Hi,
Two things I'd like to mention to Mr. Nilsen (Wildstar, you want
to relay this to him?):
| Once trade is cut off, the internal economy of the Hi-pop world
| collapses, and the staples that they can produce are no longer uniformly
| distributed, because the society can no longer pay the money for the
| goods that need to internally circulate to keep the economy up and
| running. When the economy falls, social services fail, and things fall
| apart. I see this as being one of the major effects of Hard Times, with
| one additional causal input: the Hi-pop worlds were the targets of major
| military campaigns, and suffered tremendous physical damage on top of
| everything else. This accelerated their collapse, even ones with good
| biospheres, because carrying capacity set up under one set of social
| assumptions is not necessarily stable.
I agree with your comments about the intricacy of economic
interdependencies; one thing I've been wondering about this whole
virus-induced collapse (I've been following the discussion of it,
although not contributing to it) is why it's necessary. If you want
to stage a "long night", it's much more easily done and more
believable if you make it economically induced. I dug up one of my
favorite SF novels the other day; Paul F. Wilson's _An Enemy of the
State_, which has as a main plotline a deliberately induced economic
collapse as an effective means of revolution. Have you considered
this approach?
>> 1. Economic Model: Does GDW have an economic model we can refer to? In
>> other words, what is the normal level of trade and interstellar travel (in,
>> say MCr of value, or displacement tons of cargo, number and size of ships).
>
> GDW does not have any sort of economic model which can be used to predict
> the trade between any two worlds; in general, the rules are intended to
> provide guidelines for the kind of trade that player characters are
> likely to engage in.
>
> Dave favors the large trade, inter-related economies model, and realizes
> that this is needed in order the get the effects described for Hard Times.
> The suggestion that 90% or more of all interstellar trade is carried in
> large, bulk freighters (never to be seen by the player characters) "seems
> reasonable".
The large, bulk freighters make sense to me, particularly if some
thought is applied to the shipping system and traveller jump capabilities.
I came up with a concept I call "jump boxcars" which would handle such major
shipping between heavily populated, high-tech worlds. Jump boxcars are
essentially that - large boxes that make the jump between hi-pop, hi-tech
systems. They are efficient to use in such circumstances because of the
arrangement of power source and jump engine they use.
To make a jump, a vehicle needs, essentially, five "big" things:
a lanthanum-gridded hull
a computer
a jump drive
a power plant
fuel
Starships are inefficient because they must "pull their own
weight (mass)" - particularly the mass of their fuel. As an added
burden, they carry the mass of the power plant which processes the
fuel, and the computer and avionics systems that calculate the jump.
As jump functions in Traveller, the fuel tanks and possibly the power
plant could disappear just a microsecond before the jump without
affecting the jump (as is shown by L-hyd drop tanks in standard
traveller usage).
The idea behind a jump boxcar is to make an extremely large
lanthanum-gridded hull, with a jump drive sufficient to move it. The
rest of the normal accoutrements of a starship can be left off,
although a small life support system for emergency use may be
desirable (optimal designs would probably have a 100 or 200 ton
"rider" ship for crew quarters and emergency transport).
The maneuver drives can be left off; non-jump tugships would
bring the boxcar in-system and out.
The computer and avionics can be replaced by a receiving array
that plugs directly into the jump drives (after suitble encryption
schemes); an extremely powerful computer at a space station can handle
the calculations, correcting for time lag.
The fuel and power plant can be replaced by a similar but
sturdier receiving array that plugs directly into the jump drives; the
same space station (or another, better placed for refueling) can
refine fuel from a nearby gas giant, process it, convert it to energy,
and transmit the energy to the jump boxcar via a high-intensity maser.
Depending upon the technology, this mazer may even serve to carry the
jump calculations, but a secondary receiver would probably be used for
redundancy.
Even if placing the power plant and computer systems at remote
sites proves to be unfeasible, simply substituting the power mazer for
the fuel tanks would greatly increase the cargo efficiency (and jump
range) of the ship.
The only problem wth jump boxcars is that they rely on an
extremely hefty support network - which means that interstellar trade
relies even more heavily on the stability of interstellar society. [I
would suggest that few, if any, boxcars carry passengers. The small
"rider" ship that the crew can use to return from a misjump would not
be sufficient safeguard for your average passenger. This explains the
higher cost of high and medium passages, and the existence of "normal"
starship passenger lines.]
Steven J. Owens
[email removed]