Colony Creation

### STEP 1: POPULATION

Determining a planet’s population is a straightforward investment. First decide if the colony will be based on a planet or a space station. Space stations support far fewer people and the support systems needed to keep them alive are considerably more expensive. This is represented in the separate 'spaceborn pop' column. Apply any relevant modifiers from the lower section to your investment for your initial colonial cost. For a planetary colony the system will begin to generate 2 RP after three turns (as an 'other' system as per ISW rules). Spaceborn colonies do not generate these RP, but can be upgraded in other ways as is listed below.

### STEP 2: USILR CODES

The following guidelines for generating a planet’s USILR code are primarily intended for independent planets with limited interstellar commerce—in other words, a typical Periphery planet, not typical Inner Sphere planets. Inner Sphere planets tend to have higher Industrial Development and Output than is suggested herein.

#### Technological Sophistication:

The first part of the 5-letter USILR code, Technological Sophistication, marks the level of advancement a planet can locally sustain. (Much more advanced technology may be found on the planet, but the code indicates the technology that local facilities could produce when mostly bereft of outside support). A key element of maintaining advanced technology is a large, educated, prosperous population. Technology exhibits an exponentially increasing demand for population, at least to be independently and economically sustainable. In certain conditions (extreme automation or hand-built, cottage industries) high technology can be more sustainable (Niops being a notable example of the latter). However, the capability to truly comprehend and be able to improve technology requires vast numbers of educated citizens—early 21st-century Terra being a prime example of a situation where the ability to build the most advanced technologies is found in far fewer nations than actually use (and support) those technologies. Likewise, the Terran Alliance had to bankrupt its poorer member-nations to develop and support some portions of Tech Levels C and D (notably JumpShips and fusion power).

#### Industrial Development:

This represents less a gauge of how much the world produces and more the sophistication and depth of its industry. During the Star League, some Periphery colonies were so extremely specialized (such as in the production of shoes) that they would score very low in this USILR code, but would have very high Industrial Output (producing shoes for many planets but little else, they likely starved and collapsed when the Star League fell). The age of such interstellar specialization disappeared along with most of humanity’s JumpShips, but planets may still have very backward levels of Industrial Development. As a result, scores ranging from D to B are typical on developed worlds

#### Raw Material Dependence:

This rating indicates how dependent the world is on off-world materials, which may come from other planets and asteroids in the system or from other star systems. However, the vast majority of planets have a large amount of easily-accessed materials when first settled (comparable to Earth before 2,000 BC), the placer deposits and rich ores having never been pillaged by a rapacious sapient species like humans. The degree of raw material dependence also mostly refers to rare and heavy elements; some elements (hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, silicon, iron, aluminum, etc.) are simply too widespread in the universe to ever really be deficient on a planet. As a result, most planets are fairly resource independent (typically possessing a rating ranging C to A). In BattleTech, humankind has grown jaded by this abundance of materials on habitable planets. While humanity explored the boundless mineral wealth of Terra’s asteroid belt in the 21st century (a resource which is still hardly tapped by the 31st century), it soon found habitable worlds almost always preferable (meaning less expensive) sources of raw materials than asteroids, deep mines, or other costly extraction techniques. Hence, a score of A or B represents a wealth of easily extracted resources on the planet, akin to those rarely seen on Terra after the mid-twentieth century, not the overall abundance of materials in the star system. This focus on habitable planets reached the point that it was economically worthwhile for Terra to import common ores from planets in the Outworlds Alliance during the Star League, and the Lyrans entered the Federated-Commonwealth treaty in 3020 at least partly for the untapped planetary resources of the Federated Suns despite already having vast resources of their own among asteroid belts and uninhabitable systems within the Commonwealth.

