If you were the Governor ...

[rust]

From the setting, getting to Pandora is no walk in the park - the nearest majorly populated systems are 25 parsecs away - 50 days travel in the setting...

Ah, actually it is the other way, the systems are between 41 and 50 par-
sec away, and with a hyperdrive that makes 2 parsec per day it takes a
starship approximately 21 to 25 days to reach Pandora from there. :wink:

In this region of the setting the transport of cargo costs about 1,000 Cre-
dits per dton and week, so the transport of a dton of ore worth 5,000 Cr.
to the nearest industry that can make any use of it costs 3,000 Cr., which
leaves 2,000 Cr. per dton as the colony's profit.
This means that the colony has to sell 1.5 dtons of ore just to pay for the
transport costs of 1 dton of supplies from the nearest industrial planet to
Pandora (again 3,000 Cr.), and with the average price of those supplies
at about 10,000 Cr. per dton it has to sell another 5 dtons of ore to pay
for the supplies themselves - in the end the colony sells 6.5 dtons of ore
to get 1 dton of supplies.

A normal starship passage costs about 1,500 Credits per week, so any
passenger willing to visit Pandora has to pay at least 9,000 Cr. for a re-
turn ticket. This is doubtless a lot of money, and the number of people
able and willing to spend it will not be high. Most visitors will be on a
kind of business mission, the number of tourists will remain rather low
for quite a while.
The colonists themselves will have to travel, too, on diplomatic missions
as well as for example to get some medical treatment not available on
Pandora, to attend a specialist school for some urgently needed skills,
and so on. With a 9,000 Cr. return ticket the equivalent of 4.5 dtons of
ore mined, transported and sold, the colony will be a bit reluctant to pay
for non essential voyages.

So this leads to the question - what was the original motivations and/or imperatives that led to colonization in the first place?

Mostly the wish to get away from an overcrowded, overregulated environ-
ment and to make a new beginning in an environment where there are
no tracks to be followed and each single individual is important, I think.

The Solar Alliance supports colonization, both to get rid of potential trou-
blemakers and to increase its influence over the Free Colonies (the more
former Alliance citizens there, the better ...), so this is where the colony
shares used by the colonists to buy their equipment, travel to Pandora
and invest in the colony come from: Solar Alliance subsidies.

These subsidies are also a nice incentive to relocate to a colony, for the
less wealthy citizens of the Alliance it is the biggest sum of money they
can ever get in a legal way during their entire life.
And if one decides to take this offer and move to a colony, it has advan-
tages to do it early on, while the colony is still established, because this
is when one has the best chance to get "a nice peace of the cake" as well
as to influence the future of the entire colony - as one among 550 on a
young colony the chances are much better than as one among 10 million
on an already established one.

 

[rust]

However, a lot depends on how hard SF you're running things. Chances are that the biology of Pandora and the biology of Terra are different enough that cross predation is impossible (from a nutrition point of view - something with too many teeth may still eat you).

I have decided to use a partially compatible biochemistry: The higher up
in the food chain, the less nutrition to be gained from eating it, because
the basic nutrients (sugars, etc.) produced by the primitive organisms
are used differently in the more complex ones, and the more complex it
becomes, the less compatible it becomes.

This means that Terran fish can eat the plankton of Pandora, although they
have to eat more of it, while humans cannot derive much nutrition from
the higher developed species of Pandora. The local predators also do
not get many nutrients out of the Terran species, but unfortunately they
are not aware of this and try to eat them anyway.

Pandora may find some equivalent lack of expected resources (trace minerals might be a good one. Might be a local lack of something important like Potassium).

Of course, a technic colony isn't going to fall for the same traps as an 18thC one did - they know what minerals are important and will test for them. But finding that out and searching for a solution can be a good plot point.

Thank you for a nice plot idea.

One thing I just thought of, rust - is Pandora the first water world colonised in the setting? If so, there are likely to be a bunch of untested theories about how it is going to go that may not be right.

Pandora is not the first water world that is colonised, but it is one of very
few such worlds, and all the others of this kind are very far away and ha-
ve been settled a long time ago.

For example, the Pandorans had to buy the more specialized equipment
from a firm more than 200 parsec away from Pandora, and will now have
to produce as much of it as possible themselves as soon as possible to
avoid the problem of imports that take more than 3 months to order and
another more than 3 months to deliver, with terribly high transport costs
added into such a deal.

