Alex Goodwin (and others) wrote:

Actually both Asimov's Trantor and Niven's Puppeteer Worlds came to my mind while
I was writing, but planet-moving is outside Traveller tech limits. Trantor is
possible, but again, where do the food and water come from? Orbital farms
can do the former, and ice asteroids the latter, until they run out. Humans
use a *lot* of water. Perhaps recycling tech derived from self-sufficient
starships could plug the hole. My take is that Vilani plan for the long term
(totally unlike Solomani :-) ), so that's a possibility. Asimov's numbers for
Trantor may well just reflect 1950s tech limits, and also that the Foundation
series is Space Opera, not hard SF :-)

Alex, your examples of Macau are illuminating, but I would like to explore the
ecological footprint of the island a bit more. OK, it's on an ocean, so with
sufficient power and a bit of handwaving the water supply can be covered, but
where does the food supply come from? (I stress that I simply do not know the
answer to this question.) If it takes eg 1K km^3 to supply food to the island,
then that area should get added to its 'effective' surface area (of about
120 km^3, I think).

Like I said, I think that building tower blocks higher than ~3KM is going to get
problematic, unless you are going to pressurize them, or go with genetic
modifications to the inhabitants. I suggest that the Vilani, with their well-known
aversion to anything high-risk, would not be happy with pressurized blocks.

Phil Pugliese: thank you for your post. I  like the idea that system X might have
other worlds which are not otherwise described. Gas giant moons are a favourite.
As a GM I like my worlds to have some vaguely reasonable basis in
known or already-postulated tech, and this fits well into that skeleton.

Jonathan