Clinton replied to me: > The gates are one way trips. The main expansion effort is to build a > gate, carefully calibrate it to make sure you can hit what you are aiming > for (by sending something through and waiting 6 years to find out where it > lands sometimes for initial launches - much less if it is to someplace > that can send back a messenger with the arrival coordinates), building a > core ship with the hard to locally fabricate components and an > adventuresome crew with as much automation as possible, send it through, > then build a return gate on the other side.
Hello Clinton, would the Morethan send automation or workers? And is volunteering for a first-in crew a way for Morethan who did not quite "make it" into the meritocracy at home to earn their laurels? Or do they send just the worker castes onto these high-risk missions? What is the adventure, by the way? Is there a chance that the first ship can't build the gate before their supplies run out? Or that it can't find some essential raw materials? > Deep space gates are possible, but no one has as yet come up with the > capital to build two preassembled gates just to get further away. > Proposals for doing so are frequently brought up by both the human > interests and the Morethans who are trying to relink with any other > survivors in distant worlds. The first gate of such a pair -- or all but the last gate in a chain -- can work without much calibration. And did anybody consider an interstellar assault by sending the first gate of a pair within a few lightmonths of the target and use uncalibrated launches from there for the assault? The error for 0.3 lightyears would be 0.036 AU, right? > Some limited communication has occurred over > the years by Morethan scientific jump researchers sending small masses > much further than normally possible. These experiments have an extremely > low success rate and risk sending their encoded messages inside the zone > of human influence tipping their hand. So this communication is very > limited at this time. A small, stealthy package which tries to fix the position, and only transmits within the target area ... Or is there some kind of "arrival flash"? > A small portion of the Morethan population were human > sympathizers or prisoners of war and remained in system and lived with the > prejudices, and other transhumans who lack many of the obvious physical or > political signs of the Morethan rebellion still reside in human space as > well (with varying degrees of persecution). When a meritocratic society offers only Hobson's Choice to its citizens, why should the "losers" stay in the game, instead of leaving that society? Or does Morethan society guarantee even "non-fittest" Morethan a better condition than normal humans get? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
