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beccaelizabethI'm planning a space colony, with only Sim City and Settlers games to guide me.
I think I need better reading. I know urban planning is a thing actual people actually do, I should probably learn how they get started.
Things humans need: Air, water, food, waste disposal, shelter, warmth, stuff to do, ways to make more humans
Assume a new planet is terraformed to the point it has breathable air and a whole lot of trees (this being Stargate, that seems to be the case most often.)
A new colony could take a year's supply of ration packs, and clothes and tents and so forth that would last more than a year. The idea is they have a year to make enough profit to pay for a second trip through the gate with more supplies. But they also need to build the basics ready for the second wave to move into.
I used GURPS Space rules to figure out how many containers of cabins I would need, with basic sanitary facilities built in, but I don't reckon GURPS' tendency to handwave the food, water, and sewage needs is particularly helpful here. I mean, it's not the sort of thing most people look for in their thrilling space adventures, but it's kind of crucial to building a civilisation. Sim City always starts with the water and sewage pipes.
So what kind of water treatment plant do you need to handle the waste of, initially, 200 people, intended to scale up to 10,000? Where do you find water on a new planet? How much water would you want to just bring along with you? NHS reckons 2 litres per person per day of clean drinking water, which adds up a bit fast. 400l for one day for the first colony. ... I just bumped into the thing where GURPS math is in short tons and the rest of the world uses metric ffs how hard can it be, but spaceship design rules weren't really meant for this anyway. 1000 litres of water weighs a metric ton and is 1 cubic metre apparently. See that's some handy tidy units. I looked up drinking water tankers and the first google hit reckons they can go anywhere. :) Also reckons they transport 32000 l and I'm just going to decide one of those can go instead of one of the 200 intermodal shipping containers I previously decided could fit through the gate easy on a single activation. 80 days drinking is more of a contingencies margin than a plan though. I mean you could bring 5 and call it done, but that's not a colony, that's a camp.
There's a lot of drilling and pipes and foundations and stuff to do to make a small town. You'd need lots of diggers. Or at least need diggers lots. And that would be a problem if you didn't have a way to power said diggers. Do they make electric diggers? Because if the planet needs fossil fuels then it's not getting independent any time soon. *pokes google* *finds hybrids* Aha, battery powered excavators, that'll be the thingies. ... if they're out there to mine naquada then a naquada generator can give them all the energy they need. Or a nice big solar panel array. GURPS is annoying at power generation because it's really precise about the requirements for weapon systems and really handwavey about the requirements for daily life. In general if you write down you've got solar panels then everything electrical works. So I guess the colony brings a solar panel farm to be going on with? And lots of big batteries for storing it all in. And... other tech that is GURPS trivial but RL tricky bordering on non existent.
Actually I guess in GURPS rules if you just buy mining equipment then you can use it to drill for water and dig trenches and all that stuff. Digging is digging. And I know the rules for making mini mining spaceships. Lacking more fiddly versions of said rules, I'll just have to paste in a lot more mining vehicles and tell some of them they're for water, some for basements, some for forestry. ... the rules don't care if big grabbing scooping cutting machines are picking up rock or wood. There's clearly some differences in real life, but they all need power, take up tons of cargo space, and need control rooms with skilled operators.
Maybe if I got Vehicles? Is there a 4e GURPS Vehicles? *checks* Nope, still only 3e.
... and then mum phoned and I did an hour of talking instead of space colonies.
Babysitting. There definite needs to be someone who has job of watching the people who need someone to keep an eye out on them. And a place for them to work in. Even if the colony does not arrive with such people. Because you never know.
You can buy houses, like, flatpacked. All the things you need to build a house, one kit. They're really customisable though so I couldn't find like how many containers they'd take up.
On a new planet with lots of trees you wouldn't need to send wooden bits if you sent people that can do cutting up trees.
So you need a mining/logging vehicle, but also a sawmill. like in settlers.
Settlers:
Forests + sawmill
Clay Mine + Bricklayers
Stone Mine + Stonemason
Iron Mine + Blacksmith
Sulphur Mine + Alchemist
... which is probably not the best most useful sort offworld.
