On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 2:44 AM, Onno Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> This is mostly to be able to say that the ship has something to handle >> general wear, tear, and abrasion when dealing with micrometeoroids. >> One space worth of armor spread across front, centre, and back seems >> enough to do that much, yesno? > > There are rules on abrasion at very high speeds and for > micrometeorites in Spaceships 5. To survive random junk > impacts without damage, you would want dDR 3 to 15. Hm... are you going by page SS5 p39? The ship's trip will be using about 5 mps to accelerate and half that to decelerate, so by the rules we treat is speed as 10 mps; if the once-a-year encounter roll is positive (3-4 on 3d6), and if the e-beam's point-defense fails, and if the ship fails to dodge, then, in general, 1d6 damage will be done to the front hull, right? If that's the case - then would it make more sense to stick about 6 dDr armor on the front section, such as one space of SM+8 unstreamlined light alloy armor? >> Hm... it looks like the default Spaceships fabricator would take a >> thousand hours to self-replicate; but it requires pre-existing parts >> which would take 400 hours to make, which themselves would take 160 >> hours, which would take 64 hours, which would take 25.6 hours, etc, a >> sequence which seems to end up requiring a total of 1,583.33 hours - >> call it two months and change. Bringing a one-size-up factory could >> save four months in the colony's industrialization process... assuming >> that all the power and raw-material supports were also in place. > > That's not how I read it. If a fabricator builds something > including microchips, it needs ready-made microchips. If it > wants to build microchips, it needs ready-made microchips, > not silicon crystals. Well, one of the important measures the colony designers are using is whether it can Von Neumann itself from raw materials, at least in theory and with a good amount of time. It may take a few iterations' worth of building-the-tools to build-the-tools, but if the official rules don't quite cover that, then I'm going to go for the story over the rules. >> >> 1 Hanger: $.1M >> > >> > A lot of coats, then ... sorry, pet peeve of mine. >> >> Do you have a better name? > > Hang_a_r. <forehead-slap> I'm usually better at my Englishing than that. Whaddaya wanna bet that both spellings will be considered acceptable in 50 years or so? >> > It is more like "There are five of you mining and refining >> > metals, and you efficiently created a couple hundred tons of >> > stockpiles. There is just one power tech, that's me, and the >> > batteries last only a day or two if I shut the reactor down. >> > So let's re-negotiate prices while you freeze in the dark." >> > >> > All those neat economic theories assume a functioning market. >> > What you get is monopolists and oligopolists negotiating with >> > each other (i.e. blackmailing each other for their individual >> > profit, unless that gets curbed somehow). >> >> Economics is also going to be skewed by the fact that the core group - >> the ones who are most likely to stay awake, and depending on events, >> might even be the only ones who end up aboard - are effectively a sort >> of family or clan, which throws a variety of monkey-wrenches into most >> contemporary descriptions of economic systems. > > For a hundred people or less, with specialized jobs, I see just > two options -- a kind of socialist dictatorship, where they all > meet to schedule work and everybody has to abide by it, or a > plain dictatorship, where a smaller group calls the shots. > > Any market system will break down due to monopolies and > prohibitive entry costs to break them. A miner can't become a > surgeon on short notice, or vice versa. Hm... Thinking a bit about this, the true value of a marketplace is in being able to set prices, to quantify how much X is valued compared to Y. But in a potential market in which there are various X's and Y's which are irreplaceable, and whose continued existence is fundamentally required in order for any sort of market to exist at all... then it's probably a good time to ignore the standard advice of free market proponents, as such advice depends on assumptions which don't apply. I've started using a rule-of-thumb to divide people into four general political categories: Reds, aka Jacksonians, whose highest value is honor; Whites, aka Wilsonians, whose highest value is compassion; Blues, aka Jeffersonians, whose highest value is truth; and Greens, aka Hamiltonians, whose highest value is power. (They can also be described as Fire, Water, Air, and Earth; or Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin; or paternalist, maternalist, individualist, and mercantilist; etc, etc.) If the Greens' preferred form of arranging things, exchanging money for goods and services, isn't going to work, then perhaps one or more of the others' methods can be drafted to take its place (at least until such time as a free market can be implemented). Eg, instead of "You should do the job to get paid", perhaps "You should do the job because you promised to do it", and/or "You should do the job because that'll keep your cute kids whom you love from dying", and/or "You should do the job because it's cleverly in your long-term rational self-interest". 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
