> Hello everybody, [McE] Hello Onno > 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?
[McE] It would make more sense to me to have as close to matched drives, be they 1000-ton or 1,017-ton. And be over the threshold required. And call a 983-ton drive 'not-ripe' yet. > 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. [McE] if the engines are organic and intergral, but not transplants, yes. Otherwise it would depend on the growth factors of the differing parts. If a megaton hull can grow from a 10-k-ton hull in 10 years. But the drives take 50 to reach a similar order of magnitude power increase, the shipmasters might graft in more drive buds. Or have the ex-cruiser become a carrier in 'middle-age' > 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? [McE] ...are they also organic? If so they could be said to be implanted buds of stem cells, programmed at a later date to become bigger comms, or more sensors If they aint organic, but cybernetic - so to speak, then who cares? Just install more. > Does that make sense? > > Regards, > Onno my 2 shillings. [McE] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
