Tag Archives: energy economy

Slower Than Light

Colonies, Resources, and Production

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Time to go over how colonies and manufacturing will work in STL.

As we discussed before, the core of the economy in Slower Than Light is energy — it is the basic resource that is converted into everything else.  Converting energy into other resources, though, has a couple of steps.  The first step is converting that energy into raw materials, usually metals, radioactives, and organics.

Here we see the metal resource curve for a planet. At the left is the amount of easily collected metals. At the right are the metals that require considerably more energy to collect.
Figure 1: Here we see the metal resource curve for a planet. At the left is the amount of easily collected metals. At the right are the metals that require considerably more energy to collect.

Each planet has a resource curve for each resource it supplies.  The curve provides different amounts of the resource that are available for differing amounts of energy used to recover it.  In the example in Figure 1, we see the energy requirements collecting metal using 3 different kinds of facilities.  A Surface Mine requires very little energy per ton of metal created.  A Mountain Mine requires more, but has a higher capacity.  A Mantle Mine, which goes deeper than any mine we have today, has the potential to reach colossal amounts of metal, but is extremely expensive per ton to access.

This Nuclear Engine is being assembled on a planet where Metals and Organics are relatively cheap to acquire, but Radioactives are expensive. By multiplying each ton of material by the energy cost, and adding the factory's energy requirements, the total cost of producing the nuclear engine is found.
Figure 2: This Nuclear Engine is being assembled on a planet where Metals and Organics are relatively cheap to acquire, but Radioactives are expensive. By multiplying each ton of material by the energy cost, and adding the factory’s energy requirements, the total cost of producing the nuclear engine is found.

At each colony, some fraction of the energy produced is dedicated to consumer goods, and some is dedicated to strategic projects the player or their ministers initiate.   When a project is being budgeted, the system breaks it down into components, finds the cheapest method of getting each component, and presents the player with the optimized price.  If the player is so inclined, they can drill down to see why the cost of each option is what it is, or they can just make their decision based off the summary numbers.

Figure 3: Despite the considerably higher cost of Metals and Organics in the airless and harsh environment of the Moon, it can be cheaper to build spacecraft there because of the low cost of launching those spacecraft from the Moon's shallower gravity well.
Figure 3: Despite the considerably higher cost of Metals and Organics in the airless and harsh environment of the Moon, it can be cheaper to build spacecraft there because of the low cost of launching those spacecraft from the Moon’s shallower gravity well.

Because the energy requirements for different materials varies depending on the planet and the facilities available, it can make sense to build different components in different places.  In our final image, we can see that despite the fact that it is much more expensive to get metal and organics on the Moon than on Earth, it can be cheaper to build on the Moon, because the extra cost is made up for in the launch of the spacecraft.

The numbers shown in these examples were just for the sake of illustration — they shouldn’t be taken as final game values.  The complexity shown here will also be obscured by default.  When a player takes an action, they will simply be told the final amount of energy it will cost the colony footing the bill.  The drill-down to find out why the cost is what it is, and how they could theoretically reduce the cost by building new facilities or choosing a different construction site will be present, but not shown by default.

Slower Than Light

The Energy and Information Economy

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Commerce and influence in the world of Slower Than Light seem neigh-impossible at first glance.  Shipping goods across interstellar distances is impractical for anything but the absolute most unique of artifacts.  With the shortest trips between stars taking decades, and the extraordinary expense of safely moving humans between worlds, deploying armies would be utterly impractical; even if an ark carrying tens of thousands of troops was sent at fantastic expense, the destinations would have the time to develop a military-industrial complex almost from scratch before the attackers arrived to a defense custom-built to defend against them.

In Slower Than Light, the only ships to plow the void, with precious few exceptions, will be the unmanned probes gathering information on target starsystems, and the seedships carrying hundreds or thousands of colonists.  How, then, can humanity’s scattered children have any impact on each other, enough to be a cohesive entity?

The only practically tradeable commodities are those that can be shipped at or near light-speed.  The two major components of these will be Research and Power.

Research and technology is tradeable between worlds in Slower Than Light much as it is in other games in the 4X genre, albeit on a longer timescale.  Colonies that can communicate with each other can share the fruits of their research programs, and give each other the information they need to replicate each other’s technology.

The other means of influencing other worlds is an outgrowth of  technology.  Any given star system will contain more raw resources than any colony is likely to use in the course of a game, and so the only limiting factor is if the energy available to harvest and convert those resources exists.  Using extremely tightly confined beams of radiation, colonies can trade in energy itself.

Most obviously, newly-founded colonies will benefit from receiving beamed power from the homeworld.  As the technology evolves, more power generation capacity and less loss in transfer will allow older, more mature settlements to give energy to the factions they want to help on other worlds, and help them maintain their influence over their colonies.  As those colonies grow and generate their own surpluses, they then can send power on to other colonies, and the web of influence grows.

These two forms of trade interact in very different ways.  Trading information is very straight-forward; presuming that each side actually wants what the other is offering, an exchange can be anything that both sides deem fair, although obviously lengthy back-and-forth negotiating will be exactly that.

Power transmission is a bit trickier.  Every beam spreads as it travels, and so falls off exponentially as it travels further.  Using ever-shorter frequencies of light, wider and therefore less divergent beams of power will help mitigate the power loss in transmission, but it is much more efficient to beam the power short distances rather than long distances.

The influence of power transmission is also dependent on where the power is being sent.  There’s no benefit in beaming energy to a location if the power of the beam is less than they can get from their own star.  Because of this, beamed power garners the most impact when used to influence settlements far from stars and other readily-accessible energy sources.  Planets far from their parent stars and ships plying the interstellar void would be particularly dependent on the energy sent to them from other places, while planets orbiting close to their parent stars or those around particularly bright stars would be less moved by the offer of transmitted power.

Of course shipping very small objects on very faster courier will be an option, and might be necessary for certain objectives, but the real economy of the interstellar empire in Slower Than Light is built off of the faster courier there are or ever will be: photons.