Population of Sirius

[Unseelie]

Assuming a 2% annual growth rate, and assuming that each sleeper had three thousand people, and that crete's population was decimated by hunger, and adjusting for their landing times, I've gathered that the populations of each house/region would be as follows:

Libertypop = 3000
Rhienlandpop = 3000
Kusaripop = 3000
Bretoniapop = 3000
Cretepop = 800
Maltapop = 1500

Libertypop (1 + .02)^815 = 30,638,100,000
Bretoniapop (1 + .02)^797 = 21,451,500,000
Kusaripop (1 + .02)^811 = 28,304,800,000
Rhienlandpop (1 + .02)^813 = 29,448,300,000
Cretepop (1 + .02)^796 = 5,608,240,000
Maltapop (1 + .02)^766 = 5,805,280,000

That is, in total, 121 billion people, give or take.
Now, of course, you could argue that crete has a population cap lower than 5 billion, or that malta shouldn't grow at that rate. This is just a preliminary guess, and its to illustrate that the infocards are much too low. As well as being ridiculous, because Planet Manhattan (a planet, mind you, all ideas of a messed up scale asside) is described as overpopulated and a planet wide city, with only a few hundred million people? So, four or five Greater Metropolitian NYCs, and there you have the entire land area of Planet Manhattan.

You can argue that war and crime should keep the population down, but I'll suggest that a devastating war kills maybe a few dozen million, which isn't really that large in the face of these populations. A devastating defeat can be the loss of 30% of your entire army, which would be a rather small portion of your population as a whole. Id rather suggest that the 2% growth rate has built in outlets for growth surges, such as wars.

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[Dusty Lens]

Most places seem to rely almost entirely on synth food these days, though there are a few agricultural planets out there which supply some food to entire Houses. Waste is probably incinerated, fired off into a scrap field, or nanomolecularly reprocessed into something else (last is the most likely explanation, in my opinion).

Waste is almost certainly processed at Plasma powerplants, especially given the sophistication of Freelancer modern day engines.

Also something that I wanted to mention in reminder to Uns, as there's no reply to skype there, is that Malta is just as forbidding, if not moreso, than Crete. Though the difficulties pronounced by the land's inhospitable nature is not as pronounced due to their inherit genetic flaws greatly depreciating population growths.

Furthermore, given that Cretian society didn't truly skyrocket until the advent of space flight was achieved via pwning some visiting nubs and the securing of nutritional aid from the Zoners (as is my understanding) it might be appropriate to base their real population growth off of that date.

Not sure how to apply that model to the Outcasts, as their back history is left largely unexplored in that regard. Or at least I don't recall any of it at this moment.

:DI know. The infocards give really wonky populations. 220 million on Manhattan? How many people are on Houston, then? Pittsburgh? New Berlin? The designers obviously made some logical errors. Either that, or it turns out that the scale is actually not messed up as much as we thought, and the population of Manhattan Colossi live in an underground labyrinth which fills the planet. :crazy:

Haha, seriously, doubly so because they also claim it to be an ecumenopolis, but with an absurdly low population. Charming really.

[Unseelie]

I'm willing to totally rework the population projections, working in such thoughts as the restrictions of malta and crete, the possible pro baby colony mindset of the first hundred, two hundred years...

If anyone else wants to participate, discuss growth rates for each planet+station, the amount colonists and migration, etc...

I've not the motivation to do this on my own, but as an ongoing community discussion, I'd love to build the models.

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[jammi]

Just a few points about the scale of planets, if they were intended to be the same relative size as Earth they are seriously wrong. However, considering there is a seemingly omnipotent mindset surrounding the DK, would it be unreasonable to believe they might have 'custom built' the planets of Sirius ready for the SK when they matured and developed?

Basically they might be smaller planets with super dense cores which would give them the same mass as the Earth and thus the same gravity planetside. If humanity was to exist on planets with lower than average gravity, we'd turn into tall beings with muscle wastage problems, while if we were to live on a planet with higher gravity we'd mutate into shorter ogre type things. Seeing as the NPCs still look normal, I assume the planets all have relitivly similar gravity and that gravity is close to Earth's.