Also their houses and farms aren't very specific. I've got whole other games for upgrading farms to work more better. Plants and chickens and sheeps and cows.
To know what sort of farming to do I'd need to work out what a balanced diet looks like in the smallest number of plants. I tried that before, for a spaceship, but it's maybe different if you've got a planet full of dirt to spread out onto, and also I didn't actually learn much last time I tried it. Sweet potato is good? Quorn grows in tanks? Beans and also beans and different beans. Chickens. Broccoli and sweetcorn and peas and carrots. I'll just farm all the things I actually eat. Onions.
See I don't expect to be able to make up this stuff right now, it's more a way of poking around for things I know I don't know. And then I can do reading.
Water treatment, sewage works, farms and other sorts of farms, cutting lots of trees down (Settlers usually runs out of trees if you hang around long enough, they're not big on growing more trees; you could get away with that for a long time on a fresh planet but it's probably not a good pattern to set). Digging lots of useful Stuff up. Make lots of houses.
You'd probably want to bring the fiddly bits like ovens and toilets and big windows and door locks, and then anything you can make out of logs or by stacking up rocks or whatever, that you'd try and make. You wouldn't exactly have to climb up the tech levels from scratch again, especially with bringing nice factories with CAD and 3D printers and all the modern clever bits.
If it's Stargate and you know most of your neighbours weren't allowed to read and are a much lower tech level, aside from weapons, then you'd be able to trade for lots of basic stuff as soon as you had any kind of surplus but Earth with it's TL8 tech would charge you a lot for shipping. Or at least that was what I decided on to make it dramatic. They can call home to Earth and send things back any time, but if they have to get things sent out to them it'll cost so much they probably can't afford the things.
They've got electric, and lots of solar panels. If every container has a solar panel roof that opens out then I can plug in as many ordinary things as I want and they don't need cables. But then they'd want to build proper permanent houses. If those also all have solar panels then they need 200 houses worth of solar panel in containers just to house the first wave. ... GURPS Ultra Tech says each TL9 solar array weighs 500lb, but it doesn't say what it can power. Also you'd need power cells to store what you weren't using for when the light conditions are not favorable. Which is why we mostly use steadier sorts now, even if it do mean boiling the planet.
If you're out there to mine naquada, would you want to burn naquada to get it? Well yes, that's how you drill for oil with oil burning machines, or whatever. Cost benefit ratios.
How much money would people pour in? It's not just that they'd like to make a profit, it's not for luxuries, they need to if they're going to survive, let alone ever be more than one village stuck on another world. So would they do things the cheapest quickest dirtiest way they could think of, in the first round? Because tents and latrine ditches would work for a while, and very few systems really need power if you can just wait around, and they could live like SCA or low techs while their scant resources were all poured into mining to afford lighting.
That'd be annoying though.
... a different sort of people would be willing to sign up to that level of annoying.
And they'd still need power eventually.
I wanted to send lots of labs and research though, that means sending a pretty high tech level. But what kind of research really needs to be on another planet? ... it's like Atlantis, isn't it, where they're far from the eyes of pesky ethics committees or anyone else who'd say 'are you sure that's a good idea'. It'd be all the research most likely to go boom and depopulate a large area.
The nice version of the plan is to send a hospital unit and make nice with the neighbours by improving their medical. Send a dentist and an optician with relevant tools and makers, improve many lives. Other worlds like you and want to give you things.
But you'd get through a lot of medical supplies that way. And dentures. And glasses.
See if you're taking trade goods they have to be things that the locals don't have, so nobody much is going to want your trees, Earth is going to want naquada and not much else that they currently know about, and most places are, as far as they can figure, getting along nicely. But medical care in goa'uld dominated regions tends to be, well, a goa'uld. If you don't particularly want to give up your body, you're probably stuffed. So there would be a lot of demand, but getting the supply to them would be tricksy. Like, do you invite all your neighbours in for their medical visits? That sounds like a drama generator, so yes. But that means sending out and letting them know the service is available.
