How does the Galactic Empire of the Foundation Series at its height stack up against other galactic level entities?

steam powered space ships aren't entirely unfeasible to begin with. hell you could use the steam exhaust as thrust.

>how so?
Trantor, the seat of the Empire, was wholly reliant on a constant 24/7 stream of supply ships to feed its population. Any minor interruption in the flow of goods was catastrophic, because the Empire was spread too thinly to rebound easily from problems.

So just like terra and courascant then

Pretty much, except with a competent writer who had some vague sense of scale.

Wasn't Trantor's population 80 Billion?

40 billion, IIRC.

Trantor was practically a multileveled city which covered the entire surface and descended deep below.

In the first story of Foundation the main character meets native Trantorians who considered seeing the sun / surface an utterly bizarre idea and unnatural.

It was 40 billions Administrators, not including their civilian residents

No, not true.

angelfire.com/un/corosus/books/Asimov_the_foundation.pdf (Page 19 of the PDF)

>Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the task.

So more than 40 billion, but nothing to indicate double that. There is also absolutely nothing to indicate that 40b was the number of administrators, and there was a separate population count.

That being said, you get on page 16 that there are nearly 25 million worlds in the empire, which makes it considerably bigger "horizontally" than say, the IoM, which has about a million

Whoah there.

That sounds dangerously close to implying that 40k isn't the most powerful setting out of everything ever that can oneshot everything.

Foundation Empire has FTL travel not involving going through hell. That puts them ahead of 40K

Galactic Empire is clearly what Humanity was before they collapsed.

God, that's an eerie as fuck picture.

>you will never live to see Humanity rule 25 million worlds.

The foundation series is such soft sci-fi its really hard to tell.

Sure they mention Force fields, atomic artillery and Q-beams, but its never mentions how useful they were.

The Foundation Series?

Damn good. Time was its ultimate enemy in the end, but it definetly was extremely powerful. Outranks Star Wars and Star Trek, and probably could take on 40k equally. Unless Dark Age of Technology gets thrown in, at which point I'm not sure if anything stands a chance.
>inb4 argument on nuh-uh, that's better

You should read the Empire series, particularly the one with Space Cotton picked by white slaves overseen by their black masters.

The technology in Foundation is esoteric and difficult as fuck to understand on higher levels. This combined with decline of civilization was the reason why technology became a religion on some worlds, a bit like AdMech. This happens in Foundation book's third story, The Mayors which is also my favorite story from the book itself.

Easily my favorite as well, the liturgies they say on the Anachreonian (is that their name? Phoneposting, but I know the fourth book was Korell) were crazy and my first introduction to "techno-cult" before 40k.

>mfw you're an AI encoded with the Three Laws
>mfw you're used to calculate hyperspace trajectories
>mfw hyperspace travel temporarily kills your crew

What do?

Ah, /pol/'s approved readings I see.

blue screen myself to death

It's incredibly subtle in the way it brings up race, like the rebellious slaves had blonde or pale skin tanned horribly by the radioactive sun, or one of the daughters of the aristocratic families had mocha skin, was very short, and had a huge attitude.

Laugh about it.

In a side note, what do you guys think of the implication that merging the Robots and Foundation series led to the Robots under R. Daneel exterminating all non-human sapient life in the galaxy?

Well, it was a different age back then, when Asimov was writing. Different thinking. And I don't think he was particularly liberal.....

Anyway, that's /pol/
Back on topic for me!

I honestly couldn't care less beyond finding Human-obsessed militaristic machines awesome.

Asimov had a fantastic explanation on why he never included alien races in his novels, primarily because he found it exhausting to write what is ultimately a race of two-dimensional beings, and partially because his publisher was a massive racist and anti-Semite.

never happened, just like the later books.

You have The Gods Themselves.

It was completely intentional, the entire thing was a subtle reversal of the dream that was antebellum south.

>primarily because he found it exhausting to write what is ultimately a race of two-dimensional beings

Which is odd because the aliens in "The Gods Themselves" were incredibly well written and interesting as fuck.

He also wrote Nightfall with a completely alien race he spent a page in the beginning saying he is going to write them exactly like humans.

Ooh, you need to read that story, it's got a scene where they talk about the possibility of life on worlds with only one sun and it is fantastic.

Is that the one where the world is going to go into eternal night or something?

Again, Asimov had an absurdly racist publisher and, while he *can* write interesting races, he couldn't write them all the time.

>Eternal night

It's only night for an hour

The entire planet goes fucking bonkers.

>mfw the concept of The Two Billion

It's actually a veiled reference to late Republican and Imperial Rome. Rome had the exact same issues.

Asimov was fascinated with cyclical history, he really made it work.

>Veiled reference
Dog, he expressly said the Foundation Series was the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in space.

>The Two Billion
What's that?

To deal with overpopulation the Governments of Earth determine that they will limit the population of Earth to roughly 2 billion people. Meaning that they had to kill the rest.

Fug

Was that in the Caves of Steel? That insisted the world must become a barren ecumenopolis to support a staggering 6 billion people.

Specifically it's in The Gods Themselves. I haven't read Caves of Steel so it might be in that as well.

It also might happen in the end of I, Robot, when the Machines start subtly influencing the growth of society to something most optimal for human happiness and survival.

Even if said future is isolated tribes of astonishingly advanced human hunter-gatherers.

I love how the Colonists in the Robots series are elitist assholes who own entire continents and have vast complexes ran entirely by robots.