On Tue, 9 Oct 2012, Onno Meyer wrote:
Johannes replied to me:
If you are happy with a setting spezific setup, someone might have a
monopoly on FTL drives, and rents them out to everybody else.
In that case, we'd still have non-modular ships owned by that
somebody competing with modular ships owned by everybody else.
If non-modular ships are more efficient, modular ships are
history.
Say the monopolists have limited industrial capacity. They produce hardly
anything but FTL drive modules. For reasons of policy, they don't want to
permananetly sell a module to anyone else. They are happy with the status
quo, and have an overall conservative and risk awerse outlook.
So they have no reason to make big investments in their own freighters.
They might have a few, to make secret or other sensitive runs, they have a
few warships. For ordinary cargos, they higher the lighters of their
clients. It makes the clients happier with the status quo, it if the
freight costs are a bit higher then they technically have to be, so be
it. Keeping the monopoly is more important then saving a few bucks.
Basically you need a race, an empire or some sort of guild or order, that
is the only source of FTL drives, and they need to be content with
charging acceptable fees and imposing only acceptable political measures
(like for instance no interstellar wars).
Wouldn't that lead to the Heighliners of Dune, rather than
modules?
I think it can lead to both. I always assumed that in Dune there is some
technical or ecconomic reason to make FTL ships big. Take that away and
you can have an FTL module setup, with the same basic dynamics of power
and ecconomy.
If you have modular FTL pods and can fit more then one in a usual lighter,
you could also have the situation that they are prone to failure and there
are only few repairstations.
Then the FTL pod doesn't have to be a self-contained unit,
it can do without navigation, power systems, etc.
It will most likely not have any sensors and such and no controls. You can
find reasons to put the computer that is used for navigaion into the unit.
Like maybe you need very precise calibrations, that need to be done in the
repairshop. Shipping it with a built in computer might make it more
reliable.
The drive might also be very sensitive towards getting the wrong amount of
power at critical moments. Which does not really make a case for building
a power source right into the unit, but at least for the ship having a
power source soley dedicated for the drive, rather then plugging it into
general ship power. Power cells most likely. Maybe you can argue, that the
drive needs to be calibrated to it's power source at the shop too, so if
the power source is not particulary large, you can build it in too.
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