[PvK]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
What is more special about the colony ship than the population transports? There is this great expense and time to get 1 mil pop on an empty world, but then you can send many millions more to it much, much more quickly. Seems inconsistent to me. Yes, setting up the colony is expensive, time-consuming, difficult, etc. But, so is adding more room to the colony to house all those new people.
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As far as the population transport ability, nothing. The ability to transport population in a colony ship just makes sense. If I were to include a colony module without the population capacity (Does anyone want one? I guess it would be more efficient in some ways (less in others), but at the price of more management for the player. I don't mind adding it.), it would only reduce the cost by about the cost of a starliner module.

Returning to the question, I don't see a problem with building population transport ability in deep space. The problem is the colony module, which requires all the ingredients necessary to support a population on a hostile world. Sustainable large-scale food and atmosphere sources, housing, medicine, clothes, all sorts of factories, power sources, fuel, medicines, machinery, robots, vehicles, etc etc etc. That's a massive amount of stuff, and requires very diverse manufacturing sources, and also organic biological material in self-sustaining quantities (a colonial biosphere that can help keep a large growing colonial population alive and thriving). Even if you're mechanoid or claim you have the tech to colonize mostly with droids, they too require a lot of very diverse material to keep them going and multiplying. All that massive pile of diverse crud essentially requires an established planetary industry to produce efficiently. Hence the organic cost idea to limit construction time deep in space. It could still be assembled slowly by trade and invisible transports, which would be represented by sitting out the long build time to create a colony ship or org-SY at a non-org-SY.

PvK