Mnemosyne - a picture of Solar System in the 27th century

[MichaelPoole]

I think it's a little weird that the kuiper hegemony has "pirate" raids on mercury, given how relatively far they'd have to travel compared to targets. Also weird that their "corporatist economy" is dependent on piracy in order to thrive, especially with a population of ...30 billion, which I'd expect would require more stability?

also i know we're talking about an speculative economy 600 years from now, filled with weaponized fusion torch spacecraft, but the economics of stealing something as dangerous as antimatter from orbital factories and spacecraft sounds ...off-scale, as if somali pirates or al queda stole nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines on a regular basis.

******
"It lacks the hybrid fusion-antimatter drives of the Mercurian Federation and the exotic nuclear propulsion systems used by the Commonwealth of Jupiter, but it makes up for that by the use of unusual solutions to long standing problems and the ability to miniaturize heavy and power hungry components (as well as its willingness to ignore safety rules). Rumour has it that their latest project is reclaiming the homeworld of humanity, Earth, helping the inhabitants back to their feet and taking vengeance to all that have betrayed Earth. Because of this, other powers have been toying with the idea of imposing a trade embargo on the Hegemony, preventing it from trading with any spacefaring polity, however, this move has been so far prevented by Mercurian’s deep belief in free trade and movement, as well as the fear Hegemony inspires in the rest of the Sol system."

-not that i've ever been to space, but having worked in a few mildly dangerous environments, ignoring safety rules seems like a very unnecessarily deadly and  ***expensive*** quality in a culture.
-given how comparatively easy it is to track and destroy spacecraft in space, and the relatively greater distances between objects in the outer solar system, why would the kuiper belt host a powerful and fear-inspiring culture compared to somewhere closer in-system?

You are assuming humans are rational beings. Mercurian Federation are strict libertarians and the Kuiper Hegemony are socially darwinist fascists. Think less Somali pirates, more Nazi Germany. About ignoring safety rules, I mean in the same relative sense that say, the Soviet or Nazi rocket program ignored safety rules, or how the Apollo program of the 60s was ridiculously unsafe compared to norms NASA requests from SpaceX Dragon 2 capsule now. Their main fighter craft have drive modes explicitly designed for kamikaze attacks, they don't exactly care so much about survival of the pilot.

If it seems a little too edgy, keep in mind it's the first faction I sketched out. Jupiter's moon's inhabitants and Mercurians are a lot more chill.

[Drashner1]

Hrm. To summarize, you requested that we take time out of our lives to review your non-OA setting and provide feedback.

When that feedback consists of raising questions or issues that we see (all of which were presented in a friendly 'trying to be helpful' manner with lots of qualifiers about it being your setting and you can do your own thing and such), your response consists almost entirely of some variant of 'how can you think that!' - essentially taking the position that your ideas are perfect and any issues we have are our problem and it is our responsibility to defend and justify our concerns to you before you feel any need to take them seriously. For added fun and games you do this with a tone and attitude that is rude, dismissive, and borderline insulting.

Do not attempt to post on this project or anything else non-OA related to this forum again.

If you do, I will ban you myself.

Whether or not you post anything about this project to the discord I will leave to Rynn to decide.

This thread is now locked.

Todd

Administrator - Orion's Arm Universe Project

[Drashner1]

Thread closed

[Drashner1]

After some offlist discussion with MichaelPoole that clarified some matters, I have decided to unlock the thread and allow ongoing discussion of his setting or other non-OA settings he may want to work on.

Thanks!

Todd

[Drashner1]

So - since we're discussing this...

The population numbers given in the summary have been bothering me.

It is stated that as of 'now' (call it 2650 AD) the Kuiper Hegemony has a population of 30 billion with another 60 billion living in 'client polities' (not sure what that means in this context).

It is further stated that the KH started from a group of refugees fleeing Earth as a result of an interplanetary war that depopulated Earth. The war is stated to have started in 2601.

It is not currently stated how many people were in the group of initial refugees.

I had stated that the population numbers for this setting seemed high and also asked about the use of birth control since at least in RL more advanced nations tend to have greater use of birth control to allow people to control when they have children. Some nations such as China go further than leaving it to individual choice, but they may be considered an exception rather than the rule. Some European countries are experiencing negative population growth and the US is heading in that direction IIRC. A few decades ago population growth was higher (peaking at 2% in the 60s), but is now declining to the point where this page at least predicts it will take another 200 years for population to double again.

While it is certainly possible that something could happen to make people start breeding faster again, it does not seem sufficient to just say that 'people have kids' and 'population grew fast in the past' as a viable answer to 'why is the population this high?'.

Getting back to the solar system population numbers:

Playing around with this population calculator (which may not be the last word on the subject of course. We'd need to locate and use multiple calculators to determine if they all come to the same answers or how much difference there is), I get the following:

If the Kuiper Hegemony was founded in 2601 (not a given, the war presumably took time and transit to the Kuiper Belt presumably took time, but let's run with it), and it is 'now' 2651 or so, then they've been around for 50 years.

If they started out with 6 billion people (which seems like an extraordinary number of desperate refugees to lift out of Earth's gravity well and fly across the radius of the entire solar system in the aftermath of an apparently devastating war that might have still been ongoing while escape was being attempted) and a 1.2% growth rate they only have 10.8 billion people by 2651. To get to a core population of ~30 billion (I'm ignoring the client states for now since it's not clear where that population came from) they need a growth rate around 3.3% - higher than humans have ever managed before.

If we reduce the starting population or include the wider client state population, then the growth rate has to increase accordingly. At some point we presumably also hit the limits of natural human reproduction (pregnancy takes time, recovery from pregnancy takes time, children growing to breeding age takes time, etc.).

If we include the overall system population (which seems to be around 120 billion in round numbers so far), then the rate of population growth may also need to hit very high levels, although without knowing the starting population at the time of the war this is harder to figure. Emigration from Earth would presumably also be a factor prior to the war and possibly right after, although as currently written it seems that all the refugees from Earth went to the Kuiper Hegemony.

Taking a moment to consider the solar system as a whole - It is stated in the timeline that off-Earth population was 1 million people as of 2153.

Starting from that number and ignoring emigration from Earth we are looking at 498 years for population to grow.

At a growth rate of 1.2% we end up with 380 million people.

To get to approx the population number stated for the solar system we need growth rate of somewhere between 2.37 and 2.28%. Still higher than anything humans have managed historically. Of course, we may presume that prior to the war the space based population was not only growing internally, but was receiving some number of immigrants from Earth, which could increase both the overall population and the population of breeding age at a considerable rate, probably much higher than what straightforward reproduction could manage. Whether that influx would be sufficient to justify the above population growth rate is currently unclear.

Looping back to the KH - it looks like they would either need an extraordinary starting population and the ability to support the start of extraordinary population growth almost from day one or that they more recently began engaging in a dedicated program of even more extraordinary population growth using advanced technology (artificial wombs perhaps?). Such a thing would certainly be notable and would seem to deserve being included in the information about them.

Note also that as described so far (and bearing in mind that much of the solar system has not yet been described), the KH and its 'client states' have a population greater than the entire rest of the solar system combined.

There is also the question of who or what the client states are, where they are located, and where their population is coming from since they are double the core population of the KH.

Some things to think about,

Todd

[MichaelPoole]

Starting from that number and ignoring emigration from Earth we are looking at 498 years for population to grow.

At a growth rate of 1.2% we end up with 380 million people.

To get to approx the population number stated for the solar system we need growth rate of somewhere between 2.37 and 2.28%. Still higher than anything humans have managed historically. Of course, we may presume that prior to the war the space based population was not only growing internally, but was receiving some number of immigrants from Earth, which could increase both the overall population and the population of breeding age at a considerable rate, probably much higher than what straightforward reproduction could manage. Whether that influx would be sufficient to justify the above population growth rate is currently unclear.

Looping back to the KH - it looks like they would either need an extraordinary starting population and the ability to support the start of extraordinary population growth almost from day one or that they more recently began engaging in a dedicated program of even more extraordinary population growth using advanced technology (artificial wombs perhaps?). Such a thing would certainly be notable and would seem to deserve being included in the information about them.

Note also that as described so far (and bearing in mind that much of the solar system has not yet been described), the KH and its 'client states' have a population greater than the entire rest of the solar system combined.

The vast majority of population growth in space in the first centuries was from people moving from Earth beforehand, and the vast majority of KH's subjects are in fact not its original refugee population, but people who are either subjudgated or assimilated. The KH basically decided to lay claim to pretty much every human colony established before. You do raise some good points but:
1. The Kuiper Belt has an incredible amount of space and resources in it and the population was meant to convey that. To be honest, I also inspired myself by the rapid growth of America's population upon colonization - it isn't a given that better living conditions = low birth rate, that might be the case in modern first world societies (which differ quite a lot from the societies I describe, with KH being perhaps the most deviant), but wasn't the case during the settling of the Americas - less overcrowding, more "free" (actually, often stolen but... let's not go into that) land available, less infectious disease led to people having upwards of 8 kids in the North American colonies which was high compared to the overcrowded European cities of the time. A lot of people today don't have kids because the standards have shifted upwards even more than the incomes, and thinking one must be wealthy to raise a child, I don't expect Kuiper Belt inhabitants to be consumerist in any case, let alone with such an ideology.

2. "Still higher than anything humans have managed historically" - not really, many third world countries managed higher than that as you can see here https://ourworldindata.org/world-populat...ts-preview maybe not humanity as a whole but in the 1950s-1960s, growth rates of 3-5 percent, now, consider that a.) KH are fascists who were incredibly pro-natalist historically, b.) A lot of KHs population and other population for that matter are AI/Virtual.

