T5 Only: Liquid and Hell worlds with High Populations

[ShawnDriscoll]

You're generating worlds for your subsector, when you end up with a Liquid or Hell world that has a population of a trillion on it. The chances of this occurring using real dice are very slim. But when it happens, what explanation/plot/hook do you give such a world at that moment?

 

[egor045]

You're generating worlds for your subsector, when you end up with a Liquid or Hell world that has a population of a trillion on it. The chances of this occurring using real dice are very slim. But when it happens, what explanation/plot/hook do you give such a world at that moment?

This is why I stick with 2D6-2 for population rolls

Must the inhabitants be human? Paul Elliott touched on this in his Universal World Profile book and suggests that they could be aliens well suited to the environment. Another alternative is they're humans, but they live in huge orbital colonies (O'Neill cylinders or a more modern equivalent). You'd need a high tech level for that. Of course you now have to figure out why the system has gigantic orbital colonies ...

If you're prepared to go with some out there woo-woo science, perhaps the world was the site of a (makes up a woo-woo science term on the spot) quantum coagulation event and now there are hundreds or thousands or millions of copies of everyone on the planet. Infrastructure is overloaded, there's a desperate relief effort under way consuming the food resources of three subsectors.

 

[mike wightman]

They don't live on the world, they live in orbital colonies and visit to extract handwavium.

They are augmented to survive the conditions - mechanical, biological, genetic or a combination

They were originally synthetics built to survive, but long ago won their freedom - or perhaps they didn't and the true masters lie beneath the waves (of lava)

They all live in habitats constructed to withstand the condiditions.

They are alien - it isn't a hell world to them.

 

[GrayPennell]

You reroll. You are not stuck with a setting until you share it with players.

 

[Blue Ghost]

You're generating worlds for your subsector, when you end up with a Liquid or Hell world that has a population of a trillion on it. The chances of this occurring using real dice are very slim. But when it happens, what explanation/plot/hook do you give such a world at that moment?

WhIpsnade argued that the rules needed to be fixed to address this kind of thing. His example was a TL0 or TL1 civ living on a vacuum world.

My counter was that maybe the ref says that the world got stripped of its atmosphere, or some other cataclysm happened. And there's a remote possibility that there's a vast underworld cave network that was conducive to evolution; water, warmth, light of some kind and so forth.

But you can only have so many of those extreme examples, and it seems unlikely that there would be more than one such TL1 or TL0 civ on a vacuum world through extraordinary circumstances.

Ergo my response is I think you can do it one time with an extraordinary explanation, but if you keep generating the same kind of odd-duck worlds, then maybe the rules (or worlds) need tweaking.

Personally, I can't see a civ in its right mind putting a colony on a Venus or Mercury like world. It's just a dumb idea. A research station, maybe.

 

[GrayPennell]

WhIpsnade argued that the rules needed to be fixed to address this kind of thing. His example was a TL0 or TL1 civ living on a vacuum world.

Ergo my response is I think you can do it one time with an extraordinary explanation, but if you keep generating the same kind of odd-duck worlds, then maybe the rules (or worlds) need tweaking.

Personally, I can't see a civ in its right mind putting a colony on a Venus or Mercury like world. It's just a dumb idea. A research station, maybe.

I think a gas world could have a "cloud city" refinery or two but your talking pops in the tens of thousands.

 

[Timerover51]

You're generating worlds for your subsector, when you end up with a Liquid or Hell world that has a population of a trillion on it. The chances of this occurring using real dice are very slim. But when it happens, what explanation/plot/hook do you give such a world at that moment?

By "Liquid" world, do you mean a "Water" world with the liquid being water and a hydrographic percentage of 100, or do you mean a world with liquid oceans of something besides water? If something besides water, then I start changing things, and also I do not allow for populations exceeding the billions.

As for the "Hell" world, I have house-ruled population die modifiers for atmospheric types and low hydrographic percentages. Once I get to atmosphere 9 "Dense Tainted", they start getting pretty large, like in the minus 6 range. If I decide I really need a world in that location, I either re-roll, or impose the characteristics that I want.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I think a gas world could have a "cloud city" refinery or two but your talking pops in the tens of thousands.

Yeah, good point. I think in the real world there's some proposal to float balloon habitats over Venus. I think that's way too dangerous for us, but I can see something like that in the 3I, or even before or after the period of the Third Imperium.

 

[kilemall]

1 Trillion 10 kg Ice Weasels.

 

[JimMarn]

None of my worlds have a trillion people on it yet.

I know that mining colonies, or prisons, abound in sf for Mercury. There is a twilight zone around the poles that would allow for this since Mercury isn't exactly tidally locked. It does rotate on its axis. Down in some deep craters there could be habitats.

There could be large schools of fish, and the oribiting habitats are there to deal with the fish catches, feeding the sub-sector. Or they could be selectively caught and fixed up as gourmet fish catches.

A place like Venus, there are a number of sf stories about orbiting and cloud cities for Venus. Some send ships down to the surface, and some look for materials in the clouds. Or they are there for long term terraforming by seeding the clouds with floating fungi to convert the atmosphere.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

None of my worlds have a trillion people on it yet.

It's pretty rare.

 

[AsenRG]

You're generating worlds for your subsector, when you end up with a Liquid or Hell world that has a population of a trillion on it. The chances of this occurring using real dice are very slim. But when it happens, what explanation/plot/hook do you give such a world at that moment?

Huge underwater stations.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

The red-named worlds here have populations over a trillion.

 

[kilemall]

Hmmm, perhaps on worlds with weak magnetosphere and therefore atmosphere protection, living beneath the waves provides radiation shielding.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I'm gonna do a Mongoose version of the worldgen to see how often the trillions comes up. I think that number was an option in the rules though.

ADDED:
A trillion barely shows up in Mongoose worldgens. As in never.

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

I would've expected greater clustering among the garden worlds.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I would've expected greater clustering among the garden worlds.

There is a huge cluster around garden worlds. But in this chart, I filtered it out so the garden worlds aren't buried.