Originally posted by LcKedovan:
Still, so long as a hi-pop world conforms to the above, there shouldn't be any logical pattern... since there is an element of randomness to who will find the worlds ideal for settlement.... also not forgetting things like hi-pop worlds formed due to resources etc. (despite inhospitable, if there is riches to be had, or work to be had people will move there).
That's the thing - I don't believe that will happen. SOME people will move there, sure - but people won't be living on such worlds in their billions.
Let's face it, in the TU resources aren't a problem. You'd be able to find just about any non-biological resource in any system, (e.g. vast amounts of metals in the belts).
If there are any rare resources on uninhabitable worlds (which would have to be something wacky like Lanthanum deposits or zuchai crystals or whatever), it will attract a relatively small number of people to exploit them, who are already adapted to such a life. Hence why I think there should be a cap of pop 6 at most for such worlds. A few million people is still a lot of people, more than enough to exploit the local resources and account for some level of population growth, but it avoids having BILLIONS of people on these hostile worlds.
The vast majority of people in the TU should be living on habitable worlds. Why? Because I firmly believe that no matter what the era is people prefer to breathe natural air, to run around in green (or purple, or blue) fields and bask in the yellow (or white, or orange) sun.
Speaking generally, people (especially ones used to a high-tech lifestyle) don't choose to live somewhere where it's a struggle to live, where they constantly have to worry about life support failing or the when next solar flare is gonna hit. Sure, some hardy types will choose to do that (and they're probably the sort of person represented by your average Traveller PC) but they'll be a small minority of the total human population.
So I can see small numbers of people (represented by an inordinately large span of the UWP digit, from 0 to 6 - but still up to a few million people) living on the non-habitable worlds, but the places that will have a LOT of people (pop 7+) will most likely be habitable, earthlike worlds - say size 6+, atm 4-9, hydrographics 5+.
It also makes the more sense too. Why should an earthlike world have to export its food to a nearby rockball with billions of people? It'd make much more sense for all those people to live on the garden world that's producing the agriculture that they rely on.
