beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Today I successfully managed to only play The Sims for a coyple of hours.
... it got more interesting once I learned from the internet how to make whims show again.
... but not by much.

The trouble is after that I just kind of sat here and stared at the tv.
The tv has in the whole not been on.

( Read more... )



The thing with taking forty thousand of your friends and starting over in a new world though... that would be so tricky. Finding enough friends that could get along. Because someone on tumblr pointed out you'd choose your network of people and they'd choose and they'd choose and so on out, so you wouldn't personally screen or read the cvs of forty thousand people. But. You know on Facebook there's always that one person who is like politically your complete opposite, but for some reason unfriending them would be Drama? Imagine that, but you're on another planet and there's literally no new people unless you make them. Instead of vaguely racist relatives a couple of degrees away who you only have to see at Events, there's only one town, and they live in it. And since there's so few of you, some of you are the government. And whoever brought the most friendfriends is probably driving. And somehow back on Earth this seemed like a good thing.

( Read more... )

I dreamt again that I was packing for a space colony. One way trip. I owned half the spaceship and the other half was mortgaged and the future of the colony would depend on what the other 199 people could bring to it.

So I woke up thinking about who I would invite.

Some people are obvious. Cordelia Vorkosigan has actual training in new planets, for instance. Aeryn Sun is unlikely to find anything so strange she thinks it's a big deal. SG1 have, wearily, been there done that, but then I start thinking about their likely responses to trouble and...

It's like, I would happily bring Ianto Jones anywhere, because he's smart and adaptable and once he's on your side you have his loyalty past death, yours or his. I'd worry his life would be better elsewhere, except we know how short it would be in his original context, so might as well.

But the rest of Torchwood? I mean it would be sad not to bring Jack, but bringing Jack brings the Drama. He's a military minded con artist who will do literally anything to protect his people, so you've got to be willing for your options to include all his options if you're going to bring him.

And like, if you bring Merlin, you've brought all the possibilities of magic or a modern AU healer, either of which sounds great. But it seems mean to bring Merlin without Arthur, and once you've got Arthur you bring Guinevere, and by the time you've got three of them you seem to be launching a story cycle. Do you want their skills? Sure! But do you want their drama?

And like, is bringing the person bringing their enemies into the story by implication?

Because that adds up.

So it feels weird to treat story like a pick and mix, because mean to not bring their whole set of significant connections, but once you do you've brought so many of the dynamics that made the story drama in the first place it just... seems unwise.

Even if you'd actually just like to give them a nice non drama context where they can set the rules and sit back.

Except setting the rules is not a simple deal. I mean, you've got some very different ideas about basic priorities and rule of law even just with the characters already mentioned. Throw in Highlander and Angel and all sorts else and you just... you've got a very mixed bag of alignments just for starters, and then different ideas about legal systems and how to decide them.

And very rapidly you don't need anything to happen to the colony, the colony is going to happen to itself.



Which seems like an issue.


Like I know I dream of space colonies because it seems like a controllable microcosm where I can only let The Right Sort in. But I also know that's the exact impulse that makes so many politicians arseholes? I mean, they try and control what people even be here, instead of making things good for whoever turns up. That's like 90% of the worst arguments. So the understandable impulse to just take your stuff and get out of here with your friends is also the impulse that is making things a bit difficult for said friends, often.

So the basic thing with space colonies is we thought we could get away from everyone that sucks, but it turns out we suck.

People be people, you know?




So now I'm thinking of the colony problem from two angles, who would I want to bring with me, and who would you put together to be first glance plausible but long term a plot generator of inexhaustible opportunity?

It's a be careful what you wish for. Here are 200 people I want to keep and live with forever! Oh heck now I'm living with just them forever...



Except the colony dies if you stay with the initial 200, suggested spaceship math says you need 10,000 distinct genetic lines if you have no disasters, and 40,000 if you're planning for, you know, reality, disaster prone. 200 came from SGAtlantis I think? Some generation ship math reckons 160 would do if you're going to hook up with a more diverse population at the end of the voyage, which is a distinct problem but kind of like a starter population with intent of more to follow.

But like, then you have to figure how you get from 200 to 40,000. Are all the 200 builders? Who chooses the incomers? People want to bring their families but the 40K aren't related, you'd actually need higher numbers of individuals to get the number of unrelated lines.


