Other Colonization Locations

I have a habit of focusing on Mars when I'm talking about colonization. Hence, here's a fun post on the other candidates that we know of. The ideal place to colonize is anywhere we can live with no need for tools. Failing that, the good spots to shoot for are anywhere we can make the artificial habitat cheaply, or a place we can change enough to be permanently habitable. Remember, we can effectively make any place in open space habitable temporarily, so technically just about anywhere works as a place to live. Anywhere we can get our structures that won't get them destroyed works, but that doesn't mean we should do it only because we can. Here's a short analysis of why we would want to go or avoid these areas in our local space.

We'll start from the center of the solar system, and work our way outwards. For obvious reasons, living on the sun would not be a good idea. Even our best of habitats would burn up well before reaching the sun itself; we can consider an orbit around the sun as the default location to place a habitat though. A habitat orbiting a planet has to beat orbiting the sun with a whole lot of nothing around the habitat. Surprisingly, some planets offer such bad orbital locations that a station in the middle of a lot of empty is a good idea, but let's move on to planets.

Mercury is the first planet we come across, and it does not make for a good location either. Surprisingly for such a small planet, it does have an atmosphere, at least as defined by scientists. The atmosphere itself is so far away from the planet and so thin, that by normal definitions it doesn't have anything around it, which is probably for the better. Any atmosphere Mercury could have would be blown away by the sun fairly quickly. If Mercury were to have an atmosphere, the sun's close proximity would create some very nasty storms from the massive temperature differences. It's a dead rock, and worthless for colonization. Amusingly, while Mercury is easily the smallest planet of the solar system, the surface gravity is still higher than Mars'.

Moving out further, we come to Venus, the planet supposedly representing women. It's quite hot (the hottest even), and on the outside has a pretty coppery color, with clouds swirling in its substantial atmosphere. Unfortunately for any would-be colonizer, the conditions are not good. The atmosphere is too thick, giving it a crushing pressure and high temperature. The clouds, while they may be pretty, are really made of brimstone and rain acid. A planet named for the goddess of womanhood, truly remarkable how accurate that became. (Whether I am joking or not I'll leave to the reader to decide) The only positive colonization wise is how good of a prison planet it would make.

Next up is Earth. Rated as a 10/10 planet for colonization. Would colonize again. Getting a little crowded though, make sure to check ahead for any vacancies before attempting a trip.

Last up for the rocky planets is Mars, the planet supposedly representing men. Mars is a mostly dead, cold rock, though initial reports suggest we could breathe life into it and keep it going with only the occasional blow (every million years or so at a rough guess). Until then, the planet's main claim to fame is the low gravity and a lack of hostile conditions. Won't say much, as I've said much more in previous posts.

In-between the rocky planets and the gas giants, we have the asteroid field. By itself, no asteroid is a good fit for a colony. The lack of gravity and an atmosphere are big deal-breakers. What they are good for though, is cheap construction. I've seen some suggestions that would make habitats of sufficient size and shape, done more easily than building it in conventional ways. The likelihood of being able to use old mines as housing might work too. Still much, much more expensive than anything on Earth, but it's best to look at the positives.

Further out we have the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. Both are unsuitable for colonization, given their lack of a place to land. Nor does hanging out high in the atmosphere seem to make much sense just now. What they do have are big moons, but these are too far away to be reliably powered by the sun without other help. For strict colonization, I haven't seen too much for the idea outside of resource extraction, nor do we have enough data on how gravity affects the body to know if they'd be livable if we did fix all the other problems. Assuming we did find a way to make them livable though, the fun part would be the ease of travel between the moons. Going between Saturn's bigger moons takes approximately the same fuel that a theoretical Earth mission to orbit would. (In practice, you'd get much better fuel efficiency than Earth missions) A simple rocketpack could do for some of the moons. Jupiter's moons are approximately double those of Saturn for any of the notable ones.

At the end of the list we have the two gas giants (also known as ice giants) Uranus and Neptune. Neither are at all useful for colonization, nor are the moons all that notable. Disappointing. Nor is there anything of note past them besides more rocks and ice.  Although we haven't yet noted all that's out there, (There's a lot of objects we can only dimly see) I wouldn't expect anything there. Though, coming back to it, Uranus does have one positive to it, for those of a childish nature. Hehe

So you want to visit another star?

This topic has no relation to SEAC, but is a fun exercise on some misconceptions with slowboating it to another star, So you want to go to another star eh? Unfortunately, scientists are stubborn about inventing quicker space travel. Something about physics and Einstein being a kill-joy. Instead of doing it the way we'd like to, we're stuck slowboating it across with current methods. For reference, the closest star is 4.24 light years away, with 5 other systems being less than 8.5 light years away. But why is that a problem? I know our governments are cheap, but what if we assume they're not, wouldn't that help negate the distance problem by going faster? Can't happen.

Let's start with some beginning misconceptions. The most common misconception I'll hear about is a focus on acceleration. Usually something along the line of "If we accelerate at x for y, we'll reach our destination in z years". Nothing seems off at first glance if you're not familiar with the subject, but we measure a rocket's propellant in terms of delta-velocity (dV) for good reason - the total change in velocity is a static number for the rocket and the rate of acceleration is meaningless for the majority of cases. To be clear, the amount of dV a rocket has is what's important for how quickly it can go between stars, and not any other property.

