[PvK]

Originally posted by oleg:
Well, single drone weights 15 000 tons. Obviously the ship capable to carry, service and launch such a device should be able to carry few people instead. Or look at small troop transport. It carries enough troops to conquier whole planet

I don't take the masses entirely literally, if I did, and I did my math right, I would see the smallest drone is 100 kT = 100,000 TONS. I think this is probably ridiculous for a minimum ship or drone mass, so I consider kT an abstract unit subject to imaginitive interpretation.

I will grant that a drone is very large, and yes you could pack in some civilians and supplies and stuff for them in the same space, maybe, although when you start talking about hundreds of thousands of them, for months, I think you would need major life support systems etc, which would not be present by default on a cargo ship.

Besides, why are we talking about 2m tall, 70 kg weighting aliens ? Last time I saw UFO crew on TV (in "Taken" I think) were very punny.

Well, if I were designing the game system, this might be something you could specify during race design. It's still mostly irrelevant, however. The point is, that large populations and their survival requisites are not generally very interchangable for space transport purposes with machines.

This is also a design goal of the mod. It is supposed to require investment in special transport to move populations around, and those transports are supposed to be relatively slow and vulnerable, so that the concept of escorting infrastructure ships is introduced, and colonizing distant worlds in contested space becomes an interesting challenge, and not something that can be accomplished by single full-speed general-purpose ships in a few turns, as in the unmodded game.

I realize there are degrees, and yeah it would still be quite different from the unmodded game even if population only weighs 100 kT. It's just a question of degree, design goals, and personal taste, and of course people can adjust the settings as they please. I'll test out your suggestion in practice and deliberate more. If/when 3.0 comes out, I think it will be different from 2.x in several ways...

PvK