(07-12-2018, 03:24 PM)Sciamach Wrote: Considering Rheinland has a considerable divide between rich and poor with a lot of people in the latter category (source: NB infocard), it's not a safe assumption that resources such as these are widely available to everyone.
.. It's a lamp. Hardly an amazing technology a thousand years of technological development from now.
Have you been to NB? The interiors are dark and grim.
So at some point, someone didn't provide the whole population with simulated outdoor spaces, and that became the norm at the capital. But that's a social choice, so its a choice about resource distribution made by people in power...
That's what we see from the things there, and that's in line with the descriptions of the planets. Cold, grim places, and population stresses in the early years.
(07-12-2018, 03:24 PM)Sciamach Wrote: Considering Rheinland has a considerable divide between rich and poor with a lot of people in the latter category (source: NB infocard), it's not a safe assumption that resources such as these are widely available to everyone.
.. It's a lamp. Hardly an amazing technology a thousand years of technological development from now.
Have you been to NB? The interiors are dark and grim.
So at some point, someone didn't provide the whole population with simulated outdoor spaces, and that became the norm at the capital. But that's a social choice, so its a choice about resource distribution made by people in power...
That's what we see from the things there, and that's in line with the descriptions of the planets. Cold, grim places, and population stresses in the early years.
Myeah, I'll give you that. It's all an art style choice anyway, just like the Freelancer population numbers are. Freelancer is a 90's based retro-futuristic science-fantasy story. Reasoning science and numbers into it goes beyond style and gameplay and ultimately makes no sense. Better to focus on societal and political complexities, I guess.
Honestly, I kind of think that it would've been better if Freelancer's population numbers had deliberately been kept vague.
How do you keep population numbers vague and still support lore about how industrialized the whole planet of Leeds are, the population density of the tower-cities of NT, the fact that Manhattan is supposed to be an ecunopolois? All of that leads me to lean toward large numbers. How vague do you want to leave that number? we could say "many" or "Few" or "sparsely populated"...but arguments like this aside (which I consider a feature, not a bug) I can't see what that would give us that the number do not, while numbers in the tens of billions are...pretty vague, honestly, given the scale of the number.
However, you're right about this being an art style choice, from the very lowest levels up. This is an imaginary world, and that leaves a lot of freedom up to us, the people who are imagining it. I think, to some degree, we ought have an idea of what those numbers are, and how they got to be that way, and where they're going, what sort of social and economic pressures they're causing, just for purposes of having a better fleshed out world to roleplay in, and furthermore, because that sort of information is very helpful to informing and developing stories, and the motivations of our characters.
I'm more or less okay with the population numbers that exist for planets right now. I think they're based on reasonable growth rates, which, as we've argued this way and that, you can niggle up or down and still be very reasonable. However, I think we could do with doubling, or tripling, the actuall number of people in Sirius, simply because the stations have populations in the hundreds and low thousands, which...Is that the world we're portraying?
I think, given the level of space based industry, the development of battleships and fleets at the level we see in vanilla, and project for our future, given, simply, the number of windows on larger ships, and that on stations, we could easily argue that there is headroom for many, many more persons on a station than 1000.
(07-12-2018, 04:56 PM)Unseelie Wrote: How do you keep population numbers vague and still support lore about how industrialized the whole planet of Leeds are, the population density of the tower-cities of NT, the fact that Manhattan is supposed to be an ecunopolois? All of that leads me to lean toward large numbers. How vague do you want to leave that number? we could say "many" or "Few" or "sparsely populated"...but arguments like this aside (which I consider a feature, not a bug) I can't see what that would give us that the number do not, while numbers in the tens of billions are...pretty vague, honestly, given the scale of the number.
However, you're right about this being an art style choice, from the very lowest levels up. This is an imaginary world, and that leaves a lot of freedom up to us, the people who are imagining it. I think, to some degree, we ought have an idea of what those numbers are, and how they got to be that way, and where they're going, what sort of social and economic pressures they're causing, just for purposes of having a better fleshed out world to roleplay in, and furthermore, because that sort of information is very helpful to informing and developing stories, and the motivations of our characters.[/quote]
I think the depiction of density is more important than the definition of it. This being a game we're talking about, visual and verbal queues tell us more than pure numbers. In the case of Leeds that translates to seeing the completely built over planet and that's enough to understand what kind of figures we're talking about. Does knowing whether it's 10, 20 or 30 billion people living on Leeds really make any kind of difference, given that these kinds of numbers are too big for human minds to comprehend anyway? Heck, it could say 5 billion in the description or it could be 200 billion, and it wouldn't change how we experience Leeds.
Meanwhile, for other planets it's more than sufficient for NPC's to express that they prefer Denver's quiet countryside over Manhattan's bustling metropolis. In terms of what we experience as realistic or believable, it's a lot more about visible contrast between different planets than it is about any individual planets' stat count. The fascination with Leeds comes, I believe, from it being so noticeably distinct from every other planet in Sirius, not from having a higher stat count in its description. It's a strong point of reference, just like, on the other end of the scale, planet Baden Baden and planet Junyo instinctively tell us there's not much going on there in terms of population, even before we open its description.
Knowing exactly how many people live on those planets doesn't do anything for me. All I really need to know to get a sense of what they're about is whether it's more, less, a lot more, or a lot less than other planets, and I strongly prefer visual queues and NPC's speech fragments to deliver that information over anything else. That's what makes a fictional planets come alive more than numbers ever could.
(07-12-2018, 04:56 PM)Unseelie Wrote: I'm more or less okay with the population numbers that exist for planets right now. I think they're based on reasonable growth rates, which, as we've argued this way and that, you can niggle up or down and still be very reasonable. However, I think we could do with doubling, or tripling, the actuall number of people in Sirius, simply because the stations have populations in the hundreds and low thousands, which...Is that the world we're portraying?
I think, given the level of space based industry, the development of battleships and fleets at the level we see in vanilla, and project for our future, given, simply, the number of windows on larger ships, and that on stations, we could easily argue that there is headroom for many, many more persons on a station than 1000.
Yeah, I do agree with that. After what I said before, I also have to say that the funny thing with our brains is that while numbers in the hundreds of millions and billions are too big for us to make any kind of sense of and are easy to get away with, numbers in the hundreds are something we can easily imagine, which makes us more prone to question them when it comes to scale. However, when it comes to space stations, I think we can easily think of their 'population' numbers as referring to the permanent crew, excluding everyone who's just passing through for a short while, as those numbers could potentially fluctuate strongly along the year or even years.