From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 01:53:15 -0500
Subject: Colonization Models
Just a quick thought on two ways to look at colonization, both from GDW (smart fellows there, once upon a time). One is what I will call the Traveller Model, and the other is the 2300 AD Model. In fact, the former may be a much farther advanced version of the latter, but they are distinct enough to discuss separately. Traveller Model: A darn lot of worlds (1 human empire, of which I know of 3 large ones) had 11,000 wordls. Varying tech/law/social throughout - not a lot of homogeneity. Even within a single monolithic empire, a barbarian world could be next to the high-tech sector wunderland. Tech levels from "me have rock" all the way up to personal fusion guns, personal anti-grav (I'd guess in GZGverse times, this might be about 2500- 3000 AD). How could this hash come to be? Well, if you look at it, there are a couple of factors at work: Some planetary seeding by some UberDoodz we'll call the Ancients (gone now - took themselves out). Lots of independent evolution of intelligence, though only 6(?) major races (major race = developed own jump drive tech, but one case is actually a big fake!). Also, lots of small empires (well, maybe even bigger than the whole human GZGverse, some of them) rose and fell. Traveller falls around 5700 AD on the Solomani (Terran) timeline. So the rise and fall, the genetic seeding, the diversity of life, and the cultural more which arose to not muck with low tech planets (a la prime directive - Red Zones and Amber Zones) help to explain this mosaic of society/tech/etc. Makes for a super place for an RPG and it must make for a hell of a place to govern. Also, there is no travel faster than Jump, nor comms. So pony-express over an 11,000 planet empire is quite a task. News can take years to propagate from one end of the empire to the other. Even with the government cheating! The other model, used in 2300 AD (originally Traveller 2300, which might hint at the connection), features a much more homogenous colonization. It is small (much like the proposed GZGverse - huge to us today, but small compared to 11,000 worlds). It has a few major colonial powers and some minor ones (England, France, US (ish), Russia, the PAU- equivalent (Azania?), Germany, China, etc). Some places have only one colony (Canada) and a few outposts. Others have maybe half a dozen or a dozen with some outposts. The difference between this and the other model is homogeneity of culture and technology. Yes, the colonies are different than Terra and it takes a while for stuff to propagate, but in theory you could get anything shipped to anywhere and the colonies have high tech - it might be a couple or even ten years old, but it is pretty homogenous. You don't have sword wielding barbs on one planet and UberTech Cybernetic Entities on the next. This is because in a very real sense humanity is in its first outward expansion wave. This makes the model very similar to the GZGverse (and the weapons and their rough deployments would look about the same, and the 2300 date isn't that far from 2185). I don't have any "breathtaking conclusions" to this line of thinking, but I might suggest 2300 AD as good source material (things like the Colonial Atlas, CyberTech Earth, The Vehicle Guide, The Equipment Guide, etc) for examining how things might roughly be in the GZGverse (if you wanted an RPG for GZG, this game system would also be easily convertible since the tech is so similar). And another thing worth looking at is the game's treatment of institutes (such as the astromechenrecheninstiute (KH, don't flay me for this insult to German.... It's the ARI) for one example). Corporations and independent scientific bodies play a big role in space and in exploration and development of colonies. GDW used to have a "Challenge" magazine which had a lot of useful 2300 AD articles in it too. Tomb.