This, +1 billion. By 100 is the perfect number to match military sizes, the ability for planets to be raided, water being important, mechs being rare, jumpships being rare, etc, etc.... basically, 1% of the population would fix a LOT of the stupidity that was fasanomics.
So would dropping the populations to 1/3rd to 1/5th and tripling the militarys. With current fluff jumpships are not exactly rare in any case.
Reasons? Well the populations of billions are actually over twice what they are on Earth today based on today's growth rate of 1.14%. However, modern nations are closer to .4% to .5%, meaning the population in 3025 would be about twice what is listed. As you can see even at low birth rates B-tech worlds should be decently populated. Not tiny worlds that would have difficulty's maintaining 1940s tech.
Basically, most planets should be tens to hundreds of thousands, with only key planets going into the millions. At current military percentages that gives many planets just a battalion or two, and at most maybe 100 militia regiments, again fitting all the fluff ever published.[/quote]100 militia regiments would be a small but decent sized military for 1 billion. After all who are these guys fighting? Theirs no one on their world to fight, as most worlds have a single government, and for many worlds the hostile border is 2 to 3 weeks a way at FTL speeds. And it's not likely that we are going to see WW2 era militarys as the cost of a single infantry men is considerably more expensive than it was even 40 years ago.
Trillions of population simply makes the universe too vast to make your players meaningful.
In what way? 5 guys in a world with a population of 3 million is not very meaningful as well, many games have populations in the trillions range or larger, are they any less meaningful?
Space Travel is bad for you, and apparently decreases fertility considerably
an idiotic idea, why even travel to other worlds, if FTL travel is detrimental to your health.
Planets are *very* hostile
Why even colonize the world, when as you put it move one to a better one in a few weeks... Most worlds that we have info one in B-tech are livable but not hostile. Most worlds have reasonably decent food production, not exactly a bread baskets but their not deserts.
Diseases and plagues from these new worlds are quite common
while likely, it's not going to keep them at bay for long or effect every world as bad. Many pathogens on worlds are likely to have little effect due to incompatibility of their DNA/RNA or what ever they would have.
Earth started a population control program (max 1 kid per couple until pop back down to about 5B), after people were just used to not having many kids (1-2 max) and growth rates stayed much lower and in some cases, decreased.
dose not jive with human psychology, and can cause some issues...
The population figures listed for planets were total amount of people who have been through that system, not the population *living* on that system. Chalk it up to another ComStar error.
this makes little sense.
Also on a world of 3 million you can easily move to an out of the way location, where you and your companions are the only ones around for hundreds of kilometers. Resulting in little reason to move to a new world if you hate some one that much as you can travel for months with out seeing another human being (if the world has a land mas smiler to that of earth theirs only 1 person per 50 square km -the US would have a population of just 200,000).
Worlds are wildly diverse places, chances are theirs plenty of places to suit most people on one.
If the population isn't fixed, the whole universe is kinda stupid, as it just doesn't make logical sense.
Why is the population the problem? Why not fix the real issue that is the military size is to small?
Basically the only real way to get your ideas to work is to make the human race almost completely incapable of having offspring.
I don't want a discussion about this, feel free to differ, that is just my opinion on the whole universe.
If you did not want to talk about it then you should not have mentioned it.
Personally I would just drop the population to 1/3rd to 1/5th it's current population and enlarge the military to 3x it's current size, and fluff out that theirs a large supporting apparatus behind these units, medical, maintenance, administrative, training, security and logistical units (after all a single regimental scale battle can use up hundreds of tons of munitions and hundreds of tons of armor replacements). With some 200,000 jumpships, this should reduce the issues to a considerable amount, still not completely realistic but much more reasonable.
It would at the lest give a semblance of a military, though one has to ask, why do you need a huge military? Are they going to fight WW2 sized battles? Possible but not likely given the cost of training and equipping one modern infantry men, that's not likely to change, so a realistic military is not going to be 10s of millions strong per world. Also who are these guys fighting? Most of these worlds have a single world government so theirs no one who directly challenges their way of life. The only real threat is 100+ light years a way and has attacked you once in 500+ years, and that was a minor raid.