Also, Earth makes nice with the medical supplies to many worlds both in Pegasus and the milky way. If they were doing that large scale or regular then there would be no particular draw for a new world. And if they're doing it for free then the new colony can't profit from it.
... and if the new colony is not doing for free, there can be stories all about how healthcare for profit is kind of suck.
... if it is for free, that's like charity humanitarian aid, that's a lot of money goes out. NHS style free because you pay taxes / national insurance, that wouldn't work if the whole rest of the universe was also wanting it to be free without them paying, because rest of universe is very plenty bigger than available resources always.
So it'd be pay on the door or pay for insurance. If someone on Atlantis gets ill, they're being paid for back home by the military or governments that sent them, but a little independent venture like a colony would be paying for it all themselves. If they're spreading the cost among the whole colony, it's still a cost. And if there's a medical emergency like a plague where they have to contract in the SGC then either that's paid for by corporate taxes back home or the colony could incur a large bill.
Everything is economics. Very tricky.
If they bring chem labs and the ability to make pharmeceuticals for themselves then that's... modern alchemists and mining for considerably more than sulphur. Supplies would have to be found first, and that's going to take time. Many of the first wave of colonists are just going to be surveyors and doing geology work and such. Unless the US government have done surveys from space with their shiny spaceships, which would be an expensive sort of asset that the colony would probably have to pay for in advance. Time or money? Labour or capital? Where do they have surplus?
200 people on the planet, if they want to maintain a TL8 lifestyle they're probably going to need all the short cut gadgets. Yesno?
The colony could trade the kind of stuff other planets can make if the colony has it at higher quality and is happy to swap for higher volumes instead, or different stuff at same tech level. Like, fabrics: We have some awesome dyes, and our patterns will be new and unusual. Even if we only send the exact kind of fibres they have offworld, they'd still want to swap fabrics. But offworld has different animals, like the big stinky things from the movie, so different fibres. Earth would want that, but not the military bits of Earth who currently control the gate and keep it all classified. You could accumulate trade goods for later, but you'd need good warehousing to keep fabric in tradeable condition. And then it would only get premium prices for novelty when people knew how far it had travelled. Otherwise it would be competing with ... etsy, basically, the whole hand spun hand woven low tech level quirky patterns end of the market. The only thing that would make that worth it is it's so much cheaper to open the gate to Earth rather than from it. You could ship stuff back home and it would cost whatever the US military wanted to charge for handling, rather than what they'd charge for handling plus stupendous amounts of power for the gate.
Gate pricing is so crucial to how this plays out, I have to come up with a plausible number. I don't know though, how much could it be? I mean it's a unique monopoly service, so the answer is in practice whatever the hell they can get away with charging, but that doesn't give me a ballpark. Also it's still a unique monopoly on the way home, so the incentive to ship to Earth vanishes.
I can see why the default Atlantis trade mission is to go get food. Because whoever you trade with, they have food. So you can be pretty sure you can get it wherever you travel. So why bring enough food with you? Except then you might run out of food.
It wouldn't be much use to spend the first year just building houses, on account of nobody could afford the next year to move in.
Would the first wave of colonists be building for the company, and the company allocate housing? Or would they be a bunch of independent people who want to charge the next lot of independent people fancy property market values? Different stories in each way. Would depend where the initial materials and labour came from, like, if you personally can afford to bring a whole house and you personally build it then you personally can own it, except maybe for the land its on. Who would own a planet discovered by international expedition? Or discovered by the USA run SGC? Would the colony be leasehold and have to pay the US for land and mineral rights? And then if they want to go independent they'd stop paying the rent and the SGC would send ships to collect the rent. Only they'd probably call it taxes, because when the government wants your money it's a tax.
economics words is hard.
It's much easier to imagine the kind of stories where a couple of groups shoot at each other until one wins the shiny to take home. Actually making the homes is pretty complex. I don't think I've seen that story so often neither, to learn from it. It'd be like Grand Designs, only hundreds of times over, and where you have to figure out the entire supply chain from the dirt on up. And feeding the labourers. And if you wanted a sick bay to treat their injuries in then you'd have to bring or build it too.
Hard. No wonder there's more Space Vampire stories.
