Manticore Plague Years

Weird Harold wrote:

hanuman wrote:I'm NOT debating this matter. I'm trying to understand how a top-heavy colonial expedition planned to function without anyone to fill the 'working class' niche, and thus far your answer above is the closest one that actually makes sense.

Part of the difficulty in understanding is the "top heavy colonial expedition" image.

The fact that they were willing to travel in deep-freeze for 650 years to colonize a new planet would suggest they were all "working class." They may have been rich "working class" but they didn't go to Manticore expecting to be aristocrats or live a soft life on the backs of servants. They went to Manticore to challenge themselves against a virgin wilderness.

It was only after 40-50 years when the Plague devastated the population and they imported a "worker class" that the aristocracy we know and love started to evolve.

Okay, I've been convinced that my initial concern was mistaken. It's been an interesting discussion, though, with lots of insights. Thank you, everyone.

Thanks to everyone especially RFC for refreshing my memory and clarifying when the plague hit, what the population was, and what interstellar transport capacity was available.

The plague hit early when the population was still small and interstellar transport was VERY rare.

The bottom line is that few people had the ability to flee.

The small population explains a few things.

The original colonist absolutely NEEDED to recruit a second wave of colonists to maintain not only a genetically viable population but a technologically viable population. Think about how the population of a small towns does not have a full spectrum of sophisticated skill sets such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, machinists much less skilled scientists who can evaluate environmental threats and devise methods to cope with them.

Food production would take few people. The early colony of less than 100,000 people probably needed no more than about 100,000 acres of agricultural land including grazing land or about 200 square miles. This much land could all be within a days walk of Landing. While there might have been a communal effort at first to establish food production, a few hundred people would have become the farmer sand ranchers and fisherman who fed the colony. Another few hundred would be involved in food processing.

The biggest issue confronting the colonists would have been establishing a viable manufacturing base. I would expect that everyone would have had a personal smartphone and computer that had been ruggedized to last a hundred years. Big, critical items such as tractors, harvesters, trucks, earth movers would have been included in the original equipment. A limited number of air cars would have been included. However; as the colony grows and things wear out, there will be a need for manufactured goods. The mass production techniques used today with dedicated, specialized tooling and assembly lines would not have been feasible. You would have the equivalent of CNC machining cells and 3 D printers, then a guy or small team of guys who assemble the parts by hand. You might produce one air car per day using these methods. However; your going to want to devote a big percentage of production capacity to building new CNC machining centers and 3 D printers to maintain and expand production capacity.

Given these challenges, a plague that kills off a large percentage of such a small population base is going to leave the colony without a large number of critical skills. Recruiting replacement colonists makes sense. Morphing the political structure to elevate the social status of the original colonists to a future aristocracy makes sense. If the Wintons had provided a big chunk of the colonies political capital and had arranged to properly manage reserves on old Earth, then elevating them to a monarchy made perfect sense and given how their foresight had enabled the colony to survive the plague, would have been politically feasible.


th

Nice thread, Namelessfly. Well developed discussion. I had the impression that after the plague years that status depended on how much folk could contribute to their fare. People with lots of funds who paid their own way arrived as aristocrats. People whose means were more modest and could pay a portion arrived as yeomen who received a homestead. That would have been Honor's family. Zero balancers arrived with nothing and who depended on the MCT to pay their way. Klaus Hauptman prided himself as coming from a family that rose above its zero balancer roots.

Don

hanuman wrote:

SWM wrote:Some colonists probably invested a minimum amount, and fully expected to be working for other people when they got there.

But you still are ignoring the suggestion that I have made several times now, that for the first couple decades there would not be any need for large-scale industrial work and large numbers of workers. Their children, when they grow old enough, will be able to fill those roles, since they won't have any property of their own until they can afford to purchase it.

I'm not ignoring the question, SWM. I actually addressed it in my first post re this subject. The question is this, namely where the colonists would have got their equivalent of spades and picks once the equipment the colony expedition took with it broke down. Without regular resupply lines they were going to have to be dependent on themselves to manufacture replacements, but who were going to do the work?

I'm NOT debating this matter. I'm trying to understand how a top-heavy colonial expedition planned to function without anyone to fill the 'working class' niche, and thus far your answer above is the closest one that actually makes sense.

It seems to me that what you are saying, is that the expedition's organisers allowed for some investors to make a minimal investment, with the expectation that their share of the new colony would be small enough to force them to serve as a general hire pool for the rest of the colony. Is that right?

No, what I'm saying is that in a frontier colony, EVERYONE is working class. One of the people there will be working at making picks and spades. He may or may not have someone else working for him.

Remember, there are only a few tens of thousands of people on Manticore at this time, and a significant number of them are underage. They simply don't need large-scale manufacturing. Everyone is a worker, because that's the only way to survive in a frontier.

How many colonists were there by the time the Plague started, and how many of them died?

hanuman wrote:How many colonists were there by the time the Plague started, and how many of them died?

I'm not sure David has given detailed population stats way back then. He probably has determined it for the new series. The death rate was high for people who got infected, but not sure about the infection rate and exactly what the death rate implied.

For example, my sister treats kids with Hanta (HPS), which outside a major medical center has a death rate of "most". With ECMO (where a machine takes over keeping your blood oxygenated while your lungs recover) the survival rate is not awful, but there are not that many ECMO machines and trained ECMO teams around (like 3 for the city). So if they are all in use and you show up needing ECMO your prognosis is very, very bad.