3. Unlike historical highly fecund countries, KH has a very low rate of infant mortality - the population growth rate of really poor countries would be like 10 percent if a lot of those kids didn't die. As for cloning, artificial wombs, frozen embryos... such technologies are implied and used, though I haven't yet described them explicitly but I will do so. I might reduce the population a bit, though I don't know if I will do so because while humans take the time to reproduce, AI and virtuals don't - and in my reversal of typical sci-fi tropes, KH is actually the most pro-AI, pro-virtual faction seeing as it's ruled by an AI (which makes other faction wary of AI)

[Worldtree]

so, all these points about population numbers in this future version of the kuiper belt are nice and all, but

-what are you looking for feedback about on this forum about this story/ world?

-I don't know how much feedback matters here to you but since this is a fictional vision of the future that you've started writing down, As "reviewers/ readers" with a few decades reading stuff like this, two of us, who've given feedback -might- want to read about this world and we say the population seems too high (among other notes), and that if we were to read a story or something in this world our suspension of disbelief wouldn't necessarily hold. It's your setting, but my understanding is that you're looking for feedback about how other people -react to- this setting you've posted in the OA forums.

since this story/ world is still in the basic stages of being sketched out, these details in your responses only matter to us in the sense that they communicate what the world's like, to us, the people who would theoretically read about this world.

you might get more varied responses on the OA personal settings discord?

[Drashner1]

Hm. Ok. Based on the above, my sense is that any feedback anyone provides will simply be dismissed or after-the-fact rationalized away (using information you failed to provide in the first place) such that it ends up that you've created a perfect setting on the first try and don't actually have to listen to anything anyone else might say otherwise or make any changes to your vision.

Further review and commentary would therefore seem superfluous.

Anyway

Todd

[iancampbell]

Just a couple of minor points to start with:

The fusion technology you imply might not actually be the best option, in detail. It's quite possible (and I am neither a nuclear physicist nor an engineer) that one of the better options might be dense plasma focus (DPF) fusion using a proton/B11 mix as reactant. Advantages: much commoner materials as fuel and just about no neutrons, also getting energy out of the reaction products is easier and more efficient because they are all charged. Some more info:

https://lppfusion.com/

Another possible advantage is that it might be possible to tweak the reaction geometry to make this into a fusion drive. Yet another is that the units can probably be made quite small, suitable for something the size of a large truck.

Second, I'm not sure the kamikaze option would be used much, or if it is might be used very differently. Why? Because the best weapon of a fusion torch ship, especially at short range, is its drive exhaust. Remember the Kzinti Lesson!

[MichaelPoole]

Drashner1Hm. Ok. Based on the above, my sense is that any feedback anyone provides will simply be dismissed or after-the-fact rationalized away (using information you failed to provide in the first place) such that it ends up that you've created a perfect setting on the first try and don't actually have to listen to anything anyone else might say otherwise or make any changes to your vision.

Further review and commentary would therefore seem superfluous.

Anyway

Todd

Can you please stop doing this? I'm creating this by myself in my free time, afflicted with depression and one of the first things people do is nitpick every technical detail and threaten me with a ban because of my tone. That's not what I'm used to. OA is a 20 year old collaborative project, this is something created by me and me alone in WordPad, incomparable. Nobody forces anyone to read this, it's everyone's personal choice. Apologies if I sound irritated.

Anyways, I've been thinking to move the big war earlier or revise the timeline in a different way. I want the population to be high, but you're right - the years don't line up. I'd also like to flesh out the factions. You're right that the raids are a recent development, temporary, perhaps I'll remove them and replace them by something else (then again, Mercury is mincapistan). I do want the Hegemony to be a real threat and hated for a reason though, as well as something to underline their parasitic (taking from others rather than making things by themselves) nature. Illicitly making antimatter using stolen technology that they don't really understand fully may be a more sensible choice.

iancampbell
Just a couple of minor points to start with:

The fusion technology you imply might not actually be the best option, in detail. It's quite possible (and I am neither a nuclear physicist nor an engineer) that one of the better options might be dense plasma focus (DPF) fusion using a proton/B11 mix as reactant. Advantages: much commoner materials as fuel and just about no neutrons, also getting energy out of the reaction products is easier and more efficient because they are all charged. Some more info:

https://lppfusion.com/

Another possible advantage is that it might be possible to tweak the reaction geometry to make this into a fusion drive. Yet another is that the units can probably be made quite small, suitable for something the size of a large truck.

Second, I'm not sure the kamikaze option would be used much, or if it is might be used very differently. Why? Because the best weapon of a fusion torch ship, especially at short range, is its drive exhaust. Remember the Kzinti Lesson!

Thank you for your feedback (see, I don't actually think my setting is perfect ). I've read about p/B11 fusion on ProjectRho and IIRC it was less powerful in both specific impulse and thrust but this wasn't DPF fusion so I'll do some reading. The size would definitely be a huge advantage. Can it be adopted for pulse/Orion-like operation too?

As for kamikaze, it's something Kuiperians are infamous for, but it isn't really a strategy used for winning a battle as more of a "if I can't have your vessel, noone can" losing strategy. Where other attackers might ran away, Kuiperians go for the blaze of glory. But they aren't actively suicidal and you're right, at these power levels, short range attack by drive plume would be a good strategy and I should include it.