Re: [GZG] FTverse colinies

This is an interesting question; I'd mention I read a short story
decades ago where a militaristic Earth was destroying a peaceful and
far more advanced Denebian civilization, and so they trained ONE
soldier. Of course, denebians could transfer knowledge and life
experience in minutes and reproduced full-grown adults daily, so
special situation. :)

> But the most critical piece of information for an insurgency is a
> question of PSB.  You have to determine how (relatively) easy or
> difficult it is to smuggle off-planet weapons, ammunition, advisors,
> etc. onto the planet.  You can't just load a mule train or a truck and
> take off through the back roads to smuggle onto a planet.  This will
> make or break an insurgency.	I tend to believe that orbital reentry
> would be pretty spectacular, and that the invading force SHOULD be
> patrolling the skies pretty extensively.

This is a VERY interesting question from a scenario point of view. One
possibility is an ultra low albedo cargo pod launched at high velocity
from the outskirts of a system, then left to free-fall (with some kind
of ablative re-entry shield) and release its cargo. I'd imagine that
the launching ship would accelerate to the appropriate vector, and
then use FTL drive to actually travel to the target system. You'd only
be detectable from your FTL drive usage (and maybe some final
maneuvers with your grav drive, though you could maybe use a railgun
to adjust for error in your position and avoid having any drive usage
at all), and the cargo pod itself (which would be stealthy and more or
less inert).

You could use the same technique to scout out a system. Accelerate to
some insane velocity in your home system, then use FTL drive to go to
the target system, emerge well outside detection range and free-fall
through it.

> Yeah, but how much of that high tech stuff can be maintained,
> repaired, or replaced?  The occupying power is going to put the (very
> limited number) of manufacturing facilities on lock-down.  If your
> background includes home nanotech forges that can produce anything the
> size of an automobile or smaller in every toolshed, and a fusion plant
> on every farmstead, that's one thing.  But I've digressed from the
> initial point.

I personally think that much of the industrial wealth of a system can
be found in its asteroids and low-gravity moons, but that's a matter
of taste, I suppose. I'm still working on my cost model for
interstellar transport, so there might be either a range of answers or
a few major categories of answers coming in. Or a blank-eyed shrug of
the shoulders. Stay tuned. Thanks to the several people who brought up
comparative advantage-- I'd thought of that but was looking for a way
to get a sanity check. I didn't realize that the MUcr values had been
disavowed, though. :)

Either way, the main reasons to capture interstellar colonies won't be
economic IMO. As John points out, the populations are so small that
most of any given colony world's resources are totally untapped. So
taking a new world gives you (extremely unhappy) new people, and
raises your transportation costs, but I'm not sure that your
production would actually go up that much. War for
political/cultural/religious reasons, of course, is unchanged. Maybe
even increased; if most of the fighting is on low-population worlds
away from your infrastructure, then where's the existential threat to
drive a peace deal? It would explain how the three Solar Wars dragged
on as long as they did if the fighting was well-removed from the
population and production infrastructure.

-- 
Robert Mayberry

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