With Tom R. having posted some interesting Keith documentation about traffic at ports, I was wondering when contemplating the likelihood of ships being put into parking orbits to wait for a quarter day to two and a half days at an A type port, what is the lowest legal population for a mainworld with starport type A?

If I read the classic booklets correctly, Population is 2D-2 with no modifiers. I believe that makes it possible to have port type A with heavy traffic with zero inhabitants.

I suppose one way to see it is that they could all be transient and for some reason, even though they live and work there, they aren't counted in population.

Another could be fully autonomous AI + robot run port. Not very 3I and exciting if there is a malfunction in the control systems... or it goes all 'Skynet' one day.

I suppose if it was only a high port over an unpopulated world, the mainworld might not claim the population of the port, yet they claim the port which would seem bizarre.

And thinking more about how planet's populations are generated in the game vs. in the real world how they work...

... in the game, 2D-2 gives you the exponent (another 2D-2 can give you the multiplier) and these rolls are NOT impacted by anything like the port's presence, whether it is on trade mains, whether it is hospitable to life, etc.

... in real life, most species are limited by a concept called carrying capacity and that serves as a guide to the curve of population growth (there's a slow start, a fast middle, and a slow level out around the carrying capacity being reached (maybe a bit of overshoot and die-back). So in the case of most species, the planet being hospitable, having resources, being on trade mains, having a great port, and maybe having at least a modest tech level would sure contribute to the likelihood people would be there.

I know it could be possible we'd have an zero official population world with a Starport A, but 2.7% of all type A starport worlds should have this.... does that make a lot of sense? It is what is written, but that means in every 30 type A port worlds, you'd have one of these harder to explain worlds with type A and no population. A sector has 1280 hexes and about 1/3rd usually populated so say 450 (ish) worlds and then of those 1/6th have type A ports, so 75 and 3% of those would be A port, 0 pop... so I guess 2 per sector on average.

Anyway, I'm looking at some alternatives for generation: Do the physical traits then use them to calculate some habitability indexes. They'd (over the long haul) tend to govern populations, which would in turn feed back into trade routing. Things like this exist in most 4X (explore, exploit, expand, exterminate) video games about space empires. (Stellaris is my favourite at the moment).

Anyway, I just find 2 officially zero pop, A port systems per sector a bit bizarre....

TomB