Author Topic: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?  (Read 7616 times)

Daemion

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Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« on: 04 February 2019, 03:25:47 »
So, for anyone that's completely caught-up on Touring the Stars, how many of the worlds, so far, fit the 'colony-ville' mold?

The Colony-ville mold can be defined as a large or very large central city, with only very few and/or very minor outlying communities on a largely unexplored planet.

While I do expect plenty of worlds to not conform to that typification, (largely due to Star League programs and effects on near-Earth systems) I'm wondering if the Powers That Be are using that as a staple outline for a lot of worlds.  Such a set-up certainly goes a long way to explain the ease of raids and the short duration of full-regimental or full-brigade level invasions.

Or, is the trend the opposite, with many IS worlds actually being largely populated with mid-sized communities spread out all over the globe? Something like this would help justify the notion that there are plenty of nobles with land-holdings and thus plenty of opportunities for causing trouble that turns into a table-top game.  Would also justify the undefined number of small mercenary groups that are supposed to function in the universe for short periods of time.

Secondly, have we seen a growing number of examples of civil flare-ups and conflicts, either short or ongoing, on the worlds presented so far?







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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #1 on: 04 February 2019, 11:58:15 »
I'd imagine these smaller colony worlds are setup not unlike real life Alaska.  City, but outliners are scattered there no real major roads/highways.

Entire series of TtS, i've not seen any road maps because the scale of the BattleForce2 map.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #2 on: 04 February 2019, 18:01:47 »
So, for anyone that's completely caught-up on Touring the Stars, how many of the worlds, so far, fit the 'colony-ville' mold?

None that I wrote. Some had relatively concentrated populations around limited water resources (like Ionus), and Lone Star had a handful of cities, but none were single-city worlds.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #3 on: 05 February 2019, 10:59:55 »
There are two forces working against each other that come into play here.

On the one hand, anyone who is willingly going to travel to a distant colony world is going to tend to be a loner, adventurer, or misfit, and generally not wish to or be able to comfortably settle down in just another densely populated metropolis like the one they ran away from.  On the other hand, there's little to be gained by being completely out of contact with humanity, so the colonists will tend to cluster in and around thinly populated areas of small towns and rural outlying farms and homesteads, each with at least one semi-built-up hub within a reasonable travel range that handles all of the more advanced needs of those colonists: medical care, manufacturing, administration, defense, education, and so on.  Spread will be mostly horizontal at first, until a few generations have elapsed and people with more gregarious tendencies begin centralizing and urbanizing their society (or societies, on some planets which are divided between different owning factions).

You probably won't see a lot of worlds with just one sizable city and few smaller towns outside its immediate vicinity, unless the population was forcibly moved from another urban area; the norm would probably tend to produce numerous smaller cities or large towns, with one or two slightly more significant buildups near the starport(s) to handle off-world transactions.  There will most likely be completely empty (possibly only minimally explored) areas remaining between the towns, for lack of people to settle them.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #4 on: 05 February 2019, 11:26:30 »
Age of the world or colony will have a part to play. As will the difficulty of habitation and even proximity to more developed worlds. One of the reasons why I always loved Caph.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #5 on: 05 February 2019, 13:03:33 »
I look at as mentioned age of colony and habitability of the world as being primary controlling factors on expansion rates.

to be honest for setting up and administering a new colony having everyone in one spot makes it a lot easier. with that said I disagree that colonists are all going to be anti social people.  there is obviously going to be some, but others might be people who "want to see whats beyond the next hill", and others looking for opportunities.

with that said when you have a really forgiving environment and ecosystem a colony is more likely to expand quicker.  if its actively hostile its going to expand slower if at all.
then you have to deal with things like resources, gold rush situations etc.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #6 on: 05 February 2019, 16:37:00 »
One thing working against such a set up is that there is no stargate/space elevator and access to orbit is relatively cheap- so the colonizing Jumbo (your bush pilots will be flying spheriod small craft) can drop to several different places . . . and for a viable colony you will probably want to do so to gain access to the resources you need.  I think the general colony plan will be like they describe Wallis.

