I was looking at my copy of the Megatraveller Journal the other day with a
particular emphasis on the Enaaka Worldguide article. I was looking to
incorporate it into my own (fledgeling) campaign, set in an "alternate" uni-
verse. Boy, that was a good article. The "Fungus Planet" has soooo many
possibilites. Anyway, I turned a cold, analytical eye to the world data, and I
found some problems. Most are minor (for example, the mass/gravity data just
doesn't jive with the given size/density data, unless my abacus is screwed up).
These inconsistencies are easily resolved, but I found one GLARING problem:
Aton: capital city of Enaaka
--population: 9.75 million
--location : inside a dome some THREE KILOMETERS ACROSS
The population densitty of this city is OVER ONE PERSON PER SQUARE METER!
This seems a trifle high to me. Particularly for a planet with a tech level of
six. Even if you assume extensive underground tunneling, I don't think it is
feasible. Think of all the things a big city needs: Heavy industries and manu-
facturing, power generation, transportation, distribution and retail of food
and consumer goods, waste management, atmosphere purification (for a city in
a dome, city administration, planetary government (for a capitol), emergency
services, decontamination services, law enforcement, and probably gobs of
other things I can't think of.
Anyway, this is no great problem in itself. I am just going to assume
the city of Aton to be inside a number of such domes. The problem, though,
is HOW MANY? I.E. just how big does a city of about 10 million have to be?
I think this question has a lot of applicability in other situations, too.
That is, given a particular environment (vacuum world, desert world, Earth-
like world, or maybe some type of hostile atmosphere), what is the maximum
supportable population density of a city? I would expect that as the tech
level increased, so would pop density. But how much so?
As another example, my "home-brew" campaign wound up with a kinda freak-
ish (randomly generated) world: Selky (diameter: 2000 miles -- about the size
of Earth's moon, I believe -- airless,waterless -- population over 90 BILLION!
Tech level: 12. I was tempted to throw this out as being pathetically unreason-
able, but instead I upped the tech level arbitrarily to 15 (high stellar tech-
nology can really pack those bodies in there, don't you know) and made a rather
interesting and dangerous planet (can you say "secretly cannibalistic under-
classes"? I knew you could.)
Well, to summarize in one question:
Would anyone care to enlighten me about their views of technology and pop-
ulation density? Does anyone care? Have I been wasting my time discussing
this? Have you been wasting your time reading this?
(Okay, so I can't count)
Marty Jarrio, physicist at large
[email removed]