So, the objective is clearly to get more dV into the rocket if we want to get to the star quicker. If dV is propellant, why can't we keep adding more to get to a higher speed? For a rocket, the dV is dependent on the exhaust velocity of the rocket and the percentage of mass spent on propellant compared to everything else. Because we don't have any new rocket engines just now, we can treat the exhaust velocity as a constant. Thus, if we can get more dV by devoting more mass to propellant, why don't we? The easy answer is that the mass not spent on propellant still needs to cover the mass of the engines, containers, and other structural necessities. For a given engine and engineering know-how, there will always be a maximum amount of dV you can put on a rocket.

I can't put more fuel on the rocket. But what about putting more fuel in front of it? On Earth, if I can only carry so many days of supplies, but need to get farther than those supplies allow, I can leave supply depots in-between. If you do the math, it's easy to see that such a strategy takes a lot of extra supplies and time, but it does work. Seems simple to apply a similar solution to rockets. Send out a rocket ahead of time full of fuel. When the main rocket gets to the new one, you can refuel. Get enough of those, and you get tons of extra fuel, wouldn't you? If you're paying attention, I'm betting you already know the answer. (This doesn't work, if you didn't guess)

The primary problem with a strategy of this sort is for the rocket to get the additional fuel, that fuel needs to be at the same location, but also needs a similar speed. You do not want to run into tons of fuel going 1 km/s relative to yourself. It'd make two freight trains colliding look like a gentle accident. Clearly, you'd want to have the supply rocket accelerate to the same speed as the main rocket beforehand. If you're doing that, there's no reason to have it start out farther, so we'd have it start out with the rocket.  Instead of having the supply rocket refuel the main rocket, it's simpler to have it fire first, use up its fuel, and then jettison it rather than carry it along. This is effectively how staging/booster rockets work, and they have the same rules as supply depots. It takes a lot of extra supplies for a small boost in distance. This works to an extent, but doesn't allow for much extra dV, unfortunately.

Lastly, remember that even if we accept that it will take hundreds of years to go to another star, the technology isn't there to make it worth anything. A computer that can last that long would be impossible with current tech. Getting a self-repairing computer would be closer to possible, but still far away from what we can do now. Using a generation ship that recycles all its materials is even more complicated, and potentially not doable with our current energy technology.

Hopefully that helps answer some of the questions on why faster-than-light drives are so darned handy.

Who Makes Decisions?

This post will be a slight deviation from my usual stuff; this time I'll be focusing on game design and a dash of politics, rather than science fiction concepts that people might not be familiar with. From my (limited) experience, one idea that seems to hold true is that when decisions in a story are made, they should be done by the actors of that story. For stories, this relates to the idea of Chekhov's Gun, and the general idea to not include extraneous bits to the story. For games, the same idea holds true, with the additional corollary that if a decision needs to be made, then the game must have someone to make it.

This is a simple idea at heart, but leads to problems with design if not taken into account. The classical Civilization series of games involves a single leader making all the decisions for their civilization for the entire game. That style of play works well, and mimics the board game play that it evolved from. One player makes decisions, and the gameplay itself is similar to moving pieces around on a board, with no actors other than the omniscient leaders. But what if we want to delve deeper into the simulation? Naturally, you'd need more actors around to handle decisions, and it can be easy to forget some of them.

The fun part about making these actors is to remind me as the creator who would actually make these decisions. That can be easy to forget at times, because who makes decisions and why can drastically change which decisions are made. Take the already mentioned Civilization games: as a player, I have no problems ordering my units  to attack and annex other civilizations if it makes mine stronger. That's part of the game, and I've already pointed out that I see them as pawns on a gameboard. But imagine, instead, that it was the actual leader of a civilization making that decision? Would he choose to send his citizens to die for some cities that may not matter?

Which brings me to my game, how far down do I want people to be making decisions, and what are their motivations? I haven't reached the stage where I can make a good decision, but this is one of those big questions. To give a quick example, as the head of SEAC you receive orders from Earth. One way of dealing with that is to show the leaders of each faction, along with their interests, thereby treating each as their own actor. Another way is to condense them into a single actor, likely hidden behind a new actor that serves as an adviser/emissary to the player. Both serve a similar gameplay purpose to give the player direction and requirements, but provide different variance on where the game's focus lies. Adding more actors at home means the player must focus more on home events.

My last point is, I'm afraid, a tad political. This idea, that actors make decisions, is highly important in the real world as well. We have big organizations that we find it easy to devolve into single entities, like corporations or governments, that are made up of different decisions made by the people within them. In short, a corporation doesn't decide to screw you, but instead someone within that company. Why is that important? Because it changes how we see things, and should hopefully lead us to make better decisions.

As a personal example, I've played some board games that are built around the purchase of stocks and control of companies. The best example was a game where we bought stocks in train companies, then whoever had the most stock in that company would choose which actions the company took. It's easy to equate the company you control as being you, given that you control the actions and receive rewards based on how well you do, but if you want to do well in the game, you can't think this way. Instead, the game is structured to keep things interesting, and promote company ownership changing.

In the midgame, the early trains would become obsolete, forcing the companies to buy newer trains. If you prepared for it, a company would have enough money to weather the transition no problem, but that was an unpopular strategy. Rather than keeping the money, it was useful to pay out the money to shareholders and keep stock prices high. Before paying, you'd then sell your stock to the market, letting someone else take over, who would then pay from their pocket for the new trains. The company itself continues on most of the time (there were crazy rules for bankruptcy that I only saw once), but it showed very obviously that these companies did not exist as decision makers, the players were.

