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[Bungee_man]

IIRC, Scythe of Orion mentions that Opis had a population of billions, somewhere. 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.

Am I misremembering? If this is true, then it seems like Opis getting obliterated should have been a bigger deal. I know population itself doesn't directly correlate to technological, military, or economic success, but having nine in every ten people in the sector seems like it would make its destruction into the single defining historical event, especially since it was presumably a relatively wealthy world with a higher-than-typical concentration of specialized knowledge, and a size 9 habitable planet would easily be the sector's premier food exporter. It seems like it would've supplanted the Collapse as the historical event that everyone references when talking about why things are the way they are.

[Gabloc]

Such event was also mentioned in the official blog:

The moon Opis, capital and population center of the Askonia polity, is destroyed by a Planet Killer. Andrada blames rebels, rebels blame Andrada, other rebels blame each other, others blame outside agents.

The Hegemony executive council considers Andrada’s actions erratic and ill-judged, issuing a recall order which he ignores, declaring it “weak-willed treason”.

Phillip Andrada starts purges throughout Askonia system, declares himself executor-for-life aka Diktat Executor over new polity formed from the Hegemony intervention fleet.

Most of the Hegemony task force declares for Andrada – Hero of the Battle of Maxios – while a minority remains loyal to Hegemony and a smaller minority joins the Askonian rebels. A chaotic battle breaks out in the Hegemony armada in orbit around Sindria with fighting both in ship corridors and between ships of the Hegemony fleet.

In my opinion, Opis definitely has more population than Sindria. However, to claim that it has "Billions of people" is a bit exaggeration.

[Siffrin]

I will just chalk it up to the pathers exaggerating as usual, there's a few factors that makes an Opis with billions of people quite unbelievable. First off there is no mention about it apart from a conversation with a pather, Opis wouldn't just be described as the population center of Askonia it would dwarf the entirety of the Sector with its population in the billions. It's also a moon so I don't even think there is enough room for that many people, unless if David wants to clarify this then I'm subscribed to the pathers are just lying theory.

[Aeson]

I'm inclined to agree with the others that the Pathers are likely exaggerating.

It's also a moon so I don't even think there is enough room for that many people

Unless 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 10^N since for example one hundred thousand isn't the "hundreds of thousands" that size-5 is described as representing.

[Killer of Fate]

It's also a moon so I don't even think there is enough room for that many people

Earth's surface is 80% ocean. And most of the population gathers near the coasts anyway.

[David]

Three thoughts on artistic intent here:

• Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)
• It's really interesting how difficult it is, in real life, to have true and accurate strategic/historical knowledge. Game simulations don't tend to embrace this in their mechanics because getting inaccurate numbers is really annoying and therefore really difficult to make 'work' as a game. But here, it's a matter of narrative/aesthetic, not part of the mechanics (except insofar as we give rough powers-of-ten population estimates), so it's OK to do!
• To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted. Or, indeed, people who are "real" to bureaucracy but don't actually exist! All those population numbers in Wikipedia are guesses, and it only gets worse as you go back in history, or into states/polities with less bureaucratic capacity, or less trustworthy bureaucracy. These are all potentially very interesting narrative problems (which, perhaps, could only be overcome by an absurdly powerful god-like AI integrated directly into the state apparatus, perhaps some kind of "core" which we would assign a first-rate signifier on some kind of scale of effectiveness...)

[Beep Boop]

• Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)

I'm not sure if it's so much intentionally lying as it is that all large numbers seem about the same to people and so when someone means says a "billions", this may just be them saying "many".

• To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted.

This is sort of how Deciv Subpop works, too: Theere's an unknown number of uncounted people on the planet, doing anything from subsistence to Mad Max things, and this grants you a growth bonus because now that civilization has returned, they can rejoin it and become counted again.

