I notice this board isn't used much, sorry if this is the wrong place to put this, but I was wondering if anyone had considered a race of nomads among the stars. Not so much an exodus, like in Steve's storyline, but a race that has no real home, or doesn't want a home or perhaps lost their home with no immediate hope of finding a new one. I'm thinking something akin to the Colonial Fleet in Battlestar Galactica, or perhaps more closely to the Quarians in Mass Effect, or the way the player's fleet is in Homeworld, simply hopping from one area to the next, harvesting what they need, creating from the harvest, fighting if necessary and moving on.
I've found it incredibly difficult, if not impossible to make a viable race that does this, even cheating tremendously with the research.
My method was to create a very low population race. I started at 100 million, simply because any lower left me with practically no capacity to do anything. I chose to bump my mining and production up by giving myself all of the research related to those areas. Even with that we were talking about a small fraction of what a normal race mines or produces even without any additional research. Even with this low population, I was unable to fine a reasonable way to transport them all at once, or even in relatively few trips. The best I could do, was a 250,000 person colony ship. With 4 of those I was able to reasonably carry a million people at a time, but that would still mean a good 100 trips to carry everyone, not even counting population growth. From scratch, these ships took decades to mine the minerals for and build and they were very slow and incredibly vulnerable. It was at this point, with an entire fleet mostly SM created and still unable to do what I wanted that I gave up. (I'm not even getting into the cargo problems of carrying significant amounts of research labs and mining equipment among other things.)
I'm curious if anyone has any ideas on how to adapt this. My original plan which would have been to simply drop the population on a planet along with mining equipment, let it strip-mine a planet and then turn the minerals into useful products, and then take off again, with more to work with for the next destination. I highly doubt this plan is possible, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd like to hear them. This is an idea that I'd like to try. I'm not saying it'd be competitive against a more traditional empire, but I'd like it to have a chance, no matter how slim, of working and possibly creating interesting stories to write about.
Ideas I haven't had a chance to try with this plan yet:
Bumping up the racial tolerances for planets to their max and creating numerous smaller colonies. No real homeworld, so to speak, but lessens the problem of population storage and provides more opportunity to use installations.
Ignoring the efficiencies of scale and trying a large number of small cargo and colony ships rather than the massive ones. Perhaps even cargo and colony barges.
