Thanks for the compliments, everyone!
That's an extraordinary piece of work, Ken. Still needs a little editing, but as far as I'm concerned it's fucking amazing.
Want to volunteer as editor?
Kihtaled is NOT the core of the Khanid Kingdom, Khanid Prime is - thats where the seat of the King is.
Corrected in v0.91. Thanks, Mathra!
Devoured, and I'm hungry for more. The part of me that was studying cultural anthropology before turning to medicine really loves the humanizing approach that was taken in the writing style.
If I may ask, how much of the beautiful little details came from PF sources, and how much came from your own thoughts? The quote from Heideran VII after Vak'Atioth sounds like he was channeling the spirit of a certain Roman emperor. And, I'm going to spend all day imagining and snickering about a bit of light Caldari theater based on the comedy-of-errors-like meeting of the (selfless and dutiful) farmer and the (over-the-top and clueless) Gallente Captain Kirk - "Oh, those silly, silly foreigners."
So glad you enjoyed! Humanizing the story was one of my primary goals. The various quotations, those details that I can most easily nail down and provide you an answer on, are about 1/3 PF, 1/3 transplants from real historical quotations, and 1/3 stuff I made up.
Post this on EVE Fiction! Needs CCP exposure!!!
o7 Okay, you got it!
Would someone be kind enough to upload it somewhere else?
Someone would.
tasty stuff
Hamish, thanks so much for the link! I had not seen that old thread (have only read a few chatsubo threads in my time), but it's a great resource for trying to get a handle on the early Caldari... the challenges of which are obviously not a new development. Also, not surprising to see the identity of the OP.
It's interesting that Isuuaya, which is referenced in some of the old PF, receives very little play. That may be understandable considering it isn't one of the Big Eight and, I must presume, has long since been absorbed by competitors.
As for the level of technology present on Caldari Prime, I think my depiction reasonably shows a civilization still using industrial age tech. They have radios, the means by which I imagine the Gallenteans learned that Caldari Prime's inhabitants were advanced, but haven't yet realized how to use them on a large scale or simply prefer other methods of communication because of environmental/social conditions. For example, perhaps Caldari Prime doesn't have an ionosphere being so far from Luminaire and thus long-distance sky wave transmissions are not feasible, relegating radio wave communication to a niche hobby rather than a political/military game-changer as it was on Earth.
By the same token, the first contact scene I depicted was meant to show a rather advanced (globalized and spacefaring) Gallente making contact with the far simpler (agricultural commune-dwelling) Caldari. If I had to place the Caldari in an Earth-equivalent decade at the moment of Gallente arrival, I would say they had technology comparable to the 1950s. The Gallente, on the other hand were working with stuff comparable to the 2050s. I bump the Caldari up 100 years from Herko's analogy, but I imagine that while they had 1950s tech, they weren't necessarily using it in the same ways we did on Earth or probably that they had only developed some sciences to their 20th century equivalents while others languished for whatever reason.
With regards to economic exploitation by the Gallenteans, I don't think I spared the Caldari much in that regard, but I also tried to show that they coped with the changes.
Across the board with this project I've tried to give equal play to both the old school and Tony-G school (EA and later) of PF. My hope is that I can wrap them together well enough that you can't tell the difference and don't particularly mind which parts come from which "era". At the same time, I didn't want to stray too far off the beaten path of what could be verified in PF sources, and so have been forced to gloss over certain things using vocabulary that describes long-term trends rather than specific events wherever it seemed best to let sleeping dogs lie.
Will keep working on it and improving, of course!