Johannes replied to me: > 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.
Hello Johannes, that reminds me of some "market distortions" when it comes to low-paying jobs and welfare. If you decide that everyone gets food, clothing, shelter, and medical care, no matter what, it makes no economic sense to work for very low hourly wages. On the flip side, if you assume that welfare recipients are "employed by the state" and have to work for it, the state suddenly has more workers than it can use. The alternative to metal-and-composites freighters would be not to have them. The alternative to bioship freighters would be to have them idle, and to pay their minimum upkeep. > 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. I wrote sparring partner, not enemy. The plan is to find out how very big, very advanced ships play out in 3E -- what are reasonable crew levels, how do offense and defense balance, etc. The bioships tend to be over-armed and under-armored, i.e. they cannot resist their own main gun below 1/2D, and less than ten hits will bring them to zero HP. Compare MBTs, which would be lucky to survive one penetrating hit, and 20th century battleships, which usually could survive 20 hits unless there was a freak magazine hit. The metal-and-composites ships are slightly more balanced, but that isn't because of their construction. They're TL15 compared to the bioships' TL14, so they can afford more shields. The metal ships came first, and the bioships were designed to be able to penetrate their armor. Another factor is computer/brain capacity. The biocomputer from Robots has +1 complexity, but the bioships have a single macroframe while metal ships got 50 or more. it didn't feel right to give a sentient bioship more than one brain. > 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".> More reasoned metal-chauvinists might be afraid to become dependent on a single species/genus/family/order of living ships. What if there is a plague? A parasite? Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
