Author Topic: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?  (Read 7615 times)

glitterboy2098

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #60 on: 17 February 2019, 16:17:28 »
many of the worlds we see in the fiction seem to have relatively few large cites. even those worlds that have been colonized the longest often get described with one big city and at best a few smaller ones elsewhere on the main continent.

so i would suggest that most worlds start as 'colony-villes', and while they spread out as they grow, there is still a tendency to concentrate things like goverment, military, higher education, manufacturing, etc in or around that initial city, with it spinning off and then absorbing suburbs and smaller communities as it grows.

it doesn't mean that the only people on world are there.. just the main non-rural population. you get smaller cities growing up due to the need to support the spread out farmers and miners and such (anywhere you get a warehouse and transportation hub to move their raw goods is inevitably going to grow up a city, as IRL frontier history has shown) but the one first city is pretty much going to remain the center of the world.


this actually helps explain why the succession wars could get by with such small forces as well.. in general you don't have to invade an entire planet's surface to take a world, just that main city. which makes defense easier as well. you'd still have issues with occupation, but that is generally more a matter of propaganda, infantry, and light vehicles rather than mechs and tanks.
« Last Edit: 17 February 2019, 16:20:29 by glitterboy2098 »

Colt Ward

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #61 on: 17 February 2019, 19:58:25 »
For abandoned worlds . . . what about when the primitive jumpships were all that existed and jumps were limited to 15ly?  You could have had pass-through systems where a ship could resupply, carry out temporary repairs, or just hang out waiting on the next ship to carry word or the request for help.
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massey

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #62 on: 19 February 2019, 11:25:12 »
I also live in a sprawling western city (over 600 square miles of area), and my state has a bunch of little towns that have dried up.  My job has me driving to all parts of the state, and I frequently drive through little towns that have maybe 100 people and are clustered around a grain elevator.  I'm sure that affects my vision of how the Battletech universe is supposed to work.

If a planet has good resources in one location (a source of fresh water, arable farmland, access to a protected harbor) then that probably becomes your primary landing spot.  You'd be cherry picking the best location on the planet.  In North America (what I'm most familiar with), you've got candidates in New York City (amazing natural harbor, great river, lots of timber, but sucky weather), Seattle (great weather, great harbor, great farmland nearby, but no big rivers), San Francisco (great harbor, amazing farmland, a small river going into the mountains), and New Orleans (the bestest river ever, good harbor, access to tons of farmland up the river, but yucky swamp land).  Those are the ones that stick out from a quick glance at Google Maps zoomed way out.

You'd probably send down some scientific teams to scout out each location before picking "the best" one.  Going back to our North America example, I think you almost have to pick New Orleans -- the river is just that big of an advantage.  You can follow it all the way up to the Great Lakes (and it connects to the Ohio River and the Illinois River and the Allegheny River), and from there it's not that far to one of your other top choices, New York City.  Since there's no Panama Canal, it makes sense to concentrate your development on the side of the continent with the best natural waterways.  Now you've got your primary development spot (New Orleans), your second major development spot (NYC), and tertiary development points (St Louis, Chicago, Cleveland -- all places that just "happen" to be along these major rivers that all connect together, which of course is why we built those cities in the first place).  This is the sort of thing you could look at from space and get a really good idea of what places to cherry-pick.

So your dropships land and you set up your initial colony.  If you did your work right, you've got a plan for your colony to be self-sufficient.  On a hell world, maybe the plan is just "mine the valuable stuff and stay in the hab-domes".  But on a more survivable world, you've probably got a set number of people who went to the planet with the knowledge that they were going to sail upriver and grow corn or something.  You will naturally need to expand, at least to be more self-sufficient.  Sticking with our Eastern United States example, the Great Lakes area gives you coal, iron, and other metals.  Nearby Texas gives you oil and natural gas.  You'd want to set up small settlements pretty fast to both claim them (you don't want another colony group to land on your planet and take valuable stuff), and to start providing you with needed resources.  There would be a balance between places that have the most/best stuff, and what is easiest to access.  It kinda depends on what your population is.  As your planet grows, this might mean you abandon towns that were founded out of convenience rather than for their long-term potential.

Of course, an Earth-like planet will probably draw a lot more people than Tatooine would.

massey

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #63 on: 19 February 2019, 12:01:29 »
I think there would also be a preference for certain types of colonists.  While you want doctors and engineers and other smart types, I think there is a real advantage to having a large group of population growers.  If you've seen the opening scene from Idiocracy, you want a good supply of high school jocks and girls who don't think to use birth control.  Your future colony will need manpower, and it's cheaper to grow it naturally than to fly it in.

