Gamba Subsector again

Rob Dean writes:
>Here are my ideas, as written down before I started typing this in:

Obviously one has a tendency to fall in love with one's own ideas. I have
tried to assess your ideas on their merits without considering how they
interfere with mine. Hopefully I haven't failed too often.

>Madrigal:   Most  noteworthy  features are a dense  tainted atmosphere,  a
>religious  dictatorship and an oppressive law level.  A combination of the
>Puritan and the Soviet Union, and maybe we'll get back to them later...

Taint is propably fossil fuel taint.

>Agricola:  Standard  atmosphere water world, with a  native  population  of
>mammalian amphibians, plus a human/dolphin colony.  The natives are balkan-
>ized,  with  the main source of conflict being over islands which  are  re-
>quired for breeding grounds and technology platforms.  Pregnant females and
>young children can't swim, so they need boats or islands.

I still think you need a considerable land area to evolve amphibians, but
I'm no biologist.

>Susato: Dense atmosphere, dry world, governed from Lassus since the Imperi-
>um intervened to prevent a global war about ten years ago.

Good idea. I use the "under Imperial administration" explanation for captive
governments quite a lot too.

>The natives are a minor human race, although there are no known ancient
>sites on the  planet.  <future enigma?>

Btw, keep in mind that those 40-odd minor human races works out at roughly
one per sector, so you don't want to use one without a good reason. I tend
to use them to provide an industrial and population base for fleeing
starfleets to establish star empires the way I suggested here.

>Jenkins:  An  uninhabited  earth-like planet  with  a  tainted atmosphere.
>Obviously,  whatever the taint is can't be overcome economically  with the
>use of technology...

More likely there are no useful biological products to attract exploiters
of this waterworld, and other type of settlers still have other places to
go to.

>Violone:  Low tech with a high population and a  captive  government--this
>will need explanation, later...

Hmm... I forgot the captive government rating when I tried to explain this
world. Something must have forced the Scouts to step in and take over.
Some kind of world-wide catastrophe?

>Canzona: Settled by even more fanatical religious dissidents from Madrigal,
>who  are  split up into groups that can't agree.   Potential  Amber  travel
>classification.

If this is not a regressed colony then there must be another reason for the
low tech level. Religious mania is a good one...

>Adriano: This world is too good to pass up, so it's a new colony site, and
>the population represents the advance survey team presently on the ground.

The problem is that a new colony site wouldn't have a Class A starport.
Starship construction would not be a priority if I wanted to establish a
new colony. Even starship maintenance would be performed at the home port.
They might have a B- port (Starship repair, but no spaceship construction)
but more likely a C+ (Full fuel facility). Secondly, 99 people is way too
few to open up a new world. An initial survey, sure, but how long ago do
you want the Imperial presence here to date back to? If it's more than 20
years this planet would've been surveyed already. It's one of the top
goodies of the subsector. Can you imagine anyone passing this one up and
go settle Lassus instead?

Brade,  Tenor: Mining colonies.  Tenor is a rich lanthanum source,  closely
guarded by the corporation which runs Weelkes.

>Bass:  All inhabitants are associated with the scout base, which was estab-
>lished  to support an extended system survey after the discovery  of  trace
>amounts of long half-life superheavy elements in an asteroid sample in 923.

Good idea.

>> 0205  Ricercar      X67759B-3           NI, AG     Y
>>
>> Prison planet (run by who?) with artificially restricted technology.
>> Population is forced to sell agricultural products to home planet
>> for low prices.
>
>Prison planet might be OK, but the "who?" is a problem.  That's why I chose
>this one for the "plague planet".

There's no reason why you should restrict yourself to one of each kind, you
know.

>> 0302  Tenor         E446411-6           NI         Y
>>
>> Struggling colony.
>
>Probably.  In my book, I almost always use the "mining colony" description
>when given the government type 1.

Yes of course; I overlooked the government type. In that case it is more
likely a highly profitable mining outpost. (I diffirentiate between
outposts, where most of the people comes from somewhere else and intend
to go back there eventually, and colonies, where most of the people comes
from somewhere else and intend to stay).

>> 0309  Bach          C525442-7  S        NI         Y
>>
>> Young colony. What's that Scout Base doing here?)
>
>Supporting Type S couriers jumping back and forth from Madrigal to the
>Imperial X-Boat route station at Forqueray...

What kind of support would they need there?

>> 0402  Bass          D223302-9  S        NI, P      Y
>>
>> Outpost. Again, what's the Scout base doing?
>
>That was a tough decision to make.  What do you think of the explanation for
>this one that I came up with?

Good one.

>> 0405  Lawes         EAC9200-8           NI         N
>>
>> Low-budget scientific outpost studying the ecology of this
>> insidius atmosphere world.
>
>That's what _they_ would like you to think, isn't it? (-: (-:

It beats the lanthanum extraction cover, don't you think? ;-)

>> 0605  Simpson       A74A369-D           NI         Y
>>
>> The world is the property of the Simpson Memorial Foundation. ...
>
>Not a bad idea, but I already used it to explain Galliard...

