This is two questions about civilian industry:
1. Do the civilians ever put up mining colonies outside of the Sol system? I have a 0 cost colony that has a lot of medium-sized (up to 10k of one or two types) deposits on asteroids. I have also just discovered a system with HUGE amounts of resources scattered across tens of moons and 600 asteroids. What are the requirements for the civilians to start using these places?
Search the boards for "Civilian Mining Complex" in posts from *Steve* - you should find the post/thread where Steve introduced them, which has the rules. (It will probably be in mechanics, so you can also just look through the old threads in there (that were started by Steve) - this is not a bad thing to do anyway.) The quick answer is you need something like 5M population in a system before it becomes eligible.
2. Will civilian freighters always be launched from Earth i.e. is Earth always their home planet? I have three companies all making new freighters from Earth.
I suspect that this is true. Again, you'd probably need a large population even if it were not true.
John