You might also want some Space Amish types, and anti-government survivalists, who you can just send out into the wilderness.  They aren't reliant on technology, and if worst comes to worst with your colony (the equipment breaks down and the resupply dropships never show up), they give your people a chance at survival.

You'd basically have a really good idea of 1) how many colonists you've got, 2) what growth rate you can expect, 3) available resources, and 4) long term potential.  I'd imagine that most semi-Earth like planets would have a single big city with a spaceport and all their financial and government operations there.  Then you'd probably have several smaller cities that have a valuable local resource that isn't available at your main city.  So my example in the above post would probably have a Houston, though it wouldn't need to be nearly as big.  You'd just want the Texas oil fields, some refineries, and a port.  And then you'd probably have hundreds or even thousands of smaller towns and communities spread out all over the damn place, wherever they thought they could make it work.


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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #64 on: 19 February 2019, 12:15:41 »
Population growth is good, but hold off on bringing in folks with reproductive systems that fire on full auto until you've got the farmers to feed the kids, the doctors to heal the kids, and the teachers to turn those kids into more than just another generation of spawn points.
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massey

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #65 on: 19 February 2019, 13:27:00 »
Population growth is good, but hold off on bringing in folks with reproductive systems that fire on full auto until you've got the farmers to feed the kids, the doctors to heal the kids, and the teachers to turn those kids into more than just another generation of spawn points.

Well, those are the people who are going to be the farmers.  And probably the teachers.  Yeah, if you bring in Jimbo who grew up in some big city, he's probably not gonna be a great farmer right out of the gate.  But he can get a job driving a tractor or just being a farmhand.  "Carry this over here, Jimbo.  Move that over there, Jimbo.  Feed the hogs, Jimbo."  Then when Jimbo Junior grows up in a little farming community, he'll learn the basics as he grows up.

I imagine the future has a lot of trailer parks.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #66 on: 19 February 2019, 13:33:49 »
temp housing is probably ubiquitous, especially on fledgling colonies. the most recent north dakota oil boom saw worker housing more reminiscent of 1885 than 2015. depending on the difficulty, there might be an entire generation (or several) who lives their entire life in prefab shacks.

also depending on technology, you don't actually need that many farmers. my wife's cousin and his son do several thousand acres by themselves and hire a handful of guys around harvest time to keep the combines going 24/7.

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massey

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #67 on: 19 February 2019, 14:16:27 »
There may also be kind of a "gold rush" mentality for certain planets.  You might get a lot of people showing up because they heard this was the next big place to be.  And then they don't have money to leave.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #68 on: 19 February 2019, 17:57:45 »
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glitterboy2098

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #69 on: 19 February 2019, 21:40:29 »
temp housing is probably ubiquitous, especially on fledgling colonies. the most recent north dakota oil boom saw worker housing more reminiscent of 1885 than 2015. depending on the difficulty, there might be an entire generation (or several) who lives their entire life in prefab shacks.

also depending on technology, you don't actually need that many farmers. my wife's cousin and his son do several thousand acres by themselves and hire a handful of guys around harvest time to keep the combines going 24/7.
the number of farmers you need is inverse to the amount of education those farmers receive about farming, and proportional to the amount of force multiplier technologies you give them. successful modern farmers tend to have degrees in farm science/agriculture, covering all sorts of stuff from soil chemistry to botany, at least as it relates to their profession. the more educated farmers you have, the less trial and error you have to rely on to grow enough crops. but even skilled farmers do better when they have access to force multipliers like mechanization, pesticides, tailored herbicides, engineered crops, etc.

though since the bottleneck there is the industry for such force multipliers, either the time to get it set up on world or how fast you can ship all that stuff in. odds are that the first generations on a world relied more on less advanced tools where possible.. manpower, horses, etc. mechanization used carefully to benefit the most people (using one tractor to plow many peoples field so it isn't idle, etc.)

and this is assuming that, given the speed at which humanity spread to the stars, most colonies were carefully planned to maximize the chances it'll survive. odds are a lot of colonies not backed by some nation or corporation started with not much more than manpower, given how expensive interstellar transport would be. and that is assuming that the national and corporate efforts don't cut corners.
i suspect some worlds can be summed up by a paraphrased quote from firefly
"Once they're [surveyed], they'll dump settlers on there with nothing but blankets and hatchets and maybe a herd. Some of them make it, some of them..."