So then it's a multi part: Who would you want with you, who would they want with them, and at what point does this turn into how many sorts of Drama?


I mean I'm sitting here deciding to take fictional characters with me because I'm the kind of person who spends more time with them than with actual people, so if me owning the ship means I can filter, that becomes a Problem, because what kind of people skills do I have?

And I know there are TV shows I've fallen out with because their politics turned out to be very different to mine own, so if I think about who I'd have invited in season 1, and how that would have gone by the time I realised they're their season 5 selves... or actually there are characters who would not get along with their five years different self at all, that's interesting too.



So I keep wanting to write space colony stories.


Except sometimes they're more 'inherited a mansion in magical Britain, who can I put in all the rooms', which isn't a colony because it's easier to leave and get there, and you don't shut yourself in with all 200 at once, but it's also the same because it's a group of people who, in urban fantasy, make their own laws for an assortment of reasons. A lot of shows I watch are like that actually, all the superhero stuff is just people making their own laws but as bolt ons to the wider society. And Lost Girl posited a broad set of biological needs distinct from the human, so adaptation was required just for survival, and ethics gets a bit tricky. So like that you get a small set (how many shows get 200 active characters?) but interacting with a big set (who hate and fear us, generally, because Drama).

... I keep wanting to make proper reintegration stories, because it's one thing to start with Drama, but to get to a functioning society you have to figure out what the rule set could be that could include all these sentient beings living the bets possible lives. Which is the tricky bit.

I mean it's one thing to set out to stake all vampires, but if you have vampires, who have a biological need we don't, and you have an aversion to extermination, as we should, then what do you do?

I mean there's plenty people who need donor blood to live sometimes. There's existing rules for this. Just, you know, with less biting.



I get frustrated when the story stops by inventing situations that create conflict and just... leaving it there. With the punching. And never solving anything.

We have to solve stuff.




And if the entire world gets small enough you know them all, could fit them in your school hall with room to spare, and know you need both them and their descendants for centuries, that seems like it would focus the mind on the whole sorting the problems out side of things.



... but with a lot of Drama to get there...

It persists in irritating me that JKRowling's entire wizarding world is having to get by on no better than a primary school education and a lot of vocational training. This serves them poorly. And combining a childish understanding with an elevated level of power serves everyone poorly.

I realise it's not the most helpful and efficient use of my time, but I'm still currently planning on sending the lot of them to City College. They're used to non-traditional mature students, I'm sure they'd cope.

It's also entirely possible all British wizardry could enrol at once, albeit only if everyone else left. CCN has a total enrollment above ten thousand people, ( Read more... )

But that's the boundaries, 3 to 21.5 thousand wizards in Britain, total.

Wizards aren't one in a million, but it's not a bad approximation of wizarding births compared to general population size in a year, given there were 57 million in the UK at the start of the 90s, 65 million now, and class sizes of 15 being perfectly manageable and within range for Hogwarts numbers.

That being the case it would shape their 'world' pretty thoroughly. They're not a minority in the same scale as disabled people ( Read more... )

Once I saw the range on those numbers my long standing interest in space colonies kicked in. Because they're not going to another planet but 'pure bloods' certainly want to act as if they are.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3304551.html
The numbers get very fuzzy, far too many variables, but for a long term sustainable population they reckon you want at least 10K and preferably 40K. And the starting assumption is none of those 40K are consanguineous.

Our maximum 21K British wizards who seem to be very cousins better be willing to marry foreigners.

... which might explain the wizard cup and a healthy interest in exchange students...

But muggleborns are undoubtedly their best bet, and really very necessary.



The other thing a space colony needs numbers for is sustaining a tech level. If wizardry insists on strict isolationism then numbers alone can explain their relatively retro tech, even without the inbuilt incentives towards magic. Indeed the magical equivalent of tech level would also be quite low, since maintaining a diversity of knowledge and supporting people as they specialise and experiment takes numbers too. But it's not simple, since all their basic survival needs could be met from muggle sources or possibly by use of magic. So it seems unlikely any significant proportion of wizarding population ever needed to plough a field. If they lean on muggle support services then they've got the numbers to be one lively university, or many research departments. So on tech level I have questions but far too much fuzzyness of variable to get answers. Still, by GURPS rules (Space p179-180), wizarding Britain can only maintain TL4 without outside assistance, age of sail at best. Which... would explain much.

