Paul Dale:
>I think that there may be a way to produce a ship hull without
>all the problems about welding plates together and so forth. If the hull
>is originally formed as a solid lump of whatever you are building it out
>of. We might as well assume that it is something disguisting to work
>with (like the titanium stuff or supa-dense). Cast on big lump in the
>approximate shape you want the finished product to be (this isn't even
>totally necessary) and then cut away all the bits you don't want with
>something that will cut stubborn materials (fusion torch? plasma welder?)
>In effect you tunnel the ship out of a hunk of iridium or whatever. While
>doing this smoothing out the exteriour wouldn't prove too hard.
This is all very nice, but wouldn't it be easier to just cast a hull if you
wanted to go this route?
This sounds too much like how the sculptor carved a statue of an elephant:
Take a big rock and cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
Mike Surman, re Gamba:
>What prevents a low tech agricultural world from importing high tech
>farm equipment(financing not being a problem)? Who prevents technology
>transfer between worlds? The Imperium or the local governments? Or is
>is even regulated? It doesn't seem to be defined very well in the
>rules.
Actually, I always assumed that you would import heavily. But then you
probably wouldn't qualify as a low TL world anymore. If you assume that TL
indicates local production ability, then low TL worlds with high TL
neighbors can and should import heavily so that standard of living is
higher than TL-low. Which is why I use three different TL indicators: one
for total economic strenght, one for production capability, and one for
standard of living.
I don't think that the Imperium regulates that sort of trade, though
there have been indications that people lower than TL5 or so are placed on
a restricted-import list, to keep from upsetting the status quo there too
much.
In general, any piece of machinery made close enough to make importing
it practical is also close enough to import spare parts/technicians/tech
manuals/whatever.
>The scenario I'm thinking about is this:
>A rich local or offplanet individual or corporation buys up a large
>amount (several thousand acres) of farm land. Basically sets it up
>as an agribusiness by importing the higher tech equipment and
>training locals or importing the technicians as farm hands.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. I would expect that when these things
begin, the world is on its way to being moderate TL within a decade or two
at the most. Face it, when gross world product starts to rise, the locals
will have more money to buy that neat high tech stuff, more money to send
the kids to school off-planet (which is how my longest running character
got his start, years ago - go to school on a TL11 world and bring back the
knowledge to his TL5 homeworld - he got distracted, and never got back.
Though he has sent a couple billion Imperial credits back over the last 30
years), that sort of thing. Just a matter of time till the world matches
the TL of its neighbor to within a point or two.
Your statistics do not tell the whole story in Traveller. Energy costs in
Trav are EXTREMELY low, and they will end up being the vast majority of the
expenses of running such a place. Yes, I know that you spend a s**t-pot
full of money on fertilizers and insecticides. Remember that the local
insects probably don't like your food that much, and that fertilizer is a
matter of taking LOTS of energy and adding air, water, dirt, etc.
>The initial investment in the farm would be quite large but loans
>could be secured once it was shown that quite a profit could be
>made in a reasonable amount of time. In fact the profit from the
>above numbers is about $118,000 per year which is pretty good.
>And the way MT numbers workout it will probably be even larger.
Be aware that the profitability of this operation will be a function of
available merchant traffic. In my universe, where merchant traffic tends
to be among the most extreme of the people of the TML, this would be money
in the bank. If merchant traffic were restricted to the very low level
required for luxury trade only (classic traveller), then you would lose
your shirt if you tried this. Remember that it would take seven free
traders working full time in the classic traveller picture just to deal
with the output of this one farm.
---Steve
^Z