BattleTech - The Board Game of Armored Combat
BattleTech Game Systems => General BattleTech Discussion => Topic started by: Daemion on 04 February 2019, 03:25:47
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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I could park on my lawn but it isn't as durable to my car as a driveway is.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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At $6 the Star League book is much more affordable than a print copy on the secondary market
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Just purchase the PDF of the original House Steiner book for just that reason, it was a great buy for the price.
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I will throw another one- back in the FCCW when Archer's crew landed on Odessa and accidentally faced off with the Irregulars who were camped in . . . Old Bealtown? The city had to be abandoned after 1SW or 2SW and even the river was poisoned IIRC.
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Arcturus the former Lyran Capital is full of them. Everyone left when the government moved to Tharkad.
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Tangerz has a lot of cities with no folks in them, as well.
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Terra has oodles of abandoned cities, though for different reasons than most worlds.
I wonder if Garland, TX was one of them?
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Arcturus the former Lyran Capital is full of them. Everyone left when the government moved to Tharkad.
The Steiner Sourcebook indicated that about Arcturus, but it doesn't fit available JumpShip numbers or how the population changed over the centuries. Per pg. 376 A Time of War gave a different view of Arcturus:
"Arcturus was once the Lyran capital, and unlike most worlds of the Inner
Sphere, its population growth has been slightly negative for
some time because local cultural issues discourage large families.
The population peaked at 3.3 billion during the Golden Years of
the Star League (more than two hundred years after the Lyran
capital moved to Tharkad). In previous publications, ComStar
incorrectly juxtaposed the loss of capital status more than six
hundred years ago with the modern population decline and
suggested the world was trapped in its glorious past because it
preserved its old architecture"
Tangerz has a lot of cities with no folks in them, as well.
Abandoned cities are common in BT. Truly lost ones are rarer.
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The only difference between abandoned and lost is the state of that society's record keeping.
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record keeping plus accessibility.
a semi-underground mining settlement abandoned in 2810 after it got partially flooded by magma is much easier to forget about than something you can easily see from a road or rail line or that shows up on satellite imaging.
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Some cities on Arcturus have been abandoned. TRO: 3145 references the "long-ago abandoned" city of Brighton.
Other hits for the keyword "abandoned city" include:
The city of Priam on Roche. (OTP: Widowmaker Absorption)
Daemon on Waldorff (Era Report: 3062)
Unnamed city/unnamed world in the Hell's Horses OZ (XTRO Clans Minotaur entry)
Denton on Arc-Royal (OTP Red Corsair)
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The Steiner Sourcebook indicated that about Arcturus, but it doesn't fit available JumpShip numbers or how the population changed over the centuries.
Too quick on the draw here. ;) The Steiner Sourcebook doesn't say the people left the planet, it says they left the cities and went into the countryside. Even if they had gone off-world, we know neither the population nor the spacelift for 2407.
Abandoned cities are common in BT. Truly lost ones are rarer.
Yeah, I'm not sure how effective Caph's jungles would realistically be against an orbital lidar survey.
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Too quick on the draw here. ;) The Steiner Sourcebook doesn't say the people left the planet, it says they left the cities and went into the countryside. Even if they had gone off-world, we know neither the population nor the spacelift for 2407.
We where talking about people leaving the city, not the entire planet.
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I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or if you missed what Cray said. ???
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I want to say the Marsden tank entry talked about how Arcturus economy tanked after the capital moved.
I mean, if you look you can find abandoned towns out in the US West where the mines played out or the railroad changed the traffic routes.
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I've been through a couple of mining towns in the American West, and seen cases where the whole town consists of mobile homes on cinder blocks, ready to pick up and move on short notice.
I also happen to live within reasonable driving distance of Centralia, PA, where the coal mines beneath the town caught fire and the town was abandoned. They've razed most of it over the last couple of decades, but it used to look pretty creepy with all of the boarded up or broken windows, overgrown lawns (or else scorched), and warning signs posted. At one time you could occasionally see tongues of flame leaping up through cracks in the road or pavements, but the fire has long since burned out under the town and migrated a few miles away, although the ground is now unstable.
I would assume that the abandoned towns/cities would be looted over time (and some buildings cannibalized for materials), so there would be very little left that wasn't either permanently secured or simply not worth carrying. Most archaeological sites of ancient cities find very little from the end of the city, since those would typically be looted, but a lot of earlier materials which were lost and buried under later developments or thrown away and buried in garbage piles.
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Yeah, I stayed for a bit in a company town that closed up when the local copper mine was bought & shut down. The 'town' was sold off to a university as housing for some of their more energetic experiments in the desert. But I understand what you are saying- heck (avoiding rule 4) we have some places today in the US that are going through that phase.
(http://deanoinamerica.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/img_2880-1024x768.jpg)
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I mean, if you look you can find abandoned towns out in the US West where the mines played out or the railroad changed the traffic routes.
Which one is Detroit? :D
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Detroit's problem is RULE4RULE4RULE4RULE4, and RULE4RULE4RULE4 only made it worse.
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Detroit's problem is RULE4RULE4RULE4RULE4, and RULE4RULE4RULE4 only made it worse.
By Rule4, you clearly mean the Taurian Concordat, right? :P
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What about using closed armed forces bases as another example? I think large parts of the Presidio out in San Francisco have been abandoned, haven't they? I mean Mythbusters used a series of streets in the town to test drunk driving myths, so there can't be too many people.
On a different but possibly related topic, what about someone like the Omniss terrorists or Word of Blake setting up a base hidden from the residents of Colony-ville? If most of your infrastructure is in one place, wouldn't it be easier to establish a base on the other side of the world?
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On a different but possibly related topic, what about someone like the Omniss terrorists or Word of Blake setting up a base hidden from the residents of Colony-ville? If most of your infrastructure is in one place, wouldn't it be easier to establish a base on the other side of the world?
Militia did go to ground on a planet in the Republic, I think it was a southern continent that was not developed. But the current generation of leadership hired some mercs to go investigate some suspicious 'findings' like seeing fields from satellites or such.
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On a different but possibly related topic, what about someone like the Omniss terrorists or Word of Blake setting up a base hidden from the residents of Colony-ville? If most of your infrastructure is in one place, wouldn't it be easier to establish a base on the other side of the world?
That's one of the scenarios in Touring the Stars: Gulf Breeze.
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Note that depending on the tech level, wealth of hte original colonists, a distributed model is quite easy to visualize--fusion powered small craft for transort, combined with a robust communications array in orbit would allow people to have small settlements, yet still be in touch with everyone else, especially when a flight to that central hospital is only a 20 minute suborbitable hop away.
Then the succession wars hit, and all your small craft are appropriated to allow your inbred leaders to claim the throne, and a bunch of pirates cart off your com sats.
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That's one of the scenarios in Touring the Stars: Gulf Breeze.
Has that been released? I don't seem to have it in my collection, which I thought was complete...
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Gulf Breeze has a release date of "TBD" currently. It was on the spate of pdf offerings that reopened the flow recently so I imagine we'll see it sooner rather than later
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Note that depending on the tech level, wealth of hte original colonists, a distributed model is quite easy to visualize--fusion powered small craft for transort, combined with a robust communications array in orbit would allow people to have small settlements, yet still be in touch with everyone else, especially when a flight to that central hospital is only a 20 minute suborbitable hop away.
Then the succession wars hit, and all your small craft are appropriated to allow your inbred leaders to claim the throne, and a bunch of pirates cart off your com sats.
That's roughly the situation on one of the worlds spotlighted in an MWDA novel - people live on widely scattered ranches throughout the planet. Hostile fauna and rough terrain make land transportation infrastructure impractical, so everyone has their own personal small aircraft for getting around and visiting the neighbors.
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it's like that old joke about the isolated reaches of alaska - "half the population has a pilot's license and the other half flies without one"
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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.
Or, you could also look up the effect of the Highway system on Railroad towns in the midwest. When rail was the growing means of interstate travel for bulk goods, you had lots of little towns sprout up along those lines. With the rise of the interstate highway, a shift in the pattern, towns no longer on a major thoroughfare weren't getting the commerce they need to keep afloat, let alone grow. Even places with dedicated grain elevators would quickly become ghost towns or bedroom communities for a close-by burg with active business.
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Abandoned cities are common in BT. Truly lost ones are rarer.
Hello, old Rim Worlds systems. Not only did a lot of those space dots disappear, but it was suggested that there might be populations left on a lot of those worlds when they were abandoned even by the Lyran Commonwealth.
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Hello, old Rim Worlds systems. Not only did a lot of those space dots disappear, but it was suggested that there might be populations left on a lot of those worlds when they were abandoned even by the Lyran Commonwealth.
Yes. The same thing happened in the Outworlds, e.g., Wynn's Roost.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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*snip*
Seattle (great weather...
*snip*
Not the Seattle I grew up 50 miles from, unless you like a LOT of rain...
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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..."
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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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We had a whole thread discussing the difficulties of transporting large livestock across interstellar distances a while back.
Things got weird.
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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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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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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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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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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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As far as horses, don't underestimate how sentimental humans can be... ::)
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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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cleanup
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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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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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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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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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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.