Travellers Needed - The Future of Traveller

[actionman]

Centralization in terms of concentration of power.

Decentralized, in the sense of delegation of responsibility and authority.

The more I look at the Imperial feudal system, the more effective it seems.

The honor nobles, who don't have fiefs, can be given fleet commands to keep the ranked nobles, who do have fiefs, under control.

The fleet commanders are supposed to obey the ranked noble subsector and sector dukes, but if those dukes command them to disobey the Emperor, the fleet commanders can ignore such orders with impunity. If necessary, the fleet commanders can arrest the dukes who give treasonous orders. To have a chance, all the subsector dukes would have to go to war in support of their sector duke, and they still wouldn't have the capital ships that the sector fleets have. Even then they still wouldn't have a chance, because the Emperor would order his sector fleets in nearby sectors to attack, and for good measure he could place the subsector fleets of nearby sectors directly under the command of the senior sector fleet admiral moving to put down the upstart sector. In one stroke the Emperor would assemble an overwhelming fleet and strip nearby sector dukes of the fleets they would need to support the upstart sector duke.

The reason fiefholding ranked nobles shouldn't have fleet command is because they need to be administrating their fiefs. Fleet command and fiefholding are two jobs that are so demanding that they can't be done by the same person, especially if there's a military operation that takes the admiral / fiefholder away from his fief duties for any length of time. A fiefholder who doesn't manage his fief would soon find his title for that fief revoked and given to someone else.

Honor nobles, who may be fleet commanders, can only receive fiefs from the Emperor. Therefore, it behooves them to be as loyal and effective as possible to prove themselves worthy of being rewarded with a landed title when they retire from military service.

All the incentives and military realities favor loyalty to the Emperor and don't favor rebellious vassals.

Enfeoffment and control of Imperial military power are fairly well-separated. He who controls worlds is not he who controls fleets. It's a pretty good check and balance.

 

[Condottiere]

Checks and balances.

Well, paranoia.

You can't operate a military without funding, and the cooperation of the civilian sector, and separation of the two means that while the civilian sector is invested in the military providing them with safety, the military requires access to civilian controlled infrastructure and resources.

A civilian governor can't rebel without having at least the local military with him, and a military commander can't do the same, without the local civilian resources backing him.

The paranoia aspect is that this is usually learned through experience.

 

[Limpin Legin]

I don't see how I'm contradicting myself, or how I'm in disagreement with dictionaries.

Your definition of the word is fine. However, the conclusion that the negation necessarily holds true is actually suspect. Let me try explain:

the adjective of "mostly" or the descriptive phrase "large degree of" modifies the meaning of the word "independent" (or independence), ...,

Correct, so far as quoted.
But,

... which means not independent.

No it doesn't. The negation is asserted wrongly, or the definition is referenced in a contradictory way. If you were correct, a world that is "not independent" would be totally controlled by an external organisation, in this case, the Imperium. If the independence was negligible, then you could say that they have virtually no independence, but that is not the case. Maybe the problem lies here:

"independent" has a different meaning than "mostly independent" or "large degree of independence".

No it does not change the meaning of "independent". It also does not change the meaning of the sentence to the extent that the whole sentence means the opposite of the individual words, it qualitatively adds further descriptor indicating the extent of the autonomy - it's a sliding scale of more autonomy and less autonomy, not a binary "all or nothing".
Part of the problem might be that you have relied on definitions that are defined in the negative, i.e., defined in terms of what it isn't rather than what it is. Try this word-meaning instead:

independence

1. freedom from being governed or ruled by another country: 2. the ability to…

dictionary.cambridge.org

Incidentally, in practice, very few entities have total independence as there is always some influence from internal or external factors.

 

[actionman]

Try this word-meaning instead:

independence

1. freedom from being governed or ruled by another country: 2. the ability to…

dictionary.cambridge.org

Incidentally, in practice, very few entities have total independence as there is always some influence from internal or external factors.

Let's use your definition.

According to the your preferred definition, independence means "freedom from being governed or ruled by another country".

All Imperial worlds are governed and ruled by the Imperium. Member worlds, also called subject worlds, are bound by Imperial laws, are not allowed to make their own foreign policy with regard to non-Imperial powers, and must place their armies under Imperial control on demand.

For these reasons, Imperial worlds are governed by the Imperium, and they do not meet the definition of the word independent, which is why we have to use modifiers like mostly, largely, and so on.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the worlds of the Imperium have either total independence or no independence. I'm saying that they don't meet the definition of the word independent, so they're not independent according to the definitions of the word that both of us have provided.

Imperial worlds are largely independent, which is not the same as independent, which means ""freedom from being governed or ruled by another country". Imperial worlds are not free from being governed or ruled by another country, therefore they are not independent. They remain largely, mostly, or partially independent.

I'm not interested in discussing semantics any further, especially on a thread that's not about that.

 

[Limpin Legin]

I'm not interested in discussing semantics any further, especially on a thread that's not about that.

 

[CordwainerFish]

People need to remember that Trav's setting is thousands of years in the future, in a culture formed just as much by many other worlds as by Terra. Nobody in Charted Space is going to be thinking along the lines of last century Unistat endopropaganda.