12-12-2013, 12:00 PM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
Location: LP City, Maryland
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Working man's tech
Question for you guys!
I'm designing a frontier world that my players are due to visit. It is a habitable planet that was originally zoned off for archeological purposes, but has attracted squatters who have (until now) eluded the Colony Bureau (Or was it the Ministry of Colonization?). What kind of "working man's" tech can be expected in these frontier worlds? They have limited industry and have been relying on a ship doing (mostly) clandestine runs in exchange for some not yet determined resource of value. Are wheeled vehicles still a thing at all, or is it all repulsor? With reaction-less drives and grav control, it doesn't seem like Air/Raft vehicles (to haul stuff around) even need fuel anymore (a boon to isolated places), but I don't know how rugged they are. They're also pretty pricey if I'm recalling. First thing that jumps to my mind is carts and draft animals (in situ replacements are easy then) a-la Firefly, but that might not be authentic. Anti-grav carts and draft animals? :p M. |
12-12-2013, 05:01 PM | #2 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Working man's tech
Quote:
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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12-12-2013, 05:22 PM | #3 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Baltimore, MD
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Re: Working man's tech
How far do they need to transport the "stuff" to the pickup point? Will they build boats? Roads? How will they load it onto the carts, and then offload it onto the smuggler ship? How worried are they about escaping detection, and what sort of detection is there to worry about? Is the biggest issue going to be detecting the smuggler, or hiding the squatters?
If you want animal-powered transport in your game, you can decree it, but it brings up a lot of issues. Cost isn't likely to be an issue -- an air / raft is listed in GT at around 55,000 Cr, which isn't all that pricey in the larger scale of things. |
12-12-2013, 05:47 PM | #4 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Working man's tech
What if gravs are used toward the starport, or by Very Important Organizations(Law Enforcers, bigger onworld traders, etc) but most of the transport in the outback is done by animal?
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
12-12-2013, 08:06 PM | #5 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Baltimore, MD
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Re: Working man's tech
That brings up the questions (to my mind, at least) of what's being transported, and would it be more efficient to use animal transport out there, or spend the precious trade credit on high-tech transport. If you're spending 50,000 credits a year on housing, gear, and veterinary care for your animals (not to mention feed and general upkeep), the animals have to have some serious hauling capacity to be a better solution than an air / raft. I pulled that number out of the air just because it's close to the cost of the air / raft, but there are certainly costs to be considered, as well as the inconvenience and how downright pokey animals are compared to a grav vehicle.
There could be very artificial situations where the locals might not want high-tech solutions, or where they aren't available for some reason, but it's tough to imagine that as a stable situation in a medium-to-long term time frame. |
12-12-2013, 08:45 PM | #6 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Working man's tech
Quote:
__________________
"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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12-13-2013, 04:13 AM | #7 |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Working man's tech
Think of poor places in the world today, and what things they import even though the exchange rate is a killer: AK-47s, 7.62mm Russian, RPG-7s, cars, pickup trucks, cellular phones, jeans, flip-flops, and feed-store caps. Tractors, sometimes.
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
12-13-2013, 08:33 AM | #8 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Working man's tech
Quote:
Pathans used to have native gunsmiths. They probably can't keep up with tech and at least some would have started off the Russian war with goat shooting guns.
__________________
"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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12-13-2013, 09:45 AM | #9 |
Join Date: Dec 2013
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Re: Working man's tech
Animals are horribly inefficient in terms of energy input to work they produced. But they have lots of advantages. Self repairing, self replacing, come to mind.
But with typical Traveller tech... well, Solar panels, or films or screens with efficiencies in the 90 plus percent range are probably available. And the animals may not be the draft animals of olden times, lots of nifty stuff can be done with biological engineering. Especially if the enhanced animals are Multi use, producing diary products, or lumps of muscle that can be trimmed off for meat making them a food source as well. Plus wool. Lovely stuff, wool. Silk as a by-product of dairy production, just filter it out of the food product (there is actually some thought along these lines in real life). The colonists could be using the animals as biological factories for assorted compounds.... Heh. Very useful for any isolated frontier colony, you bet. Grav sleds and draft animals. Heh. Not as daft as it sounded to me when I started writing this, actually. |
12-13-2013, 12:26 PM | #10 |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Working man's tech
It might be worth noting that a newly colonized planet can have natural resources that are very easy to exploit, based on the principle that as intelligent species develop technology, they grab the low-hanging fruits first, e.g. the easiest iron deposits, easiest natural gas deposits, and so forth. So there may be some sense in them going with fossil fuels, if the planet has those, or even bio-fuels. Maybe they plan to be doing that the first 150 years or so, figuring that that's as long as they'll need to develop the infrastructure (and population base) necessary to go fusion-powered.
What is the TL of the colonists? |
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