Hypothetical planet: Stretching the limits of credibility

[Liam's Ghost]

So let us imagine a (deep) periphery world for a moment.

What I seek from this planet is the following:

Total population of around 200 million or so divided into warring states.

"tech level B" technology and heavy industry. Industrialized powers fighting tank and surface naval battles with each other, smoke bellowing factories, that sort of thing.

Very little advanced knowledge: lousy medical care, no atomic weapons or knowledge to make them. The "practical sciences" of slamming metal and explosives together to make things to kill things have pretty much taken the lead.

No inner sphere knowledge of the planet until the big reveal.

At some point in the distant past, the colonists lost all knowledge of their origins and have developed into the societies they are now with no idea that they aren't even a native species to the planet much less that other humans exist on other worlds. (For that matter they have only a rough idea that there are other worlds, they still don't even know how their sun works).

The biggest problem I imagine in this is that we're talking about a colony that regressed far enough to forget basically everything and still had enough time to recover to a point where they can fight tank battles over well populated and industrialized territories. All within the span of time available from whenever the planet was first colonized to the 3090s or so.

Anyway, lets brainstorm. Thoughts? Opinions? Plausibility check?

[worktroll]

I see no problem with a balkanised roughly WW1-level colony planet; I see no problems with a colony forgetting its origins. The only problem I do haveis the lack of time in terms of BT chronology to go from the latter to the former.

Planting a colony which overtly fails - easy. Having survivors living on as effectively stone-agers, check. Developing basic agriculture, eventually, check, leading to development of "civilisation", writing, mechanics, science, etc - check. But if they've forgotten their origin, odds are they've forgotten just about everything else from writing to hygiene to agriculture. if you've gone that far back, you need time - lots of time, more than a couple of hundreds of years.

Okay, say the colony comes from a very early (pre-TH) colonisation attempt which sent a small number of crew, lots of fertilised ova, and early test-tube gestators.Some rich zillionaire wants to create their own paradise planet, with a population of gorgeous but dumb peons worshiping him (or her) as god. Except the first generation of peons are only in their early teens when massive anaphylactic reactions take out the "old folk". The kids will breed - hey, no TV, right? - but won't have a clue of their cultural heritage. The "god gifts" will run out and break, and the descendants will have to start all over again, with only vague ideas of a better golden age to inspire them.

Hey, just what I'd do if I was a mad zillionaire - that, or drop an asteroid on HG ;)

W.

[Liam's Ghost]

I'm considering something in the local's staple food supply that accelerates human growth and fertility, but otherwise has hazardous long term effects on humans who share certain genetic traits (or perhaps those who lack certain traits). The initial colony collapses due to these unexpected effects of what they thought was an ideal native crop, but the population expands rapidly due to a rapidly maturing (say maybe fifty percent faster) and highly fertile population, natural selection weeds out the genetic lines most susceptible to dying from the local food supply.

Of course since I can't help but make a crapsack world, the average local suffers a painfully short lifespan, and because the local food that's speeding it up is messing with an alien system that developed in/was designed for an alien environment, they still suffer much higher instances of physical and mental disturbance than non locals. I was seriously considering making their warring societies the product of a long history of mental illness, short lifespan, and a generally lousy existence.

[Crunch]

Someone would have to check the travel time, but what about a hypothetical slow ship sent out before the invention of jump drives that went off course ended up way out on the fringe and only slipped back from 2st century tech to early 20th as irreplacable parts broke down?

[glitterboy2098]

Someone would have to check the travel time, but what about a hypothetical slow ship sent out before the invention of jump drives that went off course ended up way out on the fringe and only slipped back from 2st century tech to early 20th as irreplacable parts broke down?

still not enough time. even using battletech semi-magical transit drives, your looking at more than one year for each lightyear travelled. in the thousand or so years BT has had said drives, it would cross at best 900 some lightyears. which would place the ship in the middle of one the big 5 successor states by the time the jihad starts.

and frankly, thats assuming speeds of .9c...where even a grain of dust is likely to frag your entire ship.

i can beleive a ww1 or ww2 era tech if we assume that they were unable to support an advanced technology base and had to rebuild from early industrial age levels. as long as they have the knowledge, the big slowdown is getting the 'factories to build the factories to build the factories" going.

that also means they should have at least basic fission tech knowledge too..but you could easily make a setting that has the knowledge but has decided not to pursue it due to social/religious/ethical concerns.

them not knowing they're a colony is harder. best i can figure is maybe these people left earth really early in the diaspora, and decided to actively cut their ties with earth, to the point of rewriting or destroying their history records. you'd get a submovement of people who maintain that "life here began out there", due to word of mouth knowledge being passed down from parents to kids, but you could easily have such 'cults' sidelined by the local governments..

[Liam's Ghost]

On the subject of technology I've got this kinda shallow science idea going. Certain technologies have been developed because they show an immediate use. Better steel makes better tanks, power generation replaces people hand cranking things. Speculative sciences wouldn't be studied much, which is a shame because some of the best killing machines wouldn't have been created without the speculative sciences. The locals never bother to even develop a theory that atoms exist, let alone take all the other speculative steps necessary to blow them up, but they can pour steel to make armor plates just fine.

[worktroll]

Why not eliminate steel? Let the planet have really poor iron deposits, but lots of copper, tin and zinc. You can build steam-power, guns and electricity just fine with bronze, but you won't be building skyscrapers or iron-hulled ships.

W.

[Liam's Ghost]

I'm hoping to make them a marginal threat to an unsupported light battlemech (without the obvious truck bomb). I'm not certain bronze is up to being BAR 5 armor or the barrel of a high velocity gun.

The idea involves first contact between these civilizations and an outside force, in this case the player characters (who are themselves superhuman enough to pass for aliens). It's one of those situations with an endless parade of hilarious possibilities.

[Peacemaker]

I'm hoping to make them a marginal threat to an unsupported light battlemech (without the obvious truck bomb). I'm not certain bronze is up to being BAR 5 armor or the barrel of a high velocity gun.

What if the natives of this planet use poison gas as one of their primary offensive weapons? If the Blakists could knock out the 1st Knights of the Inner Sphere with it, some Deep Periphery primitives might have a chance.

[Liam's Ghost]

What if the natives of this planet use poison gas as one of their primary offensive weapons? If the Blakists could knock out the 1st Knights of the Inner Sphere with it, some Deep Periphery primitives might have a chance.

The player characters are... unusually resistant to poison gas.  :)

Though I'm not against the locals using it anyway.

[BrokenMnemonic]

Perhaps what you need to do is follow the lead of something like the movie "The Village". Make the planet a colony created by a group determined to distance themselves from the Inner Sphere and the conflicts there for religious or philosophical reasons, so that right from the start they deliberately intended to suppress the idea that the people are from anywhere other than the planet they're on. They could be refugees fleeing the horror of the Age of War, perhaps - or the fall of the Star League. They travel until they're far enough away to make it unlikely they'll be found, they land, they deliberately dismantle their DropShips, and then once they've established regular harvests, basic industry and buildings and the like to ensure that they won't all die in a bad winter, they deliberately remove or destroy any other advanced technology they feel might lead to their children and future generations leaving the planet or asking awkward questions. Two or three generations of determined teaching, and a deliberate community effort to make sure nobody leaves any diaries or the like hanging around, and you've got a society that thinks it's always been there.

[Kullerwo]

Perhaps what you need to do is follow the lead of something like the movie "The Village".

I totally agree this! The founders of the "Village Planet", could use the mechs same way as in Village -film. To keep up the semireligions beliefs on something bad is living around them and that evil will revenge use of tabus. Like red color in Village.

It also give great plot ideas. For example incurable disease that treathens the whole world. Medicinemen have no clue, but society's old ones know their roots, and race for dropship/jumpship begins!

OK, don't want to steel your idea  ;)

[Atlan]

The KF drive was first successfully used in the 2100's. Leaving time for development, and colonisation, and the earliest you could believably have a colony ship run off into the stars and dissapear (for your proposed planet, assuming that its beyond the borders of the inner sphere) is, lets say 2200.

If your fic takes place in the modern era- lets say 3000- that gives you 800 years for a colony to fail, and raise itself up again.

So, the colonists arive in the periphery. They land. (Since their ship left around 2200, this predates dropships, and they would have had to use shuttles to move stuff from their jumpship to the planet). They start to build a colony.

Then something happens. (Exactly what is up to you- natural disaster, plague, war, they all decided to become Amish) As a result, their advanced technology is destroyed or lost.

Time passes. They spread out. They make farms. With the lack of advanced medical technology, lifespans shorten. At the same time, they have more and more children. (While in modern days most western families are small, children in developing nations -like your colony- have as many children as posible. Partly because they can't afford contraceptives, but mostly because children are usefull assets, able to help farm and provide for the family.) This causes most history to be lost, as each generation remembers less and less of what their parents told them.

Then, one day, something changes. They have an industrial revolution.

In Real Life, the industrial revolution took about 200 years, and the world's average per capita income increased over 10-fold, while the world's population increased over 6-fold. If your proposed planet did the same thing, it would explain a lot.

So, 600 years for a colony to fail, turn into a bunch of 10th century farmers, and loose all their history. Then 200 years for them to have an industrial revolution, rebuilding back up to a WW2-era technological base.

Reasonable. Especially if your planet has internal conflict- nothing encourages technological development like a good enemy.

[Neufeld]

Perhaps what you need to do is follow the lead of something like the movie "The Village". Make the planet a colony created by a group determined to distance themselves from the Inner Sphere and the conflicts there for religious or philosophical reasons, so that right from the start they deliberately intended to suppress the idea that the people are from anywhere other than the planet they're on. They could be refugees fleeing the horror of the Age of War, perhaps - or the fall of the Star League. They travel until they're far enough away to make it unlikely they'll be found, they land, they deliberately dismantle their DropShips, and then once they've established regular harvests, basic industry and buildings and the like to ensure that they won't all die in a bad winter, they deliberately remove or destroy any other advanced technology they feel might lead to their children and future generations leaving the planet or asking awkward questions. Two or three generations of determined teaching, and a deliberate community effort to make sure nobody leaves any diaries or the like hanging around, and you've got a society that thinks it's always been there.

