How Advanced is the Spinward Marches?

[robject]

The Spinward Marches is a Frontier

That's a loaded question, to which there is no correct answer.

There are years listed for some worlds. Mora, Regina, others. There are maps for claims to ownership with years attached. And there are disputes about the written years -- routes may have existed sooner than the dates we have. So we know in part, and we speak forth in part, but the perfect is not here.

The tendency is to push the domestication of the Spinward Marches back, to the founding of the Imperium if possible. And there are ancient colonies here, and there are ancient routes -- there's no reason to ignore that. But...

IMTU

My preference is to make the Marches a true frontier.

This forces me to look at "development" as meaning world development. Colonization started early, but is only beginning its course. I think very few worlds can be considered mature... I think it takes 1 billion people to consider it explored and mature. Rhylanor, Aramis, Roup, Glisten, Mora, Lunion, Strouden, Vilis, Jewell. Gram and Darrian. Arden. And a few others I'm forgetting.

The Marches has been surveyed, claimed, and fought over, but not explored.

The smallest colonies are temporary, transient single-purpose, or brand-new populations. Their worlds are largely mysteries.

The middle-population colonies are struggling to grow, and have been in survival mode since their founding. They are desperate, under-represented, and at the mercy of nobility, Imperial armed forces, interstellar corporations, and mature worlds.

The largest colonies only recently bloomed, and were struggling in survival-mode until around year 1,000. Consider that no planetary government is preserved intact for 1,000 years, no matter how many people live there. Consider that these worlds may each have hosted tens or hundreds of bloody revolutions since they were founded.

I tend to make the howling error of thinking of worlds as unitary entities where everything and everyone pulls in the same direction. Maybe when I'm handed a list of 500 UWPs my brain checks out.

1,000 years isn't enough time to "develop" the Spinward Marches.

/IMTU

 

[mike wightman]

IMTU the marches are also a true frontier. The high population worlds are a result of the IMTU way the Imperium populates a subsector - establish a major colony world and put your surplus core world population there (Forboldn project?).

High TL worlds are a way for the megacorps and Imperium to provide the goods and services the worlds of the region crave - so the odd hig TL/high pop worlds are the long established Imperial worlds.

Add a couple of minor races to the mix to boost some populations and you can definitely have a younger Marches.

 

[far-trader]

That's a loaded question, to which there is no correct answer.

True. For discussion then

1,000 years isn't enough time to "develop" the Spinward Marches.

No? How about primitive colonists (~TL3 compared to the minimum ~TL9 for the March colonists) settling a T-prime type world going from that ~TL3 and Pop3 to ~TL9 and Pop8 in ~200 years?

Seems to me a TL9 colonization effort could do as well or better in considerably less time. Unless they were restricted to STL travel, which in Traveller they aren't.

I think if you want frontiers and unexplored areas in the OTU, and a reasonable handwave of widely varying TL and Pop of worlds, you have to do as some have suggested and collapse the history by a factor of 10. So instead of 11,000 years of history you have 1,100 years. Of which Terrans have been involved in for only about 240 years instead of 2,400 years.

That makes the Marches a still relatively fresh area with about 150 years of history instead of 1,500 years. And the Sword World colonies are only about 140 years old instead of 1,400 years.

The First Frontier War was only about 60 years ago instead of 600 years ago. And the Imperial Civil War that followed only ended about 40 years ago instead of 400 years ago.

There are still ships around that participated in both. The events are still in the living memory of many people, possibly even the rare player character. Some might even have participated in the later Frontier Wars and/or the Solomani Rim War.

How much more exciting and vital does that setting sound?

 

[robject]

How about primitive colonists settling a T-prime type world going from that ~TL3 and Pop3 to ~TL9 and Pop8 in ~200 years?

So you're in the same boat I'm in: you have to explain why every mainworld in the Marches doesn't have billions of people.

Of course, you can also counter-argue that the rest of the Imperium is the same way, and then force me to admit that the problem is endemic with every world in the Traveller Universe.

And the Sword World colonies are only about 140 years old instead of 1,400 years.

So in actuality, everyone's in the same boat I'm in: how can the Swordies be 1,400 years old and yet do not have populations in the tens of billions. And the same goes with the rest of the Traveller Universe.


I think the explanation has to be something like exponential growth, coupled with regular, devastating collapse into barbarism, on a world-by-world basis.

 

[robject]

So, it took 1,000 years for the Marches to get where they are now. Now if there are still relatively empty worlds, then what does that say about the Marches?

Put another way: which Imperial worlds are truly "mature"? It depends on what you want, naturally, so there's no correct answer.

If I want a frontier, then I'll attempt to say that a mature world needs a population of 9 or A. That's about 23 worlds, located to significantly manage two to four Imperial subsectors out of 10 (and a half). The rest are in various states of ... well, not lawlessness, but call them solidly frontier.

Expand that to include population 8 worlds, and there are 41 candidates... enough to exert reasonable strength over 5 of the Marches' Imperial subsectors... leaving half in sort of an uncertain state... again, call it a frontier.

I need to build a map...

 

[Whipsnade]

The tendency is to push the domestication of the Spinward Marches back, to the founding of the Imperium if possible. And there are ancient colonies here, and there are ancient routes -- there's no reason to ignore that. But...

IMTU

My preference is to make the Marches a true frontier.

Robject,

We can have both the canonical dates and the Marches remaining a frontier. We can have Mora settled in ~60 IE and Regina joining the Imperium nearly five centuries before Earth and there still be unexplored worlds scattered about. We don't need to change canon, all we need do is look at things in a different perspective.

This forces me to look at "development" as meaning world development.

And that's one of the differing perspectives we'll use.

Fred Ramen, Rob Davenport, and I had a lengthy conversation regarding this several years back. It began on the TML, moved to private e-mails, and even took place during the two (in)famous TML Realspace meetings. Fred eventually came up with the title Sector, Interrupted to describe what we hashed out.

Everything comes into focus when you remember some canonical stories and facts:

- The Third Imperium is in the Marches as part of a political deal with the Vilani over admission of Vland to the empire. Cleon went to Vland hat in hand asking what it would take for the Vilani to join. He knew if any pretense of the Third Imperium being the heir of the two prior Imperiums was to be maintained, the Vilani and Vland had to be part of the new empire. The Vilani requirements for admission were relatively simple, but they included one point that settled the future of the Marches decades before anyone from the Imperium set foot there. The Vilani requirements in question concerned the Zhodani.

- During the Long Night the Vilani met the Zhodani and did not like what they saw. The Zhodani scared the bejabbers out of the Vilani and, given Vland's history with the Solomani and Vargr, it's not hard to imagine why. When the Third Imperium asked what the price of Vland's admission, the answer included the following pledge:

The Third Imperium's border with the Zhodani Consulate will be as far as spinward as possible from Vland

That isn't something we invented for our explanation. It's stated quite baldly in T4's "Mileau 0". So, from the very beginning of it's existence, the Third Imperium wasn't in the Marches for exploration and colonization. In the First Century, the Third Imperium is only in the Marches to identify, seize, build, and man a series of defensive border positions that were mandated by a political deal. Stretching an analogy here, the Marches were originally nothing but Vland's version of Hadrian's Wall.

- Next consider how much exploration and colonization the Third Imperium has actually undertaken within it's own borders. With the possible exception of the Marches, the Third Imperium didn't expand into anything resembling virgin territory. The Ziru Sirka and Rule of Man had been previously active for millennia in the same territories the Third Imperium was now expanding into. The Long Night had populations contracting to those worlds that could support them, abandoning outlying systems, and turning inward. This meant that the Third Imperium merely absorbed pre-exisiting populations and polities in the territories it annexed and actual large scale colonization wasn't required. It also meant that the colonies the Third Imperium would find it necessary to place would those needed for military purposes. Sound familiar?

- Settling garrisons and supplying them is one thing, planting colonies and supporting them until they're self-sufficient is another. The interstellar economics of the setting means, the Forboldn project aside, that moving large numbers of people and the large amounts of goods they require large distances is essentially impossible. A system in going to be colonized primarily by people and assets within it's subsector, possibly by people and assets within it's sector, and very rarely by people and assets beyond it's sector. This means the colonization and settlement of the Marches will be primarily an internal affair.

- Just how much monetary help can the Imperium give the Marches in that effort? Dumping money into the sector will only result in inflation. Show up with a trillion credits earmarked for colonization supplies and, if you don't take great care, all you're going to do in cause lots more money to chase the same amount of goods. The Imperium already spends locally to support it's garrisons and that spending already distorts local economies. Dumping in chunks of colonization funds will further skew the economies the Imperium depends on for military supply.

- Whether it's a question of money or people, the Marches' neighbors are of little help either. Sector next door, Deneb, is busy developing itself. Deneb is also mostly populated by the descendants of people who fled the First, Second, and Third Imperiums, so how much help will they offer and how much will the Third Imperium trust them? Corridor is little more than a garrison town keeping an eye on the local Vargr and those across the border. The nearest economic powerhouse, the region which might be able to supply the poeple, money, and goods a big colonization push would require, is Vland and all Vilani want the Marches to be is a sufficiently distant border. Colonization of and development in the Marches is primarily a bootstrap affair and the Marches' bootstraps aren't exactly big.