You could have more than one scientific institution per sub-sector, you
know. ;-)

>> 0705  Jenkins       E87A000-5           --         Y
>>
>> I'd drop the TL to 0.
>
>Represents the TL of the automatic distress beacon...(-:  (5 is the minimum
>to support broadcast radio, isn't it?)

I define TL as "Maximum sustainable by local population".

>> 0709  Adriano       A668125-C           NI         Y
>>
>> Highly desirable planet with Class A Starport and only a few
>> score inhabitants? How to make sense of that?
>> One alternate idea occured to me: A short while ago this was a
>> thriving world, but a plague wiped out the entire population.
>
>I agree with you.  This one is difficult. I decided to rate it as a start-up
>colony, though you are most likely right about it being delayed by political
>infighting among various groups attempting to gain control.  I used the
>"plague world" explanation on Ricercar.

You can have more than one of each. And if you use a plague on Adriano,
where DID it come from?

>Besides the mats, up to 5% of the surface could still be land under an A
>hydrographics classification.

4.99 %, but who's counting? Such small islands would propably serve as
anchors for land mats. Heck, they'd be the origin of the land mats.

>> 0803  Weelkes       C112888-A  S        NA         Y
>>
>> Another of these punk worlds with huge populations.
>
>Yes, but luckily there's only one in this subsector to explain.  It doesn't
>stretch credulity too far to think that there is one world headed toward
>being industrial that started life as a mining colony, does it?

No, but hundreds of millions? No mining colony needs that many people. IMO
these people's ancestors _couldn't_ leave, for whatever reason.

>> 0805  Baldwyn       A625343-A  S        NI         Y
>>
>> Again a Class A starport without the population base to support it.
>> I'd cut the starport class down to C and put an Ancient Base being
>> investigated by the Scouts here.
>
>Well, I already put the Ancient site at Galliard.  Two might be too many to
>put in this subsector. Any other ideas? As it stands now, the only important
>thing that I know about this system is that it is on the X-Boat line.

The X-boat line explains the Scout base perfectly. As for the Class A
starport, I'm predudiced against starship yards supported by a few
thousand people to dig the ore, refine the metal, build the machines to
build the tools to build the engines etc.. Whenever I find a Class A
starport on a world with less than half a million inhabitants, I tend
to look for an outside source of buyers for the ships like the Navy. If
I can't come up with a good explanation, I change the rating. (That's a
basic attitude. When I come across some unusual combination of stats I
spend 5 minutes trying to come up with an interesting explanation. Four
times out of five I succeed. But I don't insist on explaining everything.
Sometimes it is better to change a rating to something sensible.)

>> The one (roughly) ton shipyard capacity per 1000 inhabitants in TCS is
>> naval capacity only. No mention is made anywhere about civilian shipping.
>> My own rule of thumb is two ton of commercial shipping for each ton of
>> warship.
>
>I don't recall a specific ruling on this,

Me neither. As I wrote, there's no mention of civilian starships anywhere.

>and I always worked under the assumption that it was the total capacity,
>figuring that in wartime the govern-
>ment would take control of _all_ shipyards for war work,

Any government that interfered too much with the merchant marine in wartime
would run out of essential goods right speedily. Think about the British
Merchant Marine during WWII.

>and in peacetime
>they'd contract the maintenance work that overflowed from the Navy shipyards
>out to civilian shipyards, so that there was really very little distinction
>between the two.

I think that the Naval Shipyard capacity reflects the maximum amount of
civilian capacity they can take over in wartime without ruining their
economy. But that's just MY interpretation.

>> History: Remains of some fleet arrives and settles on Susato...
>
>Hmmm...I'll have to think about this.  I don't like the idea of having
>quite so many regressed colonies, but it's not a bad explanation for the
>current set-up.

The Gamban Empire lasted only long enough to put people on a lot of the
worlds. None of the colonies were self-supporting when the Empire fell
(The civil war was mostly between nations on Susato). Hence the whole-
sale regression.

>Which worlds would be in which categories in this scheme?

Gambanish populations might be found on a lot of the worlds. Suggestions:

Violone:  Settled by Gambans, regressed when Empire fell, rebuilt to TL
          6-7, nuclear bombed itself down to TL 0, advanced to TL 3.
          Interdicted until global catastrophy forced Scouts to step in
          (Massive tectonic burp? That makes the taint volcanic dust.)

Motet:    Settled by Gambans, regressed when Empire fell, rebuilding
          slow due to harsh environment. Interdicted by Scouts. Opened
          recently due to political pressure.

Madrigal  Same initial story, but had recovered to TL 4 by the time
          the Scouts got there. Scouts were forced to open world a
          generation ago.

Ricercar  Could still be a plague world. Or interdict could be the last
          Scout interdict left. This would entail putting a Scout base
          in the system.

Pavane, Canzona, possibly Gibbons could all have Gamban populations.

Adriano would have been colonized, no doubt about that. If you want
Adriano to be empty then they died out. If you take the plague story,
then they were there but not any more.

      Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
     [email removed]
- ------------
        "A  subsector  official  pompously states that the
        subsector  armed  forces  have  four Kinunir class
        ships in service,  each with enough troop strength
        to put down any military operations that threathen
        the peace of the Imperium."

                        ---Adventure 1, The Kinunir