Rikki Tikki Traveller said:
An Agricultural world was supposed to be a breadbasket for a good part of the subsector. Decrease the population and you don't get that productivity, increase it and you loose the ariable land to farm.
Isn't that assuming that people are actually going out and doing the work though rather than it being automated?
Hm, though that does raise another point, which is that if your world is habitable, then somehow that means you're crippled technologically - look at the TL chart and you'll see that you get no TL bonuses for the environment, and the only TL DMs you have are from your starport or your population. The highest possible tech that an Ag world can have is going to be if it was something like A786759-x , which gives it Tech DM of 6 (starport) +1 (gov)... so it could have a maximum tech of 13. Give it a B port and it has a max TL of 11, and a C gives it a max TL of 9. A starport of D or E would give it a max TL of 7, and an X irrationally means it's stuck in the middle ages at TL 2 because of that -4 DM. Knock those TLs down by 1 if it doesn't have gov 5.
So if it has an A or B starport one could assume that it's also sufficiently advanced in agricultural tech, genetic modification of crops etc to produce really high yield crops in as little space as possible. And you can massively increase the automation involved too. Heck, you can even start building O'Neill space stations that are basically just massive kilometre long greenhouses if you really want at those TLs - then space or even environment doesn't become an issue.
If it had a C, D, or E starport then it's pretty much like Earth. And if it had no starport then for some reason people are stuck using oxen and ploughs. I think RTT's arguments about space and people would apply at those TLs, but not at the higher ones.
An Industrial world was the industrial powerhouse for a good part of the sub-sector. Sure industrialization can occur at lower populations, Rich worlds probably have a high degree of industrialization as well, but to be a True Industrial WORLD, you have to have billions of people dedicated to making things. That volume of industrialization, even with fusion power, is going to do bad things to the air. Polution is not just about power generation but chemical polutants as well, some of which we can't even think of right now. If you allow lower populations to have the In code, you dilute the purpose of the world-spanning military-industrial complex that was the original idea.
But if you're Industrial then by implication you are technological too, and if you're technological then you an automate production. You really don't need billions of people to have factories that make things - on an individual level most of our nation-states on Earth have tens or hundreds of millions of people and yet they have factories that produce lots of stuff.
This is partly why these trade classifications are so silly. As I mentioned earlier, a world doesn't just suddenly become Industrial. If the goal, right from the outset of colonisation, is that the world is to become one huge industrial park dedicated to the production of high-tech gear then it should be classed as "Industrial" from the moment that the first factories become operational, regardless of its population at the time. After all, that's what the trade code means - that it's basically a net exporter of industrial goods.
There is a reason that ATM 3 (Very Thin) was NOT included in the In code. It isn't tainted.
It's not breathable either, so why should anyone care about polluting it?
Regarding the Fl (Fluid) code, consider it from this point of view. It is important as a trade code because it indicates that there is NO WATER, which means no fuel and no air. Methane and Ammonia might be fine for making fuel, but you can't make air (Oxygen) out of it. So a Fl code, no water, means something.
Air's never been an issue in the game though. You can refuel from gas giants after all, and they don't have oxygen in their atmospheres - they just have hydrogen and helium - and nobody's ever said that the inability to extract oxygen from a gas giant is a limitation. The Fl code can certainly affect trade (very slightly, as demonstrated earlier), but you can get fuel out of pretty much any surface liquid (water, methane, ammonia, even battery acid all contain lots of H2).