As for the population, I agree that the infocards are -wrong- and need a complete rework people-wise. I suppose it's funny that this was exactly the topic that spectacularily derailed the Discovery Writers Chat yesterday.

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[Unseelie]

I'm unwilling to accept an idea of mini planets.
I'm going to say that the scale of systems, stars, and planets are wrong, and that that of stations and ships are correct.

Its like a map, not a perfect representation.

Ergo, assume planets and stars and systems are normal sized.

And if I see this topic pop up -anywhere- I will spectacularly derail the thread/chat/conversation. Its one of my things.

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[Monk]

I would like to point out that if a planet is completely covered by a city that does not necessarily mean that it is all inhabited. There would be many support systems to produce energy, process waste etc. I think it would be plausible to have large tracts of the city that are support based and automated with minimal human interaction.

Also, colonizing new areas is difficult. Just on Earth entire colonies have failed before due to disease or lack of know how for surviving a region. Now just scale that up to interstellar travel. As an initially habitable planet, Manhattan would very likely been occupied by harmful pathogens and other threats that could go undetected due to their being completely and entirely different from anything on Earth. My guess, is that large numbers of humans would have died sometime after planet fall until new methods were discovered or until only those that are somehow genetically immune are all that are left.

Even then massive pop. growth would have been slow at first. Once acclimated to the environment the colonists would then have to go about building a society. This could result in small skirmishes and wars that kill off more people and just takes a lot of work to get going anyway. Once the colonists are able to industrialize on the planet then you would see a pop. explosion. Getting to that point would require all the aforementioned plus trying to figure out how to farm the land (pre-paste) and extract resources from it.

[Elvin]

Not an error. Realize that I am assuming a land area equal to that of Earth (148,940,000 km squared), and a population density equal to that of New York City (10,482/km squared). Actually, you're right, I might be wrong. These are just estimates. It's quite likely that they are much, much higher. Again, remember that the entire planet is covered in one huge city.

@Drake: I'd guess that waste organic material is shipped off to the nearest Synth plant for use there. Any inorgaic waste might be jettisoned into one of the many scrap fields in the New York system.

I know, well then you havent made an error in counting surface/people on it, but according to all info arund about freelancer, Trillion is...well... much more than whole Sirius have, even if we count nomads in.

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[farmerman]

As to Manhattan and being a giant city, I'm still inclined to think it's primarily all suburbs and that the population density isn't as high as major cities in present day for most of the planet. There would be areas of higher density, of course, but there would also need to be significant industrial areas just to maintain power, etc.

On the same line of thought, does it mention the percentage of water covering the surface? Because I don't recall that. In any case, it could be that it's a lot different than Earth and that's affecting our thoughts, right?

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[Rashnok]

Could always take a peek at the texture and do a bit of math with the ratio of water to landmass.

[tansytansey]

You could always do it based on in-game distances. Manhatten has a diameter of about 9k (which, considering the size of a fighter makes sense to mean 9 kilometers).

To work out the surface area we need to use this little formula: 4x3.14xr^2, which for manhatten is 4x3.14x4.5^2
meaning the surface are of Manhatten is 254.34 square kilometeres. Tiny, right?
Now we assume the planet has the same land:water ratio as earth (70% water) meaning 178.038 square kilometers is water and 76.302 square kilometers is land. And that is pretty small, the town I live in is 60 square kilometers and has a population of around 1 million. Then again, its around the same size as Singapore, which has 4.5~ million.
If we use Adamantines' example of population density, we get around 190755 people on planet manhatten, or we can go by the infocards and work backwards, meaning there would be a population density of 2,883,279.599 on Manhatten.
(but keep in mind my math isn't that great. Someone may wanna recheck my calculations).

Considering how built-up Manhatten seems, I wouldn't say that's entirely unfeesable. It's possible we pilots only see the top layer of manhatten where the landing pads, bar and dealers are located, and there are several layers of suburbs and slums lying underneath that.

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