Well, I don't know that much about economics and as usual the Wikipedia page contains a great many details but little in the way of enlightenment if you don't already know what they're talking about. Even so, I'm going to have to say...
Wait, I don't think I've described the Je'lied yet. They're the most common type of alien that were aboard the ship, and being amorphous blobs of jelly who reproduce by mitosis with genetic memory even falling from a couple of miles up only means a lot of juvenile Je'lied sprang up from the impact sites. Basically, take one of your standard rainbow hued, translucent Dragon Quest style onion shaped Slimes and make it about two feet in diameter, pour (literally) its lower half into a set of four-legged trousers for heightened mobility, give it a tool belt and the ability to extrude prehensile tentacles from the upper half, which has big shiny eyes and most commonly an affable smile and a mild fruity odor, which varies between individuals as much as the color of the their gelatinous bodies. Je'lied are dry to the touch, having a zero-range form of telekinesis that lets them keep nigh-absolute control over their liquid body mass. They live in large colonies that could almost be termed hives if not for how little actual coordination there is between individuals, extruding collections of rather seashell shaped structures for housing and work spaces (and are probably in large part responsible for the pseudo-aquatic forms many Zzard ships come in.)
These are the Zzard Imperium's most common technician caste species, who maintain and fix whatever needs either, and are capable of light manufacturing (which essentially all of Earth's industries would fall into by their terms) as well if given competent oversight to keep them motivated and focused. They're not in any danger of displacing humans wholesale, but they can consume nearly anything biological but don't need a tenth as much of anything but water as a human, produce most of the things we make with petroleum and many silicates inside their bodies if given a sample or formula and time to work out the necessary processes, and expect to do whatever work they can in the area as long as they're regularly fed and provided with the necessary parts and supplies, so they alone could have had a significant economic impact. The Soviets would probably love them, except only the light blue kind don't freeze solid during the winters in most of the USSR and there's still the problem of displacing human workers.
Given the ship's long aerobraking de-orbit and their general nigh-industructibility, you can find a Je'lied colony of thirty to a hundred individuals every one to two hundred miles across much of the Temperate Zone and Tropics, and yes this does include floating and submerged ocean colonies as well. Most of them started from a single refugee or fragment of one, and grew to the standard population size for their colonies in the intervening time. They're a major factor of why it's possible at all to keep the variable carrier and its mecha operational with zero access to the normal supply chains after the Bombardment, while trying to take an overland route from China to Europe.
I'd have said they were a major cause of this timeline's Great Depression for the above reasons, but it was well underway by the time the colonies had significant numbers of adults again, so their added manufacturing capacity and willingness to pass on technical details to anyone willing to keep company and talk about it while they work was probably more instrumental in finally pulling things out of the hole rather than digging it, in the final analysis.
Edit:
You need about about a gallon to form a new individual, minimum, any less and the bits just try to pull back together or die and fall apart into what amounts to LCL, only not necessarily orange and with a strong chemical tang rather than smelling of blood. That still allows one adult to split about 20 ways, but once a colony has reached a comfortable population undersized parts that get detached through accident or whatever just reconnect into a single whole, and despite their mostly undifferentiated physiology (the eyespots are the only real macro-structure they have) they still take about a tear to reach full growth under absolutely ideal conditions, which the rarity of certain trace elements needed to catalyse their metabolism on Earth are far from - the precise balance of those is what makes their myriad hues, which can change as a juvenile develops and reflects an affinity for certain chemical reaction chains. The the main reason for adults to divide after they reach a colony size around 120 is if more of a certain color are needed for their specialty. The Jolly Rancher smell is just one more thing engineered into them because you don't want stinking things in the enclosed atmosphere of a starship. Je'lied did not evolve, they were created intentionally from barely sapient stone-age primitives encountered very early in the Zzard's expansion.
Very, very rarely you'll find a throwback with a Human/Bluo standard Willpower score, these are generally referred to as "Barbarian Slimes of the Noth" or "Nothern" and if there's even one on Earth, it'll be becasue someone wants a Je'lied PC, since part of the mainline modifications is to consider them manufacturing errors and shun them. Je'lied need a close social group to survive, and Nothern Je'lied are resilient enough in their thinking to hold out solo for a year or two and to adopt a social circle outside their own species to satisfy that need. They are least uncommon in the blue phenotype but can occur in any of them.
