Hello OA!

[Rynn]

Welcome to the group

1. I have an idea of space habitat that seem interesting to me, but I'm not ready to create full solar system for it. I've seen some habitat articles without system description in EG, but they are very old. Is it possible to write habitat article and then somehow place it in suitable system from already existing?

That's completely fine, there's no need to create a whole system backdrop just for a habitat

2. I undestand what in developed systems economy is post-scarcity and automated, but how about the system in the first years of colonization? Obviously even then sophonts will only be overseers of neumann swarms and other automated industry, byt how many time and attention will they need to devote to the process?

Automation in OA is basically complete. Software as intelligent as people exists (as well as software that is much better). For any job a person, or sophont, can do there is software that can do it as good or better. Even on a new colony people don't have to work, the machines can simply supervise themselves and go about making more machines and infrastructure. Some colonists might like to wait in stasis (physical or otherwise) whilst others may choose to be awoken as early as their is habitat space for them.

3, unrelated to previous. For an archeologist as myself dead peoples are often more interesting that live peoples. In OA how often does a colonized system or major habitat/habitat group die out to the last sophont for whatever reasons? Not in the Sephirotics or other civilized places, of course (or maybe even there), but somewhere on the Periphery

It depends what you mean. If you mean everyone died that would be pretty rare....however even pretty rare events can happen with enough numbers. Even if the chance of one system dying out (through war, blight or other) is one in a million each year there will be dozens of dying systems, thousands throughout history.

However it's worth considering that many systems might just be abandoned as fashion sways. A relatively low populated system whose neighbour a few light years away gets a nexus might slowly start losing its people, as more migrate to be closer to the nexus link. Now systems becoming completely abandoned might be rare, but there are likely thousands of systems within which there are extensive habitats with no inhabitants, the habs in low power mode awaiting the arrival of visitors (or defending against anyone not already registered).

Finally it's worth considering how much virtual archeology there is to do. 99.9% of terragens spend most of their time in virtual worlds. The sheer quantity of historical data of events, popular environments, popular rule sets etc boggle the mind. So much to sort through and discover.