ten aristocratic couples have private apartments;
twenty skilled ranking sailors have one room per family;
seventy common deckhands are barracked.
Other rafts in the squadron are dwellings, cargo-carriers or fish and seaweed processors. The rafts, sometimes temporarily linked, are patrolled by canoes and flying guards.
Other divisions of the Fleet stretch as far as a man can see. Most fish. Diomedeans pull long nets by muscle power alone. Continuous labor has freed them from the seasonal breeding cycle of migratory Diomedeans.
1 comment:
The seagoing Diomedians have an economy and political structure which requires heavy capital accumulation and investment, both for production and war, and also an elaborate division of labor.
It's roughly equivalent to a farming economy that needs large-scale irrigation. Societies like that tend to be sharply hierarchical.
But it's also an economy dependent on a highly variable resource -- certain types of fish, which migrate in patterns that change abruptly. When that happens they have to move into new territory and displace the Diomedians already there by force, who will have to do likewise or die.
Everyone knows that internal solidarity is absolutely necessary, because they have to literally fight for the food in their childrens' mouths fairly often, against opponents with equivalently desperate motivation. For the seagoing fleets, it's a kill-or-be-killed world; that's built into their way of life.
In that setting you'd expect intense ethnocentric xenophobia, centralized despotism, and a ferocious militarism. The closest Earth analogue would be the classic Central Asian steppe empires.
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