World wide if you take the entirely guesstimated one in a million per year times 150 years you get... 1,140,000, very very roughly. But GURPS reckons the Industrial Revolution, TL5, takes 10 million people to sustain, so you're still stuffed for numbers, if in strict isolation. However it also grants you could manage TL5 at small town size with some input from outside, so there's your occasional wizarding steamtrain.

Of course GURPS seems to thin air its numbers on this one - however could you figure them out? Too many factors - but it's a place to start.

Perhaps Wizarding isn't isolated because its superiority means it has no need of higher tech, it has lower tech simply because it is isolated.

The regular addition of muggles isn't going to fix that with only a primary school education, though it really ought to have pushed some improvements. The information access technologies alone ought to... *sigh*.

Everyone is low tech because Hogwarts and fear, and I'm actively annoyed about it.

But trying to fix it might mean bumping into the ordinary government instead of having their own, and then you end up having to figure about taxes and so forth.

I mean they have a resource no one else can provide, so in conditions of fairness and freedom they ought to be able to get stupendously wealthy, but it really does tempt any number of people to restrict their conditions. Like, make them pay tax in hours worked for the government. Which puts a whole different complexion on how many wizards work for the Ministry. If it's a tithe...

Well, there's a lot of worldbuilding implied in the numbers.

The unfortunately hugely fuzzy numbers that take no account of immigration or local conditions like two recent wars that might have meant it was a very small year or may have cut into the total numbers.


Kind of explains how they could have a war with nobody noticing. Just by the numbers it would look more like a market town riot...




And I shall attempt to go do something more productive.

I don't even read canon in this fandom, I'm just somehow wandered off into fanfic...


*sigh*

So, I read a story where the Earth's entire colonisation effort was something like thirty women, and they were going to get implanted with preserved embryos on their first day there because they might be the whole hope of survival for the human race.

... which bothers me on several levels.

( Read more... )

Obviously if everyone is women you do what the computer tells you and grow whatever was frozen well enough. Er, whoever.

How long would they keep up the Ladies Only plan?

I mean if the plan is to get as much genetic diversity as possible out of the frozen embryo stores in the ship and there's some kind of time limit on that, you'd want to make sure there's plenty of wombs to go around. Would you get everyone out in a single generation?

If you're aiming for ten thousand colonists, even if you have multiple births routinely and soak the risk, that needs a really big first gen pool. So you'd want to keep up the embryos plan for multiple generations, without losing any of the earlier generations. You could do that with donor sperm and embryos. Or with a lot of social stuff to make sure your great grandchildren are still interested in decanting old world people.


also one of the mathier pieces says "the consequences of the increased medical risks of late childbirth have not yet been considered." It wanted to stretch the generations on a generation ship by having kids around 40, but, wow is that a biggie to leave out of your math. I mean, your chances change substantially over time.

( Read more... )

But only the first 200 would be volunteers who up front believe themselves willing to act that way. The future survival of the human race would depend on their reproductive behaviour. Their choices would be severely constrained.

And to get all the embryos out of storage in the shortest generations they'd need to get their daughters to act the same way. Which seems... unlikely.

( Read more... )



Hard science fiction that sets out a space colony as that baby focused without thinking through how they're actually going to feed the babies is just bad.

I mean, maybe they all get pregnant before they've got a crop going on the grounds that if they starve to death it's all one anyway, but... no.



Also the science problem in the novellette I read was far less interesting to me than the social consequences of the background setup. ( Read more... )


I think one big factor for viable colony size calculations is something like, if we send people who act pretty much like people of that cultural background do, how many do we need?

Like, we'd need to include murder rates from somewhere.

You do not get perfectly behaved people. No matter how you filter them at the start.



And the cultural changes would be massive even in the first generation kids. I mean how many immigrants feel like they don't really understand their children?

And if the future of the human race depends on women's reproductive choices, it's kind of more likely to work if you start with what those choices *actually* tend to be. First gen you could filter for people that want big families - though not for people that want big families once they start having them and are surrounded by them - but second gen will do as they will.

