Information on population help requested

[pfarland]

What source has some good numbers on the population sizes of various nations circa 3025 and 3050?

[SteelRaven]

What source has some good numbers on the population sizes of various nations circa 3025 and 3050?

I would just ignore any canonical numbers as the Fasanomic statistics are little more than page filler. 

[Blacknova]

I once had a look all the populations from worlds detailed in modern canon books (House Books, TTS, and a few other sources) and the average was a about 1 or 1.5 billion people per world from memory. The problem was that these population numbers can also come from different eras, which further causes problems for working out a base population level.

And what is published is only a small selection of worlds across settled space, so you need to take any such yard stick with a big grain of salt.

A few more sources have been released since then, so that number could have gone up or down.

Interstellar Operations has some numbers for the numbers of planets for each faction in 3025, so you can work out a general number from that, but it would be a very loose number.

[pfarland]

Awesome! Thanks, just trying to get a good random pool that includes the various factions (and hopefully AToW sub-affiliations), in the time eras of 3025-3050ish. For a random character generator for Megamek/MekHQ.

[Blacknova]

Not a problem, though you might want to run all those numbers again to double check, as I am going off memory.

Also, the planets we have data for may not be truly representative of the Inner Sphere either. There are lots of worlds and only a handful have been described to that level.

[pfarland]

Not a problem, though you might want to run all those numbers again to double check, as I am going off memory.

Also, the planets we have data for may not be truly representative of the Inner Sphere either. There are lots of worlds and only a handful have been described to that level.

I'm just looking for something that I can use as the basis for a random D1000 roll to determine where someone (a merc) is from. Close is something I'm ok with, this is like nuclear artillery, you only have to get in the general vicinity to get a decent hit.

[Dmon]

Sarna has most of the canon info about planet populations. But I would say that less than half of the planets in the BTU have been covered in any kind of detail.
https://www.sarna.net/wiki/Category:Planets

[Annwn]

Skiltao's blog is super fascinating in regards to old school FASA numbers - he covers a variety of topics.  FASA apparently used specific sources and metrics for the 3025 setting - such as the population distribution is based on mid-80's regions of England. 

https://skiltao.blogspot.com/2019/02/inner-sphere-population-in-3025.html

[Hellraiser]

Agreed, Look at Sarna since it tends to have any info published in the various "Atlas of Worlds" sections from the house books.

You can look at any single house book if you have them & each one will have a dozen or so worlds in the back giving you some figures but in a nation of 500 worlds like the Fed Suns, getting fluff on 3 dozen even is less than 10% coverage.

Most worlds are not ideal & have populations significantly smaller than Terra.
But there are a few with billions on them.
But just as many only have millions because they are only there for certain things like Mining something with much of the rest of the world unused or a hostile environment where everyone lives in a few domed cities around the planet.

[pfarland]

Skiltao's blog is super fascinating in regards to old school FASA numbers - he covers a variety of topics.  FASA apparently used specific sources and metrics for the 3025 setting - such as the population distribution is based on mid-80's regions of England. 

https://skiltao.blogspot.com/2019/02/inner-sphere-population-in-3025.html

From another thread in Megamek, I found his blog.

Using that info, as well as the Sarna info and combining them I'm getting a pretty accurate range for the population as well as Socio-Political Index, Province/Locality, dates of Planetary ownership change.

Then (partial) end goal is to use that information to create a random generator that rolls up a character's home planet and early childhood stage. The step after that is to continue on with the generator that make "Light" AToW PCs to be used in campaign play.