[TML] An odd Idea

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 31 Mar 2008 at 20:57, Jerry W Barrington wrote:

> On 3/31/08 8:39 PM, "Eris Reddoch" <erisred at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 
> > Anthony Jackson wrote:
> >> Evyn MacDude wrote:
> >>> For all those weird systems that we have been trying to explain for
> >>> years.
> >>> 
> >>> What if they are terrestrial moons of gas giants
> >> 
> >> What problem does this solve, exactly? The mystery isn't having a
> >> spaceport on an unpleasant rockball, the mystery is having a large
> >> population on such a lump.
> > 
> > I've put a multi-billion soph pop in a nowhere system in one
> > of the games I'm running right now. The ISS has it listed as
> > having 30,000 and on the rockball that's true, but out in the
> > belt there are another billion folks. What's going on? Well,
> > that billion soph belt is a major industrial site, one of the
> > major supply centers for the Imperial Navy (Army and Marines),
> > in that quadrant of the Spinward Marches. Secret as it was
> > built up and kept secret right through the 5th Frontier War,
> > but now that "Peace in our lifetimes" has broken out and the
> > Imperium is winding down their war effort it is about to stop
> > being a secret.
> 
> I'm not sure about keeping such a place secret.  It would involve shipping
> in a hell of a lot of stuff, not least of which a sizeable fraction of a
> billion people.  And if they're hard at work supplying the military,
> shipping out an enormous amount of their product.  And with all that money
> (their wages) flowing into the system, much of it would need to flow out
> again.  That calls for ongoing shipments of vast quantities of consumer
> goods.
> 
> Doesn't sound like you could hope to keep it secret for months, let alone
> decades.

I refer you to the Tri-Cities in Washington State. They ceased to 
exist for several years during WWII. They grew a lot while they 
"didn't exist". 

Y'see there was this place called "Hanford" that was being built.


--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com