First touch down will be at the mouth of a large river on a deep bay that is protected from ocean storms.  Settlements will spread up the river and along the coast using water as a cheap highway- boats could be built out of local building materials (aka native 'wood') just like the second buildings (first will either be cargo containers or for old colonies the disposable drop shuttles that become colony facilities).  Small boats and barges could be easily assembled from pre-fab shipments if no 'native wood' meets the materials requirements and simple sails can be rigged on them to move them if you did not want to use battery/solar for outboard motors.

If you DO want 'colony-villes' nothing says they have to be piled high on top of each other like SE Asian cities, NYC or other high pop density cities.  Look at some of the western plains cities in the US where they sprawl through many counties and have very few skyscrapers or even larger business towers.  I live in a city that sprawl is 39 miles N to S (probably more N, but I cut off where N 248th St was) and 56 miles E to W.  Now it has swallowed up little towns so you will occasionally see a sign about the 3 major blocks being some town that has low sales tax (and speed traps) but they are not completely separate.  Its also swallowed up some decent sized towns . . . because the city has annexed all sorts of rural area to get that tax base and keep it from other cities- Houston did a lot of the same thing.

In fact, Helmsdown as described in MWDA novel is a huge sprawl with short office towers and lots of highways . . . the description actually reminded me of driving through Houston.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #7 on: 05 February 2019, 22:13:23 »
I think the setting kind of need Colony-villes to dominate.  They can actually be conquered by the sorts of small forces seen in the lostech era and on the part of the Clans during the Clan invasion.  A spread out population you can't conquer or hold with the forces that have been written as conquering or holding worlds in Battletech. 

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #8 on: 05 February 2019, 23:38:36 »
I once pitched that there may be lost cities in the BTU but no one was having it.

I mean, we have lost planets. Don't think a city getting reduced to rubble and never rebuilt would fit naturally after a Succession War that included City Busters and Nukes.

As is, the Colony-Ville model works fine for BT regarding sometimes small force size and how changing flag rarely changes things for the every day folk. The cities usually built around the one objective on the planet with any interstellar value (thus, worth taking) the rest of the planet (what we would consider the sticks) couldn't care less unless things get planet wide bad.     
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #9 on: 06 February 2019, 00:22:32 »
 Given the feudal nature of the Inner Sphere after the formation of the Terran Hegemony, I would think most colony worlds start with a central hub that has the designated noble/administrator/governor and his staff/minions/civil servants. Also military and medical services. This would also be where the Spaceport will be (initially). The peasants/colonists arrive here and are assigned work. With a reasonable policy of indenturing and a steady supply of new arrivals you would have farmsteads expanding outward from the original site.
 As the world gets explored in detail things may get moved. Found a site for a mine of some valuable ore - May want to move the spaceport there (or build another).
 An interesting question is; are there involuntary colony's? Not prison worlds per se but something like Australia in the 18th & 19th century.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #10 on: 06 February 2019, 03:05:44 »
Yup there are. At least one "perfect" planet for colonization was turned into a prison planet by mistake, when the intern in charge of classifying it marked it as a quasi-death world.

Regarding central hubs.... Why is a spaceport important at all? Dropships can land anywhere without problems in this setting (something I find extremely hard to believe), so it does not seem very important to have a spaceport except for making tenancd, something you do not need after every jump.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #11 on: 06 February 2019, 05:57:40 »
I once pitched that there may be lost cities in the BTU but no one was having it.

Coincidentally, Stotzing did a bit of that, though it has a bit of lost colony element to it. Is the Stotzing Touring the Stars out yet?
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #12 on: 06 February 2019, 06:51:55 »
The primacy of the original colony site is reflected on some worlds, even centuries later.  In the Warrior Trilogy, both Pacifica and Tharkad are explicitly stated to run most, if not all, data storage and processing through a single planetary mainframe (presumably located at the site of the original settlement). 

