Re: How big is a troopship? [DS/FT/SG2] (and what it all means)

first up, i apologise for the delay.

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

> Tom Anderson wrote:
> 
> > > The population of the NAC capital, Albion, grew from zero to
> "almost as
> > > large as England" (assuming that the English population doesn't
> > > stagnate very much in the FT future, that's at least 50 million)
in
> 35
> > > years,
> > 
> > i can't argue with canon.
> > 
> > > and much or even most of this growth was due to immigration. 
> > 
> > now hold your horses - where do you get this idea? 
> 
> Straight out of the canon. Quoting FT timeline, 2135 entry:
"...Albion,
> which now has a population almost as large as England thanks to
massive
> immigration and engineered population growth programmes."

right; i was unhappy about the 'most' in the 'much or even most', but i
think i'm just being picky about words. i am in agreement with you.

> The "one brigade-size transport a day" immigration only moves about 30
> million people. The rest still have to be born on the planet (the
> massive engineered population growth programmes); a 40% (20+ million)
> increase in two generations or less is rather impressive :-/ The canon
> timeline doesn't say whether or not 25+% of Albion's population are
> children in 2135, but it'd pretty much have to be.

that's probably true!

2099 - population 0
2135 - population 60 million

now, my maths has gone downhill a *long* way, but i reckon i can
calculusify this one; i won't give details, because i think they're
horribly flawed. with immigration at a moderate 1 million a year (just
over 2500 a day), growth of 7 children per family in a 30-year
generation
and no death, we get a population of about 61 million after 36 years.
how
many are children i don't know, but i should imagine that it's a lot. of
course, this model assumes that people are having those children
smoothly
over their entire lifespan, which is of course not the case. anyway, of
those 61 million, 36 million (58%) are immigrants. i stand corrected.

in any case, it looks suspiciously as though St St St Jon did some
fairly
careful calculating when he picked these numbers; well, with all the
orders we send him, he has plenty of envelope backs to work on 8-).

> Also note that the 50 million level assumes that England's population
> doesn't increase noticeably in the future, in spite of England being
> one of the few places not direcly hit by warfare (which would make it
a
> rather attractive place to immigrate to).

it would also, i imagine, become rather hard to immigrate to. i can't
believe there would be immigration on a significant (1-5 million) scale.
nonetheless, anything can happen in the next half century.

> > > Assuming that the equipment necessary to survive on an alien world
> is
> > > no less bulky than the military equipment of the brigade, Albion
> saw on
> > > average at least one such Brigade-size colony unload its cargo
EACH
> AND
> > > EVERY DAY during those 35 years...
> > 
> > Singapore currently has 700 000 000 gross tonnes of shipping go 
> > through it each year; that's about 2 million tonnes a day. i would
> guess 
> > that this is more than a brigade. 
> 
> It sure is. But supertankers, large RORO ships etc aren't exactly
> uncommon on Earth today - certainly not as uncommon as Thomas suggests
> large FT freighters to be.

no, no, wrong end of the stick - i was agreeing! i'm saying that if
earth
shipping is on that order of magnitude, interstellar shipping must be
too.

tom