So, the Pandorans can build upon some previous experience of others,
but the sources of this experience are difficult to use because of the dis-
tances involved, and what was true on Planet X may well turn out to be
completely wrong on Pandora - in the end the Pandorans are very much
on their own.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

You know Rust that once you have sorted out the chief details of the setting, you should submit it to 'Signs & Portents' (I hear they pay too)... but include a map!!!

You probably want to do so only once your players are settled in enough that all the article information was already known to them (or certainly easily discoverable). That needn't be that far ahead, if they have decent scanners and a bit of gumption.

 

[rust]

You know Rust that once you have sorted out the chief details of the setting ...

Ah, this will take some time. I am currently at 26 pages of setting descrip-
tion, including a couple of maps, and as far as I can see this setting will
get to my usual ca. 50 pages before a campaign could be started.

Besides, I will of course not make any adventure plots, creature stats and
thelike available before the characters have experienced them during the
campaign, because surprise is the main element of an exploration scena-
rio.

So, do not hold your breath ... :wink:

 

[rinku]

I didn't see it anywhere (probably on one of the other threads), but I take it that in this setting truly habitable planets are more realistically scarce than in normal Traveller? That would answer BP's question about "why Pandora?" if so.

Australia was about a year away by sailing ship when settled. The whys of it had a bit to do with dumping convicts, somewhat to do with having lost the American colonies, and a fair bit to do with keeping it out of French hands. Sheep and boundless mineral wealth came later

Re publishing: Bah! If it doesn't use any copyrighted Taveller material, distill the play sessions into a novel and make some money!

 

[rust]

I didn't see it anywhere (probably on one of the other threads), but I take it that in this setting truly habitable planets are more realistically scarce than in normal Traveller?

Indeed, there are only ca. 170 inhabited planets within ca. 200 parsec
of Terra, and not all of them are really habitable planets, so compared
with the Third Imperium setting planets that can be colonized with the
available technology and at a reasonable cost are scarce.

I think the main difference is that the Third Imperium includes quite a
number of inhabited planets which the humans of my setting would not
have chosen for a colony (e.g. corrosive atmosphere, too high or too
low surface gravity, too cold or too hot climate, etc.), because their in-
terstellar civilization is still quite young (2439 AD) and they can still pick
and choose where to settle.

Re publishing: Bah! If it doesn't use any copyrighted Taveller material, distill the play sessions into a novel and make some money!

:lol:

 

[BP]

Ah, actually it is the other way, the systems are between 41 and 50 par-
sec away, and with a hyperdrive that makes 2 parsec per day it takes a
starship approximately 21 to 25 days to reach Pandora from there. :wink:

Right numbers, wrong places :wink:

Sounds like the result is the same - Pandora is unlikely to attract commerce (more costly and time consuming for merchants and a lack of funds) or tourism, unless they have something highly unique to offer...

...
Mostly the wish to get away from an overcrowded, overregulated environ-
ment and to make a new beginning in an environment where there are
no tracks to be followed and each single individual is important, I think.

The Solar Alliance supports colonization, both to get rid of potential trou-
blemakers and to increase its influence over the Free Colonies (the more
former Alliance citizens there, the better ...), so this is where the colony
shares used by the colonists to buy their equipment, travel to Pandora
and invest in the colony come from: Solar Alliance subsidies. ...

So there would be some merit in encouraging immigration, though the colony would probably not be able to afford the costs and the Alliance subsidies would be less likely to cover this enough to make it profitable (unless the colony was to take on prisoners - which are more likely sent to some closer prison planets at lower cost). Plus general immigration would probably put quite a strain on a new colony resources and management wise (talent and law enforcement).

Given such an environment, a 'recruitment' and 'funding' tour could be undertaken - to visit 'overcrowded and overregulated' systems and entice individuals of talent and wealth (young entrepreneurs and socialites keen on adventure...). But from a campaign planning standpoint - that would mean a lot more work...

 

[rust]

Given such an environment, a 'recruitment' and 'funding' tour could be undertaken - to visit 'overcrowded and overregulated' systems and entice individuals of talent and wealth (young entrepreneurs and socialites keen on adventure...).

It would make for an interesting adventure or two, with the characters
either involved in the recruitment effort or confronted with its unwelco-
me results (imagine "Paris Hilton" as one of the new colonists ...), but
I think this scenario would come rather late in the campaign, after the
colonists have established their colony, have "learned the ropes" of the
new environment and have some spare money to finance a recruitment
campaign.