Interestingly, that model (with most data stored on the central mainframe and access points being merely dumb terminals without local storage) would go a long way towards explaining the widespread loss of technology and knowledge during the Succession Wars.  On worlds targeted during the fighting, those planetary mainframes would be prime targets - a nuke lobbed onto it would wipe out all local records, throwing the world into anarchy and economic collapse even if the invasion failed.  Central storage would also make it much easier for Operation HOLY SHROUD agents to hack in and wipe out all "forbidden" technological records in one fell swoop.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #13 on: 06 February 2019, 08:00:58 »
The primacy of the original colony site is reflected on some worlds, even centuries later.  In the Warrior Trilogy, both Pacifica and Tharkad are explicitly stated to run most, if not all, data storage and processing through a single planetary mainframe (presumably located at the site of the original settlement). 

That centralization could also be - as noted in ATOW - a Succession Wars-era ComStar hack that made it harder to recover technology. ComStar often "helped" rebuild telecommunication systems with less capable, centralized systems.
Mike Miller, Materials Engineer

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**"Well, the first class name [for pocket WarShips]: 'Ship with delusions of grandeur that is going to evaporate 3.1 seconds after coming into NPPC range' tended to cause morale problems...." --Korzon77
**"Describe the Clans." "Imagine an entire civilization built out of 80’s Ric Flairs, Hulk Hogans, & Macho Man Randy Savages ruling over an entire labor force with Einstein Level Intelligence." --Jake Mikolaitis


Disclaimer: Anything stated in this post is unofficial and non-canon unless directly quoted from a published book. Random internet musings of a BattleTech writer are not canon.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #14 on: 06 February 2019, 08:12:39 »
I once pitched that there may be lost cities in the BTU but no one was having it.

I mean, we have lost planets. Don't think a city getting reduced to rubble and never rebuilt would fit naturally after a Succession War that included City Busters and Nukes.

It's pretty much inevitable that there are lost cities in BattleTech.  There are planets where whole regions or even continents were abandoned, too, so odds are there are lost cities there.  It doesn't need to be weapons, either.  Settlement patterns shift over time as the economic demographics of the planet change, or you could have natural or industrial disasters that prompt evacuations.  Look up Indianola, TX, and Centralia, PA, for examples.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #15 on: 06 February 2019, 08:39:22 »
That centralization could also be - as noted in ATOW - a Succession Wars-era ComStar hack that made it harder to recover technology. ComStar often "helped" rebuild telecommunication systems with less capable, centralized systems.

Financially speaking, centralized less-capable systems would be easier to maintain and service, and fits well with most HPGs being located in a planet's chief city or settlement. Why travel halfway around the globe to work on a computer system, when the hub is located a few blocks from your compound?
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #16 on: 06 February 2019, 08:50:51 »
Regarding central hubs.... Why is a spaceport important at all? Dropships can land anywhere without problems in this setting (something I find extremely hard to believe), so it does not seem very important to have a spaceport except for making tenancd, something you do not need after every jump.

The built up warehouses, repair and maintenance facilities, and refueling for a few. Not to mention an administrative center that houses customs and monitors who comes and goes. The spaceport exists for the planet side infrastructure as much as for the incoming spacecraft

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #17 on: 06 February 2019, 08:54:57 »
I once pitched that there may be lost cities in the BTU but no one was having it.


