Thomas replied to me: > > Say the colony ship carried biotech terraforming gear. They got > > into engine trouble, and had to find an alternative destination. > > The crew now faces a terrible choice -- terraform an inhabited > > planet, or let their colonists die. > Given that the terraforming has to be done in a reasonable amount of > time after the ships arrival. That means that the "biotech terraforming > gear" has to be prepared (meaning "preproduced") in advance in order to > be available in significant amounts on arrival. But this gear has to be > shaped for the target, otherwise it would not work (at least not work as > expected).
Nobody said it would be easy or a sure success. There must be jobs for heroes and villains, not just accountants. The beauty of biological systems is exponential growth until the capacity of the world is reached. Just one breeding pair of something nasty could transform the local ecology, if it breeds fast enough. Of course they would use more than one pair to make it faster and more certain ... And if the terraforming works not quite as expected, so what? It will be better for the colonists than no terraforming, and still a disaster for the locals. > So after a misjump (or what else lead to the disaster you are > talking about) the scientists (given there are some aboard) will need a > decent amount of time to create new biotech terraforming gear - AFTER > first collecting enough information about the starting conditions - > before the colonists can even begin with the terraforming process. So the colonizer transport hides in the outer system for a year or a decade. > From this point onwards various problems may arise: > > * if the locals' TL is high enough, they would be able to defend > themselves - and the colonists' ship is a non-moving target ... Or a moving target, if it retains STL engines. But sufficiently advanced locals could help to repair the FTL drive, so there is no need to terraform their world against their will. > * if the colonists were transported in a form of stasis (cryogenic > sleep, for example) it is possible that this could not be > maintained after arrival ... Then the colonists are dead and the story is over. So assume that they can be maintained some more, but not indefinitely. The crew has to do something relatively soon. > * it is also possible that the resources of the colonists' ship are > not sufficient to produce enough "gear" In Turtledove's Worldwar series (a technological invasion, not a biological one, mostly) the aliens thought they had not just enough stuff but also vastly overengineered gear for the task. They were wrong, but just barely, which turned it onto an eight-volume story rather than a short novella. > * due to the short time (in relation to the time spent for the > originally intended destination) there is a good chance that the > world resists from being biotechnically terraformed - perhaps with > a little help from the locals... > > As a conclusion I doubt that a lost colony ship with only biotechnical > terraforming gear is able to successfully take over another world as the > intended colony world. Now one may argue that this is only a matter of a > high enough Techlevel, but with TLs above 13 or 14 ships do not longer > get lost in such a way - and the need for colony SHIPS has also gone. Depends on the TL difference and the tech rules. A TL11 colony ship with reactionless thrusters should be able to evade TL9 warships indefinitely, and TL11 shuttles can play tag with TL9 interceptors. Against TL8 locals, they might even get something done while they do the evading. Against TL7 or less, they have space superiority if they can rig just a one laser drill in a shuttle. And if the GM wants ships to get lost/shipwrecked, there are always options. For example, assume that there can be only one FTL drive per ship, since even 'cold' backups would interfere with the technobabble. When I write vehicles, my gut reaction is to make them 'safe' against the failure of any one (or any two or three) gadgets by adding redundancy. But as a GM, I prefer ships which can fail in interesting, non-lethal ways. So don't take a backup jump drive, take a workshop and survival gear instead, the GM should provide a challenging planet where the 'muscle' of the crew can fend off natives while the 'techies' repair the ship and all get a chance to rescue an exotic alien princess on the way out. > By the way: how long do you think it will take to terraform a hostile > world into a garden Eden, with biotech only? How many stages would be > necessary? Would it be possible to do it with just one single "gear", > induced just once in the beginning of the process? Depends on the initial hostility. Starting with a Mars or a Venus, the answer is millenia, and several stages. Starting with Earth and adding a new DNA base pair or new isomeres of sugar or starch would be easier, and it might be enough to make the locals allergic to their world. _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