 

[Lord High Munchkin]

... imagine "Paris Hilton" as one of the new colonists ...

Is she still about?

She is sooo last decade!!!

 

[Ishmael]

What about desalination plants?
They would have to upgraded to gain more and more capacity as the size of the colony grew.
Where do you put the byproducts ( concentrated seawater/salty sludge)? Discharging it back into the sea would cause ecological problems at the point of discharge as well as down-current, I'd think.
Perhaps the byproduct could be treated and compressed to form pellets which could be sold as raw material for export as it would contain salts as well as dissolved minerals and metals which off-planet industries might like and have the equipment to extract. Or even as a luxury item in the form of exotic sea salt...who knows how it might be marketed in ad campaigns?

Sewage is another problem.
http://www.youthcanworld.org/PN/dumpingsewage.html

The important thing is that sewage treatment and desalination of seawater must have the capacity to supply services, not only to the citizens, but to industries as well.

What about localized changes in temperature of seawater due to industrial processes? It'd have an effect of changing the environment and thus food chains of local life forms. Extra kelp clogging filters?

just ideas....

 

[rust]

just ideas....

Good ideas, thank you very much.

While the colony is still small, its impact on the local environment should
be minimal. It rains a lot on a warm water world, so desalination is not
the only source of fresh water, and advanced biotechnology can be used
to treat the sewage. However, as the colony grows, there will doubtless
be problems. I hope that the characters will then be in positions which
will make it their responsibility to come up with solutions.

In my view the most serious problems during the early phase of the co-
lony project are likely to be caused by the seafloor mining, which will in-
troduce a lot of dirt into the water. This dirt can cover and thereby kill
organisms living on the sea floor, and it can also spread and muddy the
water enough to reduce the amount of sunlight available for photosyn-
thesis, endangering the aquafarming that needs the native plankton to
feed the fish.

 

[justacaveman]

A lot of nutrients are in the mud on the sea floor. Stirring up the mud can release these nutrients into the surrounding water, and cause an unnatural bloom in microorganism growth etc..

 

[rust]

A lot of nutrients are in the mud on the sea floor. Stirring up the mud can release these nutrients into the surrounding water, and cause an unnatural bloom in microorganism growth etc..

Yes, it is a rather complex situation. While the natural silt from the sea
floor can act as a (mostly unwanted) fertilizer, the dirt from the actual
mining can prevent the microorganisms from receiving enough sunlight
to use that fertilizer, and the entire situation can tip over in both direc-
tions, an "algae bloom" as well as a local extinction event.

Which gives me some nice options for interesting background events ...

 

[rinku]

One thing in default Traveller that encourages settlement of marginal worlds is the limits of Jump drive. In a setting where you *can* just head out on a 20 parsec trip, marginal systems will tend to stay undeveloped unless they have some rare resource.

Viable biospheres might indeed be a rarer resource than anything else.

Re desalinization: a lot depends on power source. If you're using normal Traveller hydrogen fusion, you'll not have any real issues unless the colony is undersupplied with fusion plants. Even then, you'll likely have off-peak times when the colony can distill their water. Would not suggest they use rainwater until a full analysis has been conducted for bugs and toxins.

 

[Ishmael]

Re desalinization: a lot depends on power source. If you're using normal Traveller hydrogen fusion, you'll not have any real issues unless the colony is undersupplied with fusion plants. Even then, you'll likely have off-peak times when the colony can distill their water.........

I'm not sure the typical Trav fusion plants would be best due to thermal management issues. I doubt they are super highly efficient and at the power levels postulated, even 80% would generate lots of waste heat to be dumped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_pollution

How about generators turned by the currents like underwater 'wind' farms.
Or using ocean currents and a form of MHD generator with sea water as the working fluid?

 

[Dave Chase]

Ah, stirring up the ocean (sea) floor and deep mining.

Well, what if they dig up something that has been extinct for 1,000 of years (or many generations)?

Like the movie's

The Thing
Temors (all four)


Something else that I took for a given but many might not know.
The deeper you get into the ocean (under water) the more you lose the various colors that the human eye normally can see.
The water filters out the various wave lengths of visual light.

Also, what if by stirring up the bottom it cause some of these wave lengths to be blocked sooner (or at a different depth than is normal.) The ocean life could react poorly to this

OR

The ocean life could react strongly and aggressively to this maybe even transforming into something worse.

