Hello everybody, when I got down to numbers, I had another thought. Large, mass-produced vehicles use interchangeable components. This isn't always perfect, and the right engine of an aircraft might have some mirrored parts compared to the left engine, but the seats would mostly be the same (within one class).
If a bioship is grown as an unit, but assembled from parts, would it make sense to give it e.g. one 1,017-ton thruster and one 983-ton thruster rather than two nicely matched 1,000-ton thrusters? And bioships grow in use, or there are different sizes from the same pattern, the number of similar organs would stay the same. If a 10-ton bioshuttle has two "magic" reactionless thrusters, the 100-ton bioship and the 1,000,000-ton biocruiser would also have two units, where metal ships might have two (interchangeable) thrusters for the shuttle, and a dozen separate units for the cruiser. And I have this habit of adding lots of different and redundant parts to my vehicles -- not just neutrino communicators and gravity ripple coms, but also radios and laser communicators. Adding a radio to a high-tech starship is cheap, and it helps if the primitive locals don't have superscience, or if a technobabble field jams superscience signals. Would a bioship have fewer of those "marginal" additions? Does that make sense? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
