[OT]-Interstellar Trade: A new take

I have been following this thread for quite a long time and finally decided
that I would put my two cents in.

As people have written before. It would cost a great amount of time, money and
resources to start any colony on a different world. For a colonization to be
profitable, something important must come from that colony. Over population
would be a good reason to start a new colony or maybe some sort of exotic
mineral produced only on that planet.

Also people have determined the amount of energy to get things off world

would need to be manageable and the amount of energy to produce a suitable
powersorce easy to accomplish.

But, in my opinion, there is something that most of us are failing to realize
and all of us have been caught up in the numbers and real life determinations
of interstellar trade that we have forgotten one of the requirement of a good
game and that is playablity.

Sure, I know that interstellar trade would probably only be rare items or
items of art, but where is the fun of that? I know that I might get flamed for
this message, but to make a good gaming arena (aka the different nations
in the GZG-verse), one has to weigh reality and playablity to make the
game entertaining enough for people but keep it realistic enough to be
plausable (this is the most important part of any game). The reason that
Faster-than-light drives were created was not for any realism, but to
make space 'smaller'. Definately a playablity thing. Create a FTl drive, turn
5 light years into 10 minutes. Your wargames (or certain starships) can go

where no one has gone before.

This playablity factor becomes even more necessary when you start to create
any campaign-like game (for example: adding economics into the
GZG-verse).
Sure, most colonies would be so expensive to start up and maintain for the
first months (or years) that only extreme reasons would ever force a nation to
even think of an interstellar colony, but all these sci fi game wouldn't be
anything unless there is colonies at different star systmes. So we fudge
reality a bit to make interstellar nations a possiblity and then we can attack
each other on the purple crystal world of Gorena VI with Grav tanks and Power
armor.

From: Bren Mayhugh <jygro@hotmail.com>

> Sure, I know that interstellar trade would probably only be

Much snippage.

  It CERTAINLY would be prohibitively expensive--given what we
know now. And we have a tendency to base our calculations on what we know now.
However, that doesn't produce playable results. The way to work it is to
decide what model you want to use, and work out the implications from there.
If it takes a year to get from Rigel Kent to Earth, then products will have to
be low mass, high value, and colonization will be very limited. But our model
is that ships can jump a
few light years every day--call it 1LY per day to be
conservative. Okay, how long does it take to get from Earth to
the planet you're interested in?  2-3 weeks? (Bear in mind that
some maps are in parsecs not LY). Compare that to shipping times in history
and see what they shipped. They shipped LAUNDRY from California to Hawaii to
be washed during the Gold Rush ca 1850, and I'm willing to bet that was more
than a two week round trip. UK colonized Australia and I'd suspect the average
trip was at least 2 months at that time. Trip time from Europe to North
America was, IIRC, about 4 weeks when
colonization started here in late 1500's/early 1600's.  They
might not have shipped much cavalry--horses died enroute, a
problem tanks don't much worry about--but they could sure ship
infantry and find it economical to do so.

I compleatly agree. Here are some of my additional thoughts...

OTOH...If FTL drives are slow/expensive/dangerous/require rare
materials, then interstellar trade will be severly limited, and will be
expensive items only.

How fast/convienent the FTL drive is has an effect on the colonies.

Fast/cheap/easy drives means anyone can establish a colony...and getting
needed things is only a short trip away. (Ever notice how few small
towns (near a big city) have factories?)  Only isolationists/ect would
make self-sustaining colonies in these settings.

Slow/expensive/dangerous/rare drives means every trip is expensive, so
every colony must be self-sustaining from the start.  Colonies could
expect to be on their own, except in times of emergency.

Donald Hosford

> Laserlight wrote:

> Much snippage.