reward.

The opposite of natural is a single state growing by orders of
magnitude but remaining essentially unified for 4000 years.

Well . . . there's the U.S again . . . growing from thirteen small seaboard colonies to a continent (in some ways globally) spanning state and - except for the Late Unpleasantness a century and a half back - it's been united for ~225 years.

I posit that jump lag not only limits a state's maximum size, it also cushions an existing state against fragmentation, at least to a degree. Everything else being equal, the slow speed of communications means that any idea - even the idea of rebellion against the central authority - has trouble spreading far and wide within any given territory. By the time an idea has spread throughout a large stellar polity, it's no longer the *same* idea for everyone. If not enough regions decide to rebel at once, the incipient rebellion fizzles.

Then
almost as soon as they discover jump-2, they conquer all their
neighbours in almost continuous wars over the subsequent 1500 years
(without any serious internal divisions in all that conquered
territory) and nobody else reverse-engineers or develops jump-2
themselves for 3000 years despite being much more dynamic and
innovative (which was what half the wars were about, supposedly).

Maybe Jump 2 requires a rare element or material, one which the Vilani could control strategically? Perhaps an artificial element, which only they had the tech to manufacture?

Then those pesky Terrans invent it themselves within a hundredth of
that time and exceed it in a twentieth, conquering the whole empire as
a result. Go Terrans. Yay.

The Vilani *could* have invented Jump 3, back around the same time that they invented Jump 2. They just didn't see the need. By the time they *did* see the need, they had long since gotten out of the habit of inventing *anything* new (e.g. deliberate technical stagnation as a means of social control).

Consider: As high tech as we are today, we can't put anyone on the Moon if - for some reason - we really had to do that. We *used* to be able to do that, back when then-powerful computers still took up entire rooms. The technical capacity has been lost and it would take years to get it back, even though there are people still alive today who watched those old rockets lift off.

Now imagine trying to achieve a similar capacity when it's been literally centuries since you've done anything other than assemble Drive Model A or Drive Model B, according to tried-and-true blueprints handed down from great-great-great-great-great-ad-infinitum-granddad.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice." - Bill Cosby

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester