On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:02 AM, Abrigon <[email protected]> wrote: > > I could see a cargo ship from one war, still being used in some parts of > the universe some 100-500 years laters, as long as you have parts and > ways/means to fix them, and they are still good to be used (turbo prop for > example). >
There are lots of world planning decisions to make here. In my universe, I wanted to make interstellar trade common, but actual interstellar travel less so. The mechanism that I worked up for that was to make travel reasonably slow, and to make ships hugely expensive, with large fixed costs. The drives that the ships use for jumping (it's a fixed wormhole system, with point-to-point travel, which each wormhole possibly having two destinations, but not always) are expensive because they require amazing precision engineering work and (handwave!!!), with a cost of a billion dollars. It also works out that they essentially come in one size, which means that ships will almost exclusively be built to be as large as they can be with an engine, and still make jumps. They're designed to last 100 years or so, after which the drive needs expensive repairs that make it generally economically unviable to keep in service. (There's some room for strange ships here, of course.) That gives, at least in well inhabited areas, a number of jump ships that hang out at the jumps, which collect a load of containers, jump through the hole, unload, collect an other load, and jump back. The containers are moved around by various tugs, which travel at various speeds depending on what's needed. This means that bulk cargoes and anything else that isn't time sensitive, can be shipped, slowly, with a fairly small amount of (expensive, relatively) reaction mass, minimal time on (expensive) jump ships, but taking a long time to get places. It works out that you can ship a ton of cargo a couple of systems in a month, for about what it cost in 2005 to ship a ton of cargo by sea from China to the US west coast (which also, it happens, takes roughly a month). Areas that don't support a full time jump ship or fleet of ships get served when a tramp shows up and does the transfers. There are some real back waters that never get traffic, most of 'em happy to keep it that way. People, though, tend to want to move faster, so there are fast shuttles, specialized passenger jump ships, and so on, which make travel for people faster. Much, much more expensive, too, limiting it to the very rich, crew, military and diplomats. Interestingly, communications are fast, between places with ship traffic is reasonably fast. Messages travel to the worm hole at light speed, and are jumped across at the next jump ship travel, and beamed to the next relay. Information can travel in a few days what takes months or years for goods to travel. (And because there's no relationship between normal space distance, and where the wormholes go, here are a handful of places that are only a couple light years apart, but are decades apart in travel time.) Change your world design goals, and you get different worlds, and different tech to support it. Or vice versa, of course. -- David Scheidt [email protected] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
