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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