Dave Chase

 

[rinku]

I'm not sure the typical Trav fusion plants would be best due to thermal management issues. I doubt they are super highly efficient and at the power levels postulated, even 80% would generate lots of waste heat to be dumped.

Nah, standard Traveller fusion plants are magic boxes that input hydrogen and output power (presumably there's some waste helium somewhere in the cycle...).

However, since rust seems to be running a harder SF campaign here, your points are totally valid, though disposing of waste heat on a water world is probably not going to be terribly difficult, I'd have thought.

 

[rust]

Thank you all for your ideas.

As for the colony's power plant, the initial plant will be a Fusion A plant
which supplies the entire original settlement with energy. The next step
will likely be the use of wave energy and solar energy for the growing
settlement, while the fusion power plant will provide the energy for the
colony's also growing industry. Later on a major power plant that uses
an ocean current to produce energy could well be one of the colony's
development projects, but probably only after a second settlement has
been founded - the first one will be far from any strong currents, becau-
se they would be a problem for the aquafarming.

 

[Silvereye]

Apologies for the long post and any mistakes in the quoting, but I hope it's useful.

I have decided to use a partially compatible biochemistry: The higher up
in the food chain, the less nutrition to be gained from eating it, because
the basic nutrients (sugars, etc.) produced by the primitive organisms
are used differently in the more complex ones, and the more complex it
becomes, the less compatible it becomes.

This means that Terran fish can eat the plankton of Pandora, although they
have to eat more of it, while humans cannot derive much nutrition from
the higher developed species of Pandora. The local predators also do
not get many nutrients out of the Terran species, but unfortunately they
are not aware of this and try to eat them anyway.

Pandora may find some equivalent lack of expected resources (trace minerals might be a good one. Might be a local lack of something important like Potassium).

I like the alien native incompatibility you are using, its certainly better then reversing protien chirality which means they would be totally incompatible. The trace minerals are a good explanation for it. However,
I came across an interesting study about dolphins recently. They activly target certain species of prey fish because of their oil content, despite more plentify but nutituionally poorer species being available and easier to hunt. I'll try and find you a link.

Of course, a technic colony isn't going to fall for the same traps as an 18thC one did - they know what minerals are important and will test for them. But finding that out and searching for a solution can be a good plot point.

Thank you for a nice plot idea.

One thing I just thought of, rust - is Pandora the first water world colonised in the setting? If so, there are likely to be a bunch of untested theories about how it is going to go that may not be right.

Pandora is not the first water world that is colonised, but it is one of very
few such worlds, and all the others of this kind are very far away and ha-
ve been settled a long time ago.

For example, the Pandorans had to buy the more specialized equipment
from a firm more than 200 parsec away from Pandora, and will now have
to produce as much of it as possible themselves as soon as possible to
avoid the problem of imports that take more than 3 months to order and
another more than 3 months to deliver, with terribly high transport costs
added into such a deal.

So, the Pandorans can build upon some previous experience of others,
but the sources of this experience are difficult to use because of the dis-
tances involved, and what was true on Planet X may well turn out to be
completely wrong on Pandora - in the end the Pandorans are very much
on their own.

Take a look for St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha for similar re-supply issues in the real world.

What about desalination plants? <Snip>

Sewage is another problem. <Snip>

At the higher TL and with such a low population sewage is not going to be a problem as the dilution when outfalled into the sea/ocean is going to be negligible. Besides, the colony will likely have seperated the waste streams to liquid and solids at source and treat them both seperately (much easier then the combined Victorian legecy we still have). The nutrient rich products of the treatment will likely be greatefully received by nearby farmers. It will be much the same with desalination at this population level.

The important thing is that sewage treatment and desalination of seawater must have the capacity to supply services, not only to the citizens, but to industries as well.

This is the important bit. Once you start processing for industry which may quickly need 100 - 500 times the colonies fresh water supply per day or discharges 100 - 500 times the colonies organic output, then problems will start to happen over time.

Its mainly sedentary filter feeding organisms (e.g. mussels - a bivalve mollusc) you really have to worry about clogging intakes/outfalls especially if you're heating the water with a coolant stream (from a fusion reactor) or outfalling organic waste. If done properly, they may make for a good way to make a water treatment system though. Algae normally builds up in nutrient enriched water sources, take a look for a species called Entermorpha (green filament) - usually a very good indicator of areas with nutrient enrichment.

