fauna - Would dinosaurs render a planet unfit for colonization?

Peter U, I've got to agree with the previous answers: in a high-tech, well-supplied human-colonists-vs-dinosaurs smackdown, it's pretty obviously a one-sided fight.

However, you have raised a good dramatic question, and I'm not willing to let it simply die out. :-) There are ways to make a worthwhile story of conflict and survival out of this.

Here's one example. (I didn't make this up, really: it's drawn from illustrious predecessors such as Tom Godwin's The Survivors and Marion Zimmer Bradley's account of Darkover's initial population by human starfarers. It also has roots in the Lost World genre of Victorian romance and 20th-century pulps, in which a lost colony of Greeks or Atlanteans or something has persisted in remote parts of Africa or Central Asia...)

Rather than having the "colonization" be an orderly, well-funded invasion-style immigration - the kind of thing dinosaurs could not withstand - you could perhaps have some fun with a shipwreck of a starship. This ship could have been one that was intended as a colony ship of sorts, but not fully equipped to regenerate all of the starfaring technology. This would give you a few plot points in which your human-vs-dinosaur conflict could play out:

• Without the ability to sustain high-tech weaponry, medicine, energy sources, and defenses, the humans would be in no position to dominate the world of dinosaurs. Defensive survival would be a difficult proposition.




• The humans would be confronted with the necessity of salvaging as much useful material and knowledge as possible from the ship. These artifacts would need to be conserved effectively, and it's pretty certain that the colonists would be slow to figure that out.




• Simultaneously, the humans would need to reinvent forms of society appropriate to their reduced circumstance. This would include rediscovering the survival arts such as agriculture, hunting, physical combat with manual weapons, woodworking, artisanship, etc. etc.

These points could breathe a lot of life back into your original concept, I think. You could have a multigenerational saga on your hands. Or, you could set your story point some centuries after the Landing. What kind of world would it be?

Note, too, that when I say "shipwreck" I don't necessarily mean mean a crashed vessel on the world's surface. Shipwreck, in this case, simply means that the ship had to go to an unplanned destination, can no longer depart, and presumably has no reasonable way of signalling for help. Examples:

• The ship diverted to a star of the correct spectral type because the engines were breaking down; those engines proved to be unrepairable.




• The ship was damaged (possibly by meteors or something) while in orbit, and is no longer livable. The air is gone; or the power systems have died; or there's been a bad radiation leak; or something... The humans had to take shuttlecraft down to the surface; the ability of the shuttles to make further trips to the orbiting hulk is limited.




• The ship was overwhelmed by a fight between mutineers and crew; the "colonists" were the losing side. They bailed out to the planet below because they had no other choice. The winners took the ship and left; or died trying...

These are only examples of how a group of humans could find themselves tussling with dinosaurs in a believable struggle for survival/supremacy.