The Nightstar Zoo

By definition, you'll find something in the last place you look. That's when you stop looking.

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.

"All of them."

Remember the O'Benn and their "properly conducted search" - where they basically just looked for places in interstellar space with TAD fields?

Quite a few times in my life I've kept looking after finding what I'm looking for.

For instance: If I go to the store for X, and they've moved X, and I start searching the store for X, if I get at least halfway through I'm likely to continue with the rest of the store both to see what else I find, and to familiarize myself with the new layout.

Two days ago, someone moved something on my kitchen table. They didn't move it very far, only 8 inches or so... but I could not find it until they showed me where they moved it.

Tunnel vision is very real. And it is embarrassing.

At this point, the ancient Oafans are little more than pirates, and have progressed far along the road to being the most dangerous force in the galaxy. Not because of their firepower, specifically, but because of their outlook and their willingness to take whatever they want from whoever has it based solely on their ability to do so. In a very distinct sense, they're as dangerous as the dark matter entities.

If I abandoned my house, for instance, eventually, the local authorities (in this case, the Neo Oafans) would eventually seize it. They'd then sell it at a tax sale. New people would move in. It would then be their house. If I showed up twenty or thirty years later, I wouldn't get to just waltz on in the front door and demand the current residents GTFO of my house. And yet, that's what's going on here, seemingly with no pushback.

If they aren't stopped, I can see all of the existing inhabitants of the galaxy, friend and enemy alike, aligning against them purely for self-preservation.


ETA: For those of you citing the 'they were there the whole time' version of possession, they were locked in an inaccessible cellar by their crazy brother, who never told the new owners about them. There they would have remained forever if not for the intervention of the people they're now seizing the property of.

Actually if someone stole your house and forcibly kept you from coming back there you'd be on rather solid legal ground demanding it back. The laws for abandoned property are mostly for when you could have demanded it back but didn't.

More importantly, the Oafans here are the local authorities. They do not diplomatically recognize any other extant states as of yet, so from their legal perspective the Neofans are pirates. Them enforcing their position is no different from the UNS enforcing theirs. Sucks to be the one on the recieving side, but it's not really an existential threat and there's no real reason to think they won't be willing to sign and abide by treaties in the future simply because they're not obeying ones they aren't signatories to.

Also, even granting that this is at base a government taking things because they think it should be theirs and have the force to back it up, that is literally how the UNS got the Breath Weapon. It is not a galaxy-spanning existential threat.

What's funny about your post is that this exact thing is happening on a fairly regular basis, and the squatters are pure hell to get rid of. There was recently an account of a family who allowed a guy to sleep in their camper (in the back yard) He broke into the house. They told him to leave, he swore out warrants and had the cops remove them from the house. They're now fighting for possession of their own home in the courts.

In the case of the Neofans v Anciant Oafans, the only thing giving the ancients any standing at all is their long guns. Their refusal to acknowledge any other authority doesn't grant them authority. By virtually any standard, checking out for billions of years is abandonment. Locking yourself away such that you cannot get back can also legitimately be considered abandonment. That makes the Neofans the current authorities, and the ancients more like ex-pats coming home and trying to undo everything that's been done since they left.

This wasn't a matter of forcibly keeping the ancients out, it was a case of them having left on their own with the intent (at least of the member of their own society in charge) of never coming back. That's textbook abandonment.

The fact that the modern inhabitants (or, at least their AI) let them out doesn't mitigate the original departure at all. If anything, there's a substantial claim for recompense for the act.

I stand by my claim that the ancient Oafans are going to be a galactic sized pain. After all, what's to prevent them from claiming everything in the whole galaxy?

They had long guns. Therefore, anybody who built long guns since then stole their idea. This claim has as much merit as reclaiming the habitats and ships.

They had teraporting. Therefore, anybody who's ever teraported owes them a license fee. The list goes on and on, and if anybody objects, there's those 15K+ long gun ships to press the point.

This is a stretch. Based on what we've seen so far, they've only gone after things that they have a credible claim to, ie, their ships. Whether it's the best claim in a legal sense is, of course, arguable, but the fact that their civilization built and stored those ships does mean that they have a claim to them.

I don't see how they could claim that technology invented independently as something they have rights to. It's not based on their ships and they had no part in its development.

I'm reminded of the last time that "authority by right of seniority" came up...
( Here, here and especially here. )

It seems pretty clear the end had them being forcibly uploaded and locked away against their will. The fact that they'd authorized a member of their society to take control of the station systems to keep people from being forcibly uploaded and locked away against their will doesn't alter their position that they didn't purposefully and willingly abandon their stuff.



Because that would be more obviously bullshit than recovering their stolen property from people who had acquired it from the thief. But yes they could use their firepower to do that. Much like the PD used its firepower to inform the nations of the galaxy it was keeping a major percentage of their military and the core generator. It would probably play out in a similar long term fashion.

It is important to understand that property rights all ultimately boil down to armed people agreeing on who owns stuff and using force or threat of force to enforce that. The nations of the galaxy have made some form of arrangement that covers lost or abandoned property in deep space so as to have a shared basis for that determination. The old Oafans aren't part of that arrangement so they have no more reason to respect it than the nations of the galaxy have to respect their laws. The Oafans have more firepower, so they have the capacity to enforce their position rather than the other way around.

Also worth noting that the old AI was the legitimately appointed caretaker of all that stuff, and she gave it to them. Her actions "imprisoning" them were supported by everyone who knew what was going on.

Which at this point has been shown to be only one other AI, the one she removed. That is not very much peer review.

Whatever the reason was, it apparently wasn't persuasive to any of the people forcibly uploaded against their will, namely the Oafan government and its citizenry.

I'd like a citation on this.

Don't forget that the oafans are an ancient MASSIVE and advanced race. As far as they are concerned it's possible they consider the entire galaxy to be their territory and had the resources to manage it, and these upstarts with their tin-can-hulled ships barely register as a force to be recognized, let alone an equal.

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Rule of thumb is that if you need to use a squeegee, they're at least Laz-4.

I say apparently because we do not see it explained to them. We do know from the prologues that Iafa didn't know the reason when assigned to stop it, and we know that they were deliberately trapped by Iafa and have left at the first opportunity, which indicates they do not think there is a good reason to stay uploaded forever. It's possible they did agree a temporary upload made sense and then Iafa went nuts and trapped them, or that Iafa never bothered explaining a perfectly valid reason, or that Iafa was trying to protect them from the plumbing ghosts or the observer effect. We just know they aren't at this point in time persuaded.



Well, yeah, they could think that. Star nations think lots of things. Sometimes these are different things and then wars happen. To date, though, they're limiting their demands to their habitat and stuff aboard it. Which was the only part of the galaxy they had intended to keep, so it doesn't indicate they'll want all their old planets back.

There is a distinct possibility they'll also lay claim to all the big artifacts anyone can find, more out of the strategic reasons that led to everyone else fighting for control of them than any truly justifiable reasons. But that just puts them on the same level as everyone else.

For what it’s worth, if I find something sufficiently shiny, I’ll keep looking after finding it.
Picture, if you would, your neighbor drops a box of gold coins in your back yard. You help him find them all, then after he’s gone you may look some more just in case you missed a few.

Actually, if I had a "successful find", I'd keep looking, and then pretend to find it where I stopped.

That would help to keep the real location of the treasure secret.

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I hope Para never plays with Tenzy. The result would be terrifying.
Para and Petey need to have some dialog together. Just because.