Quote Originally Posted by su_liam View Post
A pretty extreme limit, but still a limit.
True, though the only thing that pretty much makes the limits infinite is transportation - one planet could convievably produce no food, yet sustain millions if all their food was transported from another planet.

Quote Originally Posted by alaskanflyboy View Post
I just know there are services and industries in existence today that weren't in the medieval world, such as groceries, fuel stations, and power plants. I wouldn't even know where to begin in considering a rough number of their support values.
This is also pretty tricky. For example, if you had an automobile sales business, it could be built in a small town of 3,000. Yet it depends on someone somwhere else to actually make the autos as the town couldn't support the industry by itself.

I think that's what makes the "fantasy" element a little easier to manage, because we have hard values about how much land it takes to grow x amount of calories, which can support x population. Given x population, we could support Y numbers of industries/businesses. Since there was no global economy, and local economies were pretty much limited to their own villages, each village was a microcosm and distinct.

Of course, in any fantasy setting we could propose almost any combination of support structures (magical/natural) that would invalidate "real world" demographics. However, I think its easier to work with those numbers than modern/sci fi equivalents.

I'd still be curious to see what would be determined as a baseline - however inaccurate it may be. It can always serve as a starting point to build on.

What funny is that rarely (for understandable reasons) do fiction writers dwell on these things. About the only show I know that dealt with real-world needs was Star Trek:Voyager, and that was simply due to the fact that not being able to return to a nearby starbase to resupply had a serious effect on the ship's stores. It was only dealt with superficially, but at least they acknowledged the fact that the food had to come from somewhere.