The species name is pronounced "sjeh-LEED" btw, or sjeh-lee-doh for those with strict consonant-vowel linguistic accents, like jelly donuts w/o nuts.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
Quote:in the 1920s leave-it-alone liquidationism was a common position for economists to take.[23] Those liquidationists thought that a depression is good medicine. In their opinion the function of a depression was to liquidate failed investments and businesses that have been made obsolete by technological development in order to release factors of production (capital and labor) from unproductive uses so that these could be redeployed in other sectors of the technologically dynamic economy. They argued that even if self-adjustment of the economy took mass bankruptcies, then so be it...probably not. At least the establishment of Je'lied colonies at fairly close intervals would probably have mitigated or prevented the Dust Bowl, since a mildly sticky but not harmful to plant life bio-goo (which would probably even help restore depleted soil as well as sticking it together) is a snap to the little guys. Je'lied techs might have been on the problem side as far as declining employment in manufacturing, though - they've been engineered for an intuitive understanding and affinity for machines and bioscience, but the racial average for Willpower is -1 to 0, so they'll pretty much obey anyone who gives orders as long as it's not directly self-destructive or damaging to the colony.
Wait, I don't think I've described the Je'lied yet. They're the most common type of alien that were aboard the ship, and being amorphous blobs of jelly who reproduce by mitosis with genetic memory even falling from a couple of miles up only means a lot of juvenile Je'lied sprang up from the impact sites. Basically, take one of your standard rainbow hued, translucent Dragon Quest style onion shaped Slimes and make it about two feet in diameter, pour (literally) its lower half into a set of four-legged trousers for heightened mobility, give it a tool belt and the ability to extrude prehensile tentacles from the upper half, which has big shiny eyes and most commonly an affable smile and a mild fruity odor, which varies between individuals as much as the color of the their gelatinous bodies. Je'lied are dry to the touch, having a zero-range form of telekinesis that lets them keep nigh-absolute control over their liquid body mass. They live in large colonies that could almost be termed hives if not for how little actual coordination there is between individuals, extruding collections of rather seashell shaped structures for housing and work spaces (and are probably in large part responsible for the pseudo-aquatic forms many Zzard ships come in.)
These are the Zzard Imperium's most common technician caste species, who maintain and fix whatever needs either, and are capable of light manufacturing (which essentially all of Earth's industries would fall into by their terms) as well if given competent oversight to keep them motivated and focused. They're not in any danger of displacing humans wholesale, but they can consume nearly anything biological but don't need a tenth as much of anything but water as a human, produce most of the things we make with petroleum and many silicates inside their bodies if given a sample or formula and time to work out the necessary processes, and expect to do whatever work they can in the area as long as they're regularly fed and provided with the necessary parts and supplies, so they alone could have had a significant economic impact. The Soviets would probably love them, except only the light blue kind don't freeze solid during the winters in most of the USSR and there's still the problem of displacing human workers.
Given the ship's long aerobraking de-orbit and their general nigh-industructibility, you can find a Je'lied colony of thirty to a hundred individuals every one to two hundred miles across much of the Temperate Zone and Tropics, and yes this does include floating and submerged ocean colonies as well. Most of them started from a single refugee or fragment of one, and grew to the standard population size for their colonies in the intervening time. They're a major factor of why it's possible at all to keep the variable carrier and its mecha operational with zero access to the normal supply chains after the Bombardment, while trying to take an overland route from China to Europe.
I'd have said they were a major cause of this timeline's Great Depression for the above reasons, but it was well underway by the time the colonies had significant numbers of adults again, so their added manufacturing capacity and willingness to pass on technical details to anyone willing to keep company and talk about it while they work was probably more instrumental in finally pulling things out of the hole rather than digging it, in the final analysis.
Edit:
You need about about a gallon to form a new individual, minimum, any less and the bits just try to pull back together or die and fall apart into what amounts to LCL, only not necessarily orange and with a strong chemical tang rather than smelling of blood. That still allows one adult to split about 20 ways, but once a colony has reached a comfortable population undersized parts that get detached through accident or whatever just reconnect into a single whole, and despite their mostly undifferentiated physiology (the eyespots are the only real macro-structure they have) they still take about a tear to reach full growth under absolutely ideal conditions, which the rarity of certain trace elements needed to catalyse their metabolism on Earth are far from - the precise balance of those is what makes their myriad hues, which can change as a juvenile develops and reflects an affinity for certain chemical reaction chains. The the main reason for adults to divide after they reach a colony size around 120 is if more of a certain color are needed for their specialty. The Jolly Rancher smell is just one more thing engineered into them because you don't want stinking things in the enclosed atmosphere of a starship. Je'lied did not evolve, they were created intentionally from barely sapient stone-age primitives encountered very early in the Zzard's expansion.
Very, very rarely you'll find a throwback with a Human/Bluo standard Willpower score, these are generally referred to as "Barbarian Slimes of the Noth" or "Nothern" and if there's even one on Earth, it'll be becasue someone wants a Je'lied PC, since part of the mainline modifications is to consider them manufacturing errors and shun them. Je'lied need a close social group to survive, and Nothern Je'lied are resilient enough in their thinking to hold out solo for a year or two and to adopt a social circle outside their own species to satisfy that need. They are least uncommon in the blue phenotype but can occur in any of them.
The species name is pronounced "sjeh-LEED" btw, or sjeh-lee-doh for those with strict consonant-vowel linguistic accents, like jelly donuts w/o nuts.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows