Um... 200 settlers, including children and youngsters. Budget is their life savings plus whatever money they can convince a bank to loan them. Possibly a subsidy from some philantropic institution.
Qualitative suggestions are fine, but I'm also looking for help with the quantities. Including what will NOT be taken along because the settlers can't afford it.
The adventure does assume that the settlers are well equipped, but I still don't think they'll run to air defense lasers and missiles.
Oh, and the local law level won't really matter a hill of beans if the nearest law is thousand of klicks away, and there are only a handful of millions of people on the whole planet.
Hans
Hmm, seems to me that the TNE World Tamer's Handbook has an economic model that works fairly well for small settlements such as you propose here.
Caveat: note that the economic model in WTH doesn't actually work all that well. It can be used for a small colony, but if you try to model something larger, you'll quickly find its weak points (among other things wrong with it, it can't be used to model the Earth - you can't possibly grow enough food at TL8 to feed seven billion people on the land area of this planet (you can just about manage two billion, three with some insanely optimistic assumptions)).
That said...
Whenever I've used that particular model, I've always worked on the assumption that the ideal solution is the "excess labor" model - buy one unit of capital machinery of whatever type for every two labourers, plus at least two extra units of heavy industry capital equipment.
Which gives you best case productivity for lowest investment. With the two extra Heavy Industry units for making more capital machinery of whatever type, in whatever order you prefer.
Given that,
1) tents sufficient for everyone till they can get minimal prefab housing assembled,
2) enough livestock for 10-20% of the farms you expect to have (your people won't be eating their own livestock for years, they'll be letting them grow and living off the crops plus hunting till then),
3) enough weaponry for a militia unit consisting of all adult males (so about 40 rifles, five or six machineguns, all of tech level of choice),
4) food for a year (yes, one way to do this is to start your colony in local spring and count on a harvest come fall, but I prefer starting the colony in the fall, and using all the labour available to get the colony put together before a big chunk of them have to start working farms full time),
5) at least one light grav vehicle,
6) ammo and fuel. Sufficient for a week of combat for the ammo, and for six months of routine operations for the fuel. If things go well, you'll be manufacturing your own ammo and fuel before you run out.
Depending on game system, you can either use the generic air-raft for the grav vehicle, or design something. As I recall, the old TML came up with bunches of air-raft-equivalents that were way cheaper than the standard one.
Ditto for weaponry. No, they don't need bleeding edge Imperial stuff. ACRs at the upper-end, on down to WW2 era equipment at the lower-end, depending on availability and cost. But it would be really embarrassing to have your colony sacked by a band of TL4 brigands because they didn't think that decent firearms were a must-have.
What they're going to have for trade:
1) basically nothing at first.
2) within a year or two, if you've done your sums right, and nothing excessively terrible has upset any applecarts, you can begin exporting food and/or raw materials offworld. Your markets are generally going to be places with no biosphere of their own - vacuum worlds, belts, etc.
3) within the same time-frame, with appropriate planning, you can begin exporting manufactured goods locally - you won't make much, but it'll be higher TL than the locals make, and thus worth buying.
Note that if you don't mind building up some local dependencies, you can trade your manufactured goods for their food. If that's part of the plan, bring along less in the way of farm machinery and more fabbers.
Note further that even if you go this route, it's a really bad idea to be able to grow less food than the bare minimum needed by your colony. Depending on trade for luxury foodstuffs (and by luxury I mean anything more than beans&grain) is fine, but being in a situation where starvation is a likelihood if a local trade caravan is late (or your grav vehicle breaks down) is a bad thing.
Oh, and hopefully they have at least one MD and one RN (or the Impy equivalents). A Dentist would be nice too, if they're still a separate specialty in the Imperium. And one guy whose job it is to be the sheriff. Beyond those special cases, the economic model will pretty much mask the gory details to whatever extent you'd like.
Just out of curiousity, what TL did your colonists expect to live at? Somehow, I can't see Imperials wanting to live at TL4....
