Johannes wrote: > A bit a mixture of Onnos versions would be the ship as basically a mobile > family farm. It's not really a different culture then that of the the > people around it, at least in the view of both the "farmers" and the > surrounding culture. It is a different lifestyle though. Occasionally > someone marries in, occasionally some child leaves the farm/ship to take > up an ordinary job.
Hello Johannes, you're talking about a social organization, not the actual farming, right? The patriarch/matriarch owns the ship, his or her spouse is by default the XO, the heir is being groomed to take over in due time, and non-heirs must make up their mind if they want to stay in a subordinate role or strike out on their own. > There might be some education required or strongly suggested, that can > only be effectivly gotten on shore. You can't really teach history, for example, if all you have to go on are half-remembered lessons from thirty years ago. That turns a science into rote learning and legends. > Some positions might be filled with people, for whom freight crew is a > temporary job. Seasonal crew would be one of the primary pools for people, > who marry into the family. * A starship arrives in a system and visits a number of worlds/stations. Extra cargo handlers are hired at the first port, with a contract running to the last port, unless they sign up for a flight into the deep dark. * Every couple of years, the ship goes to a station for a complete overhaul and upgrade. The ship's engineers are in charge, but they hire both tech consultants for their current expertise and shipyard workers to get things done faster. If there is something really new in the upgrades, they will have to entice an expert to join the crew permanently. > If you have actually a distinct space gypsy culture you also need to think > how the number of ships and population growth get correlated. * 3E has cabins (500 cf for one or two beds) and luxury cabins (1,000 cf for one or two beds) with the option to add extra empty space. My flat is quite small, but well over 4,000 cf for one person. So say the default is one luxury cabin per person and another 1,000 cf of empty space. If the population is growing, they can turn that empty space into cabins, or divide the luxury cabins into standard cabins, or have people double up in luxury cabins (either crew on opposite shifts or couples on the same shift). From the time a baby is born to the time a kid needs his or her own room, there is plenty of time for the necessary modifications. * You could assign the same volume to each couple, no matter how many kids they have. That makes them think twice about another brat. * Have a strong social expectation of zero population growth. Everybody is parent to two children. If one crewmember dies before the expected childbearing age or has no children by then, the slightly younger generation is expected to make it up. * Merchanter's Luck by CJ Cherryh had two family ships, one dying out with just one family member left and one getting crowded, with no promotion prospects for the youngsters. Some kids saw an opportunity, to the dismay of their cautious elders ... > A central > population control authority, that does long term planing, or ad hoc > decisions by individual families/tribes? Ritually throwing surplus > population out of the airlock (if you are nice, while in port)? If there was a central authority, population control wouldn't be the first thing on my mind. If they provide insurance for ships, they're already in the ship-buying or shipbuilding business. Again, there would be years, even decades, of lead time before the new generation needs their own ship. > Luring in > required specialists with promises of sex and riches? Are those promises true or false? How rich or poor are those "space gypsies"? Can they compete with the major corporations on a level playing field, or are they just a marginal subculture? You can adjust the technology of a setting so that all ships must be self-contained communities. Flight time is a major factor. Will a corporation which owns a ship see the profits in this quarter, this year, or perhaps only in the next century? If it is the latter, corporations may be discouraged from trading. (There are other effects, too, trade becomes much more speculative in general. Will there be a customer or even a starport when you arrive?) > Shanghaing people > who will not be missed all that much, and if they work hard for a couple > of years, they can get promoted family members? An officers caste and > slaves, whos number is more flexible? * Even galley slaves were more fiction than fact, with a few notable exceptions, and rowing was relatively easy to supervise. Would you really trust a slave watching the fusion reactor? Ten lashes if it explodes, double wine ration if not? * Castes may be another matter. If you go back to the family farm example, there are the members of the family, who are somewhere in the chain of succession and who can't be fired even if things get rough, and there are the hired hands with a temporary job. * What would it do to the efficiency of the ship if the 'family' caste is much smaller than the 'temps' caste, and if the only way for a 'temp' to become 'family' is to marry in? Suddenly bedroom politics count for MUCH more than job performance, to the detriment of profits. Which makes the competition to become 'family' even more urgent ... * Even if all are 'family' you could get senior and junior career tracks. Never admit that you understand how the plumbing works, or you will be stuck down there forever. That's worth having to clean up a few spectacular messes. Zan replied to Johannes: > > A bit a mixture of Onnos versions would be the ship as basically a > mobile > > family farm. It's not really a different culture then that of the the > > people around it, at least in the view of both the "farmers" and the > > surrounding culture. It is a different lifestyle though. Occasionally > > someone marries in, occasionally some child leaves the farm/ship to take > > up an ordinary job. > > > > For some reason I am now thinking of those awful inbred backwoods > families from horror movies. There's an attic or a basement with the > horribly deformed cousin, or maybe they're keeping the last traveler > chained in the shed so he's fresh when they decide to eat his other leg. > > Now that would be an awful ship to get hired on. Could make a good > Horror game as the character slowly discovers things, but far too late > to escape as they're already deep in space, weeks from another port... This scenario only works if there are plenty of honest, clean, hard-working family ships. If you hire on, granny will make an apple pie, the sons and/or daughters take you to the barn for a bit of fun, and after a couple of years you either marry in or leave with a fat bankroll. EXCEPT FOR THIS ONE SHIP ... I have a couple of drafts and outlines. - Tug for a single big container, corporate with no room for dependents, no armament. - Tug for multiple external containers, small family or corporate with dependents, token armament. - Freighter with internal holds, ark for an entire clan even at the expense of cargo space, some armament. I just added a sizeable cell block to this one, and it has 90% standard cabins, 10% luxury cabins. Rank hath its privileges. - Freighter with internal holds, landing-capable, small family or corporate with dependents, token armament. - Freighter with internal holds for large containers (RO/RO for contragrav boxes), landing-capable, not sure about the social model and armament. - Tug with external containers, landing-capable (TL13+ shaped force screen). - Freighter with heavy-duty teleport projectors (TL16). A corporate crew would be ten or twenty. If they can bring their dependents, perhaps a hundred. The clan is 4,000 or more. Token armament are a gun or two, "hey I'm armed, take my claims of sovereignty seriously." Some armament is a dozen guns or more, to cover the retreat of the ship if things go badly. Landing-capable means the ability to set down on a world with atmosphere and more than one G, with a full load. The tugs can land without containers, e.g. for maintenance in port, but that doesn't count. Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