A lot of nutrients are in the mud on the sea floor. Stirring up the mud can release these nutrients into the surrounding water, and cause an unnatural bloom in microorganism growth etc..

Whilst this (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-10740097) is caused by the mass run off of fertilizer, local geography (the Baltic takes years to flush water through) and an ancient form of life (cyanobacteria) it can happen naturally, as justacavemen said you are also get an anoxic dead-zone when it all finally dies. Other blooms include diatoms - red tides (deadly poisons) and that enteromorpha seaweed (china before the olympics last year and this year, france last year) which releases hydrogen sulphide gas when it decays. There is also a massive dead zone that forms annually in the gulf near the mouth of the Mississipi because of every thing america dumps into the river each day.

How about generators turned by the currents like underwater 'wind' farms.
Or using ocean currents and a form of MHD generator with sea water as the working fluid?

There is a test-bed for this technology in Strangford Lough (Ireland) by Seagen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaGen). However they need strong tidal currents to get any meaningful output and their location (salt water) means they are a pain to maintain. You would be better with fusion if the reactor is cheap enough. Rust probably could have got away with powering his colony with a few land based wind turbines (if there is land) and solar pannels with batteries provided it they were sited correclty and designed for the wind. Wind turbines/batteries will probably be better for the outpost areas while they are small. Wave energy is a better option over tidal as the ocean's swell would provide power for them (e.g. Pelamis).

Something else that I took for a given but many might not know.
The deeper you get into the ocean (under water) the more you lose the various colors that the human eye normally can see.
The water filters out the various wave lengths of visual light.

Also, what if by stirring up the bottom it cause some of these wave lengths to be blocked sooner (or at a different depth than is normal.) The ocean life could react poorly to this

This is a good point, blue light pentrates deepest into the water (the longer the wavelength the shorter the penetration). The bioluminesence is an example of how animals have evolved to get around this as they have evolved to not bea bale to see red or green light. In particular, take a look at soem fo the adaptions of dragonfish.

Strong tides will stir up the sea bed lifting a significant amount of sediment in the shallows. Also river mouths (esturies and deltas) are good places for masses of sediment. Mining in these areas will not likely be of any consequence as the tide or river will shift more sediment then the miner. Which might be a problem for the miner as his hole gets filled in. Deep-water mining will put sediment into the water, which while detrimental to organisms in the vicinity might be beneficial to those on the fringes of the operation as nutients are returned to the water when the sea bed is disturbed.

Hmmm ... "The Pandora Institute of Science and Technology" would sound sufficiently grand, although the abbreviation PIST could perhaps lead to some misunderstandings ... :?

Bet the students and faculty "drink like fishes".

It's a useful part of any good Marine Biologist training. It's not like there is much else to do on an evening on a field trip to somewhere remote.

Oh that kind of gives me another idea for you Rust - What would a gang of bored kids do in the colony (read the Aliens novel by Allen Dean Foster - explains how Newt was hiding where she was, and why she was called Newt)?

Some other suggestions for what to do with your players.

Biological cataloging of the planet - to find valuable species, or to find a good native foodstock?
Geological cataloging of the planet - to find valuable minerals?
Set up remote research stations out and about on the planet for remote data survey.
A scientist/prospector has failed to contact the colony as scheduled, find out what has happened to him.
The farmers out in x region keep coming down with purple spotty-bits, find out whats causing it.
Some of the kids have an awsome new native pet (first part of a lifecycle with an apex predator that sees small humans as part of it's diet).
Stellar storm knocks out a satellite or two/ electrical storm interfearing with communications, you need to get the medical staff out to the pregnant colonist/badly injured prospector in a remote location in this storm.
Dave's Thing From The Deep (attracted by the vibrations of mining operations?)
A distress beacon is detected from deep in the ocean by a colomnist (A crashed spacecraft from pre-colonisation).

Some complications Vs Environment:
"Algal Bloom" sprung out of no-where and threatening to poison the aqua farms.
A large/school/pod of organisms are migrating through the area as part of their lifecycle and is eating everything in sight.
A large organism is acting strangely about your mini-sub. (fight, eat or mate with)

 

[rinku]

The Abyss is another film that would be good for underwater stuff, or if you want to move into alien territory.

(One of my favorite ever screen moments is when they have to cut a wire, but because of the green glow-light they can't tell the colours apart)