This entire thing, of course, makes me think that there's a lot of benefit to making every single source about your fictional world's lore some kind of character or other not-strictly-reliable narrator. Deliberately make these stories conflict from very beginning. That way any future lore or update changes that don't align will be attributable to this and the players will never notice the inconsistency because everything they know comes from unreliable narrators anyway.[/list]

[Brainwright]

These are all potentially very interesting narrative problems (which, perhaps, could only be overcome by an absurdly powerful god-like AI integrated directly into the state apparatus, perhaps some kind of "core" which we would assign a first-rate signifier on some kind of scale of effectiveness...)[/li][/list]

But if a human bureaucracy finds a less than perfect census functional, if not preferable, why would an AI refrain from playing the same game?

The figures are whatever supports the AI's future goals.  It can not only retcon the figures across the society, it can simply emphasize measurements that support its goals throughout a large number of potential situations.

It is, indeed, one of the most disturbing aspects of emerging AI technology.  Why would an AI care about being accurate when it can easily lie to a high degree of verisimilitude?  Most people would rather live in the AI's world than the actual real one, I assure you.

[Killer of Fate]

Three thoughts on artistic intent here:

• Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)
• It's really interesting how difficult it is, in real life, to have true and accurate strategic/historical knowledge. Game simulations don't tend to embrace this in their mechanics because getting inaccurate numbers is really annoying and therefore really difficult to make 'work' as a game. But here, it's a matter of narrative/aesthetic, not part of the mechanics (except insofar as we give rough powers-of-ten population estimates), so it's OK to do!
• To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted. Or, indeed, people who are "real" to bureaucracy but don't actually exist! All those population numbers in Wikipedia are guesses, and it only gets worse as you go back in history, or into states/polities with less bureaucratic capacity, or less trustworthy bureaucracy. These are all potentially very interesting narrative problems (which, perhaps, could only be overcome by an absurdly powerful god-like AI integrated directly into the state apparatus, perhaps some kind of "core" which we would assign a first-rate signifier on some kind of scale of effectiveness...)

the historian says that most of the Sector's population isn't registered or something...

"You wouldn't believe how much of my work is built upon cargo manifests. I have a former student working on Agreus; they send me copies lifted off scrapped memory cores. The real secrets are wiped, of course, but the story is all there, in the lines of onloaded and offloaded cargo compared against the hull mass calculations used by navigation to say nothing of the hyperdrive. History is written in logistics!"

"Take for instance the sheer quantity of food and supplies that 'disappear' on trade routes skimming the edge of the Core Worlds. Statistical sampling suggests that a significant percent of all economic activity in the Persean Sector is 'off the books', and a significant portion of that goes straight toward those who are called 'pirates' as well as the so-called 'decivilized' populations... to say nothing of undocumented populations within the Core itself."

The historian leans close, "The official population census of the Persean Sector could be off by as much as an order of magnitude. It's simply astounding." $HeOrShe smiles, and shaking $hisOrHer head.

[Antelope Syrup]

If I had to guess, I'd put Opis' population at the lower end of size 8. This mainly comes from the fact that it's destruction cause such an enormous refugee crisis. We don't know what the survivorship rates are for planet killer attacks, but I wouldn't imagine them to be very high. But that portion of the population which escaped Opis' destruction was enough to strain both volturn and sindria to their limit in terms of the population they could support.

[Killer of Fate]

If I had to guess, I'd put Opis' population at the lower end of size 8. This mainly comes from the fact that it's destruction cause such an enormous refugee crisis. We don't know what the survivorship rates are for planet killer attacks, but I wouldn't imagine them to be very high. But that portion of the population which escaped Opis' destruction was enough to strain both volturn and sindria to their limit in terms of the population they could support.

to be frank, Volturn is a giant ocean world and Sindria is a rock. So, no surprise there.

[rhinoabc]

If I had to guess, I'd put Opis' population at the lower end of size 8. This mainly comes from the fact that it's destruction cause such an enormous refugee crisis. We don't know what the survivorship rates are for planet killer attacks, but I wouldn't imagine them to be very high. But that portion of the population which escaped Opis' destruction was enough to strain both volturn and sindria to their limit in terms of the population they could support.