Now, for real world companies, similar rules apply. The reasons for why things happen will often have very good reasons behind them, even if they don't make sense to an outsider. The train game was obviously setup to create conflict and keep things interesting, but the core idea still applies. Ideally, we'd prefer that the rules that we create for real world corporations pushes for the outcomes we find more acceptable. I'm sure if asked, people can give other examples of where decisions made sense to the individuals that created situations we consider unfortunate. And if someone wants to change things for the better, it's imperative that they keep in mind who makes decisions and why, or else you only create more problems. In other words, corporations are not evil, as they have no capacity to be evil or good. Instead, it is the people in charge that make decisions we find unfavorable, perhaps because the system made those decisions so desirable.

Men in Space

First, I'd like to apologize to those that liked reading this blog for not updating in awhile.  It's strange how inertia works. I don't put out one post, and then the next post is harder to get out.  Continue missing posts and it never gets done. Here's a quick post to get back on the saddle.

The point of this post is to answer the question "Why don't we have more manned missions in space, and why does that change in my game?"  Our current space programs overwhelmingly prefer unmanned missions, with the few manned space missions revolving around the International Space Station or with new space programs eager to prove themselves.

The simple, straightforward, and wrong answer would be that manned space missions are expensive.  Don't get me wrong, missions to space are relatively expensive. The recent New Horizons probe sent past Pluto cost approximately $700 million over the 15 year development and deployment time, or $45 million per year.  A useful comparison might be the cost of a soldier sent to war is approximately $1 million a year. The research and development for getting long-term manned missions would be expensive, but not overly so for the budgets nations routinely throw around.  Instead, the more correct answer is manned missions are high risk and low reward.

Unmanned missions have three major advantages over manned missions. Easily the biggest for the engineers is that they don't have to return to Earth.  We can send probes flinging off into the void, or let them orbit endlessly around Mars with little backlash or consequence.  Machines and computers are built for handling preplanned objectives, and our knowledge of space is strong enough to plan the entire mission in advance.  Adding human error to the mix is more likely to cause problems whenever the mission's objectives are known enough to plan ahead. The biggest advantage for the space program itself and the politicians advocating for it is the lack of backlash if a mission runs into problems - if the mission fails, it is usually met with little notice, and often some amount of hope that what went wrong ends up fixing itself. (Which, to be fair, does happen often with the types of problems that crop up)

For manned missions, their strengths lie more in dealing with uncertainty. The human body is surprisingly versatile, especially when used with other tools (like screwdrivers or duct tape) and comes with a strong intelligence.  A random problem where planning or machinery failed can be fixed more easily by a human than by other methods.  The Apollo 13 mission, for example, had a problem with their CO₂ scrubber and had to jury rig a replacement.  Intelligence is also very handy when dealing with the light speed delay.  Even Mars, so very close as it is astronomically, has a 3-20 minute delay in contact with the Earth.  That's fine for sending pictures, but difficult for other activities. The recent Rosetta mission that landed on a comet had a delay of ~50 minutes, making it difficult to react in time if the need had arisen.

All of those advantages are great if we regard the machines we send out as important, but they aren't. Note the usage of "mission" when talking about achievements in space. The Rosetta mission's goal is to land a probe on comet 67P.  The probe itself is only useful to achieve that goal, and a failure is a loss of money, but it is still very possible to send another probe out if the first fails.  Humans, instead, are quite important; if a spacecraft fails and lives are lost, then people will care, and wonder why those lives are lost.  Landing a man on Mars would be quite prestigious, both for that man and the space organization that launched him, but a failure would cause even more hurt and embarrass the nation.

Furthermore, the timing on space travel can lead to odd peculiarities in regards to politics. There's a large gap of technology we'd need to bridge in order to send someone to Mars, which would take time and money to develop.  While money can be easy to come by, time is difficult. What leader wants to spend their political capitol advocating for a mission that wouldn't produce real results until 20 years in the future, likely long after they are gone?  (The mission alone would take about 2 years) It's a large undertaking, and support for those projects are slim. (If anyone ever asks, this is why I'll say good things about Bush. Proposing for a manned Mars mission will get me on anyone's side.  Though the ridicule he received for such support was to be expected, unfortunately.)  This is why I argue that manned missions are low reward. The prestige for the nation and program would be grand, but very difficult to attach to the individuals that started the project, leaving little incentive for the project to exist.

That answers the first bit of my original question (I hope), but what about the second? What makes the situation I'm creating different from the current one? Primarily, the reward would increase, but also the risk would decrease. A man and colony on Mars would be prestigious, and occur in a short timeframe.  A president could give the go-ahead and have a good chance of succeeding before his term is over. The risk, meanwhile, is mitigated by an increased presence in space. Losing the Challenger was a large deal, partially because we don't send people to space on a routine basis.  If, instead, we lost one of five ships currently in space, the public won't care.  Moreover, given that SEAC would be a multinational program, blame is easy to share, further lowering the risk.  At this point then, it seems normal that given a better risk/reward ratio, that men routinely in space far away from Earth could be a given, instead of a far-off dream.

PS. Please remember to like, comment, and share. It is surprising what those three actions mean to the content creator, given how easy and innocuous they may seem to the reader. Thank you, and I hope you enjoyed this post.

Rocket Propulsion

Rocket propulsion is interesting; it's not like anything else we normally encounter when moving on Earth. Originally a lot of this post was going to be in the last post, to explain about how the engine stats related to real world science, but it grew far too big. Last week's simple answer is likely to be enough for anyone deciding for engine parts, but here's how things work behind the curtains. I hope that anyone reading this finds the topic as interesting as I do.

First, let me reference cars, as I believe anyone reading this is quite familiar with them in principle. A car accelerates by spinning its tires that then push against the Earth. At the same time, there's friction pushing back against the car, mostly from wind resistance whenever the car is moving. In practice, we spend most of the energy from the engine to equal out this wind resistance acceleration, and so move at a constant speed. Even though all the car can do is accelerate, we think of its movement in terms of speed and raw distance, and this is reflected in how we measure a car's performance.

