On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes wrote:
Regardless how the genes for the new ship come into being and how many
parents are involved as long as it is at least one, one or more of
the parents build a cocoon, and after a certain time, the original ships,
plus additional children come out.
Hello Johannes,
that would leave the parent ship(s) helpless during the pregnancy.
Better keep all but one parent out, to care for the brood, unless
the physiology of the bioships makes it absolutely necessary.
Should the bioships require all or many parents helpless in a cocoon, i
would expect them forming packs (fleets?) where the currently non
multiplying protect the breeders.
Or that they go hiding in astereoid belts for breeding. If cocoons very
difficult to distinguish from astereoids, that could work too.
The children could even come out fully adult, with their personality a
clone of one parent or a mixture of the parents personalities. Or they
come out as ordinary children.
Can you clone personalities without cloning memories?
I assume they inherit memmories as well. Propably some older/ less often
remembered ones get ditched, especially if you inherit from more then one
parent.
I had made up such a race once, though not as ships. It gets difficult
doing dialogs for them in a human language. "Do you still remember when
our common past self fell from the tree?"
Assuming the ships search their food themself in some astereoid belts or
similiar you can get away with a lot of unecconomic designs.
Bioships will need energy and mass. As written, the Vehicles ship
has total conversion power plants and mega reactionless thrusters,
so she can easily get into a gravity well and scoop mass.
They might
have been built as military ships originally, but they multiply themselfs
and hirering some of them for civilian jobs, that don't require their
armaments might still be more ecconomical, then building ships, that fit
that purpose.
If the bioship is foraging to save money, that costs time. No
free lunch.
I was thinking, if bioships multiply on their own, including foraging the
necessary food/raw materials, after a while, there may be so many around,
that it stops being cost efficient to build any ships for functions where
a bioship can be used.
Sort of like horses in westerns. Don't know how authentic that is, but in
the movies there do not seem to be people too poor to have horses.
There might even be bioship trade unions, that put preassure on humans, to
outlaw mechanical ships, to keep their jobs secure and well paid.
That only works if they already have a stranglehold on transport.
Or there is another way to make them indispensable -- consider
Hamilton's Voidhawks and Blackhawks.
Since if i understood it correctly you have a conflict between bioship
civilisation and a mechanical civilisation in mind, propably one cause is
the bioships attempting to expand their monopoly/human paranoia about
bioship dominance. Depending on who you ask. The leading movement of the
mechanical faction fears to get dependent on bioships. The bioships, who
are after all gengeneered to have humanities best interests in mind, are
outraged that so many valuable resources are wasted just to build
mechanical ships, thats only real purpose is that human goverments can
tell the bioships "Neener Neener we can do spacetravel without you".>
One mans groundfloor is an other mans earthmissle
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Johannes Trimmel
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