Small Ship fleet sizes
- Thread starter whartung
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And was not the generalization of this custom that helped Rome to start having Civil Wars, as legions were more loyal to their raiser than to the Republic?
You're right, although the events of MegaTraveller (if you accept that particular version of events, which I do not, will not, can not, no way, no how, never ever ever ever :devilsuggest they're not rotating them. As Rancke points out, there are canon elements that hint pretty strongly against enfeoffment as a basis for the naval budget, but it would make for one great ATU, especially a small ship ATU. I like the idea a lot.
Or maybe Strephon's policies that reinforced the domains reduced this rotations...
See that before the Domains being reinstaured (and Archdukes given real power) rotate the squadrons from sector to sector (and most times just from one subsector to another) would already suffice, as the main noble under wchich they served already changed.
With the Domains again in play, they would have need to rotate from Domain to Domain, as if kept in the same Domain the noble under which they served remained the same (the Archduke), so this policy could well lose part of its effiect.
Also, with the raise of the Archdukes, Strephon probably trusted more those high nobles, so probably relaxing the rotation policies (as too far rotations are more expensive and disrupting than les far ones).
And in any case, see that at least at the begining of the Rebellion, most IN high brass, when taking sides, also said (and maybe even really believed) that they were loyal to the Imperium and fighting for it, just they didn't agree about who the Emperor was and the rebels.
When they realized they were no more fighting for the Imperium as a whole, it was probably too late.
pendragonman
Absent Friends Margrave
DangerousThing
SOC-13
An absolutely wonderful idea. And it gives yet another reason to have nobles in space.
As you point out, not canon, but it could be a good way to fund a small ship universe.
DangerousThing
SOC-13
At high enough tech levels I see most of the population living in archologies or other habitats. From the point of many of these people it wouldn't make much of a difference where there habitat is located because few people ever leave it.
It might be possible to build the habitats in pieces and use a jump shuttle to move them to their destination. Or maybe there are a few jump shuttles around that can move a million dTon habitat around whole.
For one thing, this lack of correlation applies to all tech levels. Secondly, just because your technology is good enough to let you survive living on a world with a corrosive atmosphere doesn't mean that it wouldn't be both cheaper and more desirable to live on a garden world.
At sufficiently high tech levels, population expansion has a very pronounced economic aspect, and it's cheaper to build more infrastructure in a benign environment than in a hostile one. That doesn't mean that you can't have high populations on crappy worlds and low populations on nice worlds, but it most certain should cause some degree of correlation.
Hans
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Even a 1km x 1km x 300meter habitat would be ~22,000,000 dTons. For just a very small "town"...
Mongoose Traveller makes a very slight nod to physical world characteristics affecting population (p.180, boxed text), but it's a 'hard science' optional rule, not a standard part of star system generation.
DangerousThing
SOC-13
I think that would fit a *large* amount of people and employment in there.
If you assume that each normal level is 3m high, except for (just randomly choosing here) 10 levels of 6m tall, then you have 95 levels, each at 1km x 1km. I'm sure that somebody here can tell us about how many people (including employment and shopping and entertainment) can live on 95 square km's.
According to Wikipedia, the burrow of Manhattan in 60 km2 and has 1.6 million people living on it. On the other hand, the living space is larger because there is a lot of skyscrapers on that piece of land.
Even still, that 22 mega-dTons is still a lot of land if officially used.
And maybe there is something on that planet that is worth having people in there. Maybe the toxic atmosphere creates interesting mining and manufacturing opportunities that can be done via waldos (IMTU what I call mainly remote controlled robots).
Um ... what are they eating? Including specs for NYC is pointless as they aren't supplying the food/water/power/waste mgmnt./environmental equip from there also.
Recalc then post again...
Per T4 rules, you're looking at roughly...
1568.75kL=112.054 Td per person for full hab including LS, presuming no frame/skin and no ag/ic. So, round up. 115 Td per person gives space for controls, too.
Which means a 1000x1000x300m brick would roughly sustain 186335 people... but the solar would need to be replaced in such a case, as the SA requirements would be too high.
| System | Vol-kL | MW |
| Stateroom | 56 | 0.001 |
| Endurance V LS | 1500 | 0.05 |
| Solar Cells | 12.75 | -0.051 |
Which means a 1000x1000x300m brick would roughly sustain 186335 people... but the solar would need to be replaced in such a case, as the SA requirements would be too high.