Yes, a splinter group of the Omniss is a good candidate:
http://www.sarna.net/wiki/Omniss

[cray]

The biggest problem I imagine in this is that we're talking about a colony that regressed far enough to forget basically everything and still had enough time to recover to a point where they can fight tank battles over well populated and industrialized territories. All within the span of time available from whenever the planet was first colonized to the 3090s or so.

Easy enough. Set the colonization in the 2200s or 2300s. The Periphery was being explored and settled by that time. Plus, 800-900 years is plenty of time to have some disaster near original colonization (or civil war, or religious war, or whatever) and recover to a large population and the requested level of technology.

Starting with 10,000 survivors of The Disaster, a low 1.25% average growth rate gets you 200 million people in 800 years. Actually, if the growth rate is much higher then it's hard to avoid larger populations over that time scale. At 2% growth rate (still low for agrarian societies), even 500 survivors will hit 3.8 billion in 800 years, or 200 million in 650 years.

A good way to squelch knowledge is to have an early war or mutiny. A technological disaster, like a crashed DropShip, would encourage survivors to preserve knowledge. However, a mutiny ("We were crammed into the ships too long! This colony 1000 light-years from Terra was stoopid!") could focus ire on anything related to the ships.

"Oh, you think you can lord over us by holding onto water filters and technical libraries? Well, watch this!" [Boom! DropShips blow up] "Now you depend on us grunts to grow your food! Burn the libraries! No one gets to rule by holding back information any more!"

Anyway, lets brainstorm. Thoughts? Opinions? Plausibility check?

Sounds plausible to me.

[Maelwys]

Sounds somewhat similar to Novo Franklin, though the tech levels probably aren't quite comparable, and the scale seems somewhat larger.

[Liam's Ghost]

Hmm... On further consideration I'll probably not use the "local crop that increases the rate of aging" element. The more I think about it, the less necessary an element it would be to the needs of the story. 

[Archangel]

I wouldn't go with them losing all knowledge of their origins, more that the details of their origins were lost to time and legend.  Each faction has their own idea of their origin.  From believing that aliens placed them on the planet to their god(s) placed them on the planet and charged them with cleansing it of all non-believers to believing the scientific origin of mankind just your planet being where it all happened to believing that their home planet is Narnia.

You could even have one faction that retained most, if not all their knowledge, and is using the planet like a huge long-term experiment while manipulating all the other factions by causing incidents that factions blame on their enemies.

Have each faction have its own advantages/disadvantages.  A faction located in an area similar to Vietnam could be like the NVA/VC, technologically not as advanced but experts in jungle warfare.  A small faction could be relatively weak to its 2 stronger neighbors who are equal in strength, but strong enough to sway the balance in their conflict.  Both sides maintain friendly relations with them to try and persuade them to ally themselves with their side while trying to prevent them from siding with their enemies.

[Sandslice]

The biggest problem I imagine in this is that we're talking about a colony that regressed far enough to forget basically everything and still had enough time to recover to a point where they can fight tank battles over well populated and industrialized territories. All within the span of time available from whenever the planet was first colonized to the 3090s or so.

Anyway, lets brainstorm. Thoughts? Opinions? Plausibility check?

What about a museum world?  Back in the early days of the Terran Hegemony (or even early Star League,) a rather wealthy family stumbled upon an inhabitable world, and decided to open a living 20th Century Museum.  Convincing a large number of adventurers, historians, anti-techs, etc to seed the world, they created a setting of various regions of early to mid 20th century Terra.  At first, before it was determined to be self-sustaining, support and new citizens flowed into it; but after it was ready and before it could be opened for public viewing, Something Happened, and the world was forgotten about.

Left to their own devices, the people did the only thing they could: they made do with what they had.  Generations passed, and the world's populations, fractioning into factions and "old-timey" nation-states, have had to spend more time defending themselves from each other than accomplishing any major developments of long-forgotten technology...

[truetanker]

@ Liam

Stop by and read my Azeroth AU Pocketverse posted in my sigbar.

Might surprise you.  ;)

TT

[tekteam26]

@ Liam

Stop by and read my Azeroth AU Pocketverse posted in my sigbar.

Might surprise you.  ;)

TT

Well, TT already knows about the colony at Archer that I have created....and hopefully all of you will get to learn about in a big way in the future. Of course, they take a totally different direction than this hypothetical planet.

[Sylterix]

How about a planet that experiences weird magnetic shifts. That could cause society to collapse and the survivors would have to rebuild. Bonus would be most computer hard drives would be toast.

As for a threat to a light mech, the locals have built primitive battlemechs/industrial mechs with the technology. They use magnetic weaponry (just rebrand medium lasers; the heat would represent the mech tearing itself apart)

Best rule it to keep things as simple as possible.

[truetanker]

And tekteam26 has a very interesting parthenon of ideas for his Archer colony.

All I can say is it really is a hard nut to crack, from what I have read and seen of it.

 ;)

TT