On Tue, 14 Jun 2011, Onno Meyer wrote:
Hello Johannes,
this series started out as sparring partners for the TL15 ships
I posted a few weeks/months/a year ago, so I came from the tech
side of things -- organics instead of metal, as far as Vehicles
can do that, and sentient robot starships with human passengers,
not human commanders and crews.
However, I think that the design decisions imply something about
bioship society as well. The Spaceships variants by Kenneth have
no bioship womb, even if the rulebooks allow that (because there
was no way to make that in Vehicles, and Vehicles came first,
but that doesn't change the fact). The bioships need human help
to reproduce, unless we're looking at the males here and there
are different female bioships.
The bioships are sentient, and they are designed to go into
harm's way. The weaponry takes too much space for mere defense.
What does it say about a society if there is a sentient warrior
caste, deliberately designed so that it depends on the help of
others to reproduce?
And what would it say if they were designed to instinctively
ENJOY that!?
On the other hand, what happens if a society grows bioships
(at some expense, even if that was just guarding and feeding
the seedling), arms them with heavy weapons, and then the
ship can say "thanks, but I don't feel like fighting, and
I don't like those sour officers, I'd rather go joyriding
with a constant party in the crew section"?
My interpretation from the stats is no more valid than yours,
of course.
Some other interpretations i can come up with:
Are the bioships already designed the only ones. There might be triggers
in bioship growth, that work similiar to royal jelly. An baby bioship
might have the possiblity to become a warship, a frighter, a passanger
ship, possibly a bioship womb as well, even if you'd have to make up your
own vehicle components for it.
Either it decides itself what it wants to become once it's grown up, and
then keeps the right diet or does the right meditations or whatever the
trigger is. Or after analyzing their potential and the possible career
opportunities, the parents, or the human owners decide on a diet.
The second variant would be somewhat analogous to the Droyne from
Traveller.
Yet an other option would start with the ships deciding themselfs, which
components to grow, either conciously or subconciously. People often are
not doing rational cost benefit analysis, when deciding on their security.
Bioships might not do that always either. They (or some of them) might
decide that they need all thoose weapons in case they ever get ambushed by
pirates and they would not want to hear about any statistics about the
unlikelyhood of that happenening and how in most cases lighter armament
would be sufficient anyway. They want to be ready for the pirate ambush,
they know from the movies..
You can even combine the idea with brains growing in the ships. if the
ships grow in "dry docks".
A joint artificial reality for all the ships in the dock?
Something like that. Or an artifical reality, while being in a womb, or
being an egg somewhere.
One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle
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Johannes Trimmel
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