Re: [GZG] [SG] Rapid Fire antipersonnel plasma gun?

On Thursday 28 September 2006 17:22, laserlight@verizon.net wrote:
> >Let's say you are dropping 10 colonies of 25,000 people each on
Earth.
> > Let's say you have one in New Zealand, another in Italy, a third in
> > Argentina, a fourth in Ireland, another in New Jersey, another in
> > Denmark, one in Moscow, one on the Cape of Good Hope, one in
Florida, and
> > one in Japan.
>
> But you wouldn't necessarily do that, because everyone's gong to want
to be
> reasonably close to a spaceport.

Assuming there is a spaceport, supplies are even a semi-regular
occurrence, and the colony has anything to ship back. Supplies
could be 'dropped' near the colony, with no need for a ship to
land. After all, what is the colony producing that homeworld will
actually want to take back?

The nicer the planet, the less the need for supplies and therefore
the less the need to stay near a centre of some kind.

For low tech, colonies will probably be dropped off and forgotten.
Maybe resupplied with a second wave of colonists a few decades
later. There won't be the resources or the will to keep on shipping
supplies to the colony.

For high tech, re-supplies can be frequent, but landing/take off
will be reasonably cheap. If you've got thruster technology with
multiple-g acceleration (e.g. Traveller, Star Wars), all you need
is a flat bit of ground to land on.

You'd need a middle ground, where re-supply is common but technology
is at the point where a hefty planet-side infrastructure is needed to
get supplies down to the planet.

You could PSB it to require a central space port, but I think it's
also reasonable to assume that there won't be one. The GZG universe
tech seems to fall into the Traveller category.

-- 
Be seeing you,			       http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.			    Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@glendale.org.uk 
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l