[Space] How habitable is my universe?

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Good Lord! Examining Space p. 90 I discover that it assumes that every planet or moon with an affinity greater than 0 will become a colony world. That means some pretty hostile dumps with no particular resources, and some truly hellish worlds if they have very abundant resources. You can have no water, infernal temperatures, and a suffocating atmosphere, but so long as there it a +2 RVM the population will exponentiate away.

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.

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I'd like to put colonies only on shirtsleeve-habitble worlds, and resource-extraction outposts on high-affinity worlds in systems with a colony in them.

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.

[David Johnston]

[QUOTE=Agemegos]

A solution to the gravity problem? Such as? Living in space habitats and extracting the resources using remotes?

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.

I suppose it's not inconceivable. But the economics has a nasty "damned if you do, damned if you don't" air about it. If space transport is cheap, these resources will be brought from less hostile sources farther away. If it is expensive, then shipping in what people need to live on a hostile planet will be expensive.

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.

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I was thinking of the other gravity problem: the one in which humans simply can't work in high gee.

Not an issue with this generation system. In all the systems I've seen, I've never seen a solid planet with positive affinity and gravity higher than 1.5 gs and I haven't seen many with gravity higher than 1.2.

[Pomphis]

High gravity requires lots of mass, which also attracts hydrogen, and suddenly we have a gas giant.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

There you go! You're another GM who doesn't want teh generation sequence to automatically put a colony on every rock or iceball with an Affinity above 0.

I am, too. For one thing, the type of star travel used will have such a huge influence on settlement patterns that the book's system simply can't be applied to everyone's universes as written. About the only time such an implementation would be useful would be for making a Traveller style universe.

[Pomphis]

Agreed. In fact, I must admit I never even really read those parts. I want rules to design the physical systems. Social aspects are setting dependent.

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

There you go! You're another GM who doesn't want teh generation sequence to automatically put a colony on every rock or iceball with an Affinity above 0.

I'm with you on this. Give me rules that tell me what the planets are like and I'll put colonies there, or not, as it fits my campaign world. Having said that, I would not be surprised to see a lot of colonies in fairly inhospitable places, simply because the technology will make it possible and the opportunity for big profits will make the colony a viable concern.

In many cities today, it would be easy to spend almost all your time in your apartment, a subway, an office, or a place of recreation like a museum or a dance club, without ever spending much time outside. It also isn't that hard to create a small indoor park. It's not a big jump to assume people would be content to live in colonies that were self-contained networks of buildings where someone NEVER has to go outside (which is a good thing, as outside is...well...Titan or Mercury or Ceres or some other cheerful place).

If you have space habitats, the colony might move from asteroid to asteroid, mining one until the mine runs out of ore, etc., and then moving on to a new asteroid. All you have to do is deploy a solar sail and you're on your way. (Although, frankly, if you have a big asteroid you won't need to move very often. A 10-km. asteroid masses about a trillion tons. Even if only 1% of that is useful, a space colony with a few thousand people could live off the resources it would provide for a long time. And there are a LOT of 10-km. asteroids. And even more 10-km. cometary bodies in the Kuiper Belt.)

Mind you, I'm not sure I'd want to live in a place like this, but there are plenty of people who would probably love it.

I also agree some colonies will be outposts; they'll flourish for ten years or twenty years and then be abandoned. But others will endure. Either the resource they're mining won't go away--mining Helium 3 from Neptune means your colony on Triton will NEVER run out of a reason to be there--or they will become a center of commerce, etc. Individual mines will play out, but the warehouses and banks on (or in) Ceres will be there forever.

Mark

[dscheidt]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I'd like to put colonies only on shirtsleeve-habitble worlds, and resource-extraction outposts on high-affinity worlds in systems with a colony in them.

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.