Originally posted by shadowdragon:
he seemed to feel that regardless of the tl your colony is built, pioneer types are the ones with the best chance for success.
Well, that was Heinlein's opinion, and it's loaded with lots of baggage which I'm not going to discuss here.
The whole point of a scientific and methodical approach to colonisation is to minimise the danger. Ideally,
none of your colonists should die. That's why you don't even
land on the world until you have run probes around testing and checking everything you can possibly test and check.
Everything you do should be done carefully and methodically. Nothing should be left to chance (if it can be avoided). It's slow, it's careful, and hopefully nobody dies.
Sure, it's time consuming and expensive, but then again, is it actually more expensive than losing your entire expedition? Is it too expensive when compared to gaining control of an entire planet?
This is not about "pioneers". This is about scientists, doctors, engineers, technicians, construction workers and, well, yes, bureaucrats. It's about people operating robots and remote probes, and studying satellite imagery. Yes, it's about people actually going out in the field in person, too, but only when they have a pretty good idea of what dangers exist, and how to circumvent them. (In theory. Of course, in a crisis...)
This is not the Wild West, or Plymouth Rock. It's more like an Antarctic research station.
Doing it the other way is dangerous, and you risk losing everything just so you can cut a few corners.
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OK, enough snarkiness. Let's try something constructive.
You want to play a "40 acres and a mule" setting. As we've seen, there are likely to be a bunch of problems with that. Can they be overcome?
Actually, yes, they can.
The first thing is for someone to actually spend forty years or so doing their homework before the colonists are sent. That simply means that you have to tweak your timeline by forty years. You can then carry on regardless, and it is less likely that anyone would accuse the people who planned the mission of incompetence. It's a compromise with my approach, of course.
A good tweak, incidentally, would be to have had the world ecologically "seeded" before the colonists arrive. Essentially, that means that the researchers would have released a variety of terrestrial species on the world, and allowed them to go wild. That means that there are sources of food, fibre and fuel beyond what the colonists themselves can establish. If their crops fail, they have a backup.
This idea is actually based on what happened historically with the early North American colonies, which were to a considerable extent established on land that had been previously cultivated by the native population. Our version (fortunately) doesn't have a previous population to be dispossessed, but the area around the colony site can instead be deliberately seeded ahead of time.
While I think of it: your colony should also be preceded by an advanced party, just to make sure the arrival of the main party runs smoothly. The researchers aren't necessarily on the same wavelength, and probably don't work for the same people.
OK, so your colonists aren't going in blind, and they have a Plan B. That's a considerable improvement, even though the economics of it all still don't make sense.
EDIT: I've cut out my nasty comment about "pioneer types".