Think of all the terms of measurement you use when talking about vehicles. Some big ones are the ones that relate to practical matters. I rate the efficiency of the vehicle in terms of miles per gallon. Similarly, I can take that number and the amount of gas I have left in order to roughly calculate how many miles I can travel before refueling. For performance I'll usually use max speed, rather than using horsepower or acceleration.

With rockets, everything is different, though there are a lot of similarities to a regular car. For a rocket to move forward, you must throw stuff out the back. The rocket gains the momentum of the stuff sent backwards, in a similar way to the car gaining momentum by pushing against the Earth. (For those that have forgotten from science class, momentum is mass * velocity, and momentum must be conserved in a given system) We call this "stuff" propellant, reaction mass, or remass, though I'm very sure we'll have more names for the stuff as it enters popular speech. (Do not call this stuff fuel, or rocket enthusiasts will be very angry with you. Unless it is fuel, as with chemical rockets, which muck everything up naming-wise)

I'm sure most people are aware of this, but space is overwhelmingly empty. For a rocket in space, this means there's no friction until you crash into something. Compared to how we think of movement on Earth, this difference is huge. The distance of a trip starting at rest, the distance gone is a function of acceleration versus time. Normally, we ignore the acceleration and consider it in terms of velocity - why would I care about the 6 seconds of acceleration I have when I'm traveling for an hour? Even though I constantly accelerate forward when using a car, my speed will not change, as it is countered by the acceleration due to friction. But with a rocket, the acceleration needs to be accounted for, and this is shown with all the terms of measurement in use with them.

Now, to keep things as simple as possible, I'll try to relate these terms to those of a normal car, but remember that the comparison is not exact; they differ in key points. This is muddled further by the tendency to talk about a rocket by its engine, while we talk about a vehicle in terms of the entire vehicle. For example, I'll give a rocket's performance measurement in terms of thrust (given in Newtons (N)), whereas a vehicle's performance is done in max speed. The vehicle's engine performance however is given in horsepower, which is similar to the engine's thrust.

With rockets, measuring how far it can go is a useless measurement. If we pick a good trajectory, the rocket can travel light years, though it will take eons. Instead, it's more useful to measure a rocket's ability to change velocity, dV (pronounced delta V, and measured in meters/second). And now we get to the fun part: measuring an engine's efficiency. That's measured either as specific impulse (labeled I_sp and given in seconds) or effective exhaust velocity, measured in meters per second. Why is it fun? It's like labeling a car's efficiency in horsepower per pound of fuel. If you're interested in learning how it relates to efficiency, read the next paragraph, or feel free to skip if you want to take my word for it.

First. Let me define I_sp more clearly. Impulse is (roughly) defined as the change in momentum, and calling it specific means using it in relation to something else. In this case, we use impulse in terms of pounds of propellant. (Note the word pound: measure the propellant in terms of weight, not mass) Instead of measuring propellant by weight, we can use mass. This other value is known as the effective exhaust velocity (more colloquially known as exhaust velocity), and also measures the average speed of the propellant as it leaves the rocket (when done outside an atmosphere). Specific impulse is more useful for other aspects relating to rocket design and so engines are rated in terms of specific impulse. Exhaust velocity is easier to understand, and much nicer for calculating dV, and so is what I'll tend to use. The calculation is dV = exhaust velocity * ln(ratio of total rocket mass to propellant mass)

It should be noted that thrust and exhaust velocity are not intrinsically linked. For a given engine power, it's usually possible to increase the thrust at the expense of exhaust velocity or vice versa. I can also increase the engine power to get an increase in both thrust and exhaust velocity compared to the old engine. This isn't always possible though, unfortunately. The ion engine is sadly stuck forever in having a very low thrust, to give an example.

Hope that helped clear some things up and gave people some interest in the matter. Remember, leave a comment if you have any questions, and I'll be sure to answer it!

Ship Design

Had a friend say that she wanted to hear something a bit more cheerful this week, so I'm going to talk about how ship design works.  I've always enjoyed making my own designs for ships when playing similar games, and I'd like to bring that to SEAC.  Even if my designs aren't exactly optimized, it's usually nice to give them your own personal flair.  (For reference, I'm a fan of lasers, quirkiness, and defenses)  Hopefully, I'm able to give enough options for players that they're able to make their own fleet that varies enough from others to really be called their own.

Basic idea for ship design (at least for my game) consists of four main topics: the mission, propulsion, consumables, and the miscellaneous options that mostly deal with morale.  Each ship is made up of a hull and a set of components.  Hulls have an available volume, radius (or alternatively diameter, whichever is easier for people to understand), mass, and length.  Components are the objects that do things - lasers or cargo containers, and can be scaled up or down in size depending on how much of the component you need.

The first thing I try to pin down when designing a new vessel is to determine it's mission.  What is this ship's purpose?  Is it a tanker, perhaps a cargo ship?  Maybe it's a combat ship, one built to slug i t out with the opponent's ships, or maybe one designed to maintain a longer range and let the tougher ships in front take all the beatings.  Whatever the mission, deciding it is where I start my design process.

Let's give an example.  I want to design a Cruiser, a type of ship designed to be good at combat and operate independently if the need arises.  I start the design by selecting a medium sized hull, and add some weapons (lasers of course!) and decent shielding.  As I add on components, the program will continually update the side variables to keep up with the new additions.  I don't care how many crew the cruiser has, but I do care if the cruiser has enough crew, and like any good program the easy stuff will be taken care of.  So, the crew and all components keeping them functioning will update, along with other components like power generation and structure.  The player will always have the option of overriding, but ideally these non-decisions should be handled by the base program.

Next up, I need to worry about the propulsion of my cruiser.  I select the engine that best fits my thrust and efficiency needs, and scale it up to fit my cruiser.  For this mission, I'm leaning towards efficiency, to save on propellant mass.  Next, I adjust how long my cruiser thrusts for during transit. (Given as a percentage) The larger the percentage that I thrust, the quicker the ship will reach its destination, but expend more propellant.  I expect most journeys to be made primarily of drifting, rather than accelerating.  Given all this information, I then add on propellant tanks, with helpful bits of data showing how much time the cruiser can thrust, average distance the ship can travel at cruising speeds, and how fast the ship accelerates.

Now for the rest of the consumables; mostly food, water, oxygen, fuel, and ammo.  For now, anything not listed there is labelled a generic "supplies".  The player will set the how long the ship is supposed to last before refueling, along with an acceptable margin of error.  How much material is required is then a simple calculation, given the rest of the design.  Except, depending on your completed research, there's also the option of using regenerative systems.  Why carry food for the entire trip if we can make it ourselves?  In practice, it doesn't provide that much of an increase in space unless we have long trips, and the technology doesn't really exist even now.  About all we currently reuse is water, and even some of that is wasted.

Lastly, the player decides on some miscellaneous options for his ship.  These can vary from which material to use for the structure, to which amenities to use for the crew.  Do you want your crew to have a mess hall with appropriate cooking facilities to boost morale, or would you rather not waste the extra mass and space on useless frivolities?  How sparse are the crew quarters?  Is it a tin can? Cramped like a submarine, or does it have ample room like a modern boat might?  Morale is always important, but it does mean wasting a lot of space and propellant to keep the men happy.

After all that, you've finally got your cruiser design ready for the factories to construct.  Hopefully it performs in a way that's similar to what you planned for.  If you find you're not really interested in all that design work and want to skip to something that's useful, there will always be pre-made designs built.  Each design is also tweakable, able to be upgraded as new components become available, or to change an existing design without starting from scratch if, say, you don't like lasers and would prefer a ship based off of missiles.  Even though we all know lasers are better.

Living Off Earth

With my last post, I received a few comments about how I didn't make Mars sound all that bad, mostly due to my analysis on the possibility of terraforming making it look tolerable.  So, with this post I wanted to talk about how living on areas off of Earth would look like. At least, how it would look before we had sunk a truly silly amount of time and work on making other planets livable.  Even working very quickly with a good budget, it would take hundreds of years for Mars to get anywhere near Earth-like. Until then, any people looking to live on Mars would need to build and live in their own artificial habitats there.

Try thinking of somewhere on the Earth's surface that you'd consider very inhospitable.  For me, some top winners would be places like the Sahara desert, Antarctica, and inside volcanoes.  Compared to Mars though, both the Sahara desert and Antarctica are by far much nicer places to live compared to an average location on Mars - if for no other reason than it being nice to step outside without the water in your lungs or the tears in your eyes boiling away.  It's easy to think about not breathing, given that we're far more used to that as a problem in our daily lives, but trust me when I say that is the least of your worries if you're caught outside without the proper precautions.

Obviously, going outside on Mars without equipment would be quite the bad idea. But what about other characteristics?  For instance, the average temperature on Mars would be surprisingly close to that of Antarctica, so you'd better bring plenty of fuel for heating!  Meanwhile, the dust storms would wreak havoc against surfaces and vastly reduce vision if someone were caught outside.  Antarctica at least only has to deal with snow storms, which aren't nearly as damaging to equipment as a good sand storm in the Sahara.  In other words, living on Mars would be most similar to living in the Antarctic, with a bit of the Sahara thrown in, except even deadlier outside and much farther from proper civilization.

This is all before we get into the small little quirks that would continue to screw with designing a proper colony for living on Mars.  Flying as we're used to it would be near impossible. This post over at XKCD describes flying in different atmospheres, with a description for flying on Mars. "The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner." Easy flying as we're used to on Earth would not work well as a common form of transport, and helicopters are certainly ruled out (not enough air).  Better get used to building roads and trains for everywhere you're interested in going.

All told, this means anyone wanting to live on Mars will be traveling quite the distance to live in a metal can.  Personally, I think you'd have to be crazy to want to go live there.  But, I'd certainly like to go anyway.  We have to start somewhere, even if it is in a metal can.  I'm not going to let Nature tell me where I can and can't live, and it's classic for humans to take an area and mold it into someplace better. It's only human nature.

Mars Sucks

Last post I mentioned that Mars sucked as a place to put down a colony.  I figured it'd make a good post to elaborate on that comment.  First, I'd like to preface that when we're looking at doing anything within the solar system, all options suck.  If it were easy or a good choice, we'd have done it already.  Chances are good that there's no good option anywhere in the space around us either, but we're not entirely sure yet.  We're not able to accurately look at planetary systems just yet.  I plan on fudging the numbers a bit to allow for a good number of potential colonization spots, if only to make things interesting.

What would I define as the perfect place to colonize? Anywhere that a caveman could live, or to be a bit more accurate; anywhere a human doesn't need any tools or knowledge about the environment in order to survive.  Any aspect of life that isn't handled naturally by the environment must be handled by the humans on the colony.  Thus, the more tools and knowledge needed for anyone to survive, the worse an area the place is for colonization.

For an example, think of where you live and see what you'd need to live.  Here in New Hampshire, I'd need at least fire for warmth, probably shelter as well, and a little bit of knowledge on what to eat and what to avoid eating.  That's a small bit of tools compared to requiring an artificial habitat and importing nearly everything that a potential Mars colony would require.

Here are the major points I'd pay attention to when determining good locations:

Radiation. For anyone that isn't familiar with this, the radiation I'm talking about is roughly any particle that is relatively small and has a relatively high amount of energy.  Light is radiation, but not really relevant due to it being relatively low energy, while x-rays are energetic enough to be worrying.  On Earth, the main protection we have against radiation from space is our atmosphere and the Earth's magnetic field.  Unfortunately for Mars, it has neither, and unfortunately for us, we know of no way to restart it.  (At least, as far as I know)

Luckily, as far as I can tell the magnetic field is not terribly important for protecting living things from radiation.  The main problem would come from vastly increasing the loss of water (along with some other molecules, but water is the big one).

Atmosphere. The big factors that we care about in regards to atmosphere are: we want it breathable, we want it safe, we want it to protect against radiation, and we want it to keep the planet warm enough.  For the atmosphere to be breathable it needs to contain enough oxygen to support life, and at a proper ratio at the given pressure.  Too little oxygen and we can't pull enough out to support us;  too high and the oxygen becomes poisonous, along with increased fire risks.  For an atmosphere to be safe, breathing can't be harmful from toxins or harmful organisms.  To give some examples, the air in my home is safe and breathable, the air at the top of Mt. Everest is safe but not breathable, the air in a burning building is breathable but not safe.  The atmosphere on Mars is both unsafe and not breathable, along with not being dense enough for protection against radiation or for providing a proper temperature.

Fixing Mars' atmosphere is something we know how to do on a technical level.  Spewing gases into the atmosphere isn't exactly something new for us.  The primary problem we would have is one of scale.  I'm sure we're all well used to hearing all about carbon dioxide, but the amount we put out is very insignificant compared to the entire atmosphere.  Suddenly exporting all our carbon dioxide production to Mars would still take millions of years to get a more reasonable atmosphere.  Though ideally it'd be more similar to a nitrogen/oxygen split, as carbon dioxide is harmful in large quantities.

According to estimates we can make, Mars should be able to hold onto an atmosphere dense enough for breathing and to keep a comfortable temperature.  The only real unfortunate problem is Mars isn't big enough to hold onto the smaller molecules at all easily, which is only made worse by the lack of a magnetic field.  For our purposes, the steady loss of water would be unfortunate, but occurring over millenia.  Certainly replenishable by an interested space-faring race. Any caveman stuck on Mars would thus have a clock to rediscover space flight before all of the water on the planet ran out. No pressure.

Biosphere. The plants and animals and other living things that reside on a planet make up the biosphere of that planet.  As far as colonization is concerned, it's useful for providing the food and oxygen we need.  Also likely to be a major source of problems with any foreign planet that has developed it's own biosphere independent of Earth, but on Mars that problem should be minimal.  All of Mars' biosphere would come from Earth, and unlikely to cause problems.  The difficulty comes with getting it built quick.  Given a long stretch of time it'd be fairly straightforward to bring on, but there's plenty of problems, like the lack of soil, water, and oxygen that is hard to build incrementally.

Gravity. Mars is on the small side of what is likely to work well for humanity, and is possibly too low for long-term viability.  Mars' gravity is only 37% that of Earth, which is pretty low.  Unfortunately, we don't exactly have much research on the subject, as we understandably don't have many options when testing biological beings at gravities smaller than that of Earth.  We don't even have very much research on how we're affected in free fall, especially as in regards to fetuses. (Highly important if you're looking to live in space is whether or not you can have kids)

Hope that helps outline all the things that Mars is missing.  Remember that for everything here, missing something means that the colony must provide it in some other manner.  Comparably, popping a colony down in the antarctic is easier and requires less resources than one on Mars.  Far less cool though, suck it Antarctica. We're going to Mars.

Game Beginning

Let's talk a little about gameplay today, and where best to start but at the beginning? I'm a huge fan of starting at the very beginning and turning a small base into something worthwhile, so you start the game with just the bare essentials; humanity has just entered this new age of space travel, and it's your job to build everything.  (Sidenote: I'll likely put in different start points for those looking to start with more if you're not as interested as I am in beginnings)

You start with a few buildings in your isolated base on Earth, along with a small population and some resources.  Your buildings are:

• Capitol building, there for administrative purposes.
• Factory, for building components which will be used in the construction of buildings and spacecraft and everything in between.
• Research lab, where researchers research new research.
• Academy, which produces people. (Trains people, at least you hope)
• Space gate with accompanying loading and unloading infrastructure.
• Storage and housing, with a good amount of starter goods already stored.

For now, I've got population split into five categories:

• Leaders.  People with names, stats, and roles that they can fill.  I'm sure some will use them as simple stat sticks, but they're also there to give life and build stories around.
• Officers.  Those that lead others, but are too low to be really notable to the player.
• Crew.  The state employees, soldiers, and engineers that crew positions and get the crap jobs.
• Civilians.  Those not aligned with the state that are paid to do their work and not get in the way.
• Colonists.  The people I spent two blog posts talking about beforehand who are interested in living on other planets.

To begin with, you'll have enough officers, crew, and civilians to run the operations, along with some extra to get you started.  In addition, you'll start with a few (1-3 I'm thinking) leaders to place around.  You don't however, start with any colonists, as you haven't built any colonies yet.

