Originally posted by Marcml30:
I don't understand your use of canon. I interpret canon to be rules or perceptions that are largely inviolate. By saying "psuedo" aren't you contradicting the word's meaning?
I was using “pseudo canon” as only a shorthand description for your claim that WC canon “doesn't exist . . . because it can be anything the developers want”, and my general point was that “canon” can range from a general (and thus fairly flexible) principle to a specific (and thus fairly rigid) rule, hence my comparison between the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Tax Code. But I probably should have elaborated.
In the case of WC, I suppose you can argue that we’ve been guilty in the Zone of confusing the common notion of “canon” as standards or norms–let’s call them “meta-facts”–with simple facts or trivia. For example–the norm or meta-fact that interstellar travel occurs via jump points versus the simple or trivial fact that jump drives are a monopoly market in Gemini Sector in 2669. Nonetheless, I think the distinction has little practical value for WC because WC is still essentially a work-in-progress. By contrast, something like Star Trek has “settled down” into a certain predictability about “who, what, and where we are”. In short, we as gamers and fans are exploring aspects of WC that Trekkers, in their respective universe, can already reminisce over.
As for your main point, which seems to be, that the canon or meta-facts of WC strike you as just too liberal or too subject to change, I think part of the answer is what I said above regarding WC’s infancy compared to other popular sci-fi “conceptions”. But more generally, even the most dogmatic canon (literary, legal, religious, etc.) has a source, and history suggests that the question is not how inviolate the particular canon is, but how many human beings have the power to change it. For example, it is nine people who decide in the U.S. exactly what “free speech” is, though those nine can be overruled by millions more but only by a tedious process of amendment.
Here in the Zone, we follow what many legal historians and political philosophers have come to generally term the “Catholic-model”. It seems to me that our nearly absolute deference to Origin and what it says about the WC universe is about as strict a canon as you could ever hope to have.
Originally posted by Quarto:
It seems obvious that when those licenses refer to the Confederation, they actually mean Tri-System.
In my view, the most telling references occur in the planets database. For example, the planet Terrel is described as “one of the first planets to be declared a pro-habitable zone by the confederation” and as “one of two planets which supplies the vast majority of the Confederations [sic] food requirements”.