R.Tempest

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #70 on: 19 February 2019, 23:37:24 »
 Setting up the agriculture for your colony leads to the question of transporting livestock. In some sci-fi settings this is solved by carrying fertilized ova and growing them on site. Except for the Clans, this growth technology is not available. Transporting live animals on dropships would be ….. interesting. A combination of the two might be viable. Transport live animals then inseminate them artificially on world.
 I'm not sure about going to high tech farming right off the top. Sure fusion power from a dropship gives you virtually unlimited energy, but how do you get it to your farm 200 kilometers from the capital? Back in the 19th century there were portable steam engines that the owners would haul around the farming communities and provide powered services that would otherwise have to be done slowly by hand. Things like having a sawmill attachment, or boring holes for wells, or even baling hay. I could see something like a fusion powered truck driving around charging tractors and combine harvesters (for a fee).

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #71 on: 20 February 2019, 00:18:34 »
We had a whole thread discussing the difficulties of transporting large livestock across interstellar distances a while back.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #72 on: 20 February 2019, 00:22:12 »
 I remember mentioning this on the previous board. Many people thought the post of `ships livestock control officer' being a punishment detail.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #73 on: 20 February 2019, 00:39:33 »
it was pretty much guaranteed that our GM would have unruly chickens in the cargo hold any time there was a game on a dropship.

it would seem likely the btu is probably flowing in meat-ish products. i could see colonists using hogs like the spaniards did where they would just turn them loose and the things would multiply like gangbusters while simultaneously demolishing local flora that might interfere with agriculture.

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R.Tempest

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #74 on: 20 February 2019, 01:48:16 »
 Sure, if the flora is digestible and nourishing. Pigs will clear your underbrush. In more open country horses & cattle will trim your grass equivalents down to about 2 inches. Sheep will take it down to barely covering the ground. Goats will tear out the roots.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #75 on: 20 February 2019, 10:27:17 »
the number of farmers you need is inverse to the amount of education those farmers receive about farming, and proportional to the amount of force multiplier technologies you give them. successful modern farmers tend to have degrees in farm science/agriculture, covering all sorts of stuff from soil chemistry to botany, at least as it relates to their profession. the more educated farmers you have, the less trial and error you have to rely on to grow enough crops. but even skilled farmers do better when they have access to force multipliers like mechanization, pesticides, tailored herbicides, engineered crops, etc.

Engineered crops check . . . but you should not need the pesticides and herbicides since the fauna/flora are not going to be present to the same degree as Earth- if at all if you are careful.  Which is not to say they will not have some sort of local problem- bacteria/fungus/local plant competition.  Of course, the larger/more frequent DS that show up increases your likelihood of getting roaches & mice stowing away.  Trying to remember which pollinating insects would have to be transported for many of the staple crops- or what crops can get away with not having pollinator insects, pretty sure that rules out fruit trees.

As far as livestock . . . yeah, goats & pigs are #1 for colonies.  They are hardy, can eat a wide range of things, high reproductive rate and can get a variety of uses with proper training.  R.Tempest . . . for the sheep & goats as you describe, that is the situation when its over-grazed.  Proper rotation of grazing land and that does not happen, its why you get some 'eco' brush control where they will release goats onto a section of land for a week or two every couple of months.  Its really weird to see in a city, but where I live we have a few drainage ditch and other areas that are fenced off to keep people out that use about 20 goats every few months to graze down the grass & scrub.  Hilarious to see city kids from apartments at the fence to watch & pet.

If you cannot get past getting a live mammal on the DS/JS then it will be poultry that is your first animal taken for the simple reason is that you can move fertilized eggs and pop them in a incubator.  They also do not require a adult animal to survive.  Did primitive JS have the grav rings?  I do not really remember.  If they DID then your colonization prim JS IMO would have direct & immediate access for the bay where the dropshuttle arrives, move the sedated livestock from the shuttle out to the ring and give them partial gravity at least.  What do you ship?  Certified 2nd breeding pregnant females that are not bred to the same males & at best distant/line related and AI tanks filled with genetic samples that are at closest linebreeding to the sample of female genes you are shipping.  Pigs & goats will of course be first though I am not sure you will ever ship horses- donkey/mules possibly to colony areas you expect to venture into rugged/rough mountains.  Goats however can be trained to be pack animals and are more sure footed than donkeys.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #76 on: 20 February 2019, 12:11:48 »
If you wanted large livestock (cows, horses, even elephants), and there were problems transporting them in normal space travel, I think you've got two basic options that would work if you really had to do it.  It wouldn't be cheap, but you could do it.

The first is a command circuit.  Minimize the amount of time that they're actually in transit.  These animals should be able to survive for a few days in microgravity without too many ill effects.

The second is a more shotgun approach.  Just bring a lot of mature females in the conventional way, and bring a bunch of pre-fertilized eggs with you.  You really only need one cow to survive the trip in a condition where she can give birth.  So bring 1000 cows, if even one survives so that she can produce a calf, then you've got all the eggs necessary to grow your herd in a few generations.  You just have them pop out calves until they drop dead, and then in a year or two the new calves will be ready to breed, and you've got a huge storehouse of genetically distinct material just waiting.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #77 on: 20 February 2019, 12:18:40 »
As far as horses, don't underestimate how sentimental humans can be...   ::)

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #78 on: 20 February 2019, 12:22:29 »
Or bring Calves, Kids, and chicks (or fertilized eggs) for poultry.  They don't need to be full size in transit and it's probably easier for the handlers as well.

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #79 on: 20 February 2019, 12:24:33 »
cleanup
« Last Edit: 29 May 2019, 16:17:38 by Easy »

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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #80 on: 20 February 2019, 12:39:14 »
Or bring Calves, Kids, and chicks (or fertilized eggs) for poultry.  They don't need to be full size in transit and it's probably easier for the handlers as well.

AlphaMirage do not want calves or kids . . . first, we have no idea what sort of effects we would get for them during the growth stage.  Additionally, you always have more risk with livestock's first birthing which is why I suggested 2nd breeding females- that are bred, next gen is en route.  But the fertilized eggs have merit b/c of how easy they are to transport and then get started.

Easy-  Fish are the easiest to transport in zero g I would think- but the problem is are the waters receptive to them.  The chemical composition of the water, temperatures and other things that induce fish to breed could be problematic.  You also have some issues with the food chain if you are trying to get advanced aquaculture to wild release.  But catfish & trout ponds?  Yeah, easy- especially since they will eat meal just like terrestrial livestock.

Massey-  If we are talking about early BT colonization- hence the Colony-villes on established BT planets- then many were settled from Terran Alliance primitive JS days.  The command circuit idea would not function as well since it was dropshuttles at that stage and could only jump 15LY.  But transporting them would possibly be easier since they could be moved in ship to the spinning grav decks.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #81 on: 21 February 2019, 10:00:54 »
I remember mentioning this on the previous board. Many people thought the post of `ships livestock control officer' being a punishment detail.

Well, "livestock control officer" does sound like a fancy name for the guy who mucks out the stables.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #82 on: 21 February 2019, 10:48:19 »
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.

I tend to use "like Nebraska, but in space" when describing a lot of colony worlds to new players.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #83 on: 21 February 2019, 11:04:55 »
Yeah . . . Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, New Mexico, Alaska, and Canadian provinces of Alberta & Saskatchewan along with the Territories would be how to picture colonies.

Of course, you can also look at historical colonies in N & S America with how they spread- which is why I suggested the original colony would be put on a large bay with access to a main artery type river in a temperate zone.  IRL examples would be the previously mentioned like New Orleans & Belem . . . but NO's location would be bypassed with modern tech IMO by have a canal or channel cut.

You might also get some funny set ups . . . for instance, I was once told that the state of Georgia has so many small counties b/c when the lines were originally drawn the county courthouse was where voting occurred.  So each county was apportioned so that the courthouse could be reached by half day's travel- on horseback as I heard it.
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Re: Touring the Stars - How Many 'Colony-villes'?
« Reply #84 on: 21 February 2019, 13:16:38 »
it would work a bit differently than early modern colonies in the americas - where proximity to the sea was a critical factor for commerce and fledgling industry, as well as concentrated defense against attack - the last reason principle dictating why European forays into Africa largely were staged along the coast until the colony fever of the 1880s (as well as a whole bunch of slave trade stuff I probably can't get into here - see Thornton's Africa and Africans).   Interior settlement was governed more by land acquisition for agriculture and ranching or resource gathering (mining, lumber, etc). Lauren Benton wrote about how the most important administrative aspect was navigable waterways not only as the most efficient transport, but as the primary vectors of maintaining control of territory and projecting sovereignty to other colonial powers. So the imperial quilt using the color fill tool on the map was really more of a tattered patchwork that where the strongest points were along waterways.

Without the need for ocean access - or in many cases, planets that either have no oceans or very small ones (or that has a lot of moons or tectonic activity that makes being close to the ocean super dangerous), you're going to put the starport and main settlement close to a place suitable for settlement with a selection of natural resources and potable water (or at least water that is plentiful and can be made potable). Defensibility where the enemy can literally land anywhere it wants would favor built up terrain that limits enemy access to important strategic locations.

Within a short period of time rail and road systems would quickly outclass any benefit from barges on rivers, and sovereignty is projected by BattleMechs or combat vehicles delivered by dropship rather than troops up the river. River systems might also make poor choices locally - North Carolina's rivers are essentially unavailable for commerce, esepcially compared with Virgina (a major campaign issue for the local whig party in the antebellum period). But railroads built after the war made that conversation largely moot.


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