At any point in time, the player can always buy more resources and people on Earth.  Buying is expensive though, and so the player is encouraged to produce their own resources.  The player begins with a fair bit of cash to start to enable initial construction, but it won't last forever.

Upon taking the gate into space, you've got a small setup that all planetary connections will have, including:

• A gate leading back to the planet.
• Small, robotic tugs that take cargo from the gate to the station.
• A station (or a ship serving as a temporary station) with storage, housing, and useful facilities.  At game start, the starting station is made primarily for storage and has a decent assembly platform.
• A secondary gate leading into the system network which can be used to transport ships to any other system network gate.  Not actually built at game start.

Along with the standard setup, you also begin with an assembly ship that assists with construction.  (Something had to build that station)

At game start, you have two major goals in mind.  You want to place and maintain a Mars colony, and build a gate connection to another system.  Sure, a Mars colony makes very little actual sense, but it's romantic enough that the politicians in charge want it anyway (Plus, what sort of space game would this be if you didn't colonize Mars?)  Going to another system is a much greater accomplishment, but the colony is easier and more straightforward, so I'll begin with that.

Let's start building! The rough outline works like this: create a connection from Earth-space to Mars-space, create a connection from Mars-space to Mars itself, build some initial infrastructures so colonists can survive, and then send them over.  Pretty straightforward, but let's go into some details.

To build a connection between two areas, you need to build a gate on both sides.  Building the gate in Earth-space is easy.  The components are built in the factory on Earth, shipped up through the gate, and then assembled by the starting assembly ship.  Building the other gate will be a bit more fun.  Gates don't work at all unless there's another gate to connect to; instead, you need to use a jump module.  Unfortunately for the player, these are also one shot devices that are pretty expensive component wise.  So, the player starts the factories up, producing both the components for a jump module and a gate.  The module is assembled out in space before activation, but the gate components need to be carried in some sort of ship storage.  The player will need to build ships as well, and can use either the pre-generated storage ship design, or create one of his own.

So, the ships go through with the gate components so another gate can be constructed to connect the two locations.  Building the next gate is easier than the last.  Another gate is queued up in the factory, components are transported up to the station, storage ships take the components from the station, go through the new gate, and unload their storage so the assembly ship can construct the gate.  A similar process exists if the player wants to build a station in the area, which is recommended if the area sees much traffic.  (You can always abandon it later)

Now for the final gate.  For the player, this one is fairly simple.  A more traditional rocket is built that can land on Mars with the gate payload intact.  The rocket is assembled in space and launched towards Mars.  Assuming everything goes right, the gate is set up, connected to space, additional material and crew can be sent to construct a functioning base on Mars.  Finally, the colonists are sent (in ships designed for a large amount of people) and the colony is constructed.

Of course, during all of this, the player has options to increase industrial capacity and infrastructure in order to make things smoother.  For example, the player can choose to have more/larger factories to make construction quicker or set up a mining base in the asteroid belt for cheaper raw materials.  Hope this beginning example is entertaining and helps with learning about the game.

Colonization Part Two

Here's the promised continuation of who I would expect to actually go out and colonize other planets.  Well, wait. I lied. First, I want to show my reasoning for my thinking, and then I'll actually talk about the colonists. Procrastination!

Let's work backwards. The way I've deliberately set the systems up, once you pass through the gate to the stars as a colonist, you're not really coming back.  This means both that you leave anything you can't bring with the keepers at the gate, and that you can't sell much of anything to someone who hasn't entered the gate.  While all this includes family heirlooms you'd want to bring but can't, it also includes money and precludes you from getting loans as there's no possibility for you to pay them off once you've entered.  If you want to enter that gate, you need to pay the gatekeeper his fee, and pay it upfront.

How expensive is the gatekeeper's fee? I'd think pretty expensive.  In this setting, I'd assume that much of the actual fee would be helped by side effects from having the fleet and infrastructure anyway, but it'd still be expensive.  If I had to guess, I'd put it at least one million dollars to start before any side effects, with the price dropping off as research and familiarity with the subject increases.  But I wouldn't be surprised if the cost were higher; the scale of these projects can get away from me sometimes, especially when there's few good analogies in the present day.  I can use cost to orbit, for example (~$10,000/kg) as a reasonable cost, but it'll always have accuracy problems.  Military deployment calculations are also useful, due to similarity at times where one is attempting to get materials and personnel to locations without the proper infrastructure for it, but the lack of good transportation parallels still makes it odd.  Good to read for learning about random things one might not have thought about.

But I digress.  Calling it expensive is enough for this exercise, I think.  I don't plan on using real numbers anyway in the game precisely to avoid these sort of issues.  (Think of X-COM's credits as an example)  It's expensive enough that only rich people will be able to afford a ticket straight up.  Anyone middle class could put in a sizable dent, but certainly not enough.  For most people, they're going to need a sponsor of some sort that can help pay.

Historically, the sponsors for colonies were often rich men looking to profit, viewed it as some variety of charity, or were looking to go there themselves.  Unfortunately for people in this setting, I'd be surprised if there was much funding from those hoping to make a profit, as no goods can be sent home.  I'd imagine some company with too much money might try it as an advertisement stunt (Facebookopolis!) but I wouldn't get my hopes up.  I'd also be surprised if there were many willing to go themselves.  That brand seems more the type to participate in the administration, then settle down on a colony later, rather than becoming an outright colonist.