- The five Frontier Wars have had a deleterious effect on the Marches too. In the first two war, Imperial garrisons and the populations associated with them were conquered and evicted from Foreven and Ziafrplians sectors. While the number of people evicted were relatively small, the effect it had on a barely settled Marches should have been huge. The opinions and beliefs of the people in this first refugee wave must have colored the Marches for generations. After the initial wave, refugees most likely trickled back into the Marches for decades afterward with each group further poisoning Marches' society. The third war saw more Imperial garrisons and settlements removed from the Querion subsector and other areas, kicking off another refugee wave. Even worse, the third war was primarily an economic one. The Outworld Coalition didn't smash Imperial battlefleets, they raided and undertook deep strikes instead savaging the economic support systems of the Imperial fleets they avoided fighting. What little internal economic progress the Marches had been able to develop since the last wars was carefully smashed by the Outworld Coalition to such an effect that the Imperium was forced to withdraw from territory amounting to nearly two subsectors.

- Summing this all up, GDW aptly named the Spinward Marches. The sector is a true "march"; a distant, thinly settled, region with scattered garrisons between two powers more prized for the armed border it represents than the economic potential it may possess. The Spinward Marches can only rely on itself for development, it's master has another role in mind for it and it's neighbors have their own problems. The Marches' role as an armed camp means the economies of it's worlds are skewed and that those worlds have been devastated by enemy action. Most importantly, and finally returning to Robject's questions, the Marches' garrison nature means that it's territory has been patrolled rather than explored.

As with many of the seemingly odd aspects of Our Olde Game, the quandaries surrounding the undeveloped nature of the 1000-year-old Spinward Marches can be plausibly explained when you shift your perspective.


Regards,
Bill

 

[rancke]

It's really not a problem to explain why a world that has been settled for 14 centuries doesn't have a population in the billions. It just came out that way. As Jim MacLean points out every once in a while, for all we know from Real Life, the trouble may be for high-tech societies to keep up their populations.

When I work out the history of a world, I usually let its population grow by a few percent per year until it reaches what I think of as the optimum population. This is the maximum population the world can comfortably sustain without crowding and straining of resources and infrastructure. For a world of size 1 the figure is, depending on habitability class:

Class

Impossible            0.0
Hostile                 0.0
Unfriendly             0.0
Neutral                0.5 million
Friendly               5.0 million
Hospitable           50.0 million

Sometimes a world is very close to being a different class. It may, for instance, fulfill every criterion for being Hospitable, except that the Surface Water percentage is 41% instead of 45%. Or a world may classify as Hospitable, but the Surface Water percentage is 45% and the gravity is 0.81 G. In such a case you can decide to use a figure in between the two given in the table.

Multiply by size of the world squared to get the figure for larger worlds.

Multiply by land percentage (100 - Surface water percentage) to get the final figure.

To account for individual idiosyncrasies of the world, modify the final figure by (2D-7)*5%.

Once the population figure exceeds the optimum, I change growth rates to a few percent per century.

The real problem, to me, is to explain apparently sovereign low-population worlds. It's not that I don't believe in micro-nations (Living in the same continent as Monaco and San Marino as I do ). It's that I believe each and every world with a population that low require a separate and singular explanation. And I run out of singular explanations after a while...

(Note that I'm not talking about outposts. Outposts have logistical support and protection from a mother world).


Hans

 

[samuelvss]

Populations, absent external and internal deletrious effects do not necessarily go. In some modern or arguably "post-modern" societies fertility is below the replacement rate for cultural reasons. Couple this with plagues, nuclear wars, famines, economic collapses, and "growth only" is a poor assumption. We are not "colonizing" our empty spaces; we are filling and growing our cities. Most of the empty spaces are empty for a reason. Why are we not moving people from Mumbai to North Dakota? Well, the reasons could go on and on -economic, social, moral- and many are not "good" reasons, but they are very real.

 

[Icosahedron]

Face it, Traveller world generation rules have been broken since Day 1.

5 billion people on a TL3 asteroid, 15 people on a utopia and an average of 2D6-2 (100 million) overall throughout the Imperium...

And the OTU, based on broken rules, is similarly broken. Accept it or houserule it - you're not going to explain it.

As a previous poster stated, RL gives us proof that an Earth-like planet can progress in isolation and with no prior tech knowledge from pop6 to pop9 in a few hundred years, even from a TL3 base level.

