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Archives for June, 2011
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Economics of New Colonies
I often play in Jim Wallman's hard SF games set in the universe he's created. I've been thinking about how new colonies get set up and the sort of funding they need. There is a lot of infrastructure required to build a viable colony on a new system. Firstly you need to survey it to find a good spot with a reasonable confluence of resources, mining sites, farming space, fresh water, building land and a suitable area for your drop zone and spaceport. Once you've done that some cheap housing, utilities, early resource processing plants and factories for essentials have to be built. Once you get to that point you might just start exporting valuable things, although you'll still need to import lots of essentials, not to mention more people. I reckon that it is a minimum of two years…
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Collaboration
For some people collaboration is a dirty word, with connotations from those who collaborated with the nazis in WW2. Not for me though, I think that it makes for a generally better outcome than trying to do everything oneself. However it does have its downsides. You often need to compromise, other people may have more time than you and drive things faster than you'd like, and perhaps not in the direction you'd choose. That said, good collaboration gives you more than you could have achieved on your own. Where has this sudden enthusiasm for collaboration come from I hear you think. Well its not a sudden enthusiasm, but a timely articulation. My OU course (B301 Making Sense of Strategy) has just entered the collaborative block. Do for the next four weeks or so we need to work as a group…