 February 12, 2011 - 6:16pm | This thread is to discuss and debate the levels of colonization that would be feasible strategies. One ship. Small fleet. Large Fleet. Colonizations Waves- terraformers first, Builders of infrastructure next and finally the colonizers. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 February 13, 2011 - 11:56am | Outside of Mechanon colonies the first ship has to be primarily an agricultural ship. Even on the best of planets you have to feed the people. Crops take months to grow, and NO ONE eats MRE's (Ration Packs) forever. Case in point; I still have a few people I know in the submarine service. Outside of the missles and engines which take up considerable space and effort, the other biggest issue is food. You start off with the perishable items first and work your way down over the next six months. Until you are eating the ration packs and your crew is getting demoralized. Hopefully you can resupply first. Yes the frontier is alot closer with trips being measured in weeks or days instead of months, but hauling your food back and forth will be EXPENSIVE. If you have room for a small fleet then you move on to fabrication and resource gathering. Eventually the parent wants their colony to be self sufficient. To have a project of this magnitude there are always beancounters involved. Whether they are looking at minimizing costs (in cases of prisoner/dissident removal) or from the standpoint of a profit motive (in cases where the colony is set up to provide reward to the parent. You need to build and you need to gather the raw materials to do it. (Everything you can utilize there is one less thing you have to haul across the void. Less fuel, less headache) Even the religious institutions need fabrication. (How are you going to wow the locals or keep your own flock in line without a fancy church) When you get to the point where food and resources are not an issue, you have to worry about defense. You now have several ships with alot of goodies on them which if left undefended are a super tempting target. Granted if you trip over a Sathar fleet you're boned, but you want enough defense with you to let folks know you are not an easy mark. After you get that big the next thing is administration and people. You have a ton of supplies and weapons, now you need mid level managers, officers and or clergy to make sure the day to day gets done. You also need a bunch of hands to make this all worth while. This all assumes a "good" planet. If you have to terraform it after the fabrication/resource gatherers you will need your terraforming equipment ship and you will lose the some of the administration and people until you terraforming is complete. People assume you can land the teraforming equipment ship first, and while it is neccessary in the first wave, you need a bunch of engineers, janitors, cooks, and other sundry items just to keep the terraforming plant operational. While you can delegate some of this work to robots which will increase your costs I know of no entity be it corporate, govermental, or religious that will entrust the major work to machines without supervisors and technicians to make sure things go smoothly. Those supervisors and techs need to eat, get their clothing/uniforms cleaned, get paid, be able to communicate home every once in a while. All those services need someone to maintain them and watch them. Just a few thoughts before I head off to work to "maintain" my colony of apartments. -LZ |
February 15, 2011 - 9:42pm | Well I'd say that you have to bring an ag ship with you. KHs has a formula for how many people can be fed by an ag ship based on Hull Size- I forget what it is. The rules specify that a crop can be grown in x time and with saving of 10% of output there will be enough to grow the next crop. Mining ship with an orbital processing lab (KHs terms) and digger shuttles- mine a comet to refuel the ion drive ships, mine asteroids for raw material for the colony. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 February 16, 2011 - 7:43am | It's 200 people per HS on the AG ship, recycling 10% means you can support 180 people indefinitely per HS. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 August 22, 2011 - 11:56am | If a colony needs to be self supporting (being on a hospitable planet/moon)I would envision it being done as bare bones as possible; regardless of wealth of the backers. If the Virginia Company and other historical colonial enterprises could get a “do over”, they would try to ensure that adequate food and water were present. Meaning crops ready to harvest and plenty of other fields cleared and ready to plant for the next season. Next I believe they would ensure that there would be environmentally secure housing in move in condition when the colony arrived. Not to mention defensive structures to protect them from aggressive flora and fauna. Since it would require “human resources” to oversee these developments, the smallest possible advance party would go ahead of the colony. I imagine a specialist and an assistant from every required field would be present. Engineer- To oversee installation of structures and mechanicals (power, sewage, etc.) Zoologist and Biologist -to study and manipulate native species for future use (I imagine it would be more expedient to tweak native species than to introduce new ones without knowing how they will upset the native biomes. In order for this to be effective though, a previous survey team would have had to collected data on possible species and their biomes. Perhaps they have already grown test batches of altered crops to take along as seed for the first fields) Computer specialist- to install networks and monitor and compile data. Robo tech -to oversee construction and production and maintenance. Medical Personnel- to care for advance team and future colonists. This would include a doctor in the psychological fields. Pilot -as backup for automated piloting systems on ship, lander and shuttle. Geologist- for mining/geological resources ventures I’m sure I have missed some and depending on the purpose of the colony, some specialist components will not apply. And any good mission would try to get personnel who could double up on skill fields to lower the number of required bodies and to work as backups should they lose a member. If I were sending a colony out, I would send this small advance crew out with a large (huge) robotic workforce to prepare the site. They would travel out in as cheap (but effective) a ship as I could secure. It would have a lander component that serve as their base camp. The ship would remain in orbit and serve as a basic orbiting platform and satellite. With the lander would be a small shuttle should they need to access their ship in orbit. After the crops have been harvested and processed, and resources tapped, the colonists are ready to be received and their living and work structures should be ready to go. |