Tell them they are wrong. There's one write up, pretty sure in TRO 3025 about one planet with a wide swath of irradiated territory including a production factories. I want to say it was maybe the Stingray, but I'd have to look again.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #18 on: 06 February 2019, 09:23:58 »
Per the Star League sourcebook, p. 170, Bryant is covered with abandoned cities, since all but the polar regions had to be evacuated when the storm inhibitors were destroyed by Amaris forces.  By the 3000s, only ComStar researchers and LosTech prospectors ventured into the storm zones.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #19 on: 06 February 2019, 09:40:20 »
The built up warehouses, repair and maintenance facilities, and refueling for a few. Not to mention an administrative center that houses customs and monitors who comes and goes. The spaceport exists for the planet side infrastructure as much as for the incoming spacecraft
Yes, this. And no.
Per the rules and fiction you do not need a spaceport to operate a dropship. I can see customs, warehouses, land transportation networks... as desirable stuff, but given the ease that a dropship has to land almost anywhere, the importance of spaceports seems extremely exagerated in planetary descriptions.

I find that Dropships being able to land everywhere is questionable (I would only allow light military grade dropships to land in non-prepared terrain, but that is me) but per the RAW this seems to be the case.
« Last Edit: 06 February 2019, 09:42:25 by Elmoth »

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #20 on: 06 February 2019, 09:59:40 »
so when you land your behemoth anywhere, who's unloading the thousands of metric tons of Spam you brought? and where will you put it? it seems inefficient to carry unloading crews and equipment when they can be provided locally in a centralized facility (and aren't on your payroll) or where bandits pirates are less likely to visit or local fauna eat your crew. the ability to land anywhere is only beneficial until it's a liability.

in addition, just because you can park the dropship anywhere doesn't mean the planetary government wants you to.


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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #21 on: 06 February 2019, 10:12:41 »
so when you land your behemoth anywhere, who's unloading the thousands of metric tons of Spam you brought? and where will you put it? it seems inefficient to carry unloading crews and equipment when they can be provided locally in a centralized facility (and aren't on your payroll) or where bandits pirates are less likely to visit or local fauna eat your crew. the ability to land anywhere is only beneficial until it's a liability.

in addition, just because you can park the dropship anywhere doesn't mean the planetary government wants you to.

Well, just because it's inefficient doesn't mean it can't be done. Especially if you hire a bunch of day laborers to haul cargo by hand. Who cares if it's inefficient if it's cheap?

As for where they put it, anywhere they want. It could be in a cheaply built building or just on a concrete pad and covered by tarps.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #22 on: 06 February 2019, 10:20:53 »
that's what distributors should do. just park their semis anywhere and cover the cargo with a tarp. local stores can just come and pick up their shit.

all of this ignores that people live on the planet and have pre-constructed infrastructure networks to do all of this. you wouldn't tolerate people coming into your town and plopping down tons of material wherever, why would they? yeah, if you're out on the wild frontier, it's convenient to be able to land where you need to but to efficiently service a set population (and reasonably guarantee the safety of your irreplaceable cargo craft or fix it efficiently... and also facilitate actually getting paid), centralized starports aren't any different than modern seaports. imagine if ships in Houston just, like, pulled up wherever on some janky makeshift dock and unloaded there.


« Last Edit: 06 February 2019, 10:27:28 by Sartris »

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #23 on: 06 February 2019, 10:23:02 »
I could park on my lawn but it isn't as durable to my car as a driveway is.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #24 on: 06 February 2019, 10:41:03 »
in addition, just because you can park the dropship anywhere doesn't mean the planetary government wants you tto.
Very much that. Same goes for the DropShip crew. Being able to land on any vaguely flat surface is very different from wanting to. Prepared spaceports are safer to land at, and will have emergency equipment and crews that can save the lives of ship crews in the event of a mishap. They'll have cargo shifting facilities to unload and load ships faster(a DropShip sitting still is bleeding money). They'll be near metropolitan areas, for much needed shore leave.

Honestly, I'm a fan of the Colony-Ville model. It makes sense that the first waves of colonists will cluster largely in one or two spots, for mutual support, at least. The initial settlement is where the best medical services are, where the markets are, where the spaceport is, etc. Build up that one city, make it a sustaining metropolis. Then expand, building more cities where resources are found and at transportation hubs as they develop. As your planetary infrastructure and society grows, that capital city will grow with it. Unless outside forces inhibit the city's growth or some other factor causes other cities to grow much faster, it's perfectly reasonable to me for the landing/capital city of a world to be the largest one by far on all but the most developed planets.

