all sorts of things...

Arthur Greene writes:

>                                             ... and in this case
>there are no serious iron or reserves with which to build local
>replacements. What I'm trying to say is that many planets don't have
>the industrial base to maintain themselves without interstellar trade.

They sure won't, but then, most of them can't support themselves WITH
interstellar trade.  The Ireland you describe would have no source of
Imperial credits to buy anything from offworld (in standard MT).
As to the question of lack of iron/nickel/metals in general that Ireland
has, most PLANETS have whole solar systems attached.  Many have ateroid
belts out there.  As was pointed out by Pournelle years ago, ONE medium
sized asteroid has more metal than the entire world's output for any
year in history.  Lack of raw materials should never be a problem.

>In any case, I'm sort of puzzled by these pirates. Why have they such
>crummy ships (and also why don't the splinters of the Imperium go and
>take them out)?

>What do all these pirates live on?

That's a very good question, which we have been asking ourselves since
we got hold of Hard Times.  (actually, I have been wondering since MT
came out, as MT made it MUCH harder to build a ship which could have a
real chance of being an effective pirate)


George William Herbert:

>    I'm in the process of coming up with a correction "diff" (new
>design tables et. al.) to fix the problems.  The only thing I don't
>know is wether it's worth it to include the real-world delta-V formula
>or not (delV = G * Isp * ln(Mr) ... ).  The simple solution is to leave
>his rules in place and fix the engines, but I'm not sure that the
>result would be very close to real-world...

So am I.  Whose rules in place?

>    BTW, one complaint that Steve had isn't valid; there is after all
>a good reason for using lift assisted launch vehicles... reusability.
>Recovering most rocket-type launch vehicles is impossible.  Not so with
>a LALV.
>    Note that I simply reject any presumption that it's possible to
>reuse normal rockets.  In my free time I design some of them, so I know
>much better 8-)

A rocket that rides down on it's jet can't be made reusable? Don't be
ridiculous!  Yes, I studied aerospace engineering, too.  While building
a realworld rocket HERE that can do that is pushing the limits of
reality, MOST Imperial worlds are considerably smaller than Terra, with
correspondingly lower surface G.  The mass-ratios required for
orbit-powered deorbit are MUCH more reasonable than here.
BTW, my beef with the LALV was NOT the concept.  It was the rules that
made the LALV less functional than a rocket.  Notice that under those
rules, I could build a rocket that could do a powered orbit-powered
deorbit with less fuel (by a factor of 5-7) than a LALV would require
just to get UP, much less back down. (GAWD, another run-on sentence
breaks free!)

>    Besides which, once we get scramjets properly in the design
>sequence, they have an actual Isp of as high as 1350 or so, three times
>that of a shuttle main engine.  See?  There _are_ good reasons... 8-)

Yes, I know about them. Hopefully, they'll have a specific impulse
higher than that within a few years after introduction.  Notice my
attempt to salvage the idea without rewriting the entire set of Low Tech
Spacecraft rules.

Paul Dugan :

>Would the IDPs be coming through with the piracy and war that is
>suppossed to be wreaking such havoc? Were these things being sent out
>for free? (note:I haven't yet aquired Hard Times, so I may be speaking
>from considerable ignorance)

Indications were that they were passed out for free, and that every
world in the Imperium had them in their databases.  Who cares whether
they still come in?  You already got the ones for TL5-15!

>The Soviets did have massive industial plants though- I don't think
>it's fair to call them a third-world nation. They fielded not just
>nukes, but a navy, submarines, tanks, etc, and had a burgeoning space
>program.
>Admeittedly, they havn't forgetten any of that stuff yet. But maybe
>all the smart-guys on the hi-tech worlds are moving off to where
>thier skills can be supported more luceratively (core areas).

It takes more than an army and navy to be a superpower.  Standard of
living might be nice, too.  ANd they STILL have all those things, as you
say.   USSR 70+ years and counting / Imperium dead after 5- years???
And I am sure that the number of people who will be willing to move away
from their homeworlds are not appreciably greater than the number of
people today who leave their home countries to seek better
opportunities.  Some do, for sure, but if they all did, then Germany
would have been depopulated after WW2.  VERY few people can pull up
their roots and walk away from everything they've ever known for the
CHANCE of better times elsewhere.  Most will stay and work for better
times here.

>Grav technology may  be simple, but it's much more expesive than
>wheels. (as the horse cart is than an auto). With the general finacial
>collapse that would seem to be enatiled by the disruption of trade, and
>the general malaise of war, and the fear about the future promoting
>depression (as we see today with buyers being cautious) I might be
>happy to give up my abaility to fly around the world in 20 minutes in
>my sleek megacredit speeder and just buy a cheap lo-tech ground car.

So, how much less does it cost to buy the wheel from an oxcart in the
USA today than it does to buy a tire for your automobile?  Wheels are
cheaper if you have a wheel factory, but if all your factories produce
Grav modules, wheels are going to be EXPENSIVE imports.  Cynthia has
designed several Grav vehicles that retail for about the same as a
modern automobile (use fuel cells and solar panels, and watch the price
of your speeder plummet!).  I doubt that wheeled vehicles would be
competitive.  Especially given the detail everyone else (GDW included)
seems to overlook.  NO ROADS!   The wheeled vehicle economy will never
work without roads for them to drive on (yes, four wheel drive offroad
vehicles exist - have you ever seen a four-wheel drive off-road
18wheeler?)  The roads would cost FAR more (llok at how much the USA
spends on them) than the grav vehicle factory ever could.

