Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
This is irrelevant to TL7 space industrialization. There is no way you're jumping from a Saturn V to a monster rocket the size of a Nimitx-class supercarrier. That's why I said this needed to belong to a highly variant alternate timeline.
As an example of the problems, even though your full production price appears to come in under a billion $ before the payload the prototype would of course have cost 100x that and that would be on the rough orsder of the entire cost of the Apollo program just for your first rocket. Not happening in our timeline.
What you need is some sort of timeline where space tech froze at TL7 for long enough to first build a SM+10 rocket and then work your way upwards. This would take multiple decades for each generation of rockets of increasing SM. That the TL would not advance past TL7 during this time period would be another anomaly that would need explaining.
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Prototypes in GURPS are not necessarily 100x cost, the vast majority of that premium comes from R&D costs, not production costs. Heck, prototypes are at cost until you get a production line going, and then they are somewhat more reasonable. Anyway, I do not think that the Saturn V rockets were 100x cost, though they only made 13 of them, so they did not recoup all of the R&D costs.
As for the SPS, it only requires Saturn V technology, so there was nothing new required. It would have taken a few dozens launches to set up the lunar base, but they could have set up a few production lines during the late-70s if they had possessed the courage and vision. Heck, they might have even dusted off the old Sea Dragon design and just went with that 30,000 ton monster (scaling up from that to 100,000 tons would have been a piece of cake given the simplicity of the designs). With 3,000 tons every launch into LEO, building the lunar base would have been a piece of cake.