Speculative Population Numbers, reproduction, and population density (No diversity politics, contains spoilers)

[fluxtorrent]

Preface: keep your identity/ethnicity politics out of this thread, you aren't welcome here. Thread will contain some spoilers, as they are necessary to inform the discussion. Most other data will require speculation and statistical analysis and projection.

Now on to the thread.

I've been wondering about number of people and how they are represented in the game. In order to inform this discussion I'm going to start with the facts we know for certain.

There are 3 known major cities (neon, Akila, New Atlantis) and 1 unknown one (Dazra, house Va'ruun) for the four main factions. One might choose to include The Key and the crimson fleet as a 5th but for the purposes of this thread I'm going to list that as part of the secondary settlements.

There are about 10 secondary settlements, again depending on what you want to count exactly.

Lastly there are hundreds of homesteads, truly an uncountable number since they are generated procedural, so we have to assume the VAST majority of people actually choose to live a non-urbanized life in this universe.

Now for the spoilers. We know the evacuation of earth started in 2156. If you have dug deep enough we know that only a fraction of the population made it off the planet and billions died, but we don't know the EXACT numbers, not even a ballpark percentage. We know the evacuation ended in 2199.
Beyond this point we enter the speculative phase.
We don't know the exact population of Earth when the evacuation occurred so if we take some reasonable samples from population projections from our own world. There are MANY models to choose from but I picked one that seemed to meet some of the ingame concepts that suggest humanity chose enlightened sustainment. So we can take an estimate of between 12billion.
Now for the evacuation, grav drives were new and deep space ships didn't exactly exist prior to the "problem". But we do have a reference point for their capabilities. The Frontier. Nova Galactic went out of business in 2203 so we know that this aged ship is representative of the tech available at the time. If we assume it was the peak of technology in terms of drive and reactor we have an upper limit how many people could be transported per ship with adequate cargo for settlement. That limit would be around 1000 people per trip assuming they were being dropped on Akila or Jemison or another suitably habitable world. i would also speculate that each round trip would take about 7 days per ship. This would mean each ship would be able to evacuate 50,000 people a year with 2 weeks off for maintence, and 2,500,000 over the course of it's lifetime. I think, given that the Frontier is still around in 2330, it is safe to assume they were built rugged enough to support the rigors of that kind of use.
So how many ships did they have? Given the nature of the problem, and the limited details we are provided it's still very hard to speculate. There was only one shipyard churning them out, so even if we assume it got the full liberty ship treatment it's still not going to be as big a number as we would like. We have to assume that we didn't see the WHOLE NG staryard when we boarded it. A flight around it's outside show 3 slips for building the large carriers it would be building for this job. The internal bay would be the smaller shuttles for dropping its carried people and supplies to the surface from these vessels, since the ingame lore states nothing that big can land (there are several examples still in those slips, anyone else hoping this means we get cap ships eventually?).

i'm going to speculate at a 6 month building time for the ships. I believe this allows for all due care and all necessary haste for these vessels. I have found no stories of disaster regarding the evacuation ships (doesn't mean there wasn't any, but it seems reasonable there would be SOMETHING otherwise). Assuming we start the evacuation countdown from the first ships completion and count the full 50 years after that. I'm also going to assume that slips 2 and 3 came online at 2 year intervals. This would mean a total of 246 Evacuation craft were produced.

So in the first year, 2 ships were produced, one evacuating 2,500,000 people over the course of its lifetime. Each consecutive ship saving 25000 less people. The last few ships only getting a few thousand people worth each. The average would actually come out exactly on the halfway mark of 1,250,000.

Now these numbers seem horribly low since that amounts to only just over 307 million saved. BUT we can account for more Deimos was around as well at the time, and they have about 16 of those large slips as well. It's impossible to say if they had them back in those days but if we assume they had at least as many we can double those numbers. We would also be able to assume smaller ships were also being made, both on planet, by other "nonmajor" ships yards and private individuals.

We can also assume a much larger number were initially evacuated to the various settlements within the sol system itself. So I feel comfortable assuming a total of about 6 billion individuals were saved.

