After yet again another failed bold reform proposal i figure it'd be more productive to discuss a moderate change to things. I think we should set up some broad based guidelines to lay out how military RP should be handled. So this thread should be over HOW we conduct military RP than how to start a military RP.
To start with, we should at least loosely define the type of military we have, its current state and focus on land, naval or air power. Even in todays world, very, very few nations have the luxury of operating a military that is able to focus on all 3 and thus as i assume Terra is made of more middle powers than not, unless we have budget busting defense budgets, most nations would only be able to focus on one area for development.
Bouncing off this we then need to look at troop numbers and defense budgets. Regarding troops, obviously the larger the military, the larger the defense budget. However i would wager that the larger the military, the LESS effective it gets a military is often expensive to supply and requires massive logistical challenges. Then moving onto budgets i feel that, depending on how a nation focuses depends on the finer definition of a defense budget. For example, if your nation focuses on its army, and relatively speaking armies are generally cheaper to fund as at its root you only need to buy rifles and bullets the defense budget would be lower. However if you decided to move in a naval direction costs would skyrocket. Ships arent easy to build, let alone maintain and sailors need extensive training to maintain ships, whereas its pretty simple to have a man aim fire and reload. An air force would, i think be somewhere in the middle as planes generally arent too expensive to build and buy (unless you start an F35 program which will bankrupt your nation before you get 1 out of it) but the training costs would be large as it takes time to train airmen.
Now that, that's settled i think we need to focus back on geography (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5647). I say this because we all cant have mechanized armed forces going guns a blazing at each other. For instance if you lived in a tropical jungle region or a mountainous region you wouldnt have a large mechanized force would you? Of course not unless you were militarily challenged.
Going from there i would like to address the issue of nuclear weapons and WMD's. Now for nukes, as a rule no one uses them and that's fine, i agree; takes the fun out of war. However i do believe that there should be some facilitation of how to use nukes. If by chance a player willingly wants to be nuked and ALL the other RP participants agree along with ALL geographic neighbors then i say go for it and do it.
Regarding other WMD's, like chem, bio weapons i do believe that they should be standard fare in war if one of the powers chooses to use them as they do far less damage on every scale than nuke weapons.
As a side thought i do believe regarding ICBM use it should be restricted to nations who have high military standing.
Now as for research and development i do believe that depending on the power level, some guidelines should be here too. Since most nations are decidedly middle and average in Terra i would say that depending on the size of the education budget, Sci + Tech budget and defense budget a chem-bio program could take up to 10 years to fully implement and a nuke program around 15 depending on outside factors. Now some would say that nations have done it in less time, however without outside help (or US abilities and drive like during the Manhattan Project) the time scale should be lengthened, and that would allow for more RP surrounding the program.
Now as for what i see as the more divisive question: how to handle intelligence and black ops/programs. Domestic intelligence should be far easier to get than foreign intel number 1. Number 2, i think this is where a good, solid prior RP build up comes into play. As both nations can reason to have some form of limited intelligence asset in a hostile nation, what nation wouldnt? As for effectiveness i think nations involved in said RP should agree on how to handle how such intelligence is gathered. For a military RP i say that basic troop movements, limited success regarding signals intel for battle comms and such but any further penetration should be consulted with the other player.
As for secret programs and ops, this is admittedly a trickier issue. The way i see it, if a country wants to have a secret program then a majority of the governing parties need to agree to the terms of it and then it is up to said parties how, if it ever gets leaked out. Any outside party which wishes to announce its IC discovery should get permission to RP its discovery from the nation.
Now we have to balance that against the power ranking (viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5619&p=68328#p68328). Now as i see it if its a real powerful nation say Dorvik, going up against Jakania, haha sorry but Dorvik would be all up in that nation like no-ones business. Thus we should take a look at how powerful each nation ranks and then determine how they would line up intel wise.
So thoughts?