Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

It has a habitability of 0. But that doesn't mean it's pointless to keep track of the fact that you'll need more equipment to live in even worse places.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

Interesting. So it looks like the big factor on having a habitable system might be solar mass. If I'm reading these results correctly that is.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

Contraception and limited family sizes are a passing fad? Edumacation becomes cheaper past TL8? Interstellar cosmic radiation causes mutations that make humans (even more) horny?

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

I'm not saying it's realistic, but it fits in with my space strategy game experiences. In most games I know - Master of Orion 2 comes to mind - it pays off to settle anything which even remotely looks like a planet. And if earthlike planets are very rare, you'll have to colonize something, I guess.

Though I admit that orbital habitats may make more sense in some cases.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

I'm not sure that's so odd, though.

As long as there are sufficient resources to survive and possibly get rich, you'll find people who will settle there, even if a place is totally godforsaken. And once the colony is established, other people will go where the jobs (or other opportunities) are.

In a hundred years, we will have the technology for people to go to most places in the solar system and survive; if people an see opportunity there, I think some of them will go, even though others might consider such places fairly hellish.

Seriously, Brett, look at the histories of our own countries. Isn't that proof enough? :)

Mark

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

I was, as I'm sure you're aware, not being entirely serious in my previous post.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

Only of course if the system is considered to be in occupied territory. There's a circularity to that. If the system isn't colonised, then there's no real reason to consider it to be within occupied territory, but if it is colonised, whether or not it has a positive affinity world determines whether it can pay for itself and therefore has a true colony rather than just an outpost. Note that the basic world generation system produces something like 1 Garden world for each 3 barren or exotic worlds but the extended world generation system has ratio that is probably about 1 in fifty at best, and over half of those systems will possess some kind of airless rock with a positive RVM.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

There's no reason why you can't. But given TL 9+ and a solution for the gravity problem, there's also no reason why you can't have a reproducing population in an artificial environment that has a resource to keep things funded. The spaceport isn't going to be very temporary because planets are big. Real big. A +1 RVM planet isn't going to be "mined" out by anything except a gigantic civilisation on the planet for a very long time.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

In my universe, colonies end up where the transportation resources are. That means some places where there's no sensible reason to be there, other than that's where the wormholes are. There are religious kooks who have a planet more suited to human habitation than earth is, but because there's no way to get there easily (round trip to the nearest populated system is about a year) there are only a couple hundred thousand people there. In the setting I'm trying to start a PbP game in (see the sig) one of the richest polities is a deep-space transfer point. If it weren't for having the nearly densest collection of wormhole routes in known space, there would be outpost stations at best on the wormholes.

Re: [Space] How habitable is my universe?
 

[QUOTE=Agemegos]That's one option, although a troublesome one for a number of reasons overlooked by space-hab enthusiasts. A simpler one is to have a barren world that happens to be large enough to have decent gravity in the first place.


That is why the only barren systems I had colonised were ones that were on the way between two or more habitable systems. That way the ships could stop there for repairs, refueling, offloading and reloading without going out of their way. However that reasoning does not apply to barren resource-rich worlds in the same system as a habitable world. The difference in distance between interplanetary and interstellar is so great that it seems to me that there must be a large cost savings to counterbalance the increase cost of opportunity.