: Well long ago it so happened a hapless alien spacefarer chanced to land his
: (possibly damaged) craft on the surface of Prior Prime and found himself
: surrounded rather quickly by the exploitative natives. Tough luck, but as
: canon an answer you're likely to find.
I wrote:
: It would be one thing if the Pfhor were just kind of... living in the
: self-sustaining ruins of some other civilization's empire. Like if all
: their ships were scavenged ships, and all their machines were scavenged
: machines, and what few robots they had were what they had and they
: couldn't make any more. If they were just a hermit crab species living in
: some other dead species' shell of a civilization, incapable of making
: their own. But they seem at least capable of replicating things they find,
: even if they can't invent them themselves, so by the time they've stolen
: robotics technology and are able to replicate it (which appears to be the
: case), the whole idea of slavery just becomes redundant.
So if the Pfhor just had that one ship that they stole from that guy, that would be an answer. But if, as appears to be the case, they reverse-engineered his ship and are capable of mass-producing more like it (and variations on the theme since they evidently have different kinds of ships), then we're back to square one because by the time you can do that you have no use for slaves.
I mean I guess we COULD posit that every individual Pfhor ship is a used spaceship stolen from someone else, and every bit of Pfhor technology is likewise a machine stolen from someone else. But that seems implausible as what kind of indomitable military empire would that make? Who would they even be capable of stealing from? (Likewise, we could posit that they make their slaves build them more and better tech, like with the S'pht, but then we're positing that they're conquering peoples more advanced than themselves, and if so by what means? Sheer overwhelming numbers of stolen used spaceships?)