I agree with Hans that a good houserule would be to make optimal population dependent on the size of the world, with modifiers to reduce that depending on local environment. All planets should reach their optimal populations within a couple of centuries or so - exponential growth is fast. Ask any germ.

You can fix it, but arguing that broke ain't broke seems pretty pointless to me.

 

[robject]

Robject,

We can have both the canonical dates and the Marches remaining a frontier. We can have Mora settled in ~60 IE and Regina joining the Imperium nearly five centuries before Earth and there still be unexplored worlds scattered about. We don't need to change change, all we need do is look at things in a different perspective.

[...] the trouble may be for high-tech societies to keep up their populations.

When I work out the history of a world, I usually let its population grow by a few percent per year until it reaches what I think of as the optimum population. This is the maximum population the world can comfortably sustain without crowding and straining of resources and infrastructure. [...]

[...] We are not "colonizing" our empty spaces; we are filling and growing our cities. [...]

Alright then, that all helps. Thank you.

 

[Spinward Scout]

As a previous poster stated, RL gives us proof that an Earth-like planet can progress in isolation and with no prior tech knowledge from pop6 to pop9 in a few hundred years, even from a TL3 base level.

There were rumors of prior tech, tho. Atlantis. Plato heard of flying machines long before the Wright Brothers ever left the ground at Kitty Hawk. I don't think the world was at pop6 after WWII (I could be wrong) - but the population didn't explode until there was a more standardized level of subsistence. It was food cultivation and standardized food distribution that did it.

 

[Peter Schutze]

>Everything comes into focus when you remember some canonical stories and facts:

Brilliant. Im surprised that isnt in the sector books eg GT: Spinward Marches although I'd prefer it a bit toned down on the garrison worlds aspect

 

[Icosahedron]

There were rumors of prior tech, tho. Atlantis. Plato heard of flying machines long before the Wright Brothers ever left the ground at Kitty Hawk. I don't think the world was at pop6 after WWII (I could be wrong) - but the population didn't explode until there was a more standardized level of subsistence. It was food cultivation and standardized food distribution that did it.

Legends don't provide a tech base. There are legends and rumours of UFOs and ETs with FTL drives, but they won't help us reach the stars without blueprints or recovered artifacts.

FYI:

WORLD POPULATION (Wikipedia)

1000 BC 50,000,000   (Pop 7)
500 BC 	100,000,000   (Pop 8)
1 	200,000,000
1000 	310,000,000	
1750 	791,000,000
1800 	978,000,000
1850 	1,262,000,000   (Pop 9)
1900 	1,650,000,000
1950 	2,518,629,000
1970 	3,692,492,000
1990 	5,263,593,000
2008 	6,706,993,000

FMI:
Ok, so population explosion isn't as rapid as I thought, until TL5. But my statement stands for any population of TL5+, and that's without any outside help - or knowledge.

 

[Spinward Scout]

Legends don't provide a tech base. There are legends and rumours of UFOs and ETs with FTL drives, but they won't help us reach the stars without blueprints or recovered artifacts.

True, but just like Star Trek, when you see some guy talking on a communicator to somebody else across the world, you want one for yourself - which is why we now have cell phones. Life imitating Art and that kind of thing. If you think it could be real - it could become real if it's possible. If you SEE a UFO move as if inertialess*, doesn't your mind start to go: 'Hey, how did they do that?' and if you are scientific, you might even build one. Without blueprints. I can't remember if it was Einstein or Newton that said he only suceeded by standing on the shoulders of giants.

EDIT: * no, I have never seen one.

 

[robject]

WORLD POPULATION (Wikipedia)

1000 BC 50,000,000   (Pop 7)
500 BC 	100,000,000   (Pop 8)
1 	200,000,000
1000 	310,000,000	
1750 	791,000,000
1800 	978,000,000
1850 	1,262,000,000   (Pop 9)
1900 	1,650,000,000
1950 	2,518,629,000
1970 	3,692,492,000
1990 	5,263,593,000
2008 	6,706,993,000

FMI:
Ok, so population explosion isn't as rapid as I thought, until TL5. But my statement stands for any population of TL5+, and that's without any outside help - or knowledge.

Quite so. I had heard that we had a pop digit of 6, not 8, ca. Year Zero, but no biggie. Looks like population growth is on the order of 1,000 years per pop digit -- an exponential function, but still a really slow one.

I could tie population growth to tech level, but I bet that equation would be too fiddly, and unnecessary.

