On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 6:24 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > David replied to Roger: > > Ship's crew is on the ship, and there's room enough for a couple hundred > pax > > as well (Though normally, ships carry a small number of luxury pax.) At > a > > big star port, with loading facilities 252 containers can come off a ship > in > > about seven hours, and loading 252 new ones takes the same amount of time > > [Really, really big places have robotic facilities that can load and > unload > > at the same time, doing the whole ship in 8 or 10 hours. ] > > That would imply travel to and from industrialized worlds. I had > emigration from an industrialized world to a developing colony > in mind. Of course ports would be among the first things built > on the new world. > > No, it just slows things down. Containers can be moved about by guys in spacesuits and pretty small tugs. It takes about an hour for a ship's crew to detach a container, tug it free, grab a replacement and hook it up. If there are dedicated local crew for the job, you ought to be able to put 12 crews (one at each end of each of six sides; might be able to fit more) to work on the ship. That's about a day, assuming you've got labor to work round the clock. Lets assume that we're willing to cut the pax loads of one of my ships in half, to use the other half of the capacity as cargo for the emigrants. That gives each 400 person container a container worth of stuff. Each container will hold 1152 cubic meters of stuff, and about that many tons of mass. 1152 cubic meters is 32 20' ISO containers. That's a lot of stuff, and should be enough to make the colony self-sufficient, at least at food and basics. We're down to 50K people per ship, so for 200 million people a year, we'd need about 400 ships. number of pax containers is the same. We'd need cargo containers, but for stuff that doesn't need life support, they're cheap [1]. We need more shuttle craft, probably, to get the cargo into orbit, and out of orbit on the far end, but they're not terribly expensive (vehicle of the week 759 can move a pax module and its cargo module in and out of orbit. It's about 50 mil a pop). Probably 20 trillion in capital, and a couple trillion a year. A TL10 world that's got 200 million people leaving a year could afford that. Now, this isn't an evacuation in the "oh, no, the sun is going out!" sense. It's a "go start a new life on Suprema IV!" sort of thing. (There's lots of colonization going on in my setting, but it's normally done on the 10,000 people with two ship loads of gear sort of scale, and lots of it done places where there's not a useful planet.) -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
