CT Only: How much for the planet?

[Enoki]

Sure, that’s one way to do it. And still would be done in the US without laws prohibiting anticompetitive practices. Market capitalism isn’t accidental.

Another is guild type stuff. It depends on the culture and laws, and of course such variables as size of empire and impinging competitive polities including naval strength backing how business is done.

For a Traveller setting, you have a class of nobility running the 3I. I take that to mean they pretty much get a cut of whatever anybody outside the nobility is doing. So, you're the baron or viscount or whatever running planet A. It might be a backwater, but you still run it. Some local starts making something and some mega corp suits show up and drop a pile of cash on your desk saying they don't like what the local is doing.

You make damn sure Mr. Local stops doing whatever it is he's doing. Toss in guilds, unions, trade groups, and other interests, and pretty quick things can get ugly if you're an upstart working outside the system.

 

[Condottiere]

Try minimum percentage local manufactured content.

 

[Spinward Flow]

When the competition complains to the government, the government says they'll do something, but foot drags because the mega corp just gave every government uber flunky a big "campaign contribution" (aka bribe).

Democratic governments (2 and 4) are susceptible to such tactics/corruption.

To be fair, the other government types are ALSO susceptible to such tactics/corruption ... but the methods (and the players involved) will be slightly different. Point being that no government type will be "immune" to what is described ... but some governments will be "more resistant" than other types to these tactics aimed at corruption.

 

[Daidoji Dave]

Here is a recent book on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_City_on_Mars

I bet the full book is fascinating.

From the wiki summary the authors' arguments sound circular. We don't know enough/it's dangerous/they won't get back in an emergency/radiation reduces lifespan/needs more study/it doesn't pay. And undergirding all those wiki mentions an attitude of it being morally wrong to knowingly send people into danger, even volunteers.

But if you get over morally wrong to send volunteers into danger, the rest takes care of itself. Learn by doing. Or as Burt Rutan [may have] said in relation to space flight, "we need to kill more pilots." But substitute Mars colonists for pilots.

Critique aside I may still track it down for inspiration, even without agreeing with it. Racetrack/centrifugal "pregnodromes" are definitely going on my low grav worlds from now on, for one.

 

[Dragoner]

I bet the full book is fascinating.

From the wiki summary the authors' arguments sound circular. We don't know enough/it's dangerous/they won't get back in an emergency/radiation reduces lifespan/needs more study/it doesn't pay. And undergirding all those wiki mentions an attitude of it being morally wrong to knowingly send people into danger, even volunteers.

But if you get over morally wrong to send volunteers into danger, the rest takes care of itself. Learn by doing. Or as Burt Rutan [may have] said in relation to space flight, "we need to kill more pilots." But substitute Mars colonists for pilots.

Critique aside I may still track it down for inspiration, even without agreeing with it. Racetrack/centrifugal "pregnodromes" are definitely going on my low grav worlds from now on, for one.

It's making the rounds with the hard sf crew. The main gist is that space exploration won't be like the west. Even the west isn't like the west like it is shown in Hollywood, I spent a lot of time traveling around it, and the most accurate description is that it was a lot of rough living, digging, and dying. Most of the places that failed did so for the lack of women, they didn't want to move to those places. In my setting, it is frontier, though with stations, more then living on marginal planets. Shirt sleeve planets are far and few between. No 70 billion on a size 3 planet, and more free wheeling, much like the west still is.

 

[Daidoji Dave]

The main gist is that space exploration won't be like the west. Even the west isn't like the west like it is shown in Hollywood, I spent a lot of time traveling around it, and the most accurate description is that it was a lot of rough living, digging, and dying.

That sounds like a fair point, but not a profound one. If proponents of Mars settlement are saying it will be easy, fun, safe or comfortable I've missed it. I'm pretty sure they're clear on the rough living and digging parts, and I wouldn't be surprised if people like Elon Musk weren't also clear on the lot of dying part and just considered it acceptable.

The first wave of English colonists to the New World soaked up 50% casualty rates in some places yet stuck around, and more kept coming. We don't see rates that bad any more, but people still do things like join the French Foreign Legion, pay their own way to volunteer in foreign wars, work on oil rigs and cold water small fishing vessels, weld underwater (good pay by the way, but its hard to get life insurance)...

Recruitment might well include people like oil workers or northern lattitude farmers rather than only academic or military pilot astronaut types we're used to, but that's a point I heard years ago from proponents not critics.

Most of the places that failed did so for the lack of women, they didn't want to move to those places.

That happened too. And yet, the west got settled from the places that made it.

But I should read the book directly rather than argue too much with the messenger. You're selling me on it despite how I may sound, so I will get around to it, but I need to finish a couple before I allow myself more.

 

[kilemall]

The it’s not the west part is why I think there will be greater need for engineers then standard atmo/gravity/earth friendly ag environment.

 

[kilemall]

Democratic governments (2 and 4) are susceptible to such tactics/corruption.

To be fair, the other government types are ALSO susceptible to such tactics/corruption ... but the methods (and the players involved) will be slightly different. Point being that no government type will be "immune" to what is described ... but some governments will be "more resistant" than other types to these tactics aimed at corruption.

Last I checked we have a bribery success roll based on LL. Low law level, not so corrupt.

 

[Condottiere]

It's cultural.

