So you wanna go to the colonies?

[Floyd Looney]

Thinking about booking passage on a space Mayflower to a new world? There are a few things you should be aware of.

You can’t bring it with you. Weight restrictions are stringent; you’ll barely be able to bring more than some clothes and a few other items.

Bring tools.

Electronics are useless. There isn’t any electricity infrastructure.

We’re talking colonial America-level of technology. If even that, it is quite a primitive place.

You see the level of technology that can be supported is directly proportional to the population.

Now if there were an advanced civilization right next door, this would be a big benefit of course. But the distance between solar systems is vast and the expense of traveling between them is enormous. There will not be any trade of corn or wheat between them; it would make no economic sense. The fact is, unless the colony could produce something very unique and valuable all “trade” would pretty much be the importation of people and tools, one way.

So the fact is, if Planet Cochrane had a population of 100,000 it would pretty much resemble rural agricultural colonial America.

The colonists would make their own homes, carve their own tables, stuff feathers into beds, make their own candles, ground their own wheat and church their own butter.

In the beginning they might have some more advanced technology but the economy does not support mining and processing ore into needed products. It barely supports anything. Those solar powered HAM radio sets can work until a vacuum tube bursts or a wire shorts, then what?

So leave your laptop at home and learn to produce some basic items and bring the tools with you, that is a key to success in the distant colonies. At least until someone develops warp technology and makes it easier and cheap to travel between the stars.

Like the Plymouth colonies life will be very rough, especially for the very first colonists.

Any science fiction story about distant, tough to reach colony worlds will need to take the link between population and technology into account.

[Attero Dominatus]

The twenty eight colonies in Vigilance have been populated for up to five centuries, but the technology depicted in the story is generally fairly conservative to give it that edgy Aliens feel (where everything seems real because every piece of equipment is at least plausible). I have yet to go into any detail on Asgard, the only capitalist society of the colonies, mainly because it will not be seen until toward the end of the novel.

The only facts I have come up with so far are that it is inhabited by sixteen million people (compared to 9+ billion on Earth and the hundreds of millions on the other main colonies) and that it is a very cold place with the equator having a climate like Minnesota (warm in summer but really cold in winter) and the poles being like Antarctica (always below freezing). This means Alaska would make a great template: low population density, air and rail being the primary means of travel, technology being geared toward ruggedness rather than bells and whistles (though there would be areas where this place is ahead of others such as some space technologies, mostly due to ex-Earth corporations having moved staff and facilities there to avoid nationalization).

I forgot to mention: I go out of my way to avoid the Casual Interstellar Travel trope. Space travel is beyond what most people could afford and you get from star system to star system by either paying the cost, getting a job on a freighter (which requires training similar to NASA astronaut training), or being part of a government or corporation.

[Floyd Looney]

That sounds good. I look forward to seeing more!

[Attero Dominatus]

I might do a prequel that takes place during the Storm War. It is mentioned in what I have posted of Vigilance, where the people, despite being outnumbered and outgunned manage to kill enough of the Commune forces to force them retreat. Kind of like the Winter War but with a more favorable ending for the defenders. Not many cities or other centralized strategic targets to take and a lot of land to go out and hide in and then strike the invaders when conditions favor the defenders and their lesser technology and equipment (during white-out conditions, which gives the Storm War its name).

[Floyd Looney]

That kind of story with maybe vignettes interspersed from the inside of a besieged city would be interesting. You might need to do some research of course.

[Attero Dominatus]

The Heavy Gear universe is a very good interpretation of a colony (I never played the board game but I love to read the books and have the first computer game). The story begins on a hot, arid world called Terra Nova in 6132 AD. As of that year, the planet has 300 million people, mostly in the cooler polar regions. The polar regions are political coalitions made of independent states with their own culture, traditions and language, and all of them have varying reasons to conflict each other (politics, ideology, resources, etc).

The technology is on average about a couple of centuries behind Earth because there is not a whole lot to justify bells and whistles. However, Terra Nova is ahead of Earth in one area: powered armor. The planet's rough terrain pretty much necessitates walking vehicles, both for combat and for civilian uses.

[Floyd Looney]

I once thought about a story where the UN got one of the newly discovered to colonize and it was called Terra Delta. It very soon degenerated into the Muslim Quarter, the Hindu Quarter, the Christian Quarter and the Euro Quarter. Obviously there was soon war, the weapons mostly improvised and built by the colonists themselves,

[Attero Dominatus]

The muslim quarter would probably divided. The sunnis and shias fight each other.

[Floyd Looney]

It would be a nightmare. They would make sure a certain percentage were homeless and all that too. lol.

[Floyd Looney]

I'm starting to get a handle on the Plymouth colony. Interesting reads. Not that I have a story for it yet.