J6P wrote:

SWM wrote:SNIP Their children, when they grow old enough, will be able to fill those roles, since they won't have any property of their own until they can afford to purchase it.

Inherit you mean?

Inheritance, Manticore-style, is an interesting subject. The original Manticore Colony, LTD, might have been set up as an equal-inheritance organisation, in which an investor's shares are equally split between all offspring. This would ultimately have resulted in continuous generational division of property whenever each generation has more than one child(likely - with new colonies, there'd be an expectation that families would go for more rather than fewer children). It's obvious the Star Kingdom chose primogeniture succession, in which the eldest offspring always inherits all titles.

However, there was a comment by Catherine Montaigne saying that less than a quarter of the Tor fortune was entailed with the title and more than half of it came from her mother's side of the family(implying her father was the Count).

Here's where I start to get confused. Saddling Henry Montaigne with the Earldom of the Tor would immediately make him amongst the top ten percent of the Star Kingdom's wealthiest subjects, with Cathy herself still in the top three or four. That seems to suggest the assets brought into the family by their mother wasn't split equally, despite not being entailed, because then he should have inherited half of his mother's fortune(a third if they have another sibling and so on).

How did the founders of the SKM plan for their subsequent children? Shutting the door on everyone after the firstborn seems a bit cold, though I suppose it'd be an incentive to get out of the ancestral family home, work hard and get hold of their own title elsewhere - Willie Alexander being an example of the sort of thing I mean. Other people who weren't expected to inherit, but did, include Michelle Henke and (I'm sorry to group those two, I really am!) Stefan Young. If their elder siblings hadn't died, they might have quietly faded away, possibly without a penny to their names or for their heirs.

Heck, that sort of thing has the potential to become the Denver Summervale type.

SWM wrote:

hanuman wrote:I'm not ignoring the question, SWM. I actually addressed it in my first post re this subject. The question is this, namely where the colonists would have got their equivalent of spades and picks once the equipment the colony expedition took with it broke down. Without regular resupply lines they were going to have to be dependent on themselves to manufacture replacements, but who were going to do the work?

I'm NOT debating this matter. I'm trying to understand how a top-heavy colonial expedition planned to function without anyone to fill the 'working class' niche, and thus far your answer above is the closest one that actually makes sense.

It seems to me that what you are saying, is that the expedition's organisers allowed for some investors to make a minimal investment, with the expectation that their share of the new colony would be small enough to force them to serve as a general hire pool for the rest of the colony. Is that right?

No, what I'm saying is that in a frontier colony, EVERYONE is working class. One of the people there will be working at making picks and spades. He may or may not have someone else working for him.

Remember, there are only a few tens of thousands of people on Manticore at this time, and a significant number of them are underage. They simply don't need large-scale manufacturing. Everyone is a worker, because that's the only way to survive in a frontier.

That brings to mind Stephanie's friend Karl in the YA series. He was, if I recall correctly, the son of a Baron. Yet we see him taking outside jobs when he is not needed on the family farm.

Karl's first girlfriend was the sole survivor of her large family, but Karl only lost his uncle. so the Plague hit unevenly and indiscriminately.

KNick wrote:

SWM" quote="hanuman wrote:I'm not ignoring the question, SWM. I actually addressed it in my first post re this subject. The question is this, namely where the colonists would have got their equivalent of spades and picks once the equipment the colony expedition took with it broke down. Without regular resupply lines they were going to have to be dependent on themselves to manufacture replacements, but who were going to do the work?

I'm NOT debating this matter. I'm trying to understand how a top-heavy colonial expedition planned to function without anyone to fill the 'working class' niche, and thus far your answer above is the closest one that actually makes sense.

It seems to me that what you are saying, is that the expedition's organisers allowed for some investors to make a minimal investment, with the expectation that their share of the new colony would be small enough to force them to serve as a general hire pool for the rest of the colony. Is that right?

No, what I'm saying is that in a frontier colony, EVERYONE is working class. One of the people there will be working at making picks and spades. He may or may not have someone else working for him.

Remember, there are only a few tens of thousands of people on Manticore at this time, and a significant number of them are underage. They simply don't need large-scale manufacturing. Everyone is a worker, because that's the only way to survive in a frontier.

That brings to mind Stephanie's friend Karl in the YA series. He was, if I recall correctly, the son of a Baron. Yet we see him taking outside jobs when he is not needed on the family farm.

Karl's first girlfriend was the sole survivor of her large family, but Karl only lost his uncle. so the Plague hit unevenly and indiscriminately.[/quote]
Remember the passage by Stephanie about some Barons and even Earls milking cows and weeding tomato's. Baron Zivonik might have a lot of land but he's still got to make the land pay and put food on the table.

hanuman wrote:How many colonists were there by the time the Plague started, and how many of them died?

There's no textev, but the plague hit two generations (40 years) after landing and killed 60% of whatever the population expanded to from the original 50,000 (including 13,000 minors)

Elizabeth I, second monarch of Manticore, is said to have "had a large vigorous family," suggesting that the colonists ran to typical frontier families of 5-10 kids. A very rough guess would be a population of 250,000 to 500,000. Almost definitely under a million.