I think that even for Traveller players the sense of scale for the Imperium can be lost.
The land area (oceans deducted) of Imperium + Solomani Confederation worlds is 1.54 trillion square km, 0.096% of Niven's Ringworld. 10342x the land area of Earth. That's only 22-27 persons per square km across the imperium and it will actually feel even more roomy than that given that asteroid/planetoid belts do hold population and have no surface area (in terms of the way I'm summing up the values anyway), and that is only counting aligned worlds.
It's quite difficult to come up with a believably diverse universe of that size. Trading campaigns might never venture beyond the extrality line, which can simplify trying to create so much diversity - even on Earth, most airports are about the same as each other.
One of the things that is harder to explain, or begs explanation at least, is why the Imperium has so many low population worlds. That implies that it's fairly easy to colonize a world, or fairly inexpensive, and there's some incentive for groups of people to pick up and settle on another world and I'm not quite clear what that would be. I imagine the texture of those decisions would be fairly similar to what was described in The Reality Dysfunction (by Peter Hamilton) with the Skibbow family relocating from an archeology on Earth to the newly-colonized, barely habitable and low tech Lalonde. I liked the description of the economic incentive for establishing the colony in that book, but I've never really come across a description of how these worlds pop up in the Imperium.
Another issue is that the Third Imperium is 1116 years old, or there about. With a 3% growth rate, a 300 person colony will hit 1 billion people in 500 years, it implies that either the average imperial world is younger than that or that the growth rate is below 3%, perhaps due to emigration. It might be worthwhile trying to apply a logistical growth model based on the tech level of the world and try to account for immigration and emigration, but from a gut feeling the Imperium is overpopulated with underpopulated worlds.
Are there traveller materials that talk about this kind of thing?
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On January 19, 2018 10:43 AM, Catherine Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
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