National Geographic's "Evacuate Earth"

On 6/24/14 11:14 PM, ERandall e.randalln@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

> Actually, I was thinking of traveling caravans around settled space
> (however much that might be "settled" at any particular moment).

Oh yeah, I didn't mean to imply that you were subject to the same
silliness as the NatGeo show.

Moving a habitat from one orbit to another DOES have sensible uses. As
you point out, a traveling caravan can visit other habitats, for
cultural exchange (including both people and goods). They can also
visit new hunks of matter, e.g. go to a new asteroid for materials.

In the outer solar system -- say, folks living in the Oort cloud --
matter could be pretty sparse. So, you might need some fairly beefy
engines (and a fair amount of patience) to get from one hunk of stuff to
another. But that's probably still better than sitting in one place,
with no new source of stuff (once your original source is all used up).

Whether/how to model all this in High Frontier, I'm still not sure. But
I'm starting to get some vague ideas that in career mode, at least, a
habitat with engines could periodically visit another settlement or a
new source of materials, and so get a big boost to income and happiness
for a while. The size and type of engines, relative to the mass of the
habitat, could determine how often this happens.

Cheers,
- Joe