Logistics of colonies

[Mourning Star]

Human colonies on other planets are a staple in science fiction, but I haven't read too much that really covers the logistics of the foundation and progress of a colony. I've been giving this some thought, trying to work out how they would actually work. I'd like your input.

Here are some premises. Assume FTL travel and communication. For the sake of simplicity, assume the planet is identical to Earth in gravity, atmospheric makeup, environmental norms, and etc. Assume that transportation from the home world to the colony is expensive and time consumptive enough that transporting raw materials or things like steel I-beams is not practical. We can transport colonists, survival necessities, tools, that's about it.

Here is what I'm thinking so far:

1 - Build a temporary shelter.
2 - Transport first colonists with survival necessities and tools.
3 - Build more permanent shelters (brick and wood) and begin agriculture - working towards becoming self-sufficient.
4 - Continue transporting new colonists and supplies.
5 - Once self-sufficience has been achieved, begin processing natural resources (mining, lumber jacking, etc.)
6 - Economy will mainly be a balance of agriculture, mining, and building for an extended period.


What am I missing? After some discussion on the logistics I have some followup hypotheticals.

[WafflesToo]

This website on atomic-rocketry has a lot of information worth considering if you're working toward a hard SF genre.

[David Gullen]

Is isn't there a contradiction with giving them FTL and also saying transport is time-consuming?

I don't really get the idea (an apologies if this is not your vision) of arriving in an FTL ship and then immediately reverting to a c20 lifestyle and technology. It's something that seems prevalent in much SF, almost an assumption that that is how it would be, but I think it is a general failure of imagination.
Assuming FTL implies a society much higher tech than ours. Without substantial training most people are not going to be capable of dealing with colonial life as the infrastructures they rely on are not there. Imagine taking an average urban familly and putting them in uncultivated ground with some supplies and telling them to get on with it. And if it's expensive to move things you wouldn't use this as a way of exporting excess population, it would be driven by business or ideology/politics, and that would determine who the colonists were.
I can just as easily see a colony being based round a single-use ship, or fleet of ships, each rapidly convertible into tech resources of various kinds. I'd unload sets of comms, nav and survey sats, I'd get my infrastructure up as fast as possible and take it from there. In other words I'd try and keep my tech rather than abandon it and hope one day I'll regain it.

[Mourning Star]

I like the disposable ship idea.

I never intended to just throw away technology, there would be plenty from the home world, but no matter how much technology you have, you still need natural resources to build infrastructure, metals especially. I didn't mean to ignore the technology, just focus on that part of it.

Regarding the time consuming FTL issue, this is essentially just a plot device, but not a new one. Science fiction writers have often chosen to put limitations on FTL travel to keep things from being too easy or giving the bad guys too much power. Jump gates are an example, not being able to use FTL technology within a star system is another.

I am not working towards hard SF, actually little of this would come up in the story I am playing with, I just feel like if I have thought through it all and come up with a believable scenario, more thoroughly understand how these things might work, the milieu I create will be better for it.

[ctg]

If they have FTL then they have teleportation as the FTL does come out with the time technologies. All your methods should be based on the ultratech and so on.

[Lith]

FTL physics goes beyond my knowledge, but:

-is this the first colony of its type? Does humanity have prior experience colonizing, such that they have learned how to do it?

-what about diseases (if there's preexisting life) and problems due to variance of the thousands of environmental factors, which even if similar to Earth overall, will still find plenty of differences to cause problems?

-Wouldn't it be easier to just live out of the ship? If it's sturdy enough to survive space, it ought to last a couple of generations.

-What kind of colony is it? Is it meant to be completely self-sustaining and agricultural? Is it meant to say, mine a resource for eventual export? Is it a group of a certain ideology headed for a new Eden? Is it a scientific colony studying some kind of phenomenon?

NASA has done a fair bit of work on space colonies using (more or less) current technology. You might find some information at the library; beyond that, I don't know.

[Mourning Star]

First colony. Assume they would do enough examination of the planet ahead of colonization to prepare the colonists with innoculations. Self-sustaining in the way that in a few thousand years the entire planet will be populated with its own cities and culture.

My first thought was to use the same ships over and over to transport new colonists and supplies, but having the ship stay as a temporary shelter or be made to break apart into pieces for making shelters does have its advantages. I wonder which would be more practical.