On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 2:19 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote: > DataPacRat wrote:
At the moment, the revised draft design looks something like this: TL9, Exposed Radiators SM+8, unstreamlined: 1000 tons 1 3*1/3 Armor, Steel: $.18M 1/3 Small Control room: $.6M 1 Engine room: $.3M 1 Fuel tanks: $.3M Fuel, 50 tons nuclear fuel pellets: $2.5M 2 Habitat: 24 bunks, total life support: $1M 1 Habitat: 1 Sickbay with automed, 5 workshops: $1.1M 1 Hanger: $.1M 1 Reaction Engine, Advanced Fusion Pulse: $20M 1 Weapon turret, Medium, 1 laser beam (and 30 tons cargo): $2M Spin Gravity: $.1M Colony gear: 5 Cargo holds: 250 tons capacity 1 Factory: Fabricator: $50M 1 Habitat: 24 Hibernation chambers: $1M 2/3: Habitat: 16 Hibernation chambers: $.66M 1 Mining: $1M 1 Refinery: $1M 1 Power Plant, Fusion: $10M Total cost for 1-way trip: $90.85M (plus cost of misc colonization gear) Delta-vee: 20 mps I'm currently toying with swapping spaces of cargo for more hibernation pods or more fuel - though 32 km/sec is several times what's needed to get to the asteroid belt. >> 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. > > Hello DataPacRat, > > just how large is the group that is going to leave? Somewhere between 20 and 180, depending on how many hibernation pods get installed. > While New > Attica as a whole tried to be self-sufficient, individual New > Atticans would trade with each other, right? Indeed. > So when a small > splinter group bugs out, they might sever their links to the > rest of New Attica, including goods and services they got > from there. "Nobody ever said life would be easy..." <ahem> >> 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.) > > Ah, but how many robots can they bring? Self-replicating robots > could allow exponential growth of the industrial base, but you > have to ask yourself if you want such a game. We already have some plans on the book for clanking replicators with something approaching today's tech ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Advanced_Automation_for_Space_Missions ), and if the colony can't create further colonies that can do the same, then one way or another it's going to die out; so while the timescale of replication may be long, it seems like it should be within the realm of possibility. > Red Mars by K. S. Robinson had some chapters where the hundred > colonists started to uncrate the (roughly TL8) equipment and > tried to get technology going. People to help the robots and > make the decisions were a major bottleneck. Once they got going, > a few people could start to terraform Mars (KSR tinkered with > the timeframes, I believe). RGB Mars has been on my in-pile for a few years now, but I've just never quite gotten to it... I really should read it soonish... > So you might want factories where people can reach the big red > STOP button if the programming has a bug. > >> 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. > > Trouble is another word for fun adventures, right? So assume > that a specialist is much better than the backup AI. Fair 'nuff. > Here in Germany, certain specialists on Frankfurt airport > went on strike for much higher wages. Just 200 out of 70,000, > but nothing goes without them, so they ask for money. What if > every single colony member has such a vital job? Hm... how about, "No, Dave, you don't /have/ to monitor the ice-melting if you don't want to. Of course, if you want to go that way, I don't /have/ to sell you any more kilojoules if /I/ don't want to. But thanks to the law of comparative advantage, we both benefit by doing what we do best - so isn't your like of having enough electricity to do stuff a lot bigger than your dislike of the boring job?" >> > - 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... > > Or lawyers and business majors. As much as the geeks pretend to > loathe them, you need a couple of "suit and tie" types in any > major project, because "techies" tend to get bogged down in > technical questions and forget little things like budgets and > timetables (or documentation and maintainable software -- they > still remember what they wrote, and the deadline is near). > > The problem comes when the "suits" can override the "techies" > even on purely technical decisions ... Hm... the group does have a few aspects which might mitigate some of that - ie, coming from a society which kicked almost all the most parasitic suits onto the curb very recently - but there's still plenty of room here for "interesting times". >> > - If the society is exogamous, where will young people meet? > >> 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). > > But wouldn't they want to meet, and to have children with their > "real genuine true love", right now? Trying to prevent that is > a major intrusion in their freedom ... sounds hardly Attican. It's an interesting question. If sex is clearly separated from reproduction, basic education includes enough genetics to thoroughly demonstrate the problems of inbreeding, and having kids amongst themselves instead of with the group's exo-wombs brings an economic burden to the parents (not to mention the physical burdens on the mother, such as having to be confined to a spin-grav pod), then these problems, while it might not entirely disappear, may be kept to a manageable level. (Or maybe not - it's something worth bringing up, to see if the main characters think of such details ahead of time.) 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