How do you design a colony socially so it does what you need genetically?



Clue: you do not stick thirty women on a one way trip and keep them pregnant from the first month they get there.




Hard science needs to at least glance at soft science or it requires the ridiculous.

I was thinking about colonising other planets via the Stargate network
as you do
which led to looking up some numbers.

In the milky way the Stargate has 39 symbols, 38 plus point of origin, leading to 1,987,690,320 hypothetical possible gate addresses according to wiki. But google suggests the current best guess on habitable planets in this galaxy is about 11,000,000,000 - though we're really guessing a lot of things to guess that. So even if every address was a functioning address to a currently habitable planet, that's like 90% of the galaxy that you can't dial. ( Read more... )

What kind of civilisation needs the gate system with these numbers?

I'm thinking it's so easy to fracture and fragment that they inevitably would. Way worser than the Cherryh Alliance/Union stuff, if so few people can go so many places.



I keep thinking about a mutant homeworld for Magneto. If they dialled the gate themselves then there'd be a 1/1,987,690,320 chance of finding them by random dialling. Though obviously if they're sensible people they'd have used an explored address. There's still a bunch of those after 10 years.

How many empty worlds did they find that were even marginally suitable for colonisation?

I know the empty world narrative is creepy, as is colonisation as a word, because historically there have been rather a lot of people standing around trying to get people's attention to point out they were in fact there first, and historically they have been responded to with genocide.

So, bad.

But it's a very big universe and we're dealing with very long timespans when we think of intelligent life evolving so finding a planet with no intelligent life to contest occupation seems kind of likely.

... Science Fiction has much more fun with the places that seemed empty but ain't, or the ones where empty isn't the half of the problems.



But I kind of like the idea of giving people a petri dish to start their preferred civilisations. I mean, that's going to go wrong in plenty enough ways just from people being people. Even without the people including Magneto.

But Magneto with a mutant homeworld that's actually a safe haven and not just a target... would he be able to relax? I think not, because he couldn't bring every mutant there forever, he'd feel responsible for the ones left behind. And if you have more than one wave going there the possibilities for discovery increase. But still.

... some people I kind of want to give a world and a holiday.



GURPS Space suggests you need 10K people for a self sustaining high tech level society. Lower numbers and the tech level inevitably drops. And I'm pretty sure they had to make up that number, but I want to poke it and possibly run experiments or find where the natural experiments are. ( Read more... )


Why I keep circling back to this problem is it's a medium scale How Do People Work. I mean, there's more than 7 billion people on this planet, that's way too many for me to get my head around. Countries are still pretty large. But colonies are potentially a smaller system with still all the working parts. How small can you pack a civilisation? Is 200 people going to be a representative or working sample? How about 1,000? How about 10,000?

What kind of skew or influence would you introduce simply via the sorting process?

The idea that Atlantis ended up very, very queer simply by bringing mostly people who didn't report being married is pretty plausible, at that time.



And obviously you'd get people who left the planet for a reason. You'd try and sort by compatible reasons, but you'd get clashes between different colonies that way, and you'd probably get clashes within a colony. Because put three people in a room and get five opinions.



I need to study much, much, much more and I don't know what bits.

Studying history isn't massively helpful because it seems to be mostly about who fights who. Fighting is the bits that don't work, I want to know how stuff works when it's working.

Also I'm not so much studying as picking up library books that seem in reasonable condition, and I haven't even done that for a couple months.



Really though, history of Britain is too huge a subject, how I to get my head around other people histories that maybe did better?


Library.



Okay, cleaner has been and gone, I'll think of something else to do.

My first fandom, with conventions, mailing lists, and fanfic, was Highlander. That's where I got both my icon and my tattoo. I haven't rewatched it for a while, partly on the sneaking suspicion it might not be as good as the good bits version in my head, but it did shape me.

I build a character by choosing their weapon. It don't have to be a sword, or even a tool of violence, but whatever it is, it will be very specific. Each weapon has a specific use, a culture and community who used it, a history, a heritage. Their use was learned somewhere, and perfected over time as that particular tool seemed suited for that character's tasks.

