Board Thread:Fiction Universe Discussion/@comment-4242472-20160124202207/@comment-4242472-20160125022907

"Most fictions would be credible enough to use such a term with regard to Gigaquadrantic politics and have the information to back it up."

- Cyrannian

I agree, and I believe this is why now might be a better time to consider such distinctions. In the past it didn't work out well because we were all settling in, learning as we went. There were arguments, concerns and possibly envy. But now we have an established core community who trust each other, can give advice and can hold more civil discussions on these matters, we are better prepared to take steps like these. And if we keep to the idea of "show don't tell" as we have done more recently, we can better maintain that the larger powers are a big deal.

And in a sense yes, there is going to be a degree of subjectivity as to whether a power can be classed as a galactic, super or hyperpower because there might be different opinions in-universe of how confidently a nation displays its influence. But this is sort-of the purpose of what came to me: We can be subjective with this term in relations pages or during stories, but what about formal articles that are, ideally, written in an emotionally-neutral manner? That might be when it might be best to more clearly define terms such as these.

The alternative might be to either keep these stages broad, so there's a very clear difference between a superpower and a hyperpower, or to keep phrases like super- or hyper-power out of the more factual sections of the fictionverse.