Originally posted by Michael Taylor:
Quote form malenfant: Sure, you can just armwave and say "these people settled on this largely uninhabitable world because they felt like it", but if you do that you should expect awkward questions from people like me asking why they settled there and not a more habitable world that would be more suitable for their chosen lifestyle.
This is exactly the proble i'm facing trying to justify why 80 BILLION 
people settled/were born/live on Stoner when there are 3 agricultural earth-like worlds jump1 or 2 away.
It is a real problem. Any suggestions anyone, other than the usual "it was a mining paradise"?
Michael,
Here's my attempt.
Note: Yes, I realize that The Grand Duchy is not a part of the Imperium, please bear with me.
A while ago, I was doing some IMTU explaining on how it was that low-pop, poor, non-idustrial, etc., worlds managed to contribute taxes to the Imperium in the form of even the few credits that GWP calculations showed they owed.
My explanation was that it was the duty of the world's noble (Marquis or Baron), to assist in the economic development of the world (assuming the world's people and government (remember, we're talking 1-9999 in pop, here) were amenable to such development).
Each Ruling Noble has various properties in their position (granted to them when their Title was created), and said properties (lands on other worlds, financial instruments, stocks, funds, derivatives, and other futuristic niceties) to generate sufficient wealth so as to avoid having an improverished Ruling Noble running around, embarressing the rest of the aristocracy.
It is the duty of these Ruling Nobles in charge of such worlds to spend this money to help create businesses and opportunities on the world to generate actual credits. In some cases, this can be simple trading companies whose job it is to "buy" natural resources out of the hands of the local inhabitants for Imperial Credits (thus getting credits into the economy), and "sell" those natural resources to free traders, or pay those free traders to ship it. Said Ruling Noble will also cooperate with the Subsector Noble to "subsidize" inbound trade to provide cheap offworld goods for the inhabitants to buy (creating the seed of a market for offworld goods). Naturally, this artifice constructed by the Ruling Noble can't last forever, and my explanation of the jump-starting of a tiny economy is undoubtedly oversimplistic, but the whole idea is to get a real economy going. That way, the local government can start taxation, and the Ruling Noble (and the rest of the Imperium will be able to start taking a cut).
In extreme cases of hopelessness on the part of economic development, it is actually the job of the Ruling Noble to fund the entire Official Tax Assessment of the world out-of-pocket (but it's not going to be too large in that case, given very low population and very low per-capita income likely in such cases).
Because a Ruling Noble will do anything to help jump-start the economy, I feel there will have been many cases in which said Ruling Noble hired outside PR firms to "sell" the desireability of the world (even in the face of vacuum dustball unattractiveness) in order to attract settlers. Sometimes these things will go badly, and the people attracted to the world will either leave or even revolt. Sometimes these things will go well. Maybe "lanthanum" or "zuchai" gets discovered in them-thar airless hills! Or something. The population skyrockets. More people move in from abroad to take advantage of the gold-rush mentality. If the family filling the shoes of the Ruling Title continues to manage well over the passing centuries, you get an airless rockball with a population of 80 Billion. In those cases where successive Ruling Nobles failed to do as well as the first, you get airless rockballs with sub-million populations.
Stoner may be in a situation where the natural resources have since run out, the population is beginning to move away, and the 80 Billion number is already falling down into the 70s as the birth rate drops and people start moving out.
!
Can you imagine what would happen to various local worlds if even 1% of Stoner's population emigrated? 800 million new settlers on various nearby worlds. And in the case of a complete "bust" in the local economy, where there was literally no hope to improve, billions could move out.
Free Traders rigged with racks of low-berths rigged in their holds would show up from all over the sector. A Type R subby merchant with its 200 ton bay filled with 400 low-berths? That's 400,000 credits per trip.
The Type R costs 101.03 Mcr in Book 2, 10% off = 90.927 / 240 = Cr378,862/Month; just the outbound trip in low passengers, would cover the mortgage, although some adjustments would have to be made so that outbound High Passengers still got their 1 dTon allowance, and the inbound trip to Stoner could probably pony up the rest.
This, of course, assumes a variant passanger availability caused by the mass off-world emigration.
Honestly, I've always been a little surprised such mass emigration stories/disasters haven't popped up in OTU history. Something similar happened to Ireland not too long ago.
Oops, I've just described the: "It was a mining paradise," story. Hmmm.
Okay, place the massive out-migration of Stoner in the previous couple of centuries, and have it's current story be an "on-the-rebound" where massive service-sector economy locally aids a massive multi-tech level industry that exports to all nearby worlds (those that experienced the massive population dumping in the past; who immediately became dependent on cheap industrial production from Stoner to survive).
Or otherwise substitute the "key location" story, where Stoner's industry and tech have been the centerpoint of all local activity going back millennia (built on the seed of the "successfull adverstising" by the initial Ruling Noble (or, because this is outside the Imperium . . . by the initial development consortium).
Or, simply state that the UWP Survey info was one of those heinous but widely known major errors. Perhaps it's UWP data got mixed up with another world's. Perhaps a survey clerk somewhere wasn't paying attention when manually keypunching some scout's handwritten notes and mixed up two worlds. The Stoner government has labored for centuries to try and get the official widely published UWP compilations updated, without success.