There's also societal forces. The harsh feudal nature of Battletech society encourages nobles to concentrate their holdings when possible for easier defense and to minimize the need for excessive infrastructure. More authoritarian realms such as the Draconis Combine and Capellan Confederation would encourage this even more, as populations that are concentrated in one area are easier to monitor and control. Clan-settled worlds are probably an extreme example of this, due to their enforced scarcity and need to defend every last holding.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #25 on: 06 February 2019, 10:41:54 »
You can land that spheroid dropship almost anywhere, but it's going to leave a nasty burn mark over a broad area in the process.  Obviously, incinerating someone's fields with the exhaust plume from a fusion reactor will generally not go over well with the locals.  Ferrocrete landing pads, warehouses, refueling facilities, entertainment to provide R&R for the crews, customs offices and personnel on hand, and various other amenities make dedicated starports the preferable landing sites for any kind of legitimate business, although a relatively minimal secondary facility near specific exportable resources would make a lot of sense, rather than trucking the materials across a continent.  You probably won't see much, if any, of dropships touching down in random or undeveloped locations after the initial colonization landings.

As said, the age of the settlement and its habitability will play major roles in how it is shaped.  The initial push will likely be outward, unless environmental conditions restrict free movement by tying the settlers to purification or filtration equipment, large heating or cooling systems, or other expensive machinery to maintain livable conditions.  After a couple of generations, the move will be increasingly directed inward and upward.  Planets settled early on will have major cities, with high population density in the urban centers.  Newer colonies will generally tend to be spread out more evenly within their inhabited areas, depending heavily on environmental conditions, and the number of settled areas will also depend upon the resources and other conditions.

It's not a "one size fits all" situation in the least, and there will inevitably be a lot of variation from planet to planet.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #26 on: 06 February 2019, 10:44:27 »
With how cheap BT space transit is most rail and road networks should be intended for short range transit- or at least were IMO before the Star League fell.  Shipping over water may still compete for costs.  But the comment about how colonies could/should resemble Alaska is probably not that far off when you take into account the bush pilots & transport, how some of the towns have huge arrays of batteries (Fairbanks) in case there is a black out, and like I mentioned earlier the majority of cities & towns on coast/river.

IF we are talking about colonies being centralized in their services . . . IMO we would stand a high chance of the first planetary city being the largest and besides having the spaceport, HPG & com/record center it would also likely have the planet's primary fusion electricity plant, major hospital & CDC version, property records (remember stories about burning down the bank or claim offices).  Look at some of the western states that were some of the last to become states, they tended to have all the governmental power centered in whatever town was the administrative center for the territory.


For example, look at the state of Wyoming.  In the SE corner you have the state's capital Cheyenne which is just over the border from Colorado and no too far from the Nebraska border either.  Most of the state's population is the SE corner vs the NW corner . . . and aside from the NW being a national park area it was a lot of wilderness (which would be why it became a park).  But the population pushed into the state from the SE, and some did not travel very far beyond the administrative center.


Sartis & Kit-  Two different conversations going IMO, the established colony with infrastructure and how the colony is established to develop that infrastructure.  I am not plopping a Behemoth out in the sticks, but I could use a Manatee to move 1kt of whatever resource in a sub-orbital hop to the established spaceport to feed the new industries there as the colony is getting established.  Like a bush pilot for remote areas.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #27 on: 06 February 2019, 11:19:11 »
the question i was answering was whether starports are necessary. they are.