This works for a society that imports 100% of everything else it needs. Doesn't work for an actual world society.
I had a weird thought about the First Imperium being funded on some feudal model and then the Terrans coming at them from a model based on heavy taxation of several billion people panicked at the thought of hostile aliens. Might explain some things.
Cheaper and more desirable, but the lesson of the Alaska gold rush among other examples says that people go where the money is. Truly hostile worlds are rare enough that I figure they pop up for some very good economic reason that drew people there. How fast and how large such a world's population grows would depend on what that economic reason was and how powerful the economic reward was. Would have to be pretty dang lucrative to justify the expense of the habitat.
Maybe they struck lanthanum!
cor·re·la·tion noun \ˌkȯr-ə-ˈlā-shən, ˌkär-\
1 : the state or relation of being correlated; specifically: a relation existing between phenomena or things or between mathematical or statistical variables which tend to vary, be associated, or occur together in a way not expected on the basis of chance alone <the obviously high positive correlation between scholastic aptitude and college entrance — J. B. Conant>
1 : the state or relation of being correlated; specifically: a relation existing between phenomena or things or between mathematical or statistical variables which tend to vary, be associated, or occur together in a way not expected on the basis of chance alone <the obviously high positive correlation between scholastic aptitude and college entrance — J. B. Conant>
-- Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Emphasis mine.
Incidentally, the population density of Alaska is the lowest in the US (1.26/sq mi (0.49/km2)).
With Traveller world generation the population distribution of truly hostile worlds is exactly the same as the population distribution of truly hospitable worlds and the same as the population distribution of every other combination of physical stats. 1 in 36 has a population level of 0, 2 in 36 has a population level of 1, and so on and so forth. The relationship between the habitability and the population of a world is entirely a matter of chance.
This is IMO not only an egregious flaw, it is also one that has no game justification -- it doesn't make game play easier or more fun and it is belief-suspension-breakingly implausible.
Hans
Thus, the factors at play on a hostile world are not the same as the factors at play on a garden world; there can be no trying to correlate the two because the underlying factors differ. It's like trying to compare crop yield to steel output. I'm sorry I didn't make that clear enough.
If the people are there for economic reasons, it's probable that a high percentage of them are immigrants from offworld or offspring of recent immigrants. The factors guiding growth under circumstances in which people are deliberately going someplace that is otherwise hostile are different from those occurring on a garden world.
And, yes, the pop roll is the pop roll, no modifiers for atmosphere type, or world size, or hydrographics, or tech level for that matter. There's a compensating modifier that raises tech level for some extreme circumstances, presumably under the argument that they need more tech to live there and the tech allows the world to be more commercially viable. However, it still allows for some very odd results. It is indeed possible to have a world of billions of folk under a corrosive atmosphere struggling to survive with 19th century tech - unless I've missed some modifier.
It is an odd method, but in truth we don't have any basis for judging how big a population a hostile world with some unknown economic attractant is likely to be. It's anybody's guess - althought I'll admit that the entire absence of an agricultural sector would tend to imply a lower average population than on some more mundane world, at least in my mind. Still, if anything the tech level rules are a bigger issue; they create some odd situations.
Planetary atmosphere is 2d-7 + size. Planetary size is 2d-2. Probability of a breathable atmosphere (with or without filter mask) in that set of rolls is 56.7%, 74.4% if you count the worlds where you need a compressor. Probability of a vacuum/trace world is 15.9%. Probability of an exotic/corrosive/insidious in that set is 9.72%.
So, folk are already gravitating toward worlds with breathable atmospheres. Only 1 in 10 settled primary worlds are exotic/corrosive/insidious, even though we know there are likely to be a whole lot of worlds out there with non-O2 atmospheres. We must therefore conclude that there is some significant attractant that makes those hostile worlds attractive enough to not only be the dominant world in their systems but to attract significant population.
I might have introduced some modifier based on the lack of that agricultural sector, but a -1 in this circumstance is an order of magnitude, which seems like a lot. At best, I'd have cut the pop in half.
There is some Earth history precedence. Gold fields in inhospitable areas. These populations became, in the majority, miners & suppliers. Most of the family unit was living elsewhere while the "worker" sent money back home. It would probably be the case in the Trav examples of MUCH more hostile environments. Companies with employees that don't live there permanently.
If everything else was equal, would you expect people to prefer moving to a hospitable world to moving to a hostile world? That's what causes a correlation between habitability and population. The fact that everything else isn't equal is what makes it a correlation instead of a linear function.
Consider the statement:
"Researchers have found a direct correlation between smoking and lung cancer."
It doesn't mean that no one who doesn't smoke gets lung cancer and that everyone who smokes get lung cancer. It means that fewer non-smokers than smokers get lung cancer.
Which is precisely why there is a correlation between habitability and population size. More people will want to go to garden worlds than to crappy worlds. You need some additional attraction to go to the crappy world.
That argument would have some bite if the percentage of worlds with breathable atmosphere with low populations wasn't exactly the same as the percentage of worlds with any other kind of atmosphere.
Yes, there are fewer inhabited worlds with corrosive atmospheres. But the percentage of inhabited worlds with corrosive atmospheres with billions of inhabitants is exactly the same as the percentage of inhabited garden worlds with billions of inhabitants.
Hans
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Interesting point. There's going to be a stable population, but a large fraction of the population could be semi-transients, perhaps workers who are there on two-to-four-year contracts or something like that. At 8 to 10k a pop, I don't expect a lot of short-cycle traffic, but if the wage is right, then the ticket is affordable. Low berth is an alternative if we get around that death rate; otherwise, someone desperate enough to risk the roll is likely to stay there until he's made his fortune rather than to run back and forth taking the gamble repeatedly.
You are correct: if everything else was equal, people would preferentially move to hospitable worlds. There already is a correlation between habitability and population: 75% of the primary worlds are worlds requiring no or minimal interventions to breathe. Why? Possibly because, all other things being equal, those worlds have more to offer and, lacking a need for extensive life support arrangements, it costs less to live there.
However, in a handful of cases, all other things are not equal. There is at least one other factor at play besides habitability: economics. There may be more. You are focused solely on habitability, but those other factors will likewise influence population statistics. If you wanted a more accurate model for rolling population, you'd need a variable for the world's economic potential - and there is no such factor in the game to add to the mix. We'd have to invent it. Barring that, we are left to take the results as they occur and infer the other factors from the results.
The result is that for every billion+ exotic/etc. world, there are about 7.5 breathable worlds with billion+ populations and 1.5 vacuum/trace worlds with billion+ populations, which to me says the correlation between habitability and population is pretty strong, but that there are other factors in play. What we DON'T know is what there is about that exotic world (or the vacuum world, for that matter) that keeps the population up at that level. That would form the basis for the GM fleshing out that particular world.
In the optional rule in Mongoose Traveller, atmosphere types 5, 6 and 8 give a +1 to population. All other atmospheres give a -1.
Apparently because in 75% of the systems, there are worlds with breathable atmospheres. In Traveller, all systems get colonized[*]and they get the exact same population distribution. The 25% of systems without worlds with breathable atmosphere get the exact same population distribution as the systems with worlds with breathable atmospheres. Evidently breathable air is not really a factor in people's choice of colonization object, or the economic advantages of the systems with worlds without breathable atmospheres just happen to precisely counter the disadvantages of their particular brand of non-breatability.
[*] Almost all systems; there are a few with no population at all -- however, the physical characteristics of uninhabited mainworlds cover the same range as every other population level, so the don't help your argument at all.
It's not a handful of cases. It's 25% of all systems.
I am focused on habitability because I'm talking about the correlation of habitability and population size. As I said in my previous post, other factors are why it would only be a correlation instead of a linear function.
I did start out by saying (or at least implying) that the current system failed to take something into account. It isn't really a surprise that something would have to be added to remedy that. If it wasn't needed, there wouldn't be a lack in the first place.
What I'd do was to make a neat little table that separated the worlds rolled up by the world generation system into six categories: Impossible, hostile, unfriendly, neutral, friendly, hospitable. Then I'd assign a population of 0 to impossible worlds, roll thrice and work out some adjustment to the roll based on habitability. A simple +2 to -2 modifier would be easiest, but I don't like to lose the possibility of a pop A world with corrosive atmosphere completely, nor do I like upping the number of high-population worlds. Something that pushed the numbers towards the high medium range (pop 6-8) would be nice.
And for every world with a particular atmosphere with 10 billion inhabitants there is one with the same sort of atmosphere with 0 inhabitants, which to me say there is no correlation whatsoever.
Hans
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