Prev: RE: Lost SG2 Fiction Next: Re:Lost scenerio

Re: Strategic Full Thrust

From: "Imre A. Szabo" <ias@s...>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 15:44:00 -0500
Subject: Re: Strategic Full Thrust

Michael Sandy wrote:
> 
> > 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

The economical way to build colonies is to put seed factories on the
planet with just enough colonist to do the maintence that the seed
factories can not do for themselves.  This way you get substantial
economic benefit with only a small fraction of the cost and shipping
tonnage compared to sending hordes of people and machinery to set up
colonies.  It takes a bit longer, but seed factories can grow
exponentially...  Which means they would rapidly surpass the economic
growth of a conventional colony.

IAS


Prev: RE: Lost SG2 Fiction Next: Re:Lost scenerio