The Star Liners produce some amazing speeds, but no interesting vehicles. So I thought about something Mike mentioned, Stargate SG-1, and my reply re the lack of vehicles in the series. What is the difference between a vehicle transported through a gate and one carried by a starship?
* I'm usually assuming that the vehicles carried on a starship have the same TL as the ship. Entire starships as higher-TL artifacts are possible, but by and large the people who run the ships can also build them, and they will build vehicles at their best TL. By comparison, the stargate network is an ancient artefact. (It doesn't have to be, compare Peter F. Hamilton.) The gate explorers could have TL7 or TL8 vehicles on strange worlds. * Somewhat similar things happen in Traveller, with tainted or airless low-tech worlds. TL10 traders carry people to those worlds, and they maintain lower-TL settlements there. * A starship sets out with a complement of ground vehicles. It might not know in advance what planets it will visit, or it could go with the same complement to different worlds. Gate vehicles can be more specialized -- you send a probe to check the environment, then you call the right kind of vehicles from central storage. * The gate in SG-1 is not rated for mass or volume, just for diameter. (The Gate on VXi16 is the same.) Vehicles would be optimized to fit through the gate, not for low mass. * Hamilton suggested trains for an established gate network. The VXi16 gate is a minimum of $50 billion, so it needs to be used efficiently. (About five times the cost of the channel tunnel.) Regards, Onno _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