And legal and illegal, for example politician's campaign contributions and dark money from SuperPACs.

 

[Dragoner]

My setting is about as hard science as they come for Traveller, I take liberties, and am "optimistic" about our expanding into space. I like the forlorn feeling of the empty spaces out west, abandoned places, and try to give that same feeling.

 

[Bartleby]

My setting is about as hard science as they come for Traveller, I take liberties, and am "optimistic" about our expanding into space. I like the forlorn feeling of the empty spaces out west, abandoned places, and try to give that same feeling.

I assume you have seen Zozer's Hostile?

 

[Dragoner]

I assume you have seen Zozer's Hostile?

I know of it, not really looked into it.

 

[whartung]

From the Hostile website:

Instead space is the preserve of the big corporations that focus on extracting minerals, oil and other raw materials from the extra-solar planets and moons to be shipped back to Earth in order to support the vast populations there.

There's some truth there.

In The West, the investment necessary to participate on an individual level is low. Some good shoes, a gun, and some supplies. Maybe a horse or a mule. A pick, shovel, gold pan. And a hat.

Off you go to find a mining claim. Or to trap fur. Or to hunt meat for the nearby trading post. The gold rushes produced thousands of individual workers, working for themselves. Of course, to start, you walked from civilization. Hundreds of miles.

Some with a bit more capital got into the "selling shovels to miners" business. May not necessarily strike it rich, the income is more steady during the boom.

There can still be places like that. Places where individuals can find their fortune, relying as much on themselves as they are on the trading post for coffee, tobacco, gun powder, and lead. But you'll need the cooperation of someone with a multi-million credit starship to get you there. You're not walking.

But we've learned, with capital, it can be more efficient. Rather than hunting individual bears, perhaps better to drum up some investors, bump up the accommodations, and hire some hunters to do the legwork for you. Sure, you could be one of those hunters, but now you're Working for the Man. Or, worse, you're alone and competing against those that are.

If space is risky, it takes more and more capital to even get started. As the risk goes down, so does the investment necessary.

 

[Dragoner]

I have a had a bunch of graduate level economics courses, largely useless, though that is where I drew info from for economics in my setting.

 

[Condottiere]

 

[Daidoji Dave]

... greater need for engineers then standard atmo/gravity/earth friendly ag environment.

Definitely true in itself, but I also think the first small settlements won't have room or time for the engineer with a clean office job/roughneck doing the actual work divide. They'll have engineers performing labor or running machinery, just out of necessity. Really tough questions can always be beamed back home, at least at first.

The question then becomes how to get those people. Start with roughnecks and educate them, or start with academic engineers and accustom them to labor?

Except - there are a few "dual-classed" people out there already. As one instance, welding program at a community college for 1-2 year, transfer the credits to a four college with an industrial engineering degree, and you've got an industrial engineer who personally knows how to weld. That's a track no adult ever mentioned to me when I was in high school, but the one I met makes more than I do.

 

[Dragoner]

I can weld, not great, I have to know it though, otherwise when they come to do the x-rays there would be bad welds. Many of us work in the field, it is just up or out, so I went to business management school 20 years after my initial degree. I looked at the req's for Mars personnel (mech and struct), and could fulfill them, told my wife, and she said she'd divorce me if I went. She said the same thing though when I was offered an Army job after 9/11, and I was thinking of taking it.

I have panned for gold, fun, I have a vial of about $200 worth on the shelf in my office, though I know that 90% of claims were worked by companies. There are still claims active, one can buy them for about $150,000; none really worth it though, most mineral extraction is subsidized. It is an artificial scarcity economy, same as OPEC and oil. It was the timber that was really valuable, those stands are gone now.

 

[kilemall]

Definitely true in itself, but I also think the first small settlements won't have room or time for the engineer with a clean office job/roughneck doing the actual work divide. They'll have engineers performing labor or running machinery, just out of necessity. Really tough questions can always be beamed back home, at least at first.

The question then becomes how to get those people. Start with roughnecks and educate them, or start with academic engineers and accustom them to labor?

Except - there are a few "dual-classed" people out there already. As one instance, welding program at a community college for 1-2 year, transfer the credits to a four college with an industrial engineering degree, and you've got an industrial engineer who personally knows how to weld. That's a track no adult ever mentioned to me when I was in high school, but the one I met makes more than I do.

Colonist should have been one of the original COTI careers. Prospecting, ag tech, mech/electronics/engineering, broker, gun combat, medical including planet Xenomedicine and veterinarian, and heaps of jack of all trades.

Belter could probably serve as a template with fewer space skills and more colonist.

 

[punkrabbitt]

Ya know, thinking of all the failed Old West settlements, and it might be spooky for the PCs to exit Jump in a Pop 0-2 system and have it be oddly quiet. Maybe everyone left. Maybe they died. It's a mystery, Scooby-Doo!

 

[Dragoner]

Ya know, thinking of all the failed Old West settlements, and it might be spooky for the PCs to exit Jump in a Pop 0-2 system and have it be oddly quiet. Maybe everyone left. Maybe they died. It's a mystery, Scooby-Doo!

What I do, have maps for abandoned starports too, maybe a station around another planet in the system, working that planet. Probably one of the spookiest places I have been is Manzanar: Native Americans inhabited it, then settlers until LA took their water, and finally an internment camp during the war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanar