*shrugs* The setting states that there are bases that Ariadna don't know the specifics of on Dawn. Ariadna are not sovereign over all of Dawn. Stealth space ship and TO vehicles exist in the setting. ... Anyone arguing that these things aren't true is just making meaningless noise.
Frankly, I see little reason for the commercial wars of corporations claiming chunks of Dawn to end once Ariadna is recognized as a "1st rate" superpower (of the second order, that is, with Nomads) by O-12 unless they have ownership of the whole planet. Also, I see PanO is playing with fire, again, regarding an internal, all-scale war between governments of the Human Sphere with those actions... So does multi-instancing of cubes, and I don't see five Achilles on the table at once, dude. Being able to camo your ship on space or on the surface of a planet is one thing. Doing it during re-entry? congrats on having more tech than the frigging Combined Army, who need to hire local smuggles to deploy on Dawn. Guess that explains why PanO wins, better everything than any other faction. Guess we should all melt our models and play PanO then... oh wait, PanO vs PanO all the time -.-
Which doesn't mean it cannot happen in-universe. Honestly if it is said stealth ships exist in-universe, the only thing we have to do is to look up the source and read what exactly they are capable of. No matter how much sci-fi-tech we exercise here, it is all decided with one sentence by an author in the end... ...oh wait, and he already decided that PanO did in fact re-occupy old bases and nobody did anything about it, so entire discussion on whether it's possible is pointless because it really just happened. vOv
Nah, the discussion is more about if this is WARPFINITY or still Infinity. Lazy, childish settings have things happen "just because". Mature settings have chained events, explanations, and above everything the most important thing of all: Internal Consistency.
And the latter tend to gain traits of the former when it's one guy writing the thing for 10 years and having deadlines for releasing books that need to be aligned with what the company currently sells, and conducting semi-narrative competitive events that, being wargaming events, must include reasons for any faction fighting any other faction including themselves, regardless of what has happened or was written before. Bashing warp-something settings is fun until you realize that approach at least has one thing going for its internal consistency, even though it boils down to "anything can happen". Can't screw that up I get when you want your favorite setting to retain traits you like it for, but discussing why it is impossible for thing that just happened to happen will not help with that.
I'm just going to say this again, you don't need to stealth your way into orbit, you just need to ride into orbit with a stealth aircraft. Literally nobody has claimed that the stealth tech to enter orbit undetected exists now, I have simply pointed out that the technology to remain undetected after orbital insertion and to the ground most certainly does exist in the setting. Combined with the fact that secret bases exist on Dawn, outside of Ariadna, as we've had confirmed and the whole thing is quite clear. I'm not sure what the actual objection is... beyond "fuck PanOceania because fuck those guys" which is all I'm actually hearing in the way of actual complaint.
Infinity if fairly internal consistent and follows its internal logic quite well, so I am not sure what is the problem. I am also not sure why PanO would even care to deploy stealth ships on Dawn, the corporations are there they have mining bases and ask (demand) PanO military to protect their lobbies interests, the troops (and craft ectr ectr) are already there on the ground. PanO probably ad hoced various dispersed units to form the Dawn Iron wall on Dawn and instead of sending each craft back to its individual location, they reoccupied an abandoned base. Ariadna are the sole Government on Dawn, the others have trade missions, or companies exploiting the planet, but no Superpower has an organised settlement there, I guess this changed with Japanese, they transformed Kurage from a research outpost to a colony, that is more claim on Ariadna territory than the superpowers did.
Maybe if the Uprising information were not isolated as what has been described as "JSA-Point of View" only we could argue there with some basis. As it is, the first advance in the fluff since HSN2, that is background that was not established and vaguely referred to, is like a knife balanced on its point. Dunno why, too. Either Ariadna has government rights on the whole planet and the stealth is necessary and stupidly risky, because if the Iwon Wall was deployed 20 days before O-12 authorization that means PanO at war with YJ and then pissing over Ariadna too (at the very least creating two allies of convenience), OR Ariadna was recognized as its own big government to stop the corporations to wage war against each other on the planet's surface and escalate to a conflict between PanO and YJ eventually but not granted full rights over the planet (either for themselves, or as themselves and "tutors" for the Antipodes) for some strange reason that would not stop the corp's conflict.
Uprising is written mainly from JSA/ NA2 point of view, one must read and apply the knowledge of the setting to extract the information from Yu Jing or any other's point of view really. Ariadna was given autonomy and sovereignty mainly because nobody wanted PanO to get another (resource rich) planet, the question remained if it was not PanO's whose was it? and the easiest solution was to give it to the people already there, of course this does not stop the planet been resource rich, or Ariadna been bitter by the rest of Humanity for leaving them there and not wanting much with the rest of the Human Sphere, using the same odd space colonisation laws (that should really have been revised after Svalarheima) both PanO an Yu Jing claimed exploitation rights over unoccupied Dawn territory, interestingly enouph in contrast with Both Paradiso and Svalarheima, I do not think any major power has "permanent settlements" on the planet.
To pull from the RPG book blurb on the Snark Lands, the island south of Noviy Cimmeria, it is stated there that Yu Jing "laid claim to the island and quickly established multiple colonies." Even if you wanted to argue that this is poorly phrased and describes an effort dating from before the Commercial Conflicts rather than something occurring now, the book then counters by fixing this colonization in the timeline when it tells you the whole population of one of those colonies vanished mysteriously last year. Thats an active territorial claim and colonization effort, by a great power that isnt Ariadna, on Dawn.
I see I am afraid I have not read the RPG yet, I was under the impression that the great powers made outposts (mining and research) in order to look like "good guys", we are not settling civilian outposts, no sir, we have research stations and mining outposts totally "not colonies". Ill have to check those PDFs.
Infinity has never qualified as "hard" sci-fi for me. It's got lots of things that don't really hold up under scrutiny or otherwise violate our understanding of how the universe works. But it's fun to read, and the game is fun to play. I'm not really bothered by occasional inconsistencies. I also suspect that as the Modiphius RPG continues to release books, there will be a certain amount of drift in the setting. While they'll provide lots of interesting background and additional perspectives on things, they won't always 100% match up with the main storyline. While they do have all of their writing vetted by CB before release, it's still a different team's take on the setting and will never be as consistent as it would if Gutier wrote every word himself. (But of course that's not feasible because there's only one of him and he's already busy with Infinity the minis game)
Well it is hard but not "hard" it is viewed as "hard" by many because the other offerings out there are closer to space opera than "hard" (I am using "" to match your description, I am assuming by "hard" you mean Arthur C. Clarke level of hardness). So while it would never pass as a true "Hard" sci fi setting it is closer to "hard" than to space opera. I hope I conveyed that right.
Infinity is a significantly harder scifi setting than any of the other scifi wargames (GW, Mantic, Warlord, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc). Wormhole FTL travel and comms, quantum-entangled comms in some places (quantum-entangled comms is theoretically FTL, if I've understood the concept correctly). I think the setting-wide handwave is artificial gravity, which at least used to require large generators. Not sure if it still does, considering that Antenociti's has some grav cars in the Designed for Infinity range. The biggest violation of scifi hardness is the werewolves, all that mass/bulk comes from nowhere. Arguably hacking, but considering how many idiots still get viruses due to stupid users opening obvious malware... Missiles don't do Aggravated damage, silly. (shorter answer: CB were drinking beer while watching Dog Soldiers, and liked the idea for their in-house RPG, which then became Infinity)
Nope, no artificial gravity. Everything is either rotation or thrust. Except the Combined Army... and they are explicitly "Voodootech".
Even Antenociti's grav cars are, if I'm recalling correctly, based not on having the anti-grav exclusively in the car itself, but some sort of system where a hovercar works in concert with technology built into the roads to allow it to defy gravity, something present in many developed cities but leaves those cars as essentially propulsionless bricks if you try to take them out to rural areas.
Huh, I thought it was common knowledge that Ariadna is not Dawn. Ariadna is located in Dawn, and O12 recognizes Ariadna, but Dawn has other island-continents (smaller than the one colonized by Ariadna) which is where PanO and Yu Jing have "Commercial Interests" mining Teseum and shipping it out of Dawn. Bostria even explained so in one of the Podcasts (can't remember which). So, while Ariadna is recognized as a Nation (like the Nomads who have no planet but 3 ships, and Haqqislam who just have 1 planet, and because those 2 advocated for Ariadna), their Control of Dawn isn't, given that the two most powerful states in the Human Sphere AGREE the uncolonized parts are up for grabs. Think of it as the US war in Irak, China's man made Islands, and Russia's annexation of Crimea. The UN said "No!" And the Superpowers just said "Already did it."
Well, OK, so how is that big Haqq ship landing sideways into a hangar, instead of on open ground? (HSN3, pg 113) Also, the description of the Zero-gee skill states that there are places where you can turn the gravity on or off! Emphasis mine. Note that I'm OK with there not being artificial gravity without a centrifuge or thrust. But the setting art implies it, and the terrain rule states it outright.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness Please do note that one thing is "scale of sci fi hardness", for stuff like spaceships, FTL travel, etc... (of which Infinity would be on the Lv3 of the scale), and another entirely different thing is Internal Consistency. A literary work that is not internally consistent is a nightmare to follow, because anything can happen anytime without a clue, warning, or logic. For example, in Infinity the Dog Warriors and Exalted Races are explained because "tohaa are friedly with the Tzechi Digestors", which are the Phlebotium of the setting (with the VodooTech), and that has nothing to do with internal consistency. What would break that internal consistency would be like, for example, the CA suddenly showing from nowhere in the middle of Acontecimiento's close orbit, ready to battle and conquer the planet, because we would be talking about a major step up and aside for the FTL (from "use wormholes" to "hyperspace, yoh!" or even being able to create FTL portals between two positions). Well, the most egregious example would be the ISS "effectivity" during the Uprising, but that has already been beaten so much it's hard to find more than atoms of that. You should be wrong about that, because the main argument Modiphius has been giving about the glacial pace it takes them to publish anything Infinity-related is that Interruptor has to check everything. So if the RPG generates inconsistencies, only one person is to blame; and the RPG has the same level of canon value as the existing fluff. ---------------------------- About YJ's outposts: the Ariadna splatbook mentions the "exclusion zone" (pg 33), and it's refered as all of Dawn that is not colonized by Ariadna (so not part of Ariadna per se, because of the weather or that the Antipode tribes are there...): That is taken verbatim from the book, and it means in short that what sites of Dawn not under control of the Ariadnan government has been set aside as "free for scientific study" reserves, but non-ariadnans try to mine illegally. Then, suddenly we get a part about how Ariadnan mines are environmental friendly, but those exploited by corps are strip mined, contaminating and making a mess of everything... and O-12 refuses to take measures against that. That part also changes the name from Exclusion Zone to Outer Crescent... As always, a mess.
