On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 02:36:33PM -0700, Craig Berry wrote:
> If they keep up this pace constantly, they circle back around to
> K'Kree and Hiver space in around 50 millennia. Maybe the scouts get
> there a few thousand years earlier.

That seems a reasonable pace.  My guess would be that most of the
ihatei fleets are likely to come from the fringe between core and
frontier, where it is clear that opportunities for land are low and
yet the distances to new worlds are not too great.  By the time the
Aslan zone is even just two thousand parsecs across, very few in the
center seem likely to raise a fleet on the prospect of having to
travel ten years to the frontier before doing anything.

A single year seems much more palatable and likely to succeed.  That
would put the "fringe" on the order of 100-200 parsecs across, and it
probably takes on the order of a couple hundred years to build a newly
settled world into a "core" world.  So the rate of expansion could
indeed be on the order of a parsec per year.

This depends critically on the tolerance for longer-term expeditions.
My assumption that few would join a ten-year expedition is hugely
dependent on cultural factors that may not apply to their cultures.
Even a tiny proportion of long-range expeditions from within the
settled zone can massively change the results, due simply to the
vastly greater population in there.  If even 0.001% of the population
were willing to embark on a colony ship to the frontier from the core,
the timescale to settle the galaxy would probably be reduced tenfold.

Even that reduced timescale is still at least five thousand years.

> The galaxy sure is big...

Yes, it sure is -- even with Traveller's FTL drives.

- Tim