Question of the Week

[ailelie]

First off, happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate it. I'm sorry about the lateness of this post; I got distracted by Yuletide.

Anyway.

(3) Where are your resources (they need not all be widely available in the same ecosystem. In fact, scarcity of one or more resource can lead to interesting adaptations)? Be sure to consider the below.

Water (drinking, cooking, farming)
Energy (light, fuel, food, nutrients)
Medicine
Air
Living space
Power (wealth, make-up, rarities, etc)
Supplies (cloth, tool, building materials, etc)


This is, I hope, a rather straightforward question. The point is to know where you do and do not have access to certain resources. This can help with designing creature adaptations, trade routes, housing types, and more.

Comments

[annariel]

Water: Water will obviously be readily available on New Gabarone. Where planets have atomspheres there is probably also water though this may well be frozen as ice. The gas planets will have liquid hydrogen and oxygen so I will assume techniques to manufacture water from these. The leaves the planets without atmosphere needing to conserve and ultimately import water.

Food: All the planets are going to have food growing facilities though I imagine that there will be relatively little scope for animal husbandry outside New Gabarone. Meat is therefore rare and a delicacy. I did mention spice minerals in one of my drabbles (channeling, I think, the Spice Mines of Kessel from Star Wars) but I quite like the idea so I shall assume some kind of interesting alloy/mineral of something or other which conveys an interesting taste to food. I had better put this on one of the planets that doesn't obviously have much else to offer!!

Power: I'm going to hypothesize a future where gases such as Helium and Hydrogen can be easily (and safely, in the case of Hydrogen, used for power). I'll also assume that versions of nuclear power are readily available and safe. This means that the gas planets are all valuable fuel resources, as are any other planets which may have an abundance of minerals such as uranium.

Useful Environment: It occurs to me that there are manufacturing techniques that are specialised to low or zero-G which means I'm going to want a couple of cities which are entirely off-world and whose economy is based on manufacture.

The non-gas giant, non-terrestrial planets I have are A1, A3 and B1 - B6. I'll put useful nuclear material on A3, B4 and B5. Spice Mines on B6, and some rare minerals on B1 and B2. A1 and B3 can be the places wierd hermits go who want to get away from the world!