Building the Long Distance Colony fleet

[Korzon77]

There was a period between the Reunificaiton War and the Amaris Civil War (better known as "when everything went to (Censored)"  when there was a LOT of money around.  We have source books talking about single companies with thousands of jumpships of an economy so transport rich that you honestly would create a periphery that was dependent on reliable and large scale shipping.

So, this ws the time when another wave of colonization might occur, except that the prosperity of the time's tended to militate against it (even high populatoin worlds in the IS aren't much more populated than 21st century earth, and they have far more in the way of technology than we do to make places habitable).

So the likely gorups that are going to leave are ideological groups, wanting to get away from the sphere.  They could be:

1.  WE have a feeling that bad things are going to happen/the casper drones will rise up and destroy mankind/our leaders catch a terminal case of the stupids at least once every half-century.

2.  Wanting to leave for moral reasons-- the STar League happily slaughtered millins and we want no part in it.

3.  Other erasons.

But these groups likely want to leave and get far away from the IS-- and as you can see from the reunificaiton war, that has to be distant indeed.

So, presuming a wealthy shipping lord, or funding from other sources, and given the extensive shipbuilding capabilities of the pre-succession wars era, when shipyards were common...

What type of fleet would you build to have a truly long distance flight into the unknown of the "macross colony fleet variety".  You're leaving, you aren't intending on coming back and to be certain nobody gets the bright idea of "inviting you" to join the star league, you *minimum* distance from terra is at least 2500 ly's.  More likely further.  A lot further. 

Because of this, you need to carry everything you'll need with you. there's no coming back and no ordering out to earth for that part you forgot to stock. 

What do you do?

[cray]

I'm not going to address the preliminary scouting and groundbreaking, just the main fleet.

I'd want to take several million people with me and, say, 10 tons of "equipment" per person (covering industrial, agricultural, and infrastructure-type gear ranging from machine tools to tractors.) To stay sneaky and hidden, I'd want to send off this fleet in one go. (Also, the round trip is a bitch, so you won't get much re-use from the ships.)

Going 3000 light-years is 100 jumps. At an average of 9 days per jump, that's a 900-day journey. I'm not going to spend the effort of establishing a recharge station chain or use lithium-fusion batteries; they increase the cost of the effort and reduce JumpShip capacity.

I'd use Mammoth-class DropShips as my people-carriers and Monoliths as my JumpShips, just to minimize the fleet size.

With such a long journey, StratOps' consumables rules make it far better to use quarters rather than stuffing the colonists into infantry bays. For a 900-day journey and 200 man-days per ton of consumables for personnel in quarters, each person will need 4.5 tons of consumables. I'll increase that to 6 tons per person, then add 2 tons of personal supplies/luggage per person. With standard-quality quarters, that's 15 tons per person. With the aforementioned 10 tons of equipment per person, that's 25 tons total per person.

Each Mammoth, with 35,000 tons of cargo space, is thus able to carry 1,400 people. Each Monolith is able to carry 12,600 people. I'll round down and say 12,500 people because that'll make the next calculation smoother.

To move 3 million colonists, enough (IMO) to sustain a technological civilization on spare parts and old knowledge, 240 Monoliths are needed, plus 2,160 Mammoths. Might as well round up to 250 and 2250.

So, you can get this effort done on 1-3 trillion Star League bucks, ballpark. That's quite affordable for some Star League bajillionaires.

Setting this up is an effort of a decade or more simply because of the round-trip times. A string of HPGs (to be destroyed after the colony is complete) would really cut times because you don't have to wait for 900-day courier flights.

[VhenRa]

The downside of going in one big wave is... unless you go blind you are going to need to send scouts years beforehand to actually find your colony world and return home with said info.

[Fireangel]

Problem with a large (million +) drop colony is that one relatively minor disaster in the early stages can have repercussions far out of proportion with the nature of the problem.

I wrote an article on colony building that might be useful.

Cowdragon took that idea and developed a small craft colonization model that might also work well.

[Khymerion]

I love the idea of a Macross-Frontier style Battletech fleet... especially if it was put together intelligently like Cray's suggestion and using Fireangel's stuff.

Then again, this was the heyday of the Star League when a visionary with too much money in the Hegemony could get away with building a few custom ships instead of just using off the shelf components like Cray's entry.   After all, you need at least a few recognizable unique ships for the fleet in any of the glamor shots that will be done in any documentary done by the colonists afterwards or for the historians left in the Inner Sphere to use.

And a command ship for your protagonists to ride around on.

[cray]

The downside of going in one big wave is... unless you go blind you are going to need to send scouts years beforehand to actually find your colony world and return home with said info.

Like the scouting, HPG chain, and the decade of set-up work I mentioned in my first post?

Problem with a large (million +) drop colony is that one relatively minor disaster in the early stages can have repercussions far out of proportion with the nature of the problem.

Hence the preparatory work I mentioned but didn't detail. I was looking at the biggest logistics question: how many ships are needed when, basically, ships that won't be used for round trips due to the enormous flight time.

The actual colony establishment schedule - one giant flotilla or a string of smaller personnel deliveries - doesn't matter to the ship numbers in the situation. It's just details, like the smaller quantity of ships, personnel, and supplies needed to break ground ahead of the arrival of most of the population.

[rlbell]

This really shows why colonization efforts benefit from command circuits.  2500+ ly trip requires (per Cray) 900 days of consumables for each colonist.  A command circuit will take a while to set up, but each colonist can be delivered with 50 days of consumables (less if there are available pirate points to eliminate travel times to/from the standard points).  The command circuit hand carried messages will be slower than HPG signals, but includes a parcel service.

The command circuit will take longer to ship all of the supplies and colonists, but less of the supplies will be consumed along the way, so cargo space is more efficiently used.

The increased time is a problem, as jumping every nine days means that a chain of one hundred ships will take five years to ferry as many dropships as a single massive lift.  The odd advantage is that if each JS was carrying two DS, the hundred JS massive lift would require two hundred DS, but the hundred JS command circuit would just keep using the same two (more if transit time from the final jump point does not allow for the DS to return to the JS before it jumps out of system for the next run).

Another advantage of the command circuit is that it makes it easier to hide the scale of what you are doing.  A single jumpship on a secretive packet route draws much less attention than a hundred JS leaving simultaneously (coordinating a hundred JS leaving from different places is possible, but you need to be really careful about ensuring that everything shows up in the correct order).

[cray]

The increased time is a problem, as jumping every nine days means that a chain of one hundred ships will take five years to ferry as many dropships as a single massive lift.  The odd advantage is that if each JS was carrying two DS, the hundred JS massive lift would require two hundred DS, but the hundred JS command circuit would just keep using the same two (more if transit time from the final jump point does not allow for the DS to return to the JS before it jumps out of system for the next run).

You might want several sets of DropShips running the circuit. Large craft docking operations run to the tune of a couple of hours between undocking and docking to another ship, plus transit between the two JumpShips (which should be some hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart for safety). With 100 jumps involved, you're looking at 8.33 days, and giving the crews some rest periods between jumps would probably be wise. (Here's a question: what's it like to jump while asleep?)

If you limit jumps to once every 2 hours, then a 16-hour waking period could fit in 9 jumps. 100 jumps becomes an 11.11-day transit. That's time for the first JumpShips in the command circuit to safely charge for a second jump (returning to their other station), though even the 24-hour jump schedule (8.33 days) would be enough time for the ships to recharge.

At a minimum, then, you could keep two groups of DropShips circulating simultaneously: one out-bound to the colony, one in-bound back to the inner Sphere.

There's also the initial planet-to-jump point and final jump point-to-planet transit. For nice, life-friendly G-type stars, those interplanetary transits are also about the length of a JumpShip's recharge period, so you'll want 2 groups of DropShips circulating on each of those legs, too, to maximize utilization of the command circuit. That's a total of 6 sets of DropShips. (Unless the origin and destination jumps arrive at pirate points, in which case you might cut back to 2 or 3 sets.)

Regarding totals of ships: for my colony of 3 million people, with 9.75 tons of equipment per person and each person kept in standard quarters (vs. infantry bays) and thus needing 0.25 tons of consumables each for 50 days, the capacity of a Mammoth increases to 2000 passengers. That means the equivalent of 1,500 Mammoths will be required. With a Monolith able to 9 DropShips at once, the command circuit will have to make 167 jumps. At one jump every 11.11 days and full utilization of the command circuit, that's an 1852-day delivery cycle: 5.07 years.

You're probably going to want some redundancy: spare DropShips and JumpShips stationed along the circuit to plug in for ships that have to halt operations for maintenance.

In any case, the command circuit does allow for a considerable cost reduction as you're eliminating thousands of DropShips.

[Fireangel]

Another advantage of the command circuit is that it makes it easier to hide the scale of what you are doing.  A single jumpship on a secretive packet route draws much less attention than a hundred JS leaving simultaneously (coordinating a hundred JS leaving from different places is possible, but you need to be really careful about ensuring that everything shows up in the correct order).

I'm not so sure; given the distances under discussion, the 100 droppers may not leave at the same time, but assuming one leaves every 7 days, such movements will be noticed after a while.

[cawest]

if you have one or two de-milied corn cobs, that would make the trip easyer... if your going for one big jump, you have alot of valueable stuff. you will need to protect it.  i would use them as the last ships to go.  i know today you have guys that have 707's and F-106's as toys.

[Korzon77]

Here's a question-- are there any rules for truly self-supporting ships-- IE, o'neil style habitats with ajump drive?  Given the incredible advantages fusion power gives you in recycling, the water/air should be close to 100 percent, but that still leaves needing to raise food for your people.  If it doesn't, what would be a good benchmark for a self-sustaining ecology in terms of tons per person?

(this is for the long distance colony fleet that isn't actually leaving with a set destination and figures they'll set up shop after thy have a while to scope out the new real estate in the LMC)

[cray]

Here's a question-- are there any rules for truly self-supporting ships-- IE, o'neil style habitats with ajump drive?

No, since BT doesn't support spacecraft massing billions of tons like O'Neil colonies. For construction rules, see Strategic Operations' advanced spacecraft construction rules.

Given the incredible advantages fusion power gives you in recycling, the water/air should be close to 100 percent,

The rules for quarters cut consumables to 5kg a day per person, reflecting the best recycling available in BT.

That's pretty low, but you wanted a colony set up 100 jumps from anywhere. That's either a 900-day journey (4.5 tons plus a margin of safety) or 0.25 tons (command circuit with a factor-of-5 safety) per person.

When you're facing an 11.11-day trip (via command circuit) but give 50 days of consumables for only 0.25 tons, that's pretty minimal life support requirements. After all, the major source of mass is the quarters (7 tons per person) and colonization supplies (9.75 tons per person). There shouldn't be anything to complain about with respect to life support requirements (0.25 tons)

Even if you're stuck with the 900-day transit, the mass-per-person only grows from 17 tons to 22 tons. Spending several billion tons on a soil-stuffed, super-giant O'Neil habitat doesn't seem worth the trouble of cutting out 5 tons per person when you're adding ultra-massive ecosystems.

this is for the long distance colony fleet that isn't actually leaving with a set destination and figures they'll set up shop after thy have a while to scope out the new real estate in the LMC)

No one is going to risk millions of lives just "jumping off into the great black yonder." They'll arrange either scouting missions or astronomical surveys first and have a clear idea of where they're going. Early 21st Century astronomers are already mapping out star systems hundreds and thousands of light-years away. Their BT counterparts should be able to see systems much further away in much better detail without leaving Terra's orbit.

If the leaders of the colonization mission don't take such preliminary precautions, one can hope they'll be lynched before the colonization fleet leaves civilization. It's too easy to map out a route and find a good destination that there's no reason to jump blindly off into deep space.

[Korzon77]

If the leaders of the colonization mission don't take such preliminary precautions, one can hope they'll be lynched before the colonization fleet leaves civilization. It's too easy to map out a route and find a good destination that there's no reason to jump blindly off into deep space.

Not a fan of Kerenksy? :)

On the self supporting thing, I was thinking of just fluffing it that if you have over year or two's of consumable supplies for your crew, the assumption will be that you're actually using some form of regenerative lifesupport and you don't have to worry about it.

On the o'neil idea, I dunno if it has to be that big (obviously I'm refering to the idea of the o'neil, not the island designs we got).  IE, you could mae some grav decks with first class accomodations and some extra weight fluffed as "Gardens" and such.*

The big thing is that for really long range missions, ones that are intneind to leave the IS far behind-- even if you have scoped out the terrain, you're talking a fairly long time in close quarters so having at least a ew provisions for nicer "natural" accommodations would be pretty important for psychological reasons.

*3057's small habitat gives you about 6,000 people on 120,000 tons.  making it into a jumpshipo transportable space station would require losing 20,000 tons of cargo (to be carried by other dropshps), but would provide good long-term accomidations, in addition to being quite useful once you arrived.

[Gryphon]

Question: What is the minimum sustainable level of genetic diversity needed here?

Corollary: What is the minimum sustainable level of genetic diversity when Star League era genetics and medical technology are taken into account?

Query: What is the next closest thing to "cryogenic freezing" or "biologic stasis"?

When the above are taken into account, what do the numbers look like then?

[Fireangel]

The way to go about it IMHO would be to determine how much tonnage of "stuff" would be required on board to produce one ton of consumables in a self-sustaining basis.

The issue, as Cray points out, is that consumables in BT are really quite insignificant in the big picture, especially considering the relatively short distances traveled and ease of resupply.

[cray]

Not a fan of Kerenksy? :)

Kerensky didn't necessarily jump blindly into space.

On the o'neil idea, I dunno if it has to be that big (obviously I'm refering to the idea of the o'neil, not the island designs we got).  IE, you could mae some grav decks with first class accomodations and some extra weight fluffed as "Gardens" and such.*

Soil and water get real heavy real fast.

The big thing is that for really long range missions, ones that are intneind to leave the IS far behind-- even if you have scoped out the terrain, you're talking a fairly long time in close quarters so having at least a ew provisions for nicer "natural" accommodations would be pretty important for psychological reasons.

You can avoid that headache if you use the command circuits described in this system. The advantages of the command circuit are:

1) No home rules required, unlike your O'Neil ships.
2) Reduced resources required, since you're cutting out most of the DropShips. This point bears deep consideration: for the same budget, a command circuit long-distance colonization effort can deliver far more people and equipment because it is so much cheaper.
3) The colonists are on ships for days, not years, so they're much happier.
4) Further psychological benefits include elimination of worries of being unable to find habitable planets. You know in advance you have a colony waiting for you.

The wandering fleet is a bad approach to colonization.

*3057's small habitat gives you about 6,000 people on 120,000 tons.  making it into a jumpshipo transportable space station...

...Is impossible since it is bigger than 100,000 tons. A collar can only carry 100,000 tons. Also, the cargo unloading rules of StratOps make it difficult and annoying to unload the station to a DropShip. It's simpler to use a DropShip directly, which avoids the extra cargo swap. (Yet another reason for the command circuit colonization effort.)

Korzon, do you really want a long-range colonization effort, or do you want people living in a mobile fleet of spaceships?

Question: What is the minimum sustainable level of genetic diversity needed here?

A few hundred unrelated adults are plenty.

Corollary: What is the minimum sustainable level of genetic diversity when Star League era genetics and medical technology are taken into account?

Bring a liquid nitrogen jar-o'-zygotes and you're fine. Star League technology would be overkill.

Query: What is the next closest thing to "cryogenic freezing" or "biologic stasis"?

BT has some freeze equipment, though it is rare and little used in the 31st Century.

When the above are taken into account, what do the numbers look like then?

That depends on whether you want your grandkids to live in a cave or maintain a technological society. I'm suggesting millions of people not for genetic diversity, which only requires trivial numbers of people to achieve, but rather to maintain and grow a sophisticated technological society. The most advanced factories today sit on huge pyramids of industry, supporting services, vast numbers of specialists, and (most of all) hundreds of millions of consumers. A few million left to themselves would have trouble natively developing and maintaining an early 20th Century level of technology.

Colonists can bring along mountains of high tech industrial gear, spare parts, supplies, blue prints, etc. to start with a high tech industry and, with care, sustain it for decades or centuries. But the smaller the colony's population gets, the more trouble it risks because it'll have fewer specialists, less living knowledge about the mysterious black boxes that build their stuff, and a smaller economy to sustain a diverse technological base.

That's why I'm targeting a colony in the millions.

[Gryphon]

Sure, but people and their attendant needs are tonnage intensive. So you "can" the people, or minimize them to a degree, and carry the tech you need to expand in the future. These guys aren't intending to come back, so their needs for certain military things is minimal. They don't require regiments of mechs or combat vehicles, some PA(L) companies, a wing or two of fighters, at best they buy a few demilitarized warships and rearm them, carrying their entire combat force that way.

For the rest, a few tens of thousands "awake" to run things and set the ground work, a few hundreds of thousands "asleep" to pick up there and expand, and then you start using your zygote option to force rapid expansion, artificial wombs should be around still, right? We aren't trying to create a society that could rival an IS house within a few centuries, are we? Instead, the aim should be to create a sustainable society with a population that won't cause issues, since the aim is to set up so far out that were the IS to continue expanding (which isn't the apparent case, even before they leave) it will be centuries before they arrive.

Trying to set up a fully technic society requires you to move too damn much stuff and people, and that won't go unnoticed. Get noticed, and even if you succeed, someone is going to wonder where you went and come looking. Go unnoticed, and you get 3-1o centuries of societal and technical growth.

[cray]

Sure, but people and their attendant needs are tonnage intensive. So you "can" the people,

Why put them in stasis for 11 days?

or minimize them to a degree, and carry the tech you need to expand in the future. These guys aren't intending to come back, so their needs for certain military things is minimal. They don't require regiments of mechs or combat vehicles, some PA(L) companies, a wing or two of fighters, at best they buy a few demilitarized warships and rearm them, carrying their entire combat force that way.

I hadn't even considered the military aspect. The mass requirements of a decent defense force are so small as to be lost in the noise of a multi-million-colonist population.

Trying to set up a fully technic society requires you to move too damn much stuff and people

You can't hide the fact you're setting up a colony to intelligence agencies (who'd be the only ones to really notice the recruiting of suitable colonists from thousands of worlds). What you can do is hide your destination. There are no jump trackers in BT.

, and that won't go unnoticed. Get noticed, and even if you succeed, someone is going to wonder where you went and come looking.

Let them look. There are 2 million stars in the Inner Sphere, which took centuries to explore by JumpShip. In a 3000-light-year sphere that Korzon specified, there's about 432 million stars to search. There are no jump trackers in BT to find where JumpShips went, and there's an average of 370 stars within a 30-light-year radius of any single star. Your curious pursuers will be faced with a recon project requiring thousands of JumpShips and millennia to find you.

It ain't worth it. Unless you're running off with the crown jewels or the Lost Cameron Heir, no one's going to bother with such an impossible search.

[VhenRa]

When he was talking about stations, he was meaning stations like the Snowden that can apparently attach to a Jumpship via the collar like a Dropship, complete with KF Boom.

[cray]

When he was talking about stations, he was meaning stations like the Snowden that can apparently attach to a Jumpship via the collar like a Dropship, complete with KF Boom.

I understood that. My points were that 1) docking collars still have a 100,000-ton limitation, and 2) detachable or not, space stations won't be able to land and thus you'll need an inefficient extra transfer stage to get the people to the ground of the new colony.

[VhenRa]

You can however probably cram more people/supplies into said stations. Then use a Dropship per X number of Stations to move things into place on the surface.

[cray]

You can however probably cram more people/supplies into said stations.

Yes, you definitely could. Space stations have much lower structural and engine masses than DropShips, thus freeing up a lot of mass for people.

Then use a Dropship per X number of Stations to move things into place on the surface.

Yes, you could do that. As I've said twice before, though, that's an inefficient process.

It's inefficient on several levels: first, you still need almost as many DropShips as in the Command Circuit method for delivering colonists 3,000 light-years from home, so you're now adding unnecessary spacecraft to the process. The basic command circuit model discussed earlier in the thread uses ~100 Monolith-class JumpShips and 54 Mammoth-class DropShips.

Using space stations still requires the 100 JumpShips and adds at least 18 space stations, potentially 54 or more if they're carried from JumpShips to planet orbit before unloading. (If the stations use their own engines for the transit, then you'll need around 100 space stations to maintain full utilization of the command circuit. The 9-day transit from jump point to planet will increase to 28 days.) If they're driven by tugs at 1G to the planet, you still need 54 space stations, plus 36 tug DropShips. Then you need DropShips to unload the space stations, either at the jump point or planetary orbit, and either multiple trips are required per DropShip (because the stations will hold more than any DropShip) or several DropShips are required per space station to be unloaded simultaneously.

If you're abandoning the command circuit, the numbers balloon because you need all the colonists carried at once.

The second point of inefficiency is the loading/unloading process. A DropShip can only dock to one of the space station's cargo bay doors at a time and, per the cargo transfer rules of StratOps, that limits unloading rates. Per the rules, zero-G loading/unloading is a slow process that might take weeks to empty the space station.

Sticking to a system of JumpShips and DropShips only considerably simplifies the process and reduces the numbers of spacecraft involved. The colonists and cargo board a DropShip on the origin planet; they stay on it through 100 jumps; then they walk off the DropShip on the new planet. The loading/unloading will be rapid because a) all DropShip doors can be used by the space port simultaneously; b) heavy cargo lifters will be available at the space port, unlike the DropShip-to-space station transfer; c) loading/unloading at a planet will not suffer the zero-G transfer penalty; and d) you skip extraneous ship-to-station transfers.

The situation where you want space stations is not for colonization flights, but rather for long-term space settlement, like a gypsy fleet.

[Fireangel]

Dispensing with the command circuit, a modified seed colony method might be useful for such far-flung colonial efforts; a Jumpship goes out fully loaded and leaves most (if not all) the droppers at the colony, bringing back the recon/research team and their dropper (if any).

By the time the jumpship returns to the IS (~6 yr after departure), the second wave should be ready to go. Load them up, take three years to get to the colony, drop off wave 2 plus a few droppers, bring back the ones that were left behind.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Second+ waves can be made with smaller jumpships departing once every six months to a year. Conversely, a single jumpship (or two) can serve the colonial effort start to finish.

Pros: 1-2 jumpships + (max dropship capacity x2) dropships are needed. Higher chance of survival/success due to spread-out arrivals.
Cons: Takes longer to get big numbers going, one jumpship failure can be catastrophic.

[snewsom2997]

Now that we have drone rules, what about a mission of Drone/Ships to set up the colony to be filled by humans later.
A Monolith(S) Full of Drone Dropships, Monolith(S) get to system dump Drone Ships, they burn in system and begin pre-programmed building instructions. Even if only assembling Prefab buildings, for Water Purification, Habitation, Storage, Getting Crops Going, Starting Surveys etc., to be filled with equipment by colonists later. I would assume that if Drones can fix busted Warships to a point, building a simple boxs, Plowing fields, or flying over and taking readings should be no problem

[Fireangel]

Now that we have drone rules, what about a mission of Drone/Ships to set up the colony to be filled by humans later.
A Monolith(S) Full of Drone Dropships, Monolith(S) get to system dump Drone Ships, they burn in system and begin pre-programmed building instructions. Even if only assembling Prefab buildings, for Water Purification, Habitation, Storage, Getting Crops Going, Starting Surveys etc., to be filled with equipment by colonists later. I would assume that if Drones can fix busted Warships to a point, building a simple boxs, Plowing fields, or flying over and taking readings should be no problem

Because with BT tech it is infinitely cheaper and simpler to just send people to do the job.

Real world "colonization" models for going to mars (yadda, yadda) simply don't work at all in BT for many reasons, including tech differences and the fact that the real world "colonies" are actually outposts, not colonies.

[Hellfire]

Now that we have drone rules, what about a mission of Drone/Ships to set up the colony to be filled by humans later.
A Monolith(S) Full of Drone Dropships, Monolith(S) get to system dump Drone Ships, they burn in system and begin pre-programmed building instructions. Even if only assembling Prefab buildings, for Water Purification, Habitation, Storage, Getting Crops Going, Starting Surveys etc., to be filled with equipment by colonists later. I would assume that if Drones can fix busted Warships to a point, building a simple boxs, Plowing fields, or flying over and taking readings should be no problem

I've brought up that idea before and referenced Voyage from Yesteryear. I think Cray is putting to much emphasis on building infrastructure from the ground up. Sure it's safer that way, but personally if it's available I prefer a massive amount of up front development. With as much automation as possible regardless of the costs.

If you want another reference more Ombey and less Lalonde from the Nights Dawn Trilogy. The people on Lalonde where going out into the forest and clearing trees and building log cabins. The standard colonization package of the Kingdom of Kulu for Ombey included so much infrastructure development they towed an asteroid into orbit to start the colonies space industry on or before day one of colonization.

In short, up front as much development as possible and that means a very large equipment tonnage per person before colonization starts. Of course this isn't always possible, just preferable in my opinion.

[cray]

I've brought up that idea before and referenced Voyage from Yesteryear. I think Cray is putting to much emphasis on building infrastructure from the ground up.

Nope. I'm emphasizing the population needed to sustain a minimum level of infrastructure and technology.

Sure it's safer that way, but personally if it's available I prefer a massive amount of up front development. With as much automation as possible regardless of the costs.

That was my plan, too. Otherwise, a few million people won't accomplish much beyond the 20th Century level of technology if they have to start from scratch.

In short, up front as much development as possible and that means a very large equipment tonnage per person before colonization starts.

Hence my suggestion of 10 tons of equipment per person. That's 30 million tons of industrial equipment, supplies, and spare parts in my scenario.

[Warclaw]

While I agree that Stations like the Snowden are an inefficient way to move the colonists, I'd still want to take a few along.  For a couple reasons.

1: Zero/low gee manufacturing.

2: A couple actual Snowdens with associated small craft and mining mechs would be a good jump-start on an asteroid based resource extraction set up.  I don't know about you, but I certainly could find uses for good amounts of nickel-iron, carbon, and other such minerals.

[Korzon77]

True, although the primary view of battletech seems to be that planet side extraction is more effecient and less expensive-- note that asteroid operations had their heyday before the development of FTL opened up habitable worlds. 

OTH, having some of your industry off planet does help protect you against the unfortnate failure to realize that you're about to have some planet wide disater that might destroy most of the onworld infrastructure.

[cray]

1: Zero/low gee manufacturing.

Other than endosteel, zero-G doesn't deliver much in the way of useful industrial products. Skylab, Mir, and the ISS have shown a long series of disappointments in material science, and BT's rules on cargo handling don't make zero-G assembly lines attractive. Anything that 1960s and 1970s thought would be awesome to make in zero-G turned out to be simpler, faster, and much cheaper to make on a planet.

2: A couple actual Snowdens with associated small craft and mining mechs would be a good jump-start on an asteroid based resource extraction set up.  I don't know about you, but I certainly could find uses for good amounts of nickel-iron, carbon, and other such minerals.

BT has made it clear (in ATOW, pg371-372, under Resources) that zero-G mining is not cost effective except for certain rare elements. Nickel-iron and carbon are elements worth pennies a kilogram when they're rare on planetary surfaces. Throw in BT's tiny DropShips' small cargo capacities, cost of vacuum and micro-G operations, and you find that the only thing you'll want to mine in space is platinum-group metals and maybe gold.

Trying to mine nickel-iron from an asteroid at several C-bills per kilogram is never going to compete with planetary mines that deliver the same ore at pennies a kilogram.

Even in real life, O'Neil's inspirational "The High Frontier" is filled with orders-of-magnitude over-optimism about operating costs and resource values. An asteroid ain't going to do snot for a planetary economy unless it means supplying ultra-rare elements.

BT enforces that by making space mining rare and of limited utility. As noted in JHS:Terra, Terra's asteroid belt could easily meet all of the Inner Sphere's resource requirements for tens of millennia. However, it's cheaper and easier to mine habitable planets in FASAonomics, leading to the oddities in resource starvation seen throughout the Inner Sphere.