It's pretty difficult guess how many people were on Opis based off of the refugee crisis it created because we don't know how many people lived on the various worlds of Askonia before the crisis, and we don't know how much of a forewarning there was for refugees to be able to get off the planet, or how long it took for the PK to actually kill the entire planet - both of which would very drastically change the rate of survival.

But given that every other world in the system either has no land or has no habitable atmosphere, even just a few million getting off Opis would probably be enough to cause a huge refugee crisis as there'd be very few places to actually put them, which I think is best illustrated in how Nortia is described, with new housing being put everywhere it can fit.

[Bungee_man]

Three thoughts on artistic intent here:

• Would Pathers lie?? In other words: people often say things that fudge numbers a bit, often for rhetorical reasons, and often they can work out a way to believe themselves. (Ah, these numbers include the casualties caused by infrastructure breakdowns and starvation in other places, and they include the war-dead, and, if you think about it....)
• It's really interesting how difficult it is, in real life, to have true and accurate strategic/historical knowledge. Game simulations don't tend to embrace this in their mechanics because getting inaccurate numbers is really annoying and therefore really difficult to make 'work' as a game. But here, it's a matter of narrative/aesthetic, not part of the mechanics (except insofar as we give rough powers-of-ten population estimates), so it's OK to do!
• To that point, there is also a concept of people who are "real" according to official state bureaucracy, and people who haven't been counted. Or, indeed, people who are "real" to bureaucracy but don't actually exist! All those population numbers in Wikipedia are guesses, and it only gets worse as you go back in history, or into states/polities with less bureaucratic capacity, or less trustworthy bureaucracy. These are all potentially very interesting narrative problems (which, perhaps, could only be overcome by an absurdly powerful god-like AI integrated directly into the state apparatus, perhaps some kind of "core" which we would assign a first-rate signifier on some kind of scale of effectiveness...)

I'm a bit curious as to the order-of-magnitude difference, though - it's one thing to cite a number that's a bit overexaggerated for rhetorical effect, and quite another to cite a number that makes up the majority of the sector, especially for something within living memory. It would be like a natural disaster destroying, say, Springfield, and then an Illinoisian barely 20 years later saying that the death toll was one hundred million, when Chicago, a city whose vast population makes its presence felt statewide, has a population of roughly two million, and the entire state only has twelve million.

Likewise, I could see a bureaucrat running the numbers and getting twice as many dead as really died, by projecting out some family trees according to outdated birthrate statistics, counting long-dead people who were still alive on official records, and so on, but his supervisor would have to sanity-check a total indicating that a single planet contained more than half the sector's official population, right?

I am curious about just how impactful the destruction of Opus was - the game seems to treat it as a localized refugee crisis, with its sector-wide importance being symbolic (an entire nation, gone in an instant!) rather than economic. If its destruction could really have killed billions of people, even through second-order effects, wouldn't that supersede the Collapse itself as the defining event in sector history?

[Beep Boop]

It's pretty difficult guess how many people were on Opis based off of the refugee crisis it created because we don't know how many people lived on the various worlds of Askonia before the crisis, and we don't know how much of a forewarning there was for refugees to be able to get off the planet, or how long it took for the PK to actually kill the entire planet - both of which would very drastically change the rate of survival.

Even if they had plenty of warning, there would not be much they could have done. Consider: The largest passenger liner available to the sector, the Starliner, holds a measly 1500 people. If the population grows at rate comparable to Earth at about 1% per year, and Opis was a size-8 planet, then anything between 2-15 fully loaded Starliners must leave every day...for the population to not grow at all. The numbers only get sillier if Opis was size 9. I've never quite seen this many Starliners anywhere.

Planetary evacuation is functionally impossible.

[Brainwright]

So far, what this thread has really driven home is that it's a little strange for planets to be owned by one faction with one or two official markets.