Thread: Flat Black
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Old 09-18-2013, 06:24 AM   #139
Agemegos
 
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Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Colony lists

Well. That's a big job done!

I modified my spreadsheet that implements the GURPS Space star system design sequence so that instead of generating a star at random it reads observational data out of the Extended Hipparcos Catalogue, a recent catalogue of nearby stars. Then I looped it through the 101 thousand stars in the catalogue to generate a whole sphere of nearby stars. And then I did that 200 times over and picked the set of results I liked (number 169, as it happens).

Then I took only the habitable planets out of that and fed them into a model of the history of colonisation in FLAT BLACK, and worked out how many immigrants of what sort would arrive on each one, in each decade. That gave me 625 colonies to which emigrants had gone from Earth, and told me when they had left. I named all those colonies. Then I worked out a good (but I'm sure not optimal) selection of those at about the right distance to be sector HQs, and assigned each colony to the sector of which the HQ was its closest SHQ.

Then I built a cowboy model of the industrial development and population growth of each colony, and ran it to determine the population of each primary colony and its development level. And I put the results in the FLAT BLACK wiki. 624 colonies, listed alphabetically by name, by distance from Sol, by economic development level, by population, and by sector.

The tables give you the
  • name of each colony
  • star name or catalogue number and planet number for its planet
  • spectral class of the star
  • distance from Sol in light-years
  • constellation (direction) it's in
  • a percentage rating ("salubrity") of how attractive surface conditions are on the most habitable planet in the system
  • population as at 606 PDT
  • development level (The Suite is everything over 8.0)
  • size & type code for the starport facilities
  • name of the sector it's in
  • distance to SHQ in light-years
  • size of the planet relative to Earth
  • surface gravity in gee
  • atmospheric pressure in bar
  • percentage of the surface covered by oceans (disregarding ice)
  • level of solar illumination on the planet, relative to Earth, as a percentage
  • average surface temperature, in Celcius
  • length of the year, in annis (Earth years)
  • length of the day (if any) in hours
  • catalogue number in the Handbook of Planets

Now that that is done I can start sketching out some colonies.
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Last edited by Agemegos; 09-18-2013 at 04:32 PM.
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