Honestly, I'm a fan of the Colony-Ville model. It makes sense that the first waves of colonists will cluster largely in one or two spots, for mutual support, at least. The initial settlement is where the best medical services are, where the markets are, where the spaceport is, etc. Build up that one city, make it a sustaining metropolis. Then expand, building more cities where resources are found and at transportation hubs as they develop. As your planetary infrastructure and society grows, that capital city will grow with it. Unless outside forces inhibit the city's growth or some other factor causes other cities to grow much faster, it's perfectly reasonable to me for the landing/capital city of a world to be the largest one by far on all but the most developed planets.

proximity to harvestable resources is a historical driver of settlement beyond primary cities - first, often temporary and then more permanent as the workers desire to be close to their families and merchants desire to be close to settled populations that want to buy things. the wildcard in the BTU is agriculture - you're probably not going to have millions moving to the frontier for their 160 acre land grant and heavy industry exists so there is less impetus to spread out so much.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #28 on: 06 February 2019, 14:11:41 »
the question i was answering was whether starports are necessary. they are.

proximity to harvestable resources is a historical driver of settlement beyond primary cities - first, often temporary and then more permanent as the workers desire to be close to their families and merchants desire to be close to settled populations that want to buy things. the wildcard in the BTU is agriculture - you're probably not going to have millions moving to the frontier for their 160 acre land grant and heavy industry exists so there is less impetus to spread out so much.
aspects of this is kind of what I was getting at.

to use a few examples of worlds colonized (typically around the star league era)
you will have a primary reason the planet was colonized
for example:
reasonable climate:
agriculture food, food animals or similar.
population relief
general expansion

semi nasty world, (similar to reasonable but with an issue, like occasional horrible storm seasons, lack of or contaminated water, dangerous and hostile flora or fauna, etc. ) :
in many ways similar to the reasonable climate reasons.
getting rid of shall we say medium security criminals.
removing unwanted ethnic groups, that can't get upgraded to more desirable worlds.
exploiting a rare or unique resource.

hell worlds: these are outposts or colonies established for ulterior motives.
scientific research
mining outpost/colony
emptying prisons of lifers/death row inmates.
military installation
manufacturing that involves horribly toxic/environmentally destructive processes.
or similar.

many times more than one "reason" may be combined.

expansion patterns:
these are going to be driven by a number of factors, a well equipped and funded settlement on a reasonably friendly world is likely to expand reasonably quickly and range from family dislikes neighbors, to grabbing a land claim etc.  they will likely expand quickly and have lots of settlers showing up.  this will lead to lots of Midwest style "towns" where there are a number of farms or similar anchored around a food storage facility and transportation hub. depending on factors, it may include a pad/runway/port for large transports or small dropships, whatever makes the most economic sense.

a more hostile world is going to expand more slowly and strategically because something like the small farm settlement or ranch is not likely to survive.

on a "hell world" expansion is going to be extremely slow and unlikely, in many cases it will be driven by offworld sponsors, rather than local population because its so difficult (or expensive)

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #29 on: 06 February 2019, 14:41:03 »
Coincidentally, Stotzing did a bit of that, though it has a bit of lost colony element to it. Is the Stotzing Touring the Stars out yet?
It's pretty much inevitable that there are lost cities in BattleTech.  There are planets where whole regions or even continents were abandoned, too, so odds are there are lost cities there.  It doesn't need to be weapons, either.  Settlement patterns shift over time as the economic demographics of the planet change, or you could have natural or industrial disasters that prompt evacuations.  Look up Indianola, TX, and Centralia, PA, for examples.
Tell them they are wrong. There's one write up, pretty sure in TRO 3025 about one planet with a wide swath of irradiated territory including a production factories. I want to say it was maybe the Stingray, but I'd have to look again.
Per the Star League sourcebook, p. 170, Bryant is covered with abandoned cities, since all but the polar regions had to be evacuated when the storm inhibitors were destroyed by Amaris forces.  By the 3000s, only ComStar researchers and LosTech prospectors ventured into the storm zones.
:) Thanks for the info, guys. It's nice knowing that was at least in the ball park (Guess I need to buy more BTU PDFs ;) )
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