[Space] How habitable is my universe?

[David Johnston]

Originally Posted by thrash

Is raw vacuum in orbit "habitable"? If not, then assigning a "habitability" rating to worse conditions is pointless.

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.

[Fnordianslip]

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.

[Rupert]

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?

[zorg]

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.

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.

[Mgellis]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

That's not my point. My point is that Space assumes that people will settle and permanently occupy planets that I consider utterly uninhabitable.

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

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Past TL7 it's not 'horny' that counts: it's 'clucky'.

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

[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.

[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.

[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.