Means the people as a whole. Gatestriders. Not a group.
Individualism and hauling your own weight explicitly means people work in groups.
No it doesn't. You can haul your own weight alone and be Individual just as well as you can with others.
Nothing in this precludes people striking it out alone and provides space for individuals who do. If you are an individual who doesn't want to socialize at all, or outside of a tight group, then you can.
Large extended families or tribes.
So this lays down the history of large shared claims like towns, and not individual ones.
It is lore that resources were nearly expended getting to EM-8ER. It isn't efficient for there to be individuals and individual claims.
Not all towns and cities start as a group of people. Especially given how that paragraph is worded. It's almost explicitly eliciting a pioneering wild west scenario. The only thing it doesn't do is go "WILD WEST, YEE HAW BOYEEEEE, GETCHER GOLD CLAIM."
Given there is a hub, which is supposedly a gargantuan space station near the moon and enough time has been given to complete it... Plus, the accepted feedback about everyone asking that your first frame and starting gear just be given to you... I think we're past the all of our resources being nearly expended. This implies mining, gathering, and manufacturing is well under way at this point, and the time where extreme rationing is needed has passed. We're at a point in time where expansion is needed.
If Jim wants to take a genny and plop it down in the middle of the desert and promise to protect it because it helps terraform, why not? Especially since you could just give him auto-turret blueprints and tell him to get a couple on his territory asap to help protect it with his shiny new frame.
If Gary, Mike, and Sarah want to build homes together for a small village or "The Knights of Aeturnus" want to build their citadel, then sure. But Jim can have a shack where he shoots saber-squirrels who venture too far onto his lawn with a 40 gauge space shotgun so long as he keeps that genny running. If he makes a friend who wants to move nearby, he's not going to stop them and a town can start to develop organically. Hell, if people want to cluster with others who they don't even know nothing is stopping them. They can. But others who want to be and start alone can as well.
This is where I get my militarization concept from. It didn't need to exist for the gatestrider homeworld or their other terraforming endeavours. Once Tsi-Hu began attacking, specialized MEKs were armed as guards.
I don't see gatestriders proliferating, I see them losing small-town claims.
There's nothing in there talking about how valuable the mining ops, refineries, and manufactories are.
You aren't going to send forces to attack Jim all that often. Maybe if a scout gets in range, sure.
But your eyes are on the Knights of Aeturnus, who have to supply 100 people with arms, ammo, and armor.
Your eyes are on the military bases protecting 2 of the 3 motherlodes of space-maggufinite, which Jim is nowhere near because he calculated the exact furthest point away from any thing of military value and plopped his shack down right there.
After this vision book was created was discussion on having a safe zone (which got moved into orbit) and then creating one foothold at a time.
Great.. How does this change anything? Footholds come after bootstrapping, which is what homesteads do. It makes everything after easier because you have extremely low value targets doing some work and all you had to do is give someone empty land, a genny, and a dream. Maybe also, you know, a baller 3D printer. This just makes footholds easier to set up because everyone is capable of producing their own crap instead of having to wait their turn at the Manufactorium, which whoops, is under attack again.
