[Graeme Dice]

Well again, we disagree. I think you're oversimplifying, and not considering many problems which will take serious amounts of time to develop. Developing technology, even in completely understood conditions on a home planet completely supported by infrastructure, takes time. And, it seems to me there would be millions of issues in trying to convert an alien planet into a homeworld-equivalent.

The thing is that you don't

Perhaps if you look at it as just a lab. However, that wasn't my point - you're looking at my question upside-down. What I was trying to say, is that a civilization only manages to raise so much novel thought and invention per year, mostly by the top fringe of its intellectual elite.

Most basic technology research is limited more by funding than by a lack of minds. Double the money you give to a professor, and they will greatly increase the number of grad students working for them.

An excellent educational system, and a gathering of minds to educate the best students in the best way, is a product of the culture as a whole, and is made possible, protected, and nurtured, by social factors built up over centuries, and which have essentially nothing to do with finding more space on alien planets to build labs.

The social factors already exist however, and don't need to be built up over centuries. A colony of ours on Mars or the Moon doesn't need to reinvent steam power, go through the industrial revolution, or develop a working economic system, they can simply use the knowledge and experience that already exists.

Well, clearly our assumptions vary widely. For example, I don't see "cornucopia fusion power from water" as a basic tech in SE4. If it were so easy to generate power, what are supplies and the Quantum Reactor all about in SE4?

Ships can't carry unlimited fuel supplies. A planet with a resupply depot has infinite supplies, representing essentially limitless fueling and energy generation capability. The Quantum Reactor is a method of getting around the fuel/mass ratio problem that plagues ships that require high performances.

I think you are describing a much higher tech level in these things than SE4's tech tree represents. Of course, a mod that made such assumptions (and I think you are making many assumptions about the tech abilities besides just fusion power) would be perfectly legitimate - it's just not what I imagined when I thought about Proportions mod.

You should read the Red Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson. I imagine that a starting empire is at least as advanced as the human's at the end of that series.

Well, again, your imagination of SE4's tech levels is simply much higher than mine. For example, I don't see SE4 as starting with FTL drives. Light takes EIGHT MINUTES to get from the Sun to the Earth. An SE4 turn is about a month. So, light speed in SE4 would be oh, probably well over 1000, not 6 (ion engine speed in SE4).

As others have mentioned, they can travel interstellar distances essentially instantly, and have the ability to cross solar systems in a manner of months. That's incredibly more advanced than what we can manage, and indicates that they are using at the very least the equivalent of a fission reactor to generate the power for their ion engines.

Again, I disagree. At least, at the tech levels I imagine. Each planet's environment is quite a bit different. Atmosphere composition is just one of many, many factors.

That's why you build buildings and contain your own environment within them. Colonizing Mars is essentially the same as colonizing Antartica, except that there's not enough air to breath.

Just because you can make a chip to survive in an environment, after years of research, doesn't make it cost-effective, or not require separate research and development times thousands of different projects.

The 200 degree chips are cost effective when they are the only thing that can do the job. Heck, they're cheap enough that some of my fellow students stuck them into an liquid asphalt tank to measure temperature Last year.

Again, ok, you can redefine population as mostly non-organic droids, but that's just an abstraction. You still need something to be able to perform a massive range of tasks, including self-support and survival in an unexplored environment. You still need power, transportation, and tons of specialized equipment and materials. Using mostly robotic personnel may solve some problems, but it introduces others. You need less food and medicine, but more power, batteries, lubricants, maintenance facilities, and spare parts, etc. If you think this can all be made from chain-reaction factories and built up from rocks, well, I think you're describing year 3000 (or year 4000) technology again.

I believe that that is more like year 2100 technology.

Well, I disagree that it's a non-issue, at least without serious tech development. Atmospheric manipulation would be a tech area, as would fusion power, pollution and temperature control, etc.

The empires in SE4 need fusion power to be able to accomplish almost any of the tasks they regulary do. You can't generate limitless fuel planet-side in any other manner realistically. Temperature control can be accomplished by large mirrors, pollution doesn't matter when there's nothing living on the world and you can throw things into space for free.

If you have such technologies, maybe. Maybe by year 4000.

Hollowing out asteroids automatically and using the raw materials to construct engines is something we should be able to do in about 100-200 years at the very latest.

Given your assumptions, I might say the same thing, but again, it sounds to me like you're 600-2000 years ahead of the techs I'm imagining.

I think you've got a very skewed view of the technology level available to a civilization. You've got weapons that can raze entire continents from a single ship, but don't have the technology to build a power plant that can produce less than that much energy on a continuous basis?

Even so, though, I still think planetary conditions would be major economic disincentives. Atmosphere composition would be only one thing. Gravity, radiation, pressure, temperature, volcanic activity, meteor activity, weather activity, indigenous life, indigenous microbes, would all present seriously expensive obstacles.

Meteor activity will not be a problem if you have gas giants in system and have a planet with an atmosphere.

Due to the complementary nature, and the complexity, of high-tech infrastructure found on a fully-civilized planet, I don't see alien colonies quickly reaching homeworld-challenging abilities even at very high tech levels. Again, only possibly with massively advanced technology, and even then, it would take signifigant time.

I see colonies becoming as powerful as homworlds with no longer than a century after first habitation. It's not going to take longer than it did on Earth to develop the technology, even if you do it from scratch, and I seriously hope you aren't sending colonists down with horse drawn plows and no books.

It seems to me you're reasoning backwards, again. How many of the planets we know of have an Earthlike atmospheric composition? Zero.

Mars would be Earth like with a few comets slammed into the surface to release CO2. Venus requires that the CO2 be removed to be earth-like.

Maybe not at your year 3000 tech level. At the tech level I imagine, robots would still require specialization and infrastructure development, which requires massive continuous transport of spare parts and supplies, as well as technological specialization, and infrastructure development on the planet to make the facilities feasible and productive.

I think you are expecting technological achievement to slow down from it's current pace far too quickly. Within 50-100 years, we should be able to build self-maintaining AI robots capable of doing all these tasks.

I don't see people "surviving easily" in a vacuum. They survive inside carefully and expensively produced and maintained artificial environments. Fragile environments which are only possible thanks to massive amounts of infrastructure which exists only on the homeworld. Planets generally are more inhospitible than vaccuum, especially before their environments have been explored and understood.

Remember that we have free energy thanks to the necessary fusion plants for SE4 to even be possible. With free energy, almost all restrictions on building things become a matter of finding the resources somewhere. You can explore a planet's conditions from orbit easily enough that we do it today.

It's not just a question of "population to run such things". Infrastructure (energy, supplies, spare parts, transportation, etc) and hospitible environments, are also represented by population, and by cultural facilities. Your imagined technology seems to include the ability to make everything from refined metals to microchips to mechanical parts, to limitless power, all from a few simple machines. Mine doesn't.

It assumes such capability because such capability is simple to a civilization that can perform feats like those at the beginning of a standard SE4 game.

Well, you may have found a technique that I didn't think of, there. I'll have to check that for play balance... you may have found something I didn't intend.

I'd hope it doesn't change, as that's the just about the only thing that makes empire development interesting, as otherwise your forces are unrealistically small.