Highlander was big on flashbacks. ( Read more... )

So I learned from Highlander that every character has history. Which seems pretty obvious. But a lot of shows, just by only telling the present, they make it seem like a character's life started in the pilot episode, or at least the interesting bit. ( Read more... )

A character's journey, historic and geographic, will influence which ideas they carry as well as the tools they use. And it can be very, very specific. ( Read more... )

And that kind of depth and detail is an absolute bugger to build into a created 'verse, fantasy or SF. It's hard enough to show what a world is like now, but it'll feel like a paper backdrop until it can give the impression it had a journey to get that way.

It's tempting to leave an individual in a holding pattern before the story gets started. ( Read more... )

I sat down to write this just to say that I think the space colony series I've been planning could benefit from flashbacks. ( Read more... )

Buuuuuut, presence of extensive flashbacks does not automatically endear a show to me. And even shows I like can have (interminable) flashbacks I could do without. I think the tricky bit is to keep it both relevant and fresh, despite it being the past. If the same thing happens in every flashback, bored now. And it's nice to see what made a character the person they are today, but it's tricky to get the right speed of revelation and to keep it tied to the plot of the week.

I'm also thinking about arc vs self contained stories. If one timeframe is arc and the other is self contained, does that compliment or drag at each other? ( Read more... )

The thing with my space colony though, I was going to use fanfic characters to give it depth of background, only to adapt them to this setting which is kind of a fusion or AU then I'd need to retell the most significant bits of their lives. New old friends, yes? Even if I used familiar names we'd need to get to know them twice, who they were in the fusion backstory and who they are in the ongoing plot. ( Read more... )

I keep telling myself that I haven't started writing this thing because if I just let it stew a bit longer it might be possible to file serial numbers off and make it proper original. Actually at the moment I have two slightly different offworld colony stories that just don't mesh, one with capertillers and Welsh stone circles and a very British cast, the other with a straight up Stargate setting. The Stargate one is always going to be fanfic, but right now it's merely a mess of a multi fandom fusion that I can't imagine anyone would read, and with a bit of polish it might be spin off series level original. The two series don't quite mesh, but they do both deal with disability and some magic cures. And I know that nobody hesitates to write different Being Masculine On a Starship stories, but I'm hesitating over different Being Disabled in a Space Colony stories, even though the differences are not things I could smush together. One is a low character point low resources ordinary people story, the other a high power vast resources big politics tale that draws on comic book characters and Star Trek level competence. They don't match, they don't go the same places, I kind of want to tell both, I stall on telling either.

I stall on putting one word next to another, and whenever I notice that, instead of opening a file and trying it, I just talk myself into a woe spiral about how maybe I'm not a writer after all. Blergh.

Or, as you may notice, pontificate at length in meta.

i'm going to post this and get breakfast. it's only 1530, i've been up since 0730, that's a totally reasonable interval before breakfast...

Random thought about my Stargate space colony: it's supposed to be funded mainly by mining.
And I have decided that any story that could involve giving actors jobs should have at least one character of restricted growth.

... 7 mining technicians just introduced themselves, and I can't decide if it's a terrible idea...

see I decided to make more roles for short actors after I saw a documentary that featured some people who have spent their entire careers in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Years and years and years. In the same panto. Sometimes playing a different dwarf. I cannot even imagine how tired you get of the hi ho song. ... actually that probably applies even without being an actor.

... but, mining, and my current approach to characters of 'fanfic all the things'...

also, if I'm playing with the sarcophagus, there's plots about what constitutes healing and how disability is constructed and how it impacts / interacts with identity. Like, there's some ways of ending up short that might be 'healed', and others that would not, if the sarc takes a pattern from genetics and then resets everything to that specification. so a group of people to have different experiences would be helpful.

... but possibly still *facepalm* of me for thinking of it...

It's a story I was going to do in the Rhodri 'verse, only if you start with 200 colonists you can bring more variety from the get go and do the same story lots of different ways at once.




There's the thing where any story I sit down and make words on is a better story than the ones that never get made, but that only applies to the making of them, not the releasing them into the wild.

My brain is super helpful. So I end up with weird math in the space tag. Possibly also rhodri or stargate tags? I should have thought of a consistent tag if I ever wanted to find it all again.

So I worked out that a single stargate activation could easily let through 200 standard shipping containers, the artics carrying them, and whatever passengers fitted in the cabs. Or, of course, a shipping container full of people, but I'm making lines to color inside, so say each colonist brings one container and a theoretical 25 tons of cargo plus their personal backpack load. Then the lorries unload, turn around, dial home, and drive back.

