[OT]-Interstellar Trade: A new take

I have been following this thread for quite a long time and finally
decided 
that I would put my two cents in.

As people have written before.	It would cost a great amount of time,
money 
and resources to start any colony on a different world.  For a
colonization 
to be profitable, something important must come from that colony.  Over 
population would be a good reason to start a new colony or maybe some
sort 
of exotic mineral produced only on that planet.

Also people have determined the amount of energy to get things off world

would need to be manageable and the amount of energy to produce a
suitable 
powersorce easy to accomplish.

But, in my opinion, there is something that most of us are failing to 
realize and all of us have been caught up in the numbers and real life 
determinations of interstellar trade that we have forgotten one of the 
requirement of a good game and that is playablity.

Sure, I know that interstellar trade would probably only be rare items
or 
items of art, but where is the fun of that?  I know that I might get
flamed 
for this message, but to make a good gaming arena (aka the different
nations 
in the GZG-verse), one has to weigh reality and playablity to make the
game 
entertaining enough for people but keep it realistic enough to be
plausable 
(this is the most important part of any game). The reason that 
Faster-than-light drives were created was not for any realism, but to
make 
space 'smaller'. Definately a playablity thing. Create a FTl drive, turn
5 
light years into 10 minutes. Your wargames (or certain starships) can go

where no one has gone before.

This playablity factor becomes even more necessary when you start to
create 
any campaign-like game (for example: adding economics into the
GZG-verse). 
Sure, most colonies would be so expensive to start up and maintain for
the 
first months (or years) that only extreme reasons would ever force a
nation 
to even think of an interstellar colony, but all these sci fi game
wouldn't 
be anything unless there is colonies at different star systmes. So we
fudge 
reality a bit to make interstellar nations a possiblity and then we can 
attack each other on the purple crystal world of Gorena VI with Grav
tanks 
and Power armor.

-Bren

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