How people run their games is entirely up to them, if Colin wants to have his colonies using draft horses as power that is his choice as ref. :lol:
Without intending to upset anyone here who is environmentally active much of the save the environment campaign and current solutions are short term patches which in the long term are actually worse.
I’ll start with food.
You need the colony to feed itself not ship thousands of tons of food there. Allowing for the soil being able to support terrestrial crops you have hydroponic bays and field planting. Hydroponics are man power intensive but require little in the way of machines, field production is manpower light but machine intensive.
Probably the first thing put in would be the hydroponics as fast grow food stuffs can be up and running in a few months. Gene modified field crops can be up and harvestable in 6 months with good soil and fertilisers. The hydroponics bays have a small foot print but require much more care and monitoring, the fields take up vastly more room but a single person can look after many acres.
On a new colony where you need to feed everyone which food path you follow depends on the colony. If you have a lot of spare people and a lack of space then hydroponics. With less people but lots of space then fields are the way forward.
I don’t see the average colony lacking space or having lots of spare people so I suspect fields are going to be the most common.
The Horse drawn colony is going to have access to GM seed stock and may have a limited supply of fertilizer shipped in but without chemical/oil production on site is not going to be able to afford to ship large amounts of plant food. They will need to support and maintain the horses against disease, illness, injury, predators etc. Horse drawn ploughs will work the land, horse drawn harvesters will cut the crop, horse drawn machines or large numbers of people will gather the crop for processing.
The oil powered colony will have a multi use tractor much like a JCB with buckets, ploughs, cranes etc. This tractor can pull a plough, pull a harvester, collect the crop and tow it around in trailers. One person can plough hundreds of acres a day or harvest the same area. Larger fields, access to much higher volumes of fertilisers since the world has a developing petro chemical industrial base.
If you want your colony feeding itself fast you can use hydroponics and lots of people and horse drawn farm equipment or you can produce five to ten times the yield with tractors. Modern farm yields are vastly higher than Victorian and its not just because of better science and fertilizers.
Fuel and power
Colin mentioned Bio fuels. Not intending to upset or insult anyone but Bio fuels are about as stupid a solution to environmental problems as windmills. Here on 21st century earth they are much less viable, end up with a higher environmental impact and seem to have single handed driven up the world food index and increased hunger in the third world and you need to burn more of it since it has a lower energy density.
On a colony struggling to produce its own food why on earth (or any other planet) would it sacrifice growing capacity for bio fuels. Rapeseed produces five times the yield of corn or wheat so to get a decent bio fuel yield you are giving up a lot of food production. Consider also that with horse drawn farms your production and the area you can farm is much lower than with tractors, how much of that are you going to sacrifice for bio fuel.
Solar, tidal etc can produce electricity if you have a steady source of it to power the base structures but to be mobile you need to store and use it. By the 2300s batteries are likely to be far more effective but what does it take to make them. With a 3d printer/fabricator or even a skilled person with a good set of tools parts can be made to keep ICEs running for years and even to make new ones. On a starting colony with limited production capacity how many new electric drives and high capacity batteries can they make (also bear in mid limited plastics and chemicals due to no oil explotation)
If you only means of moving stuff is horse drawn you are looking at rural Victorian life. 20 miles away from the core colony becomes a day’s travel, everything needs to be close by because you cannot ship goods long distances. If the colony wants local wood or minerals it needs to be set up next to them. With horse drawn wagons having the good metals 100 miles away is a huge logistics problem, being able to mine large volumes of metals helps with rapid colony expansion. When it takes a week for a horse drawn cart to carry food out to the mine and bring the ore back that is a lot of people power and horse power tied up just to bring a few tons of ore to the colony. When a tractor can make the trip out and back in a day with a full load of ore your colony grows much faster.
Also when something goes wrong and you need a replacement part that has shut down production at the mine waiting a week for the next horse drawn cart means no production for a week or more, having the replacement part made and delivered the next day means a loss of two days production.
Colony expansion.
To expand the colony you need to feed it, provide it with power and shelter. The shelter bit requires materials for construction which must be local. You cannot ship in prefabs and corrugated sheeting past the initial creation point so you need to find, harvest, refine and use local materials.
Early colonies are going to be wood if the world has trees, it is the most versatile building material.
Now your colony should be using petrol powered chain saws (or maybe electric battery ones) to cut down the trees. Moving the trees to the place where it is being prepared is next, a horse can drap a good ton or two of tree, more if you have wagons or are using wheels and axels. The tractor on the other hand can drag a lot more wood and do so faster. Cutting the trees into boards could be done in the field or back at the colony, solar could power this or a generator so this will be about as efficient at either colony. Then you need to get the cut wood to the building site.
Again you are looking at multiple horses and wagons or a single tractor. One tractor/trailer should be able to carry enough cut timber for a basic building in one go, that’s one person driving. Half a dozen horse drawn wagons with horses and drivers take longer to move the same volume of good. Your construction team can be on site waiting for the timber to be delivered and put up the frame over a day of two then move on while the less physical work of cladding, fitting etc is done by another team. This presumes the materials are at hand.
If your wood is coming from further away than say 10 miles then its more than a day’s round trip by horse so you need to either double the number of horse drawn carts with more drivers or you slow down production of the buildings.
Now non wood building materials. Where are you getting the insulations, the plastics, even the nails from? It’s not going to be flown in apart from the set up runs, you need to source it locally.
Insulation could be compressed wheat stalks or grass rather than plastic fibres but you need to allow for the lower levels of corn/wheat crop yields with horse drawn tech, the material used for building is not being used for bio fuels and is not being burnt for power or used as natural fertilizer for the next crop.
What about metals, nails for the wood, hinges for the doors, cables, bars, bracings and reinforcement, replacing the tools being broken building the houses. Log cabins are acceptable for homes and buildings for an early colony but the sooner you can start building larger and more versatile buildings the faster your colony becomes self sustaining. Plentiful metals and plastics to go with the wood make building much easier, speaking for myself I like having windows even if they are locally made plastic rather than crystal clear glass.
You can build a colony with horse drawn power; the grand children of the founders may have a nice colony one day. Or you can build one using every technology available and the founders can sit on their porches in the evening watching their children growing up in a viable small town.
I’ll stop here because this is getting to be a long post.
