Just trying to kick some numbers around :-) There was a footnote in the Star Trek Technical Manual concluding that the Enterprise-D could not evacuate a seriously populated world. There are other science fiction settings with colonization as a way to relieve population pressure from Earth. I wonder what the bottlenecks are with a sufficiently high GURPS TL ...
* Earth has approx. 7 billion people with a growth rate around 2%, so shipping 140 million per year would cancel population growth if all other things remain equal. Of course the colonists would likely be drawn from the same age groups which have children, so the actual number would be lower, or Earth populations would fall. On the other hand, who knows what the population will be in a far future when 'magical' science makes starships possible? I'm assuming 200 million colonists per year. * The Spaceships rules have bunkrooms and sleeper capsules at 0.25 habitat slots per person. In Vehicles, a cryonic capsule is 1,000 lbs. and 50 cf while a bunk is 200 lbs. and 100 cf, plus life support. TL10 full life support is 200 lbs. and 5 cf, TL11 full life support is 20 lbs. and 1 cf. The power use in either case is relatively minor. * How much bunk can you stuff into 100 cf? It is not just the bunk, but also a 'slice' of corridors, galleys and sanitary facilities. Say 10 cf out of 100 cf are 'wasted' -- overhead with pipes, gaps between bunks, etc. 35 cf would get a 2.5' by 2' by 7' bunk, stacked four or five high, and 30 cf get half of the 4' corridor between two rows of bunks. 1% of a toilet and shower (VXi) are 0.9 cf. Make that 2 cf for access. A hall or bar is 100 cf per person, add 10% of that for three meals per day in shifts. A galley (again VXi) for three cooks is 400 cf. If it serves 1,000 colonists (cooking in shifts), that would be 0.4 cf. Seems low, unless some of the food processing space is accounted with the bar/mess. Call it 1 cf, and there are 12 cf left for major corridors. Definitely not fun, but then it is not for very long, or cryo capsules would be preferable. * Flight time depends on the FTL drive rules, perhaps ten days for a single trip (that would be a Traveller jump, or a few parsec with hyperdrive or warp). Loading, unloading, return, maintenance, and a ship might do ten flights per year. That means the fleet needs a capacity of 20 million. At the unlikely extremes, it could be two 10-million-man ships or a million 20-man ships. Too many ships, and the need for trained crews becomes an issue. Too few, and each single ship wastes too much time for check-in/check-out. I'm wondering if a million-man ship would be feasible, just because it is so awesome. * Time for boarding will be an issue. The largest airports in the world have less than 100 million passengers per year, so the spaceport would need five or ten times the capacity of Atlanta or Frankfurt. Still, ground facilities are a minor problem compared to the ships themselves ... Comments? Thoughts? _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
