Talk:Forine (world)

There's a big problem with the portrayal of Forine as covered with buildings. I'll leave aside the fact that I've put a lot of the population in orbital habitats and in the asteroids, precisely because Forine is such a miserable world, since that is non-canonical. But even if everyone did live on Forine, you still wouldn't get that effect. A 3,000 miles diameter world has a lot of surface, especially when it doesn't waste any of it on oceans, agricultural areas, and wildernesses. Try working out how much acreage each Forininan would have if the entire surface was single-storied buildings. Add the extreme unlikelihood that buildings would be single-storied, and the picture simply doesn't make sense.

I'm very tempted to rewrite the description wholesale, but I don't want to do that without giving others the chance to show me that I'm wrong. Are my calculations incorrect? (I can't give you my exact figures, because I made them a long time ago and I don't have them here, but I think it worked out at several thousand square meters per inhabitant).

Rancke 12:52, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that with a population of 6 billion, there would be loads of space per inhabitant; so a world wide arcology would most likely not be in use.

Given the inhospitable climate (Minus140+; doesn’t really matter what scale you use Celsius or Fahrenheit) the need for protection from just the temperature would be enormous; not even taking the atmospherics into account; a regional arcology might make more sense. Sstefan 13:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh sure. Arcologies or environmental domes are a must. Come to think about it, you might be able to do something with environmental domes (assuming for purposes of argument that TL 10 is sufficient to make Really Big environmental domes). If the domes cover not only residential areas, but also agricultural fields and artificial lakes and wildernesses, you may be able to cover a lot of Forine with them. Of course, this would give Forine the ability to grow its own crops, but I've never believed in the notion that a high-population world would import most of its foodstuff instead of using hydroponics and carniculture to grow it. The logistics are simply prohibitive - the number of ships you need to import food for 6 billion people is huge. (Note that I'm not saying that Forine can't import a lot of naturally grown food as luxuries, just that most of what its hoi polloi eats must be home-grown).

One problem is that I've no idea how big environmental domes that are reasonable for what tech levels, nor do I really have any feel for how much space domes for X people would take up.

Rancke 13:53, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree about the unlikelihood of a world-spanning arcology even with a population of 6 Billion, but I assue that it's the prerogative of the first person to post text on a system to define it however he or she wants. To my way of thinking, later posters are obliged to work within the confines of the 'founder's' conception of the world/system.

I don't think that posting first gives anyone 'dibs' on any system. To my mind, the important point when working in a shared universe is to cooperate with the other contributors in creating a fun, believable, self-consistent game universe. To that end, I generally consider it counter-productive to disregard other peoples' work, as long as it makes sense. There are plenty of blank spaces to work on. But if it does not make sense, I don't feel obliged to accept it (Unless Marc Miller or one of his minions tell me to do so ;-).

However, it's obviously a waste of effort for me to overwrite your stuff if you're just going to restore it. Likewise, it's a waste of effort for you to restore it if I'm just going to change it again. Which is precisely why I started this discussion. Hopefully, we can arrive at some mutually acceptable worldview. [R]

As for the matter of food imports, my inspiration there was the former USSR. In theory it was more than capable of producing all the food it needed and then some, but in practice it had to import huge quantities of the stuff. The reasons flowed from its ruling philosophy (which led to collectivized agriculture, an overemphasis on industrial production -- especially for military purposes -- and a total disregard for environmental factors) and the foibles of leaders such as Stalin and Khrushchev.

Given that we're positing an unbroken succession of dictatorial regimes on Forine extending back many centuries, it seemed reasonable to me to suppose that similar policies had led to similar results.

The former USSR didn't get its food shipped in on multi-million credit starships. Rancke 13:44, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

You are mistaken in supposing that it was I who posited a world-spanning arcology on Forine. Rather, I wrote my contributions on Forine to correspond with those of an earlier contributor. So please do not refrain from making any changes on my account.

I'm not certain why the means of importation (multi-million credit starships or otherwise) should render the assumption of heavy reliance on offword foodstuffs invalid. I posit that a series of dictatorial regimes focused on industrial development and large scale infrastructure projects (largely for the glorification of the regime) would not accord high priority to meeting the common folk's needs for subistence. In any event, I replaced the word "most" with "much" in reference to Forine's food supply problems in response to your earlier critique. This seems to be in accord with canonical sources that refer to the importance of the Agworld Combine in meeting District 268's food needs.--Vendarth 22:34, 21 August 2007 (UTC)