On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 1:59 PM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > DataPacRat asked
>> Does anyone have any suggestions on outfitting such an expedition? For >> example, are there any existing TL9ish craft statted out which would >> make a reasonable baseline to build on, or gear I'm likely to forget, >> or important social factors with technical fixes, or anything >> resembling the sort? > > Hello DataPacRat, > > your people come from an orbital civilization, which prides itself > on small or at least modular habs. So the characters should simply > take stock of what they routinely buy from others, especially from > Earth, and they have a list of what to bring. They should consider > what they sell to others, and wonder if that can go on, too. In addition, New Attica has developed something of a self-conscious tradition of doing as much as possible without imports (especially imports from Earth), which started during their bid for independence, as part of Earth's strategy to bring them back into the fold was to try to stop shipping supplies and starve them out. > Your players won't have it as easy, so let's start a brain-storm. > > * Industrial or craft people will not be able to specialize and > get economies of scale. Each small-station tinkerer will have > to be jack of all trades and master of none. Minorly eased with 3D printers and extensive databases - but for the more complicated items, such as computers, lasers, rockets, and so on, garage-scale tinkering won't cut it, and so they'll have to set up dedicated production lines. With robots to do the manual labour, there's no particular reason that such factories have to be anywhere near the colonist's habitable spaces, so a lot of this is likely to be happening out-of-sight. (Though perhaps still with sousveillance cameras, just in case one of the trusted colonists is actually an untrustworthy saboteur.) > If they are your New Atticans, what does a small community with > just one doctor, one pilot, etc. do to the economic/social > rules? A community with multiple single-points-of-failure is just asking for trouble; if only certain individuals currently possess vital skills, then one of the more important commodities will be training programs, and perhaps AIs programmed for various aspects of such tasks in case nobody better is available at a given moment. > * Emergency medical care. It used to be possible to scoot over to > a larger hab, and to import supplies from Earth. No matter how well-prepared they are, they're going to end up with people requiring treatment that's just not available. One option that comes to mind is to put such 'untreatable' cases into cryogenic stasis, to await the time that the colony broadens its med-base to handle them - or re-opens trade with the rest of the system, or some other unforeseen eventuality eventuates. > * Emergency life support 'restocking' -- what if the algae mutate? > You will need considerably more backup systems for everything. There's an old rule-of-thumb, that you should have at least three independent sources of anything you need to survive. The algae are one source of the oxygen, water, and food needed to survive; and even if there are alternate life-support measures, it would be a good idea to have some source of new algae other than existing algae - say, some frozen stocks; and a computer file of the genetic code plus the equipment to print out the DNA and insert it into a new cell-culture. > * Access to larger stations with rotational gravity, e.g. during a > pregnancy or for surgery. I can buy gravity being necessary for pregnancy, though most of the ladies in question may decide the colony would be better off if they were active members, and put exo-wombs in spin-capsules to grow the next generation. Surgery... is an interesting thought. I have a novel from the 80's, "Space Doctor" by Lee Correy, which is about the medical side of creating a freefall factory in orbit. If the clinic needed rotational-gravity for emergency surgery, a good bit of redesign would have needed to be done, so the doctor had some incentive to see if he could do his job in freefall. I don't remember many more details; I'll have to dig it up again to refresh my memory. > * Face to face contacts with other people, instead of chatrooms. Hm... The society they're leaving had gotten used to at least a portion of the population using robotic proxies, ala the movie "Surrogates"; the colonists may want to weed out people who depend on them too strongly. (Or maybe look into getting a few, if those few are better-adapted to piloting robot bodies that are more capable of doing things in space than live bodies in spacesuits. As just one option, live bodies buried deep in an asteroid are safer from the 20 rad a year they'd be exposed to working outside...) > - Teachers for skills with a physical component, from mechanics > to zero-g-ballet. The setting has a technology which isn't quite GURPS standard, but which is reasonably close to what GURPS calls neural interface tech. It's the ability to sense impulses within, block the impulses of, and/or induce new impulses in sensory and motor-control nerves. This allows a variety of tasks, such as sensing what a body feels, giving a person arbitrary physical sensations, sensing how a person is trying to move, and moving a body like a puppet. One person can even 'drive' another. (We've got a short story about that, "A Mile in Another Rat's Paws".) > - People to mediate or serve as a buffer in case of a conflict > between two colonists in a small team. "Fine, I quit" is not > an option. This is probably where the main characters are likely to have the most trouble - the core group are fairly geeky (ie, most of them met as they built themselves a computer from scratch while they were in high school), and the social sciences have tended to be low on their priority lists. Not missing entirely, though; their almost-motto is "Get the job done, whatever it takes", and it's obvious that certain forms of social-stuff get in the way of getting the job done, and other forms let them try to get the job done in ways they otherwise couldn't. Hm... maybe one of the outsiders they try bringing aboard will be a social scientist to help with precisely those issues; which opens up a few interesting plot possibilities... > - If the society is exogamous, where will young people meet? Even with exo-wombs and a bank of frozen sperm and ova, if they maintain their separation from the rest of the system, it's going to be pretty hard to avoid in-breeding - in fact, that's likely to be one of the more significant long-term risks to the colony. Depending on how /many/ frozen gametes they bring, they might be able to hold it off for long enough to create enough daughter colonies to allow each colony to serve as a somewhat separate population... More directly to your question, with exo-wombs and frozen gametes, young people won't /need/ to meet in order to perpetuate the colony, at least for a couple of generations - by which time the whole thing is likely to have developed in ways the founders never expected (and may even find rather disturbing). Thank you for your time, -- DataPacRat lu .iacu'i ma krinu lo du'u .ei mi krici la'e di'u li'u traji lo ka vajni fo lo preti _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