So we assume that the human population at 2200, 130 years before the game commences is about 6 billion people, a reasoned starting point and number for population. Spread that across the dozen major habitats and worlds at the time we get a population density of around half a billion per world, most of which is in territory currently claimed by the UC

Considering we have a higher population density on THIS world right now it starts to make more sense why the Settled Systems seem so wild and unsettled. Add to that the population slowly spreading out beyond that, a major war in 2300, and the negative effect such spread has on population growth and we start to see a major problem facing humanity in this age. The lack of FTL communication also creates a further disconnect.

In 2330 you can find friendly human settlements on over 100 planets, and for every friendly one you find spacers, pirates, and Ecliptic in 10 others. This spreads the population out even further, even if it isn't spread evenly.

So i guess I'm looking for your thoughts, speculation, and take on the numbers to see how anyone else interested in this kind of thing considers it.

[Lrock]

We also know there are colony ships prior to the invention of grav drive, not sure how many of those were built and sent, and how many people they hold, we actually encounter one in game.

However, I have a theory they are actually none human who captured the colony ship to infiltrate human society, as there is not possible for a colony ship without grav drive to travel from Sol system to the system the colony ship appeared in within 3-4 generations (per the captain, she's third generation captain). It's basically going to be almost 2 generation just to get out of the Sol system flying at the speed of how fast the ships can go in game.

[fauxpas]

Honestly I'm not sure it the population is that high even.

[fluxtorrent]

Originally posted by Lrock:

We also know there are colony ships prior to the invention of grav drive, not sure how many of those were built and sent, and how many people they hold, we actually encounter one in game.

However, I have a theory they are actually none human who captured the colony ship to infiltrate human society, as there is not possible for a colony ship without grav drive to travel from Sol system to the system the colony ship appeared in within 3-4 generations (per the captain, she's third generation captain). It's basically going to be almost 2 generation just to get out of the Sol system flying at the speed of how fast the ships can go in game.

Considering that ship left before the advent of the grav drive it's been adrift for nearly 300 years, which does makes its travel time reasonable given it went slightly less than 50 light years (48 light years along the jump route, around 45 directly), it isn't using the same kind of drives common in the SS and we are actually capable of making drives (17% light? Easy) that could do that trip now, even if I wouldn't trust any ship built for that purpose with the rest of our tech XD

[ULTRA]

There's like a few high schools worth of humans left
And they're almost all space bandits

[maeharaprojekt]

So as OP noted, the Colony War was pretty brutal.

Before the Colony War, the overall human population took an earlier, sizable hit thanks to the Va'Ruun crusade to purge humanity of all pagans (anyone who doesn't worship Set / the Great Serpent) and heretics. From what I've been able to glean, so far, the Va'Ruun didn't even accept converts during their crusade.

On top of those large conflicts are constant losses of human life due to Spacer and pirate attacks, the occasional terrormorph rampage, and the ongoing (but far smaller) campaign of genocide by the Va'Ruun Zealots. Then there is general death and destruction from animal attacks and natural disasters.

Yeah. I am not at all surprised at how thin the human presence is across Known Space.

[fluxtorrent]

Well there is the timeframe/total population issue. I'm sure there were some attempts to build contained settlements on earth to save more people but how many would be overrun by the sheer number of people not escaping? If we taker my conservative estimates we are talking 6 billion people left stuck on the planet. We also don't have a clear picture on jsut how chaotic it was. I would not be surprised if it escalated to real warfare at some point.

[maeharaprojekt]

Originally posted by fluxtorrent:

Well there is the timeframe/total population issue. I'm sure there were some attempts to build contained settlements on earth to save more people but how many would be overrun by the sheer number of people not escaping? If we taker my conservative estimates we are talking 6 billion people left stuck on the planet. We also don't have a clear picture on jsut how chaotic it was. I would not be surprised if it escalated to real warfare at some point.

I would expect it, TBH. We are not a nice, cuddly species, and the people who got left behind would, IMO, turn tribal and start genociding anyone and any group that "doesn't belong," in attempts to build or steal any system, at all, that could get them to Luna or Mars... Maybe they even had a workable plan to get some of their kids and a few adults up to survive in an orbital habitat that had hydro/aero-ponics and use *anything* they could find or cobble together as radiation shielding.

[fluxtorrent]

Hmm something else to consider, it is INSANELY expensive to live in the cities, I mean you can literally buy a ship for less than most of the houses. That actually kind of explains the far more nomadic nature people seem to have in the game