Strategic Full Thrust

Having discussed how FT campaigns are run it seems
the most popular way to increase production is to
conquer NPC planets and set them to producing for
your empire.

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.

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.

More realistic would be for colonies to have production
less than 1/1000 of the home planet, but that makes
the establishment of distant colonies a much less
attractive proposition.

Think about it, if the colony can justify its cost
in X years that means 1000X worth of ships have been
built at the home system in that time!	If a colony
ship is the cost of a large Capital ship, that is the
equivalent of 1000 Capital ships!  A huge bookkeeping
exercise!

If the colony _can't_ justify its cost during the
lifetime of the campaign, it won't get built.

Unless colonies can somehow rapidly increase their
production and population a lot faster than on the
homeworld, what is the point?

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!

On the other hand, such a timespan would involve ships
hundreds of years old somehow avoiding complete
obsolescence...

Michael Sandy