Simplifying Gurps Space world creation

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by ericthered

• Every single system is colonized, even if its just resource 0 tiny rocks.

Yup. I consider that silly.

One interesting thing I've noticed is that sulfur moons get a lot of colonies, because they tend to be very volcanic and thus have high resource numbers.

The high resource numbers are plausible. A lot of important industrial elements (e.g. copper, tin are chalcophiles in the Goldschmidt classification, which means that they tend to form sulphide minerals. They are not concentrated in any type of asteroid, and they are depleted from the rocky crusts of terrestrial planets except in isolated ore bodies. They are useful, their ores are scarce, and there aren't any promising asteroidal resources. But since sulphur moons are characterised by numerous large volcanoes that spew sulphur and what looks like ultra-mafic lava. It's plausible that sulphur moon like Io have rich fields of sulphide-rich volcanic rocks at the surface, the like of which would be found nowhere else. They might well include valuable ores of industrial metals that would not be glutted by asteroid mining.