[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Icelander's setting is cool, and he is doing the kinds of things which make this colony sound truthy, I just wanted to speak up for the principle that in our world, maintaining early-20th-century technology requires a lot more people than people planning off-world colonies or post-apocalyptic settings want to believe. I don't want to get in the way of having a cool game with Antarctic Space Nazis and their atom-powered zeppelins which are the least frightening thing in their arsenal, because I have no idea whether 50,000 settlers plus local slaves and 30,000 tons of goods is enough.

Obviously, Antarctic Space Nazis are impossible in the real world.

On the other hand, that's no reason not to speculate with as much detail we can muster about the level of their zeppelin technology fifty years into their history, granting the impossible, magical factors that led to ASNs in the first place.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Edit: A few hundred settlers and their descendants definitely is not, even if they have uncommonly long lives

Well, I established in the campaign where the PCs tried to stop the birth of the new world order desired by the occult inner circle of the SS leadership that 500 carefully chosen SS men and their wives (or women chosen for eugenic purposes to become their wives, for the unmarried) would become the nucleus of a new settlement around Wahr Wewelsburg. They'd be chosen as the most ideologically pure, genetically superior, intelligent, educated and accomplished members of the entire SS.

The PCs were aware that aside from these Übermennsch paragons, there were a lot (many thousands) of Stürmmanner from SS-Sturmkampfgruppe Totenkopf, for security and fighting locals, anywhere from a few dozen to several hundred surviving special forces and commandos serving in the SS-Sonderlehrgang z. b. V. Jötunheim and one or more other SS-Sonderkommando units, and maybe a hundred, maybe several hundreds, of the senior leadership itself and their HQ staff.

There were hints that engineers, technicians, agricultural experts, geologists, munitions experts, logistics personnel and scientists had been at work in the other worlds, but the PCs never actually visited any of the areas where the Nazi leadership planned to set up mining, industry or manufacturing, so they'd have no way of knowing how many people were involved.

On considering it, there doesn't seem to be much reason for the SS leadership to minimize the numbers, as they have plenty of fertile farmland about to yield its first harvest near the time of settlement, vast potential hunting grounds and the opportunity for each settler that is added to the colony of bringing along personal supplies, in any case.

Assuming that people working on preparing the ground for settlement are willing to bring along a package of stuff every day to work and carry it during the 5-10 minute walk to work, they can have anywhere from 600 to 30 such packages for their own personal use in the new world, depending on whether they were brought on early in the preparation process or were a last minute hire. And if they were willing to spend their lunch hour lugging heavy things over the World Tree, well, they can double, triple or quintuple the weight of stuff they personally can haul over. On average, each extra settler can thus add at least a ton of potential weight that can be brought over.

Granted, there are limits to how much useful high-tech even the senior leadership of the SS can scrounge up in a Germany that experiences ever greater shortages of a lot of things as the war goes on, but they'd find something worth bringing. Even if the stuff they bring in addition to the 30,000 tons of strategic materiel that will be carefully obtained from the massive industrial resoueces under SS command might consists of less strategically vital technological devices and more marginally useful knick-nacks at TL7 that will be much more highly sought after on a world where the local TL is mostly TL2, with a few TL3 societies, that's still a net gain for each extra colonist.

Even if the extra weight that more colonists would be bringing thus probably cannot all be more tons of carefully chosen expensive tooling, technical libraries, blueprints and precursors for TL7 industry, but just stuff to make the first few months and years more comfortable and successful, like more seed corn, transplanted garden vegetables, scavenged metal tools, glass jars, canning equipment, tobacco, candy, spices and other luxuries, that still means that adding an extra colonist will never be a net negative, as long as he has at least a month or more to prepare.

All of which is to say that the ca 600 scientists, engineers, technical experts and teachers who I assumed would be working with locals to create the best industry practical at the early days of the colony could fairly plausibly be increased by at least an order of magnitude without contradicting anything established about the Antarctic Space Nazis. Indeed, it is probably more plausible that all the thousands of people that the SS leadership had do specialized design work and various odd scientific analysis, without telling them the true purpose, would be brought into the new world, rather than left behind.

Indeed, there is no compeling reason not to evacuate valued workers of the Wunderwaffen projects under SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler through the World Tree, instead of having them try to escape the Allied advances in the real world (or surrender, as many did in our history). If anything, all the workers simply disappearing is probably better from an operational security standpoint, too, as even tangentially involved people would have heard rumours of all sorts of secret stuff. Granted, the ASNs had good reasons not to worry all that much about the victorious Allies somehow following them, but there's really no reason to simply gift potential foes valuable information, even if you are very certain they won't be able to capitalize on any intelligence they might obtain.

So it might be that the numbers of Earth-born Germans who travelled over before Silesia and Westphalia fell into Allied hands were more like 30,000-50,000 than a few hundred. At the very least, I should assume that they numbered in the thousands, with informal settlement really having started several months before the official founding date of April 30, 1945, as workers involved in preparations related to the Last Redoubt on behalf of the SS, mostly through the SS-WVHA, would be evacuated into the other worlds as the Allies advanced over the areas where they were working.

Yeah, these people wouldn't all be perfect eugenic specimens, ideologically pure Nazis and carefully chosen for quasi-mystical reasons, but then, they wouldn't be settling around Wahr Wewelsburg, just the less symbolically important (but more practically vital) areas in Germania Hyperborea and Jötunheim where the Antarctic Space Nazis plan to establish their manufacturing centres and local industry.

And, well, they'd be some of the best scientists, engineers, technicians and mechanics Germany had, because those were the people working in various Wünderwaffen projects. In addition, anyone working under the auspices of SS-WVHA was a potential colonist, if he was judged to possess critical skills, 'good Aryan blood' and the requisite Nazi political credentials. In case of truly vital skill sets, the requisite political credentials were probably relaxed from 'true Nazi believer' to "seems willing to obey the representatives of the SS (whatever his private beliefs)', as had indeed been done with any number of scientists and engineers throughtout the war.

Some of the better known firms working in some way under the auspices of the SS-WVHA included Heinkel and BMW, firms that produced aircraft and aircraft engines as well as the more familiar vehicles; the chemical giant, IG Farben, which manufactured rubber, synthetic fuels, synthetic explosives and pharmaceuticals; Junkers aircraft; Krupp steel; Messerschmitt; the metal and tubing firm Salzgitter AG (part of Reichswerke Hermann Göring, but received workers through SS-WVHA); the electrical engineering company Siemens-Schuckertwerke; Apollinaris mineral water; Allach porcelain; and DEST (building material and armament). And the V-2 production was done in part in the old Zeppelinwerke, with many of the same people working there.

And that doesn't even begin to cover all the civil engineering and infrastructure projects under the SS-WVHA, as well as the administration of slave labour and manufacturing in the concentration camps, which means that the skill set available for potential colonists would realistically be exactly what they need, i.e. the ability to train unwilling people who might have no previous technical expertise and don't necessarily speak German to become workers in a vast slave industrial economy and then organize and administer the network of slave industries.