Re: Strategic Full Thrust

> Michael Sandy wrote:

> Every planet conquered, will have to be guarded.  Such worlds would
> produce less than they would free...
  
Whether the world is conquered or peacefully 
inducted into your civilization, it is a lot
easier to get new production out of a populated
world than to colonize one yourself.

> > 
> > There is very little provision for colonizing and
> > populating a system by oneself.  The big problem is
> > that the size and cost of a colony ship capable of
> > transporting a significant fraction of a planet's
> > population (> 0.1%) is HUGE under most estimations
> > of ship size.
> 
> Or just use a HORD! of small (ie: in the normal ship building ranges)
> colony ships.

Um, my point was that if you use the Dirtside II
conversion rules, 1 Mass of Cargo can move 50
people, then to get .1% of the population of a
5 billion population world you'd need 2000 Mass
of cargo doing 50 round trips.	If you don't
mind doing the paperwork for thousands of ships,
great...

> As to production rates...
> 
>   No world, regardless of society, would devote 100% of GNP (Gross
> National Product) to military spending.  It is simply easyer to assume
> that the cash a world produces is the "Military Spending Budget". 
This
> greatly simplifies the budget rules of any strategic game.

Are you going to claim that an established world
will spend less in combined Civilian space ships,
military ships _and_ research than a colony world?
Yes, the homeworld will have more drones and more
people on the dole, but that can't reasonably 
account for more than a factor of two difference
in production.

> Donald Hosford

I suppose the easiest answer is that a Colony world
isn't an economical way of spreading one's power in
most FT campaigns.  Once you start meeting enemy
warships you may spend a lot on bribing/conquering
scouting other civilizations, but it is a little
late to get colonial production into play.

Thank you everybody for your comments!

Michael Sandy