August 22, 2011 - 3:51pm | I like the advance party concept, could work with the main expedition as well if cryo-sleep is used. ship arrives and only the specialist that are needed to begin set up will be revived. That was sort of the theme in Alexis Alvarez's Frontier Historian project game. Expedition funded by the richest 1% of Earth who got to come out in cyro chambers, they kept their bodies and were called Alphas, everyone else had their memories downloaded and got a vat grown clone body upon arrival. I loved his ideas but was put off by d20. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
September 3, 2011 - 10:11am | Another way to look at level is make a table defining the colo's size, tech, capability. Size Tech Capability 1 Low Twice a month supplies 2 Low Once a month supplies 3 Modern Self-sustaining 4 Modern Can support one other colony in the same star system 5 Modern Can support two other colonies within 5 light-years This gives Referee's some ideas to work with... |
 September 3, 2011 - 6:33pm | I too like the idea of an advance party - a smaller group that sets out
likely in one ship in order to set things set up and get it ready for
the main colonization party that would follow after a year (perhaps a
decade or more if something like terraforming is involved) or so. With
that in mind the corporation in question would likely have put some
thought into the possibility that this advance party could end up being
stranded for one reason or another without support from the main
colonization party for an extended period of time - perhaps even
indefinitely. I did some research and found that many scientists these days think that a bare minimum of 50 humans would be required to advance a population without genetic problems arising. That number (50) is the BARE MINIMUM mind you. The research put the number at 50-500. So any advance party, I would think, would likely have at least 50 unrelated people (25 male and 25 female) involved - likely something more like 60-70 (as a buffer for accidental death and that sort of thing). And I'm thinking that the main party would likely have something closer to that 500 number. So I was considering the advance party colonization ship and to me, it seems logical to think that that ship would have to have a few things. 1) It should be capable of traveling to other star systems. 2) It should be capable of rudimentary self defense. 3) It should be self sufficient and capable of providing those 50-70 people with the bare minimum required to start a successful colony and be capable of providing this basic starting colony with the infrastructure required to survive indefinitely without support. 4) I think it's also pretty important that this advance party ship should have the ability to land on the surface of a plant. So here are my thoughts on all that... Minimal weaponry (a assault rocket launcher or maybe a laser battery) and interstellar travel are easy to incorporate. No big deal there as hull size (HS) 3 is the minimum size that is capable of interstellar travel and the maximum size allowed for atmospheric maneuvering. For 3 and 4 (above) however, this would require a HS 3 ship be capable of carrying 50-70 people - which a HS 3 ship can not do. For that you'd be looking at something like a light cruiser (HS 12-14!). So to solve this HS problem I was thinking - maybe this colony class starship can be configured kind of like a barge? The ship itself would be HS 3 with a crew compliment of about 10. It would tow a colony pod with it which would serve as the living quarters for the remainder of the personnel as well as storage for all the necessary colony equipment (agricultural gear, tools, etc). The pod would have 3 lifeboats (or perhaps a couple shuttles) associated with it. Once in orbit around the prospective planet to be colonized, the lifeboats would launch with the colonists (and any sensitive/fragile gear) and the starship would separate from the pod. As the colonists are leaving the pod they would actuate certain release levers. Once all the levers had been actuated, pressurized blast doors would seal closed thereby dividing the pod into sections and a countdown would be initiated. This countdown would result in the pod splitting into sealed sections small enough to manage the landing procedure. How many sections would the pod split into? Lets say that each section would have to equal HS 3 or less. So if the pod is HS 12 it would have to split into 4 sections in order to land instead of impacting like a meteor (this would insure that, even if something happened where one of the sections was destroyed upon landing, there would still be something left to salvage from the other sections). The pod's sections would then proceed to conduct 'hard' landings on the planet's surface, following a pre-plotted (calculated so that the individual pod sections would land within a kilometer of each other) automated flight plan. By hard landing I mean, it would have an automated thruster assisted landing. This landing, though technically called a landing, might better be described as more of a controlled crash (this is why there would be no life forms on these pod sections during the landing procedure). Afterward the pod would never again be suitable for space travel and would not be capable of lifting off the planet. It is a one shot deal because the damage to the super structure of each pod section would be very significant. Once the pod sections have landed on the planet's surface, the lifeboats and the colony class starship would land nearby and the job of building the colony could start. The pod sections, aside from carrying the tools and equipment needed (distributed evenly among all 4 sections so that not all of any one particular inventory item would be lost in the case of a catastrophic event to one of the sections) would then be systematically dismantled and used to build housing and whatnot for the colonists. These pods would be designed so that the superstructure absorbs the damage of the hard landing, but so that the basic structure would remain intact with the express intention of being dismantled for use as building materials once on the planet's surface. I don't have to outrun that nasty beast my friend...I just have to outrun you!  |
