Figuring out the numbers for Campaigns

When creating a campaign it is wise to look at the
mechanics of production, technology development,
and the cost of increasing production.	What rules
you use will have a great effect on the campaign.

Important numbers:
1)  How long does it take a ship to get from one 
significant system to another?

2)  How much production is there?  (in relation to starting
fleet size)

3)  How much production does it take to increase ones
production?  Three 'turns' production, ten 'turns'?

This factor is more important in long campaigns.

4)  How dependant on population is production?

5)  How fast does population increase in comparison
to increases in production?

(This factor is heavily dependant on factor 1 and 8)

6)  Is it cheaper to build colonial structures and industries
on site or to transport them?

7)  How many people can fit in a colony ship?

8)  How long is the campaign, in comparison with production
turns?

9)  How fast will new technologies be developed, in
proportion to the length of the game and production?

All these factors have an impact on how important
colony worlds are to protect.  Colony systems have to
produce _something_ or they aren't worth fighting for.
One of the questions for a campaign is whether the
time period for expanding production facilities on colony
worlds will allow new factories to have an impact over 
the course of the campaign.

If it only takes a couple of weeks for ships to travel
anywhere on the front, only a small amount of production
is going to be available for the campaign, unless the
defense has a very strong edge.  Also, production of new
facilities is unlikely to be useful at all.

If the defense has a strong edge then a significant force
build up will be needed to take out even lightly defended
systems.  If all or nothing bids to take over systems are
extremely expensive then commerce raiding and wars of
attrition can make the production levels of both space
powers important.

If it takes years to travel between stars then not only
will expanding production facilities have an effect on
the campaign, but so too will technological advances,
and even population expansion.

Lets take a couple of campaign examples:

The Vietnam war lasted long enough for both new
production and new technologies to have an effect
on the battlefield.

By contrast, almost all the equipment used in the
Gulf War was already built or in the pipeline.	The
major exceptions were the retrofitting of laser
guidance heads to 'dumb' bombs, the deployment of
the Joint Stars surveillance and battle management
system ahead of schedule, and the use of Fuel-Air bombs
to clear minefields.  There were some refinements
of existing weapons and doctrine during the air war,
but there really weren't any new technologies
developed during the war in response to the war.

During WWII, not only were new technologies and
new weapons built, but a large part of the war was
over the resources needed to build new weapons.
After the Dutch sabotaged the oil fields in the Dutch
East Indies the Japanese built whole new oil wells.
The US built several major ship building facilities
during the war as well.

In a Full Thrust campaign, how effective would a scorched
system tactic be?  If colonies can blow up all their fuel
refining capacity and either evacuate or take to the hills,
how useful is it to take possession of the colony?

How much control over civilian installations do Admirals
have?  Will the civilian government of a system come
to their own terms with an invader to preserve what they
have built?

Another number to tinker with:
How big are these ships, anyway?  While the system is
quite flexible in simulating various science fiction
backgrounds the rules for marines fix the scale a little
bit.  Even using cryosleep, only 50 people can fit in
1 Mass of Cargo space.	That makes shifting huge colonial
populations _expensive_, and time consuming.

That colony ship I posted recently could shift 1000 people
per trip.  Even with a 1 week round trip that would only be
50,000 people per year.  In order to shift a reasonably large
number of people you would need a huge number of colony
ships.	If you don't mind each power having fleets in the
100,000 point range, that is no problem, but if you want
managable fleet sizes and numbers you have to pay attention
to the scale.

Increasing the Cargo capacity to 500 people per Cargo Mass
would make ground combats involve larger units but would
enable a reasonable sized ship to carry a starter colony all
by itself.

Increase the Cargo capacity to 5000 people per Cargo Mass
and shifting the population of nations becomes possible, if
the colony ships can make rapid enough return trips.

At 50,000 people per Cargo Mass, even a one-way colony
ship can carry enough people to justify a significant
production capacity for the colony they create.

Star Trek Full Thrust has more people on board than the
More Thrust section imples they would.	A heavy cruiser
has over a thousand people on board.  Since cryosleep can
accommodate four times as many people, a cruiser sized
colony ship could accommodate over 4,000 colonists,
much greater than the 1,000 colonists on that 100 Mass
colony ship I posted a short while back.

Even after tinkering with the People per Cargo Mass ratio,
how does a colony world of 1 million pop contribute
significantly to the production capacity of an empire whose
capital system has a population in the billions?  Sure, after
200 years of growth its own population will be approaching
the billions, but that implies a very long campaign!

One could have a campaign with populations much smaller
than billions by assuming that after the initial diaspora the
home planet was nuked.	Then you'd have various colony
worlds, each with populations in the few millions trying
to build fast.

Michael Sandy