( Read more... )


200 people with stories that hook into sarcophagus use and leaving to build a new world.

Who would you bring?

... and how many others would they bring, on ice, on the hope?

Could a standard shipping container fit through a Stargate?

( Read more... )

I make all these daft plans for other planets.  I should go back to making daft plans for this planet.  Intentional communities as practice for space colonisation.

… fun?

I have been reading about food banks. More people need more food and the food banks are running out before they feed all the people. It is bad and getting worse and it's because of the government deciding that people need bullying more than they need food and I don't understand how there's politicians sitting there saying it's nothing to do with the government when it's so closely tied to welfare reforms.

My idea of a practice space colony seems more urgent today. Especially the food self sufficiency bit. It would be hard to do, but it is important.

( Read more... )

I have vast empty where knowing where my food comes from could usefully be.

If people want to practice food self sufficiency, such as would be necessary for a space colony, then they need a place to grow things and someone who knows how and a plan that gives all the nutrition they need and a plan that grows... how many percent extra? You can't grow precisely the right amount because then if it goes wrong you have starving.

This morning when I woke up I thought I would start a Dreamwidth community so people could post their ideas about practical practice space colonies, and then go ask some SF writers what they know from their plannings, or possibly from their gardenings. Also maybe ask SF conventions how they organise a few hundred people for a weekend and how that experience could translate to space colonies. But now I'm thinking that's a bit fluffy compared to actual hungry people. There still needs to be a plan with communication, and something that catches the imagination, but it needs nice strong concrete details to be going on with. And probably somewhere to dig.

My planned practice space colony grows all its own food plus a bit spare, and has a central kitchen and dining room, partly because I can't cook and I like eating on a regular basis, but also so it can have a little cafe. That would be the start of the business side while the colony practice gets going. And then if there's anything else to be made and sold then it can go on display around the walls or something.

My plans need a lot of people and some real estate.

Food banks at the moment are drawing on existing religious communities, who have halls and humans. My space colony plan is intended to get a different community interested. But the SF community, while many and variously skilled, mostly hires its real estate by the weekend.

I should go looking to see what existing volunteers are doing. They probably have proper practical things going on already. ... I just don't see me being very helpful to them.

I've been thinking on how to design social housing for my offworld colony.
We'd need to do practice runs here first, of course, like the dudes that went to Mars and back without leaving their living room simulator. Every plan needs a test.
So we could build the first version here.
( Read more... )

So the first thing we'd need is to set up a lot of accessible housing for people with disabilities.

If you're thinking that the Enterprise lacked many people with disabilities (unless you count the superpowered blind guy), well, that's a far higher tech level than we currently have available. Their shields protected them from almost everything, and their meds could repair even major radiation damage. We are somewhat short of that standard.

Any major offworld expedition is going to spend a long, long time getting there, through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered. ( Read more... )

A proper colony isn't just people being looked after and people doing the looking after, it would have all the parts and pieces of a functioning community. In my happy dreams as well as a cafe we'd have the airponics and chickens to supply that cafe. Or hydroponics or whatever actually works. Dirt gardening is traditional and most people know how it works, but higher tech can make higher yields for the same energy and water. Building in growing areas to the colony is a good investment. Areas on different levels so wheel people can help with the food too.

A machine repairs place that can fix or even build wheelchairs and other assistive tech sounds good too. Not that I personally would have a clue where to start. But that seems to be steady business, a need that's not going away.

Not all the flats would be for people with disabilities. Their carers and the cook and the farmers and the tech people could all live there too. That would be proper colony style, everyone in one place working together.

You'd also need family sized places and places for kids to play, because a sustainable colony needs to grow the next set of farmer - carer - techs too. Not just make a stack of bedsits and warehouse people in them.

Starting with the people with disabilities and working out until everyone gets what they need you get a little economy going. Granted, probably based on government benefits right now, but if the people who brought you to the planet needed looking after for the rest of their lives, it would be a sign of an already failed colony if they didn't get what they needed. Plus many people with disabilities can and do work, though it's harder to get hired in the first place. Most places don't start out designing accessbility in, so there's avoidable barriers. Having a whole little community set up this way though, some people with disabilities would also be carers, or farmers, or techs, or just do something on the internet that brings in money, I don't know. (Not being one of those can work people. I just study.) Oh, and study is another thing everyone could do, there's study for all levels of ability, it's more fun than staring at the walls. We'd need to bring teachers and make sure we had access to books. (Hence being near the Library. Or University. And not just because they're my favourite places in the world.) Plus there should be somewhere to do dancing. I like my dancing lessons. Though that does loop back to the soundproofing and social spaces items.

So, okay, design a community, get some social housing built, make it epic with this being the first step to colonisation.

Probably needs a few more details before going asking for funding...

I keep on getting bits of background on my spacer characters. Like, what games they play at school. It pretty much has to be the battleroom game from Ender's Game, but they'd just call it Enders. The enemy's door is down... but that only makes sense to kids raised in gravity.

If you mix dirtsiders with stationers with fleet born with merchanters you get minimum four different ways to relate to gravity, and if you add belters or whoever you hypothesise as being mostly freefall then that's five.

People born on planets get an idea of down as a constant, of falling meaning down, and that makes sense to them.
Stationers live in spin gravity that is constant in a given area but varies by deck, whereas merchanters have spin gravity that spins up and down variably. So how hard 'down' pulls you depends on both where you are and when it is. Both of them have to adjust to things falling down-and-away, not what we think of as 'straight' down. Like living on a hill all the time. Or in a bowl. I could never quite figure that out.
Both merchant and fleet kids grew up with burn gravity, the kind where the engines kick the ship up at you, but only fleet can spend fuel so profligately they can have near-constant thrust. Fleet kids live closer to planet conditions than station kids, their down is just down, but it can be stronger or weaker depending. Sometimes very much stronger. And sometimes when they manuever the ship kicks sideways. Often enough to get used to the idea that sometimes walls jump out at you.
Belters experience all those conditions when they put in to station or get boosted out somewhere, but they spend a lot more time in freefall than any of the rest.
So all of them have different relationships with gravity, and the enemy's door is wherever the hell it is, variably, with expectation of 'down' kicking off in a different direction any minute now.

They would not design the same game. And they would not play it the same way.

Plus they'd all have muscles and reflexes optimised for different roles within the game. You'd develop something a bit like rugby where what position they play goes with what shape they are. Sort of.

There would be kids who were better at flying/falling and there would be kids who were better at throwing them.

Manuevers would be something like trapeze art or floor show gymnastics, depending what the gravity was doing. You'd get kids kicking off from each other to change direction mid flight. You'd get people launching in pairs or groups so they could change vector unpredictably, or you'd get them intercepting each other already out there, like the world's most swooping rugby tackles. You'd have kids with some kind of anchor who have the whole job of boosting other kids and changing vectors for them, catch and throw.

and then you add guns. If they're little hand held thingies they can't do much but shoot, but if they're long with a t sort of thing going on then they can hook in to each other, bash against each other like I said about the morris dancing, hook on the surroundings, give you extra leverage. Be a tool in themselves, not just a point and click. Even if you could have a tiny next gen phaser you'd want a big nightstick sort of thing so you can have more options.

The playing field would depend on what they wanted to make an analog of. Free floating or circle spinning lumps to play planet or rock would be for one set of challenges, thinking of yourself as a ship, using the gravity to slingshot into new orbits. But to train for in ship fighting you could have any configuration likely to be found inside or around a ship hull, like warehouse racking or sensor vanes on a magnetic surface or whatever plants grow up there, trees even. And you'd give the kids magnetic boots, or not, or some of them with and some without.

To get used to the idea of finite fuel you could have backpacks... would super soakers work as a propellant system? Small finite thrust, but in any direction and without cooperation.

... my society would want to get cooperation in bone deep, so they'd keep that trick for the olders.

Add to this the fact every last one of them would have read the Ender series... wait, no, actually that would only be true of my lot before the War. So lets just say all the tricks from there would be very familiar.

Oh, it would be grand.

... you'd probably get kids with broken necks fairly often, but this is the far future, they can fix that pretty good too.

... now I'm wondering if I just figured out what happened to one of my pilots. it beats the hell out of half pipe basketball...