In Praise of GURPS Traveller

[mike wightman]

Look at the original Spinward Marches.

There are garden worlds with zero/low population designated as off limits by the Ministry of Conservation, while others are earmarked for direct Imperial colonisation from the interior by the Ministry of Colonisation.

Any TL9 culture can construct habitats in space, they really are trivial undertakings by that TL. Rockballs and asteroids as artificial habitats have their advantages - you can exploit the resources without worrying about environmental issues.

Trouble is the Spinward Marches were retconned from being a relatively newly developed frontier area to a region exploited for over a thousand years, at a stroke that makes those unoccupied garden worlds ridiculous. GT was particularly guilty of this.

 

[Brandon C]

Garden worlds might also have a restrictive immigration, populace policy.

In a multi system interstellar polity, it could be restricted to the elite.

There is nothing in the rules that says explicitly says that. The only thing that that even implies it it is "referees, this is a random system and you will have to make sense of senseless results, even though with a little forethought we could have avoided this".

 

[Brandon C]

There are garden worlds with zero/low population designated as off limits by the Ministry of Conservation, while others are earmarked for direct Imperial colonisation from the interior by the Ministry of Colonisation.

And what mental pretzel logic will you use for the virtually uninhabited garden worlds one parsec from barren rockballs with over a billion people?

Any TL9 culture can construct habitats in space, they really are trivial undertakings by that TL. Rockballs and asteroids as artificial habitats have their advantages - you can exploit the resources without worrying about environmental issues.

You are also much closer to a single disaster killing everyone on the planet.

 

[mike wightman]

And what mental pretzel logic will you use for the virtually uninhabited garden worlds one parsec from barren rockballs with over a billion people?

You tell me? That's how it is in the Imperial Spinward Marches.

The logic is that by TL10 the vast majority of the population lives in artificial habitats, so the colonization of systems by building artificial habitats is no big deal. The Imperium reserves the rights to newly discovered garden worlds, the issue is in proto-Third Imperium the Spinward Marches are a frontier colony still being assimilated into the Imperium, with worlds only contacted within the past few decades, but by the time of GT the Spinward Marches has been occupied for a millennia.

Prior to Third Imperium contact the cultures of the planets of the Spinward Marches that had achieved TL9+ could have easily constructed artificial habitats, built space industries and colonized their systems to the tune of billions of inhabitants.
They could have colonized adjacent systems via high fractional c STL let alone early jump technology.

You are also much closer to a single disaster killing everyone on the planet.

It has always been so.

But if you have a billion people living in thousands of artificial habitats you are much less likely for a single disaster to kill more than a small percentage of the population.

 

[whartung]

Any TL9 culture can construct habitats in space, they really are trivial undertakings by that TL. Rockballs and asteroids as artificial habitats have their advantages - you can exploit the resources without worrying about environmental issues.

That doesn't mean they're actually pleasant to live in. It's not even clear to me that any space habitat of any magnitude can really get passed "sick building" syndrome, despite their best efforts of filtering and air processing.

There's a reason there's a lot of people in California vs the Great White North states, even though they have fresh air up there.