Re: Strategic Full Thrust

Michael Sandy wrote:

> And yet, when a colony is established, its production is somehow
> within only a few orders of magnitude of the home system, even those
> its size in many orders smaller.

You could explain it like this: the homeworld has a large unproductive
population while a colony is founded with a certain goal and a
population to fit. The colony would be more focused on one type of
production and wouldn't waste capacity on luxury goods either. Just
think what would happen if all earth resources were turned to
terraforming Mars (rationing, no more home computers but hey, masses of
interplanetary spaceships ;-)

> If the initial production is negligible for the first 100 or 200 years
> then a 100-fold or 1000-fold increase in population could justify the
> colonies expense. That is a much greater timespan than most campaigns!

Not if you're gaming Haldeman's Forever War ;-)

I think the math behind the pbem game Galaxy could be used to run a
campaign, dropping the technology and material calculations. When the
new mass based design systems appears in the FB it'll be easy to adapt:
1 point of ship mass in Galaxy is just the same in FT. One mass of cargo
can carry a unit of colonists or capital (=industrial capacity).

Ludo Toen