Setting up new colony

[Peter Schutze]

>your're carrying enough consumables to keep you going until local argrivulture can start making surpluses, so you've got a fiar amount of spare food to play with

Im not sure this is neccessarily true. Without the parameters being better defined I'd play it safe and assume time in orbit is likely to count heavily against the safety margin:-

Even picking a good area might put you in a early years of the Sydney colony situation .... several years of below subsistence level agriculture until something breaks your way

unlike sydney colony, the idea here **is** that you wont have new ships arriving with more food and additional/ replacement labour every few months or even a convenient dutch east indies colony nearby that you can send whats left of the original fleetto in desperation for extra supplies

what happens if the only good areas are in spring when you arrive ? those extra weeks spent dawdling in orbit might mean you have to chose less than optimal areas or sit in orbit for most of a (local) year instead, waiting out the no-growing seasons. thats likely to wipe 1/4 off your "safety margin"

 

[whartung]

Im not sure this is neccessarily true. Without the parameters being better defined I'd play it safe and assume time in orbit is likely to count heavily against the safety margin:-

The time in orbit is part of the safety margin. It will be planned out that way.

If they're going in "blind", then it's pretty hard to fathom that they are planning on showing up and dropping right away. That implies that there's at least a year or more of supplies on ship while they scout the planet for a good spot, and figure out seasons, weather patterns, water shed, possibly local animals, etc.

During this stage much of the population may well be still in statis or whatever, depending on the type of ship, making supplies possibly less of an issue.

But, barring an adventure hook of "yea, we're here, but, ohnoes, the ship is leaking and we have to get everything off right away", this operation is going to have the first 5 years of the colony as planned out as practical. They're not going to be bumbling about and guessing, they'll know this before they leave and adapt to circumstance as best they can. If they can't off load within a "year" on the planet, then the colony is likely already a failure.