[email removed] Made a very good reply to my original design
post for O'neill style colonies in Traveller.
I also agree that 468x10 6 MCr is too expensive. That is not even including
the support structure needed to build the station. The only mistake that I
could have made (and I did do this deliberately) was to design the colony as a
Starship. Building the colony would be similar to colonizing a world with an
insidous or no atmosphere. And there are plenty of those in Traveller. So I
would guess that building an orbital colony would be similar to colonizing a
vacuum world.
Other monetary comparisons are: O'neills testimony before congress that
extablishing a small colony (only 10,000 inhabitants) plus the powersats to
provide Earth with energy plus the lunar colony needed to provide the raw
materials would cost $40 to $200 billion (in 1978). Cyberpunk gives costs from
4 to 7 billion eb for their larger colonies. Both are a huge difference from
the 468 teracredits (x10 12) I have for my colony.
The one thing that is really needed to build a colony is a reason. O'neill
used solar power generation as the driving force with manufacturing as a
secondary reason. Fusion at TL-9 destroys that reason. Cyberpunk uses
basically the same reasoning with a bit more emphasis on the manufacturing.
I welcome all comments (flames, etc.) but I will close saying that I did the
design study just to see how it would turn out. I do think that special
design rules would be necessary to make it work in Traveller. Those same
rules should possibly cover the colonizing of other worlds. For example: The
n-th planet of that system x parsecs away is really rich in minerals. Lets
mine it! How much would it cost to send 10,000 sentients over there and set
up a mining base???
I question these thing because I like to Role play in a setting that has man
expanding out into the galaxy. And when you try to come up with some frontier
setting these question do arise.
John Bucsek [email removed]
Attempting to expand the universe.