For shelter, I like the idea of the transparent cubes the best. The idea is just amazingly sexy, and very appropriate to the theme.<br/><br/><br/>I think that the primitive hand tools for mining are the best way to go, with some advanced technology like the mentioned wind turbines to provide for the electrical needs of the cube shelters and their accompanying heaters and such, in tandem with the solar collectors.<br/><br/><br/>The nanotech suits are also a great idea, as they provide a consistent, possibly self repairing and therefore easy to implement, means of letting the prisoners deal with the harsh environment when out of the shelters. One idea I did have, to get around the issue of how do you have sex in a nanosuit, is that instead of just having transponders built into the nanotech suits, each prisoner could also be subdermally tagged as well. If a prisoner enters one of the cubes, there could be a system that removes the suit from her body and plugs it into the power grid to make sure it recharges before she has to go back out into the cold. Although I freely admit I'm not sure how to implement that idea just yet...<br/><br/><br/>The transponders in the suits and perhaps implanted in the prisoners themselves could also serve as the means to keep any prisoners away from any of the higher level technology in place. Say if an inmate gets too close to a wind turbine or other such equipment, her suit could lock down and hold her in place for a set time as a warning, and approaching closer can result in something far worse.<br/><br/><br/>On the idea of individual quotas, I don't know that this would work well in practice. How do you keep track of the actual mining done by each prisoner, and not just the ore/minerals that each prisoner actually delivers to the storage area? It seems to me that the overall quota works better in the setting. The Empire knows there are x number of prisoners, and expects y amounts of raw materials at each supply drop. If y is lower than expect, supplies are shortened, and if greater, extra supplies might be provided.<br/><br/><br/>In the case of prisoner death, why not have whatever crews are doing supply drops scan the transponders of each prisoner, producing an accurate, automated count of living population? No need for the prisoners themselves to keep track of such numbers.<br/><br/><br/>I do like the idea of multiple settlements, but I imagine they would be highly scattered across the planet, though some might be in closer relation. Say the Empire put the settlements down near deposits of the materials they want to be mined, and then drop the prisoners off to get down to it.