However, the availability of charity seems quite likely to be a good sponsor.  Especially nowadays, there's no requirement that it be just one sponsor, but that general funds could exist.  Along with charity, they'd have a major advantage in funding over their historical counterparts with the large expansion of the state.  State subsidies for colonists seem likely, and possibly plentiful as states compete with one another.  For the setting, I'd think the interesting point would be less gaining state funding, but intentionally limiting it to make things more interesting.  State colonies that are extensions of their Earth counterparts would work, but would also break a personal rule of the setting that space colonization is seen as a deliberate side show, and dissociated with the governments themselves, leading to the outcome where the costs are borne by the player, but effectively subsidized by the budget from the combination of all nations.

Which leads to the final question: who actually goes?  Historically, it seems that the vast majority did so in order to flee something from the old world.  Well known sources of fear were religious persecution and war, but also more mundane fears like economic hardship.  Along with those who chose to go, some were also sent.  Prisoners and debters were common, along with the occasional man effectively exiled for political reasons.  I'd think that much of these would certainly apply today, dependent on availability of volunteers.  Sending prisoners isn't a very good option if there's already a flood looking to leave, but if you're having troubles finding people to go, giving prisoners the option of going doesn't seem like a bad idea, especially for the less popular destinations.  (I'm assuming that such prisoners would have at least some restrictions based off of their reason for incarceration.  In the long run, it's likely to be quite a bit cheaper)

What does all this mean for the player?  I'm not really sure yet.  It does provide me a lot of room to experiment with to see what works best though.  All that I've said here allows for more information and possible game restrictions for the player player to deal with, but I'd be lying if I didn't think a lot of it was unnecessary and possibly unwanted.  For example, does it matter why the colonists left Earth? It could affect stats or place restrictions on which colonies they could end up in, if I were interested in showing that.  Could be pure fluff, if I don't want to simulate it to such detail too.  Should be fun exploring though, to see which works best, and how far it gets before it becomes just noise.

The People that Colonize

Here, I'm going to talk about the people that would go colonizing, which sci-fi books tell me would be something like an explosion once the key to space has been unlocked.  If only we could develop a warp drive, you'd have people flocking to new planets, spreading humanity across the universe (and perhaps comparing humanity to a disease), or so conventional wisdom goes.

 Personally, I don't really think that's going to happen.  My experience with people has tended to show that most are perfectly willing to live where they are, perhaps moving to follow a job/career in another area.  But; going to a new world isn't some new job that you take up in a different location, it's an act where you create a new life in a new location, something very different than I think most modern people are used to.

Certainly after some time the colony is established enough such that new arrivals are better categorized as immigrants instead of colonists, but there is always that new land around established areas where the wilds are tamed so that civilization can emerge, and so there's that option available. (Do remember that the first areas are chosen for good reason. Get it quick before all the good stuff is taken!)  So, these colonists are the ones I want to talk about.  Not people looking to emigrate to a colony, but the people looking to establish that colony.

Historically when I look at how and why colonies are established and who goes, I'd split them up into three different categories: Extraction, base(port) building, and new home.

Extraction is the type of colony usually set up as the big evil of European imperialism.  This is the sort of colony that attracts colonists looking to get rich usually by extracting some natural resource in the area.  The spices and exotic plants from South America, the gold mines from Mexico and California, or the rubber from Africa were all good examples of these sort of colonies.  What usually made these evil were the usage of non-Europeans to work the areas, either imported or native to the area.  Not necessarily used everywhere, but still is the idea we often associate with colonies when talking about the evils of imperialism.

Ideally, I'd imagine that these wouldn't really occur in SEAC's game lifetime, as I've intentionally cut off the possibility of a profit motive to the homeland.  (More out of pragmatism.  As long as no government or individuals can plunder the stars, then there's no need to fight over who controls access out or worry about who pays for the enormous start-up fees)  I'd certainly guess that once colonies become established that they'd have these sort of towns pop up outside the bounds of civilization, but I'd be surprised if they were all that harmful.  Historically, the California gold rush was a great example of this sort of colonization that didn't result in mass enslavement, but did result in an enlargement of civilization in the US.

Base building is the second type of colonization that I've seen occur frequently.  A state or other major entity seeking to expand its power projection builds bases so that it can satisfy the logistical demands of a larger area.  During the age of European colonization, these bases were typically ports, built to act as way stations or to receive goods to send inland.  For this sort of interstellar empire, you'd have the same function in space stations or in some sort of initial base camp (that's likely to form into a city or town as local government replaces the foreign government).

As far as colonization goes, these bases are characterized by having workers manning the base, paid for by the entity in control of the base, along with a good amount of support positions for the people of the base.  So alongside the administrators and dock workers maintaining the port, you'd have the shopkeepers and cooks (and less savory jobs like whores and swindlers), all maintaining this point of civilization.

These bases are likely to serve as points of extraction for natural resources as well, but only for maintaining the state's interests.  Selling the resources too much puts it more in the Extraction term of colonization.  In normal game play the bases should be expected to provide resources (think asteroid mining), industry, and to expand logistics for the player by acting as mass storage for fuel and other necessities.

Long term colonization of the area depends on how nice the area is and how large it's able to become when the base inevitably becomes obsolete.  I'd imagine that for space stations, the long term population would be a direct function of traffic in the area and usefulness of the station itself, as I don't see much growth from colonists choosing to stay, as the area is expensive and expansion difficult, but the planets nearby are likely targets for these people looking to settle down after their stint in the station.

The last brand of colonization in my categorization is those seeking a new home.  North America (excluding Central America and the Caribbean, to be clear), Australia, and South Africa (mostly. Until the industrial age at least) were popular areas for this brand of colonization.  Unfortunately, I think this post is already quite long enough, and I'll talk more on the subject of what I imagine these colonists would like at a later time.