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General Discussion / Re: How large was Opis?
« on: March 28, 2024, 10:43:37 PM »
I'm inclined to agree with the others that the Pathers are likely exaggerating.
The bigger issues with moons as major population centers tend to be things like habitability and economic viability, especially considering that much of the industry it might have had would seem to have been duplicated elsewhere in the system, going by what's represented in the game, and that if we're assuming it's a small moon then it probably wouldn't have had much in the way of natural resources.
Another point of caution for these kinds of relative population figures is that we do not have reliable - or in most cases any - "historical" population data. Opis may have been destroyed only ~25 years before the game starts, but that's still time enough for significant changes in population to have occurred, especially considering that we know that the Second AI War was fought - and Hanan Pacha and Killa essentially wiped out - in the intervening period.
* Other ranges are possible, depending on how loose you want to be with the numbers. 950 thousand, for example, is a number in the "hundreds of thousands," i.e. size-5, but it's also "about" a million, i.e. size-6, while if you want to be nit-picky you could also argue that size-N must be strictly more than 10N since for example one hundred thousand isn't the "hundreds of thousands" that size-5 is described as representing.
It's also a moon so I don't even think there is enough room for that many peopleUnless there's a hard number somewhere for the size of Opis, I don't think that that's a reasonable assumption to make. At a population density of a thousand people per square kilometer (about a tenth that of New York City or a fifth that of London, according to a quick Google search), you'd only need an object with a surface area of a million square kilometers to fit a billion people; assuming a spherical body, that's an object with a radius of about 280km. That's not tiny, obviously, but at only about a sixth of the radius of the Moon I don't think it's really straining credulity, either.
The bigger issues with moons as major population centers tend to be things like habitability and economic viability, especially considering that much of the industry it might have had would seem to have been duplicated elsewhere in the system, going by what's represented in the game, and that if we're assuming it's a small moon then it probably wouldn't have had much in the way of natural resources.
Chicomoztoc, which currently makes up a majority of the sector's population on its own, has a population in the hundreds of millions, which would mean that Opis made up somewhere around 90 percent of the sector's population.I would advise you to be extremely cautious about making these kinds of assumptions regarding relative populations from the numbers we're given in the game, especially given that we do not know if - or how - population numbers are rounded. (something)x108 could be anything from 100 million to just shy of a billion,* we have no idea where in that range the population of Chicomztoc falls, and aside from an unreliable source claiming "billions" we have no idea what the population of Opis was prior to its destruction. Furthermore, there are seven size-7 and five size-6 worlds in the Core, which could between them represent anywhere from 75 million to 750 million people, so while it is certainly plausible that Chicomoztoc is home to a significant majority of the Core's population, it's also possible that Chicomoztoc's population is less than an eighth of the Core's "present-day" total while an Opis which really did have a population in excess of a billion could plausibly have been home to less than half of the Sector's total population at the time of its destruction.
Another point of caution for these kinds of relative population figures is that we do not have reliable - or in most cases any - "historical" population data. Opis may have been destroyed only ~25 years before the game starts, but that's still time enough for significant changes in population to have occurred, especially considering that we know that the Second AI War was fought - and Hanan Pacha and Killa essentially wiped out - in the intervening period.
* Other ranges are possible, depending on how loose you want to be with the numbers. 950 thousand, for example, is a number in the "hundreds of thousands," i.e. size-5, but it's also "about" a million, i.e. size-6, while if you want to be nit-picky you could also argue that size-N must be strictly more than 10N since for example one hundred thousand isn't the "hundreds of thousands" that size-5 is described as representing.