Okay, I'll post this and get on with my Sunday.
I think I need better reading. I know urban planning is a thing actual people actually do, I should probably learn how they get started.
Things humans need: Air, water, food, waste disposal, shelter, warmth, stuff to do, ways to make more humans
Assume a new planet is terraformed to the point it has breathable air and a whole lot of trees (this being Stargate, that seems to be the case most often.)
A new colony could take a year's supply of ration packs, and clothes and tents and so forth that would last more than a year. The idea is they have a year to make enough profit to pay for a second trip through the gate with more supplies. But they also need to build the basics ready for the second wave to move into.
I used GURPS Space rules to figure out how many containers of cabins I would need, with basic sanitary facilities built in, but I don't reckon GURPS' tendency to handwave the food, water, and sewage needs is particularly helpful here. I mean, it's not the sort of thing most people look for in their thrilling space adventures, but it's kind of crucial to building a civilisation. Sim City always starts with the water and sewage pipes.
So what kind of water treatment plant do you need to handle the waste of, initially, 200 people, intended to scale up to 10,000? Where do you find water on a new planet? How much water would you want to just bring along with you? NHS reckons 2 litres per person per day of clean drinking water, which adds up a bit fast. 400l for one day for the first colony. ... I just bumped into the thing where GURPS math is in short tons and the rest of the world uses metric ffs how hard can it be, but spaceship design rules weren't really meant for this anyway. 1000 litres of water weighs a metric ton and is 1 cubic metre apparently. See that's some handy tidy units. I looked up drinking water tankers and the first google hit reckons they can go anywhere. :) Also reckons they transport 32000 l and I'm just going to decide one of those can go instead of one of the 200 intermodal shipping containers I previously decided could fit through the gate easy on a single activation. 80 days drinking is more of a contingencies margin than a plan though. I mean you could bring 5 and call it done, but that's not a colony, that's a camp.
There's a lot of drilling and pipes and foundations and stuff to do to make a small town. You'd need lots of diggers. Or at least need diggers lots. And that would be a problem if you didn't have a way to power said diggers. Do they make electric diggers? Because if the planet needs fossil fuels then it's not getting independent any time soon. *pokes google* *finds hybrids* Aha, battery powered excavators, that'll be the thingies. ... if they're out there to mine naquada then a naquada generator can give them all the energy they need. Or a nice big solar panel array. GURPS is annoying at power generation because it's really precise about the requirements for weapon systems and really handwavey about the requirements for daily life. In general if you write down you've got solar panels then everything electrical works. So I guess the colony brings a solar panel farm to be going on with? And lots of big batteries for storing it all in. And... other tech that is GURPS trivial but RL tricky bordering on non existent.
Actually I guess in GURPS rules if you just buy mining equipment then you can use it to drill for water and dig trenches and all that stuff. Digging is digging. And I know the rules for making mini mining spaceships. Lacking more fiddly versions of said rules, I'll just have to paste in a lot more mining vehicles and tell some of them they're for water, some for basements, some for forestry. ... the rules don't care if big grabbing scooping cutting machines are picking up rock or wood. There's clearly some differences in real life, but they all need power, take up tons of cargo space, and need control rooms with skilled operators.
Maybe if I got Vehicles? Is there a 4e GURPS Vehicles? *checks* Nope, still only 3e.
... and then mum phoned and I did an hour of talking instead of space colonies.
Babysitting. There definite needs to be someone who has job of watching the people who need someone to keep an eye out on them. And a place for them to work in. Even if the colony does not arrive with such people. Because you never know.
You can buy houses, like, flatpacked. All the things you need to build a house, one kit. They're really customisable though so I couldn't find like how many containers they'd take up.
On a new planet with lots of trees you wouldn't need to send wooden bits if you sent people that can do cutting up trees.
So you need a mining/logging vehicle, but also a sawmill. like in settlers.
Settlers:
Forests + sawmill
Clay Mine + Bricklayers
Stone Mine + Stonemason
Iron Mine + Blacksmith
Sulphur Mine + Alchemist
... which is probably not the best most useful sort offworld.
