Figuring out the numbers for Campaigns

When creating a campaign it is wise to look at the mechanics of production,
technology development, and the cost of increasing production. What rules you
use will have a great effect on the campaign.

Important numbers: 1) How long does it take a ship to get from one significant
system to another?

2) How much production is there? (in relation to starting fleet size)

3) How much production does it take to increase ones production? Three 'turns'
production, ten 'turns'?

This factor is more important in long campaigns.

4) How dependant on population is production?

5) How fast does population increase in comparison to increases in production?

(This factor is heavily dependant on factor 1 and 8)

6) Is it cheaper to build colonial structures and industries on site or to
transport them?

7) How many people can fit in a colony ship?

8) How long is the campaign, in comparison with production turns?

9) How fast will new technologies be developed, in proportion to the length of
the game and production?

All these factors have an impact on how important colony worlds are to
protect. Colony systems have to
produce _something_ or they aren't worth fighting for.
One of the questions for a campaign is whether the time period for expanding
production facilities on colony worlds will allow new factories to have an
impact over the course of the campaign.

If it only takes a couple of weeks for ships to travel anywhere on the front,
only a small amount of production is going to be available for the campaign,
unless the defense has a very strong edge. Also, production of new facilities
is unlikely to be useful at all.

If the defense has a strong edge then a significant force build up will be
needed to take out even lightly defended systems. If all or nothing bids to
take over systems are extremely expensive then commerce raiding and wars of
attrition can make the production levels of both space powers important.

If it takes years to travel between stars then not only will expanding
production facilities have an effect on the campaign, but so too will
technological advances, and even population expansion.

Lets take a couple of campaign examples:

The Vietnam war lasted long enough for both new production and new
technologies to have an effect on the battlefield.

By contrast, almost all the equipment used in the Gulf War was already built
or in the pipeline. The major exceptions were the retrofitting of laser
guidance heads to 'dumb' bombs, the deployment of the Joint Stars surveillance
and battle management
system ahead of schedule, and the use of Fuel-Air bombs
to clear minefields. There were some refinements of existing weapons and
doctrine during the air war, but there really weren't any new technologies
developed during the war in response to the war.

During WWII, not only were new technologies and new weapons built, but a large
part of the war was over the resources needed to build new weapons. After the
Dutch sabotaged the oil fields in the Dutch East Indies the Japanese built
whole new oil wells. The US built several major ship building facilities
during the war as well.

In a Full Thrust campaign, how effective would a scorched system tactic be? If
colonies can blow up all their fuel refining capacity and either evacuate or
take to the hills, how useful is it to take possession of the colony?

How much control over civilian installations do Admirals have? Will the
civilian government of a system come to their own terms with an invader to
preserve what they have built?

Another number to tinker with: How big are these ships, anyway? While the
system is quite flexible in simulating various science fiction backgrounds the
rules for marines fix the scale a little bit. Even using cryosleep, only 50
people can fit in 1 Mass of Cargo space. That makes shifting huge colonial
populations _expensive_, and time consuming.

That colony ship I posted recently could shift 1000 people per trip. Even with
a 1 week round trip that would only be 50,000 people per year. In order to
shift a reasonably large number of people you would need a huge number of
colony ships. If you don't mind each power having fleets in the 100,000 point
range, that is no problem, but if you want managable fleet sizes and numbers
you have to pay attention to the scale.

Increasing the Cargo capacity to 500 people per Cargo Mass would make ground
combats involve larger units but would enable a reasonable sized ship to carry
a starter colony all by itself.

Increase the Cargo capacity to 5000 people per Cargo Mass and shifting the
population of nations becomes possible, if the colony ships can make rapid
enough return trips.

At 50,000 people per Cargo Mass, even a one-way colony
ship can carry enough people to justify a significant production capacity for
the colony they create.

Star Trek Full Thrust has more people on board than the More Thrust section
imples they would. A heavy cruiser has over a thousand people on board. Since
cryosleep can accommodate four times as many people, a cruiser sized colony
ship could accommodate over 4,000 colonists, much greater than the 1,000
colonists on that 100 Mass colony ship I posted a short while back.

Even after tinkering with the People per Cargo Mass ratio, how does a colony
world of 1 million pop contribute significantly to the production capacity of
an empire whose capital system has a population in the billions? Sure, after
200 years of growth its own population will be approaching the billions, but
that implies a very long campaign!

One could have a campaign with populations much smaller than billions by
assuming that after the initial diaspora the home planet was nuked. Then you'd
have various colony worlds, each with populations in the few millions trying
to build fast.