Colony
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 18:21, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
The term colony is often used to mean any system in which a planet has been used to house humans under the auspices of the Confederacy. More specifically, though, a colony is a settlement, including the people, all improvements they have built or brought, and the surrounding terrain that they claim as theirs. It should be noted that many systems have more than one colony, which confuses people who say a system name when they really mean a colony IN that system.
Non-confederacy established populations of humans on other planets can be referred to as a "colony" but are not members of the Confederacy, have no rights or obligations in regards to the Confederacy, and in general do not interact with the Confederacy.
Not all of the planets are garden worlds by any means and a few of them are down-right inhospitable. They have different flora and fauna which brings a multitude of problems and opportunities as well as vastly different years.
Colonies are initially centered around military and/or research facilities with a naval shipyard in orbit. They are independent entities within the Confederacy. See also: Confederacy Law and Governance
Number of Colonies and Population
TH envisioned about two dozen colonies of differing capacities due to gravitation and other environmental factors. This turned out to be conservative, as more than 75 have been mentioned in stories. One world he described is a moon around a gas giant. A thousand pod ship would drop approximately five thousand people -- that's his vague guess at the bell curve. There should be a lot of 6s -- at 2 apiece --somewhat fewer 7s -- at 4 apiece -- a LOT fewer 8s, at 6 apiece -- and very few 9s at 8 apiece. Sooo... 400 families of 3, 350 families of 5, 175 families of 7, and 75 families of 9... I get 4850. Adding children in the range between birth and age fourteen that get a free ride at the sufferance of their sponsor -- better say 5000 -- or maybe 5100. Early colony ships would carry a tenth of that. One large ship servicing a colony would drop 8 times a year... (This assumes as TH indicated in Pickup 18 that ships take a month at slow boost to let colony groups settle out and get their medical support and indoctrination, but can return at high boost in half of that time, on average. 39000 people. (Adults - 8 times 4850)
Warships are MUCH faster and there is a transporter network -- that colonies have to be plugged into.) (This statement makes no sense. All facilities as well as all ships larger than the smallest corvettes contain a transporter nexus which can reach out to pads up to 300,000 miles or ~480,000 Km away, and even the smallest shuttles carry a transporter pad which can be used any time they are in range of a nexus. There is no interstellar network to be plugged into. -ZM)
Bigger colonies = more servicing ships. Darjee limitations being what they are, there would probably be an early slow build out of the transport fleet, with us taking over some capacity where possible. Fifty ships the first year, 25 of them being thesmaller 100 pod type, perhaps?
Late in the Diaspora, TH sees a story where some critical manufacturing plant on Earth is staffed with 5s -- 6.4s with contracts that say if they last 6 months, they get two concubines and at the one year mark they're all lifted out to a colony world to an identical facility. (I'm still working on this concept, so feel free to critique it. It occurs to me that the 6 and above group would not have been totally evaced, for instance, so why pick 5s? Factory workers vs. geniuses, perhaps... Maybe only ship 50% at a time...)
See Also
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