>Fusion plants raises another issue, which is that of the government
>financing of hi-tech products. Industrail policy would avryu from world
>to world, but probably be present in some form. But with budgets
>becoming tight, the money that used to go into such hi-tech research
>would go into more sustainable,  immediately practical technologies.

Actually, given MT rules set, fusion plants are one of the most
practical ways of getting energy.  Again, tooling up to build the
alternatives costs money (lots of it).  If you have to have money,
anyway, build something that is better than obsolete junk.

>If the governement stops subsidizing the local fusion plant because it
>can no longer afford to do so (or the knowhow has gone off-world) or
>the spare parts arent being made, all your hi-tech gadgets will be
>useless.

Why should the government subsidize local fusion plants?  They cost
somewhere in the range of 33Cr per Kw.  In the USA, power plants of all
types cost in the neighborhood of $1000 per KW.

>The soviets are experinceing this now with their reactors (according to
>recent news reports). Their refurbishing old parts, but who knows
>how long that will last.

Probably forever, or until teh fuel cores burn out.  No components of a
nuclear plant are all that hard to make, if you have basic machine
tools.

>BTW where are hi-tech, low water worlds getting their hydrogen?

Probably from a moon (theirs, or another planet insystem's) with ice.
Or from a carbonaceous-chrondite asteroid.  A 3Km ateroid would ahve
about 500,000,000 tons of hydrogen in it.  That could keep a terawatt
worth of fusion plants running for maybe 1500 years, even a MT's abysmal
efficiencies.

>But our navy isn't undergoing a major financial crunch, and facing
>a major military threat at the moment. Hard times would be a feedback
>loop: the markets go down, the technology skips a beat, causing more
>finacial instability and so on.

Neither are most of theirs.  And why didn't this happen in the
Depression, if it so likely?

>I've always understood tech to be an average for the population.
>Reducing the number of hi-tech items by 90% means only the wealthy
>or the government then could have them. I imagine the governement would
>do that in such perilous times (witness rationing during WWII).
>
>Plus there's going to be a lot fewer wealthy, since I doubtmany of them
>were hoarding hard currency, but had alot of paper (or silicon) assets.

Check out World Builder's Handbook for guidelines on who has the
High-Tech.  In most TL15 worlds, most people would be living at TL14 (or
perhaps TL13).  Which is still a whole lot higher than TL10!  Even if
90% of it evaporated overnight, they probably could rebuild all of it in
5 years.
And why should you stop being wealthy because the Stock Market crashed?
As Sam Walton said after losing $500,000,000 in the Stock Market
collapse a few years ago, "it was paper yesterday, it's still paper
today."
If you own a factory, it won't evaporate just because the Stock Market
does.  If you have a factory, and no cash, BARTER!  Your people will
work for room and board if times are that bad, and you can provide them
by trading the products of your factories for the products of other
people's factories.

>Was all this technology in the hands of the average german or in
>the military. There were no commercial jetliners for long after the
>germans developed the jet. This is an interesting thread, though:
>as worlds going through this diffculty might turn to such command
>economy alternatives (i.e. Nazi autarky) to speed up relief.

Good point.  Though notice the WBH again.  Most of the state-of-the-art
is in the hands of the elite on most worlds anyway.  But Germany's
general TL was higher in 1939 than in 1919, in any case.  Remember the
Volkswagon?  Remember the Sanger antipodal bomber?
And as I said on a post this past AM, we (Cynthia and I) expect to see a
LOT of Htlers and Stalins and Roosevelts in the next few years of the
Imperium.

>I wanted to address another issue though, and that is the vilani
>cultural influence, which must be prevalent to some extent throughout
>the imperium in general. If the smart-sophonts have hightailed it out
>of the dangerous areas, it would leave alot of people behind who
>wouldn't know were to begin to understand a tech 15 blueprint, and who
>might not want to when they could just slap together an oxcart (or run
>a driveshaft out of their failed grav-vehicle).

I doubt that the smart sophonts did, but the Vilani heritage CANNOT be
that strong, since the same problem existed in teh Long Night.  Plenty
of time for evolution to wipe out that particular mind-set.  Note the
troubles Vland has had in reinstating it even in their own sector.

And if it were common, then the lads left behind would just know how to
do one thing, which WILL NOT BE how to build wheeled vehicles!  They are
far more likely to have cookbook knowledge of Grav engineering than of
wheeled vehicle design (which they haven't used in 11,000 years).

>Maybe the 5-level techdrop is too extreme, maybe it isn't extreme
>enough.
>It would seem to be a good way to quantify the general chaos of the
>hard times period. Remeber that the rich on the necounter tables always
>did
>have +2 TL items, and the peasants -2 TL. (or therebaouts.)
>I'm going to get hard times soo and give it a looksee. It sounds
>interesting.

The five Tl drop is ludicrous. The assumption that such a drop would
last for more than a VERY short period is even more ludicrous.
HOWEVER, the MOST LUDICROUS THING TRAVELLER (in any incarnation) HAS
EVER DONE IS TO ASSUME THAT "PEASANTS" WILL BE COMMON IN THE
IMPERIUM!!!!!!!!

- -- Via DLG Pro v0.985b

[email removed]

I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun