So the Touring Terra section of JHS: Terra informs us that Terrans tend to live a long time, with roughly twice the average life expectancy of the rest of the inner sphere.
Per the Star League Sourcebook, the Inner Sphere-wide average was 120 years. That included long-lived planets like Terra and places like Annapolis, with 50-ish average life spans. Throw in the Succession Wars and the average plummets to just under 90 years, while Terra's average didn't alter much.
My question is how does this manifest? I assume a Terran is going to reach maturity at the same rate (no jokes about thirty year old teenagers for instance) but how should one expect for them to age after that?
As implied in the fluff of JHS:Terra, they exhibit about half the aging rate after maturity as modern humans - their 18 is our 18, but their 90 is our 45 (hence many Terran women delaying families until nearly their second century), and their 150 is our 75-90ish.
This is a result of numerous genetic "vaccines" and similar medicines used through the Terran Alliance and later, pre-Succession War cultures. The lingering effects are most pronounced on planets with matching medical knowledge (e.g., El Dorado and, presumably, New Avalon see an average of 120 years), which can help other aging-related problems like cardiac artery congestion - youthful skin and energy doesn't say much about arterial plaque, as Hanse Davion could tell you, while Natasha Kerensky was clearly in good shape into her 70s. With less advanced medicine and less access to medical care for most Inner Sphere planets, the Inner Sphere average is dragged down to early Terran Alliance levels (89.5, was it?) and some are positively abysmal for lack of basic medicines (e.g., Annapolis, where the peasants rarely see 60).
At least, that's what I intended when I wrote about that.
This has no rules backing as of yet, so any RPG aging rules take precedence.
Do they suffer the detriments of old age at the same time as everybody else would and just hold on longer, or, for terrans, is 70 the new 30?
New 30-40-ish, anyway.
Do they remain at their physical peak for longer before finally starting to show age around eighty or so?
Such was my intent. Whether Herb and the aging rules agree is another matter.
