Manticore Plague Years

namelessfly wrote:Once the plague started, lots of Manticorans would have tried to flee the system. If this occurred soon after Earth's final war, the SL would have cared very much.

Flee how? All their assets are tied up in the colony.

Duckk wrote:

namelessfly wrote:Once the plague started, lots of Manticorans would have tried to flee the system. If this occurred soon after Earth's final war, the SL would have cared very much.

Flee how? All their assets are tied up in the colony.

The Travis Long story unequivocally reveals that hyperdrive ships are common enough at the time between the plague and the discovery of the MWJ that the RMN is created. There are war fleets and pirates and cargo ships. Cargo ships might visit only a few times a year, but they do visit.

I'm fully aware of that, but it is also largely irrelevant to the point I was making. The original colonists' assets were tied up in their claim. Leaving the system to settle elsewhere is a major financial undertaking which many colonists simply could not afford to do.

As I recall the story, the colonists who took off from earth were very well financed, unlike many expeditions who took off on faith and a shoe string...think Nucio.

So they were able to be met by modern ships with whatever modern tech , medical and otherwise that their reps on earth thought they might need. My impression was that the ability to do this was unusual.

Also, the RMN was founded prior to the discovery of the junction, early enough to drive off a major pirate raid as well as to defeat an attempt at conquest by mercenaries hired by Axel.

What I'm pointing out is that this wasn't your typical hardscrabble Verge colony. Manticore's colonists were well resoursed and had planned well for their effort.

Don

Uroboros wrote:
The biggest problem would be that eventually, those people are going to wake up and wonder where their money went. While 500 years seems like a really long time, medical technology was probably already stretching people's lives well into the triple digits without prolong. It probably was not as many generations as you think, really.

As well, all you really have to do to ensure that the people handling your money have a big enough slice of the pie that they keep wanting to increase it, rather than just take the whole pot. Add a dash of oversight, and viola! Given that much capital, I'm certain that at least some of it was siphoned off, but it was probably a very tiny percentage of the total.

I am also certain that given the amount of colony ships departing from the system, a lot of these kinds of trusts were about, and they had a lot of rules, laws and regulations surrounding their creation and management.

Probably government protections or some sort of governing body overseeing the financial probity of colony funds would be the 'best' guarantee, but in every single case, based on the experiences of the past few decades it seems almost inevitable to me that some entity or another would decide to skim or completely empty the fund.

Considering that Ramparjet aged at 125 years (without prolong) was looking at the end of his natural lifespan before the Mesans made him eat his own pulser dart I think that life extension can get people into the triple digits but not much further at the time of the MCT being established.

A multi-generational stewardship would also have issues with those left with the reins deciding to embezzle the whole amount rather than let their relatives share it with others.

One possibility is some sort of mandate that after a certain age (50-60?) stewards must hand over control to their children and board a vessel to Manticore. That way at least the children will have the knowledge that if they screw with the fund they will also be shafting their own parents.

Duckk wrote:I'm fully aware of that, but it is also largely irrelevant to the point I was making. The original colonists' assets were tied up in their claim. Leaving the system to settle elsewhere is a major financial undertaking which many colonists simply could not afford to do.

I am thinking that onlythe top 1/10 of a percent might be able to flee.

What was the population at that point? One million? Ten Million? One hundred million people?

That gives you a wave of refugees of perhaps 1,000 to 100,000 people.

It only takes one carrier to trigger a pandemic in another system, The Manticoran colonists might have been sensitized to the plague pathogen or they might have been resistant to it. If the later were true, it would ream the population of any planet that it got too.

The distinction needs to be made between the colony government and the colonists. The colony was well funded thanks to the MCT. The colonists had a lot of their value tied up in illiquid assets like a plot of land. If a colonist wanted to immigrate away, he or she would likely have had to sell their share in the colony in order to fund it (good luck finding a buyer in the middle of an epidemic). And it's not as if said immigrant could demand his or her share of the MCT, anymore than I can demand my share of the Fort Knox's gold as a citizen of the United States.

Could some people have immigrated away from Manticore? Given the law of large numbers, it's statistically likely. But I very, very much doubt it was anything over a tiny fraction of a percent. The colonists understood the risks, and they were willing to put in hard work to build a new colony. The Plague definitely was more dire than they had anticipated, but neither did it fundamentally dent their reasons for immigrating to Manticore in the first place.

Considering that Ramparjet aged at 125 years (without prolong) was looking at the end of his natural lifespan before the Mesans made him eat his own pulser dart I think that life extension can get people into the triple digits but not much further at the time of the MCT being established.

Rajampet had prolong.

namelessfly wrote:I am thinking that onlythe top 1/10 of a percent might be able to flee.

What was the population at that point? One million? Ten Million? One hundred million people?

That gives you a wave of refugees of perhaps 1,000 to 100,000 people.

It only takes one carrier to trigger a pandemic in another system, The Manticoran colonists might have been sensitized to the plague pathogen or they might have been resistant to it. If the later were true, it would ream the population of any planet that it got too.

You are massively overestimating the population of Manticore at the time. The Plague struck some 40-50 years after colonization, and the original expedition barely had 50,000 people.

There's no indication of how long the incubation period for the Plague virus was, nor whether there were carriers immune to the disease. Given the much slower interstellar speed of ships back then, it's entirely possible that even if an infected person or carrier got aboard a ship, by the time it got anywhere near its next destination, the crew could be dead - even with an immune carrier, that person as the sole survivor aboard the entire ship would not be able to pilot it into another inhabited system.

The sole survivor would slowly go mad, wandering the halls of that drifting merchantman in hyperspace until life support ran out, at which point he would be transported through time and space to join an internet forum in the 21st century AD and spew fantastical notions about superbattlecruisers escorted by superlacs and superdestroyers.