So. Assuming worlds are all in different phases of a 1,000 year growth cycle, the inventory of pop9+ worlds in the Marches could go something like this:

Year Pop9+
100: 6
200: 8
300: 9
400: 11
500: 13
600: 14
700: 16
800: 18
900: 19
1000: 21
1100: 23

 

[Jeffr0]

Legends don't provide a tech base. There are legends and rumours of UFOs and ETs with FTL drives, but they won't help us reach the stars without blueprints or recovered artifacts.

FYI:

WORLD POPULATION (Wikipedia)

1000 BC 50,000,000   (Pop 7)
500 BC 	100,000,000   (Pop 8)
1 	200,000,000
1000 	310,000,000	
1750 	791,000,000
1800 	978,000,000
1850 	1,262,000,000   (Pop 9)
1900 	1,650,000,000
1950 	2,518,629,000
1970 	3,692,492,000
1990 	5,263,593,000
2008 	6,706,993,000

FMI:
Ok, so population explosion isn't as rapid as I thought, until TL5. But my statement stands for any population of TL5+, and that's without any outside help - or knowledge.

What about the "brain drain" effect. Wouldn't the best and brightest leave their homeworlds to go work for the Imperium? Maybe we should be looking at the population growth in third world countries that suffer from this....

 

[robject]

What about the "brain drain" effect. Wouldn't the best and brightest leave their homeworlds to go work for the Imperium? Maybe we should be looking at the population growth in third world countries that suffer from this....

No data. Maybe we can assume "no effect", in two different ways:

(1) it appears that less than 100 per billion population become travellers.

(2) assume some % make it to the capital of their world, and some % of those make it to the subsector capital, and twiddle those numbers appropriately.

 

[Peter Schutze]

>I can't remember if it was Einstein or Newton that said he only suceeded by standing on the shoulders of giants.

if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants

>If you think it could be real - it could become real if it's possible.

half the trouble with tech is knowing something is possible .... the other half is the material science / capacity

i doubt a culture that thinks the sky/stars is a crystal the world turns within would think of trying to travel to one of those lights

pre-renaissance era mankind theoretically had all the tech for various things like railways but not the materials capacity for more them to be than an emperor's novelty

 

[Icosahedron]

Looks like population growth is on the order of 1,000 years per pop digit -- an exponential function, but still a really slow one.

I could tie population growth to tech level, but I bet that equation would be too fiddly, and unnecessary.

No, Rob, there are several problems with that assumption:

1. You're taking into account the whole time period from 1000BC to present, but nothing much happened from 1000BC to AD1000. Eg. if you look at the time scale to rise from 1bn to 10bn, it's more like 200 yrs per pop code (1850 to 2050).

2. You need to take TL into account because it's a (the) driver for population expansion - this is why no significant change took place from 1000BC to AD1000. The big 3 technological drivers were the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution and Mass Production. We haven't seen the results of the Digital Revolution yet...
Population growth in a technological race isn't a smooth curve, but a series of step changes - the technological steps may follow an exponential curve, but that's another matter.

3. The above figures are for a population in isolation with no outside influences. A few shiploads of fusion generators, grav vehicles, nanotech, precision machine tools, computers, instruction holochips, etc, would slash even that 200 yrs.

IMO to get the right figure for your diaspora, you need to account for the effective TL of the population - including imported knowledge and equipment. It might take quite some time (maybe a millennium or more) to drag a population up from TL1 Pop1 to TL5 pop5, even with outside help, but you could get from there to TL9 pop9 in just a few generations. With no restrictions, a human population can easily double, possibly triple, every (say 25 yr) generation - that will make a tenfold increase possible in about 50 yrs. There are only 3 restrictions - Resources, Technology and Culture.

The shoulders of giants was Newton's quote.

 

[robject]

1. You're taking into account the whole time period from 1000BC to present, but nothing much happened from 1000BC to AD1000. [...]

2. You need to take TL into account because it's a (the) driver for population expansion - [...]

3. The above figures are for a population in isolation with no outside influences. [...]

I don't disagree on any particular point.

Let me reiterate: My Spinward Marches is a frontier. I'm getting pictures of its population growth. I'm not interested in creating canonical, accurate tables of how any population will grow.

First, we implicitly assume interstellar influence and interference.

Second, I'm borrowing Marc's assumption that pop 1-5 worlds can change their population levels year to year. A concerted effort can start or finish a colony in those size ranges.

Third, the Marches more or less has the same population distribution as the rest of Known Space. This indicates to me that Far Trader, Icosahedron and Hans may be onto something, here: planets have an optimum population level (Hans) that is reached fairly quickly (i.e. <1100 years) (Far Trader & Icosahedron).