"Small SF Off-World Frontier Town Layout Suggestions?" Topic

Guys,

Just found this map of Old West town of "Deadwood":

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And here's Tombstone:

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Dan
TMP link

I think the reason for forming is more important than we realise. And I don't just mean the materials that they are exploiting.

For a government/national level investment there will be more order. They will be establishing for the long term – there is a reason they want this planet / area and so they will need to have access to everything across all of the different lines of operations. This makes it expensive, but sustainable.

Large corporate ventures will only put in facilities to locally produce if there is a saving on importing the same. Their facilities will be pre-planned but there may be some 'extra-curricular' business on the outskirts of the settlement. They will be right on top of the production / extraction area and will have corporate offices instead of town halls.

Commercial colonisation – where people pay to go to a planet to colonise – or 'pilgrim father' type colonisation will have more individual 'parcels', even where a town springs up. The commercial ones are likely to run a 'company shop', this would allow a colonisation to provide a second income stream (and if traded for raw materials from the planet a potentially lucrative one).

'Accidental Colonisation', which I think is more where Dan is going, happens where a colony no longer gets the external support (Dan's example) or is a survivor colony from a crashed ship. These are likely to have various degrees of order and chaos as people make the best of what they have. Over time there will be a sine wave of cooperation and selfishness that will shape the colony to a greater or lesser extent.

What is interesting is when we pre-suppose that space travel is expensive, planets are big (no!!! Really, really big, like planet sized) and for many years will lack planetary of orbital infrastructure required to get any degree of coverage. Once we have that premise we can have all of the above on the same planet. After all, why would a corporation mess with some farmer colonists who are living beyond the fringe of a national colony…. When you find the reasons for the conflict you find the wargames!

What d'you think protection might look like? Perimeter fences, walls, ditches, a fort/keep/stockade?

Clearly depends on the threat and the materials at hand, but assuming some form of ground nasties, the "materials at hand" question is interesting.

I'm also starting to wonder about the sort of buildings used, I was thinking about cylinders of prefabricated surfaces – cylinders have two benefits over square or rectangular columns – you need less surface area for the enclosed volume (about 12%) and they are a stronger structure in higher stress conditions (wind, ground wobbles etc) as there are no corners.

Besides, they are dead easy to make out of tins :-)

Also, did you all see this, could be quite interesting as a hard point/defenisve perimeter plan

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I must be going blind. Took me a while to find the "view/open" button.

Looks very interesting so far. Might also work for Post Apocalyptic defences. Will read in detail now.

Thanks,

Dan
PS. Of course, one would never build in that fashion unless you already expected hostile local natives or constant raiding by foreigners – and expected very little (or timely) help from the authorities!

Great thread idea Cacique Caribe!

The Afrikaaners, and those pushing beyond the rule of the British Colonies, fit into the bracket of 'Commercial Colonisation'. The manor farm type buildings are based upon self, or limited mutual, protection and not on the use of force by a government or corporate security force. The farms are much bigger than the sort of family holdings you might expect and they fit a pattern based upon investment to generate wealth that can be seen in other places – Hudson Bay forts in Canada for example.

As a planet is colonised, you may see these in 'wild' areas with a government or corporate facilitiy further back. The corporation may encourage these sorts of independant ventures as low risk means of generating food for their own businesses – they control the only market and also the only way of getting manufactured items, therefore thay can control the price but hold none of the risks. This was done by the British in the Cape, where most farming was initially to feed the Royal Navy.

What else may you get in this type of settlement (on the fringe of more developed settling)? I'd expect to see some form of 'outreach' law enforcement / security. Just keeping a weather eye on the more developed areas interests. These could be small patrols similar to the RCMP, Texas Rangers or Natal Mounted Police. The second thing I would expect to see would be outcast groupings, those that have not finished endentured service, those that don't want the corporate or government version of 'New Eden'. Whereas human civilisation is a story of reducing migration or its change to transhumance, we could see a new type of nomad emerge (see Angel Barracks' Junker idea for the rejectionist version).

Again, if you create a world that has several of these types and scarcity of a resouce you can create all sorts of tensions and troubles. Excellent background for a wargame world…

"The Afrikaaners, and those pushing beyond the rule of the British Colonies, fit into the bracket of 'Commercial Colonisation'. The manor farm type buildings are based upon self, or limited mutual, protection and not on the use of force by a government or corporate security force"

That frontier farm-fort I pointed towards is actually even more interesting from a Sci-Fi scenario pov, in that it was built by the 1820 English settlers – a deliberate attempt to settle people in a "buffer land" between the Cape Colony and the encroaching Xhosa, who were being pushed south by Shaka's Zulus.

In a Sci Fi environment Ie can imagine:

- an incresaed amount of hostile activity to the original vested interests' settlemenst (say mining etc)
- a mass settlement of the poor and desperate from more crowded worlds in a buffer zone,
- lots of "small wars", evolution of citizen, irregular and light military forces,
- the start of human/native mixed communities
- fracture between the new settlers, who are committed to their land and liveihood, and the colonial government, who are not

As Adam says, an excellent scenaro for Sci Fi wars

Colour map of tombstone, 1888: