The new outpost, with an agricultural installation close by, and the Golconda dimly visible in the distance:
Some additional thoughts now that I've had a chance to take a look in person...
Ideally the Outpost option would come with a residential Installation. Large installations can have easily hundreds of times the internal volume of an outpost, and that's before you even consider that in many of the outpost models much of the internal volume has to be occupied by docking bay stuff.
...
The International Space Station has a pressurized volume of about 1000 m3, and can theoretically house about 8 people (although it very rarely has that many aboard at once). That works out to 125 m3 per person. Pulling a random urban geography study off the Google, that is comparable to the volumetric housing density of severely overcrowded rental housing on Earth. So let's call that "pretty cramped but livable".
The Civilian Outpost model has two large modules that look habitable. One is about 400x200x80 meters, and the other is about 400x130x60m. That gives a total of 9.5M m3. So if the entire interior is solid residential housing, as crowded as the ISS or tenement housing, it can hold about 76,000 people. Thus, I guess if you a assume "tens of thousands" means like 20,000 or so, a single outpost actually could hold reasonable-ish sized apartments for all of them. Still not going to be much room for zero-g handball courts or other amenities, though!
The Golcondans did in fact get a Civilian Outpost, so the above numbers hold. Fortunately for them, they have also been given an installation. While the Agricultural model isn't the largest installation available, the main block still has on the order of 100 times greater internal volume than the presumed habitation modules on the outpost. If even a fraction of that is devoted to residential space (I can't imagine it's
exclusively agricultural production facilities inside) then they'll have a very reasonable amount of living space for a population of 20,000 or so. Another nice feature of the Agricultural installation is the spinning farm domes. It may not be a planet, but they'll have the opportunity to feel grass under their feet. Those domes are around 300m diameter, so even plenty of space for a football match now and then!
I also like that the Golcondans got their own faction, and the outpost (actually the entire instance) is under their control. Their faction doesn't show up in the influence table, so presumably it's cut off from the BGS - sensible, since they're supposed to be isolationists, so (for now) they don't care about influence in the system, much less getting into conflicts or conducting expansions. However, since they
are described as isolationist, it's a bit jarring to see every faction in the system offering missions and passengers at their outpost. Especially since the Golcondans themselves don't offer these!
The Golconda is there too, parked 30 km from the outpost. A good distance for a vehicle you want to preserve as a museum or a shrine, but don't necessarily trust not to break up or explode some day. The log messages can still be accessed, via comm beacons positioned near the ship. Missed opportunity not adding a final message recording this emotional farewell to the Golconda we read about in Galnet.
