That's correct.
If you just want nude colonists with no equipment or food or life support, and to drop 'em off on a planet where the gravity and temperature and atmosphere and weather and local creatures are all completely alien to them, and then ask them to start cranking out the Capital ships ASAP, well... they won't even survive the trip. They'll weigh less, but won't do you much good unless your race has the "just add water - freeze-dried hybernation" advantage, or something. And even then, they'll need all sorts of construction, manufacturing, life support, power generation, medical, and other equipment to keep them alive and productive (instead of just becoming castaways) on the alien world.
The other thing is that 1 kT = an abstract measurement that determines what can be put on a design, but otherwise can't be expected to be consistent. We had a long discussion of colony ship sizes and so on on one of the Proportions threads - I think the "Proportions 2.1 released" one. If you start doing math thinking in terms of volume, Proportions' pop sizes start seeming really generous.
Derek, if you include the Starliner Modules from Proportions 2.2, the maximum population transportation rate more or less doubles, which would be easier (and IMO more interesting/realistic) than halving their mass.
PvK
quote:
Originally posted by Derek:
Heh. No, but when you consider all the luggage, supplies, support structure and such that you would have to take to emigrate to a completely new planet, along with life support and such for the journey, you might get more than 1 ton per person.
Look at it this way: on a modern cruise ship, which never sails too far from land, and in which you only take enough luggage to Last a week or so, you still have each person occupying a large amount of space. I would say easily tow or three tons per person. Cruise ships weigh on the order of 70kT nowadays, and only hold two or three thousand passengers, along with the same amount of crew. They don't even have to carry their own oxygen.
Even when you consider military transports, you still have a lot of space taken up by incidentals.
Finally, it slows down the growth of colonies, which is part of the point of the economic model of Proportions, and as such, my mod.
On the other hand, I am considering cutting it in half, to 500kt per population point. Thats what playtesting is for 
Derek