Also their houses and farms aren't very specific. I've got whole other games for upgrading farms to work more better. Plants and chickens and sheeps and cows.
To know what sort of farming to do I'd need to work out what a balanced diet looks like in the smallest number of plants. I tried that before, for a spaceship, but it's maybe different if you've got a planet full of dirt to spread out onto, and also I didn't actually learn much last time I tried it. Sweet potato is good? Quorn grows in tanks? Beans and also beans and different beans. Chickens. Broccoli and sweetcorn and peas and carrots. I'll just farm all the things I actually eat. Onions.
See I don't expect to be able to make up this stuff right now, it's more a way of poking around for things I know I don't know. And then I can do reading.
Water treatment, sewage works, farms and other sorts of farms, cutting lots of trees down (Settlers usually runs out of trees if you hang around long enough, they're not big on growing more trees; you could get away with that for a long time on a fresh planet but it's probably not a good pattern to set). Digging lots of useful Stuff up. Make lots of houses.
You'd probably want to bring the fiddly bits like ovens and toilets and big windows and door locks, and then anything you can make out of logs or by stacking up rocks or whatever, that you'd try and make. You wouldn't exactly have to climb up the tech levels from scratch again, especially with bringing nice factories with CAD and 3D printers and all the modern clever bits.
If it's Stargate and you know most of your neighbours weren't allowed to read and are a much lower tech level, aside from weapons, then you'd be able to trade for lots of basic stuff as soon as you had any kind of surplus but Earth with it's TL8 tech would charge you a lot for shipping. Or at least that was what I decided on to make it dramatic. They can call home to Earth and send things back any time, but if they have to get things sent out to them it'll cost so much they probably can't afford the things.
They've got electric, and lots of solar panels. If every container has a solar panel roof that opens out then I can plug in as many ordinary things as I want and they don't need cables. But then they'd want to build proper permanent houses. If those also all have solar panels then they need 200 houses worth of solar panel in containers just to house the first wave. ... GURPS Ultra Tech says each TL9 solar array weighs 500lb, but it doesn't say what it can power. Also you'd need power cells to store what you weren't using for when the light conditions are not favorable. Which is why we mostly use steadier sorts now, even if it do mean boiling the planet.
If you're out there to mine naquada, would you want to burn naquada to get it? Well yes, that's how you drill for oil with oil burning machines, or whatever. Cost benefit ratios.
How much money would people pour in? It's not just that they'd like to make a profit, it's not for luxuries, they need to if they're going to survive, let alone ever be more than one village stuck on another world. So would they do things the cheapest quickest dirtiest way they could think of, in the first round? Because tents and latrine ditches would work for a while, and very few systems really need power if you can just wait around, and they could live like SCA or low techs while their scant resources were all poured into mining to afford lighting.
That'd be annoying though.
... a different sort of people would be willing to sign up to that level of annoying.
And they'd still need power eventually.
I wanted to send lots of labs and research though, that means sending a pretty high tech level. But what kind of research really needs to be on another planet? ... it's like Atlantis, isn't it, where they're far from the eyes of pesky ethics committees or anyone else who'd say 'are you sure that's a good idea'. It'd be all the research most likely to go boom and depopulate a large area.
The nice version of the plan is to send a hospital unit and make nice with the neighbours by improving their medical. Send a dentist and an optician with relevant tools and makers, improve many lives. Other worlds like you and want to give you things.
But you'd get through a lot of medical supplies that way. And dentures. And glasses.
See if you're taking trade goods they have to be things that the locals don't have, so nobody much is going to want your trees, Earth is going to want naquada and not much else that they currently know about, and most places are, as far as they can figure, getting along nicely. But medical care in goa'uld dominated regions tends to be, well, a goa'uld. If you don't particularly want to give up your body, you're probably stuffed. So there would be a lot of demand, but getting the supply to them would be tricksy. Like, do you invite all your neighbours in for their medical visits? That sounds like a drama generator, so yes. But that means sending out and letting them know the service is available.
Also, Earth makes nice with the medical supplies to many worlds both in Pegasus and the milky way. If they were doing that large scale or regular then there would be no particular draw for a new world. And if they're doing it for free then the new colony can't profit from it.
... and if the new colony is not doing for free, there can be stories all about how healthcare for profit is kind of suck.
... if it is for free, that's like charity humanitarian aid, that's a lot of money goes out. NHS style free because you pay taxes / national insurance, that wouldn't work if the whole rest of the universe was also wanting it to be free without them paying, because rest of universe is very plenty bigger than available resources always.
So it'd be pay on the door or pay for insurance. If someone on Atlantis gets ill, they're being paid for back home by the military or governments that sent them, but a little independent venture like a colony would be paying for it all themselves. If they're spreading the cost among the whole colony, it's still a cost. And if there's a medical emergency like a plague where they have to contract in the SGC then either that's paid for by corporate taxes back home or the colony could incur a large bill.
Everything is economics. Very tricky.
If they bring chem labs and the ability to make pharmeceuticals for themselves then that's... modern alchemists and mining for considerably more than sulphur. Supplies would have to be found first, and that's going to take time. Many of the first wave of colonists are just going to be surveyors and doing geology work and such. Unless the US government have done surveys from space with their shiny spaceships, which would be an expensive sort of asset that the colony would probably have to pay for in advance. Time or money? Labour or capital? Where do they have surplus?
200 people on the planet, if they want to maintain a TL8 lifestyle they're probably going to need all the short cut gadgets. Yesno?
The colony could trade the kind of stuff other planets can make if the colony has it at higher quality and is happy to swap for higher volumes instead, or different stuff at same tech level. Like, fabrics: We have some awesome dyes, and our patterns will be new and unusual. Even if we only send the exact kind of fibres they have offworld, they'd still want to swap fabrics. But offworld has different animals, like the big stinky things from the movie, so different fibres. Earth would want that, but not the military bits of Earth who currently control the gate and keep it all classified. You could accumulate trade goods for later, but you'd need good warehousing to keep fabric in tradeable condition. And then it would only get premium prices for novelty when people knew how far it had travelled. Otherwise it would be competing with ... etsy, basically, the whole hand spun hand woven low tech level quirky patterns end of the market. The only thing that would make that worth it is it's so much cheaper to open the gate to Earth rather than from it. You could ship stuff back home and it would cost whatever the US military wanted to charge for handling, rather than what they'd charge for handling plus stupendous amounts of power for the gate.
Gate pricing is so crucial to how this plays out, I have to come up with a plausible number. I don't know though, how much could it be? I mean it's a unique monopoly service, so the answer is in practice whatever the hell they can get away with charging, but that doesn't give me a ballpark. Also it's still a unique monopoly on the way home, so the incentive to ship to Earth vanishes.
I can see why the default Atlantis trade mission is to go get food. Because whoever you trade with, they have food. So you can be pretty sure you can get it wherever you travel. So why bring enough food with you? Except then you might run out of food.
It wouldn't be much use to spend the first year just building houses, on account of nobody could afford the next year to move in.
Would the first wave of colonists be building for the company, and the company allocate housing? Or would they be a bunch of independent people who want to charge the next lot of independent people fancy property market values? Different stories in each way. Would depend where the initial materials and labour came from, like, if you personally can afford to bring a whole house and you personally build it then you personally can own it, except maybe for the land its on. Who would own a planet discovered by international expedition? Or discovered by the USA run SGC? Would the colony be leasehold and have to pay the US for land and mineral rights? And then if they want to go independent they'd stop paying the rent and the SGC would send ships to collect the rent. Only they'd probably call it taxes, because when the government wants your money it's a tax.
economics words is hard.
It's much easier to imagine the kind of stories where a couple of groups shoot at each other until one wins the shiny to take home. Actually making the homes is pretty complex. I don't think I've seen that story so often neither, to learn from it. It'd be like Grand Designs, only hundreds of times over, and where you have to figure out the entire supply chain from the dirt on up. And feeding the labourers. And if you wanted a sick bay to treat their injuries in then you'd have to bring or build it too.
Hard. No wonder there's more Space Vampire stories.
Okay, I'll post this and get on with my Sunday.