#### Industrial Output:

Simply put, this is how much a world can produce from its non-agricultural, non-service industries. Industrial Output is not particularly representative of military production (unless the population is very small, as on Hesperus II), but rather how well the world’s industry can sustain its population, because military production on an average Inner Sphere planet is much, much smaller than civilian industry. Industrial Output is also not representative of Technological Sophistication; primitive nations (like the “developed” Terran nations of the late 20th century) can produce staggering quantities of goods. This score is proportional to population: a planet of 100 million people with an Industrial Output of A does not produce as many goods as a planet of 5 billion people with an Industrial Output of A (or B, or C, or D, for that matter). Finally, even worlds that are allegedly covered in factories and heavily industrialized (terms involving a great deal of artistic license) are unlikely to involve more than 10 percent of their populations in industry unless their Technological Sophistication is F or Regressed. Those who build goods for others are rarely a large percentage of the population of even moderately advanced worlds; most of the rest of the population is in the service industry.

#### Agricultural Dependence:

This rating is a measure of how much food the world needs to import to support its population. In the modern era, the dearth of JumpShips has made virtually all planets self-sustaining. (The Inner Sphere planets that could not feed themselves died in the early Succession Wars.) Hence, scores of C or B are the norm. Generally, only the smallest worlds, those possessing thousands of inhabitants, can effectively be sustained by interstellar or even interplanetary imports, though a few populous worlds of the Inner Sphere that are extremely wealthy and powerful, such as Galax and Irian, are able to survive on interstellar or at least interplanetary imports. This is because feeding hundreds of millions of people (the average planetary population of the Inner Sphere) calls for millions of tons of daily food imports, which the JumpShips and DropShips of BattleTech cannot easily deliver. If more than a few average Inner Sphere planets had Agricultural Dependence scores of D or F, most of the JumpShips and DropShips in the Inner Sphere would be monopolized to keep them fed. The other side of this transportation bottleneck is that even abundant worlds (with scores of A or B) can only export a fraction of their food production (most often luxury foods, seeds, and other compact, light agricultural products). Finally, even “breadbasket” worlds with huge surpluses of food are unlikely to involve more than 1 percent of the population in agriculture (and perhaps quite a bit less) unless their Technological Sophistication is F or Regressed. Likewise, agricultural regions rarely cover more than a small percentage of land area on a planet, despite dramatic fictional descriptions to the contrary. As with Industrial Output, the Agricultural Dependence Rating of a planet is related to its population. A planet with a population of 100 million and an Agricultural Dependence of A produces far less total food than a planet with a population of 5 billion and an Agricultural Dependence of C

### STEP 3: OTHER FEATURES

#### Hyperpulse Generators:

Introduced in 2630, the HPG substantially cut communication times previously bottlenecked by JumpShip transit. The two types of HPGs available for star systems are A-rated and B-rated. Both classes of HPGs have a 50-light-year range. Serving as communication hubs for B-rated HPGs, an A-rated HPG transmits to each B-rated HPG in range sequentially every 12 to 24 hours (sooner for priority messages and during the Star League). B-rated HPGs transmit less frequently than A-rated HPGs (every 12 hours during the Star League, or every few days after the fall of the Star League). ComStar also sometimes offers C- and D-rated services for Periphery planets near the Inner Sphere (within 550 light�years of Terra), which are not HPGs but rather courier JumpShips that provided scheduled message deliveries (visits every 3 months in the case of C-rated service, or annually for D-rated service), plus offering subsidized collars to traders’ DropShips

#### Recharge Stations:

These space stations are deployed at the zenith and nadir jump points of star systems to accelerate and standardize recharge times. They can reduce the minimum safe recharge time of a JumpShip from 175 hours to 100 hours, and are even more useful at dim K- and M-class stars. Recharge stations proliferated from the 2200s through the Star League era, but the Succession Wars found them easy targets. After 2820, less than one in four Inner Sphere systems has a recharge station, and even fewer have stations at both their zenith and nadir points. Recharge stations are even rarer in the Periphery during the Succession Wars, and scarce in the Deep Periphery (outside of Clan systems), but are not dependent on ComStar and the Word of Blake like HPGs. Recharge Stations may be built in a system with a space population of 100 or more for a total of 150 RP. Any fleets jumping into a system with a recharge station only spends .5 movement points to make that jump.