On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 1:16 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > 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? >
I'd expect it to follow the design requirements that a regular ship would have. So a single engine failure shouldn't be devastating. If 983 tons would meet the requirement, then that's okay. If it wouldn't, it's not. > 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. It's probably faster to grow more smaller units than fewer big ones, though. That might be a consideration. Or it might not. Depends on who builds them. > > 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? Setting color, I think. If the ship builders don't worry about talking to primatives, they probably aren't going to have equipment to talk to them. > Does that make sense? > > Regards, > Onno > _______________________________________________ > GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> > http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l > -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
