Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 06-27-2022, 09:35 AM   #51
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
The substance used for roads is asphalt.
Indeed. Concrete is also an option, and I believe tends to be more durable, but it's not as easily patched, and any of it that needs to be redone (from accumulated wear and tear) you have to stay off of for a good long while to let it cure to full strength... which isn't a great option for a roadway. I believe it's also more expensive, like most alternatives to petroleum.
__________________
GURPS Overhaul
Varyon is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 09:46 AM   #52
Tom Mazanec
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

So final state of society is TL 4 (assuming we cannot make fission economically replace all fossil fuel use)? OK, but would there be any tricks of TL 5+? Like radio?
Tom Mazanec is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:07 AM   #53
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec View Post
So final state of society is TL 4 (assuming we cannot make fission economically replace all fossil fuel use)? OK, but would there be any tricks of TL 5+? Like radio?
<shrug> You can make vacuum tubes by hand. You can even make the glass for them the same way. I'm not so sure about the bakelite that was used for the bases but a smale scale process for making enough synthetic materials for insulation would not violate your "fossil fuels/significant level" clause. It wouldn't be significant.

If you can import raw latex from rubber trees from the tropical regions where they grow you might keep a fair portion of TL5-6 technologies. No rubber would take you back to TL4 in a _hard_ way.

You can move significant amounts of stuff in big sailing ships. It was done until the beginnign of WWI. A Google search produces a whole book on the subject.

https://books.google.com/books/about...d=GPjgAQAACAAJ
__________________
Fred Brackin
Fred Brackin is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:29 AM   #54
Donny Brook
 
Donny Brook's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

I think the answer very much depends on how well the crisis is managed. Wise choices could mitigate the problems with known but under-used technology. For example geothermal energy is reliable and not particularly technology intensive.
Donny Brook is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:29 AM   #55
Tom Mazanec
 
Join Date: Oct 2007
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Maybe I should have said EROEI of fissile becomes impractical (I am trying to phrase this accurately and not start a nuclear flame war :-) ).
Politics could be global still...Spain had a world empire without fossil fuel, much less fissile!
Tom Mazanec is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:53 AM   #56
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Mazanec View Post
So final state of society is TL 4 (assuming we cannot make fission economically replace all fossil fuel use)? OK, but would there be any tricks of TL 5+? Like radio?
The final state of society doesn't match the GURPS TL scheme. Fundamentally, anything you can do with fossil fuels you can also do with non-fossil biologicals, but the options for producing them are rather land intensive so the carrying capacity is reduced, and they're more expensive so a lot of marginal products just die. Air and road transport are likely pretty well gutted, ship and rail are more maintainable but have the usual limitations of what ship and rail can do. Telecommunications likely has relatively low bandwidth but probably persists, cell towers are actually pretty cheap.
__________________
My GURPS site and Blog.
Anthony is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 12:46 PM   #57
Willy
 
Join Date: Dec 2020
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

There are worldwide some projects to store and preserve the knowledge of our world for further times. The smallest are time capsules others are whole bunkers filled with special treated Discs with a shelf live of up to 2000 years. Or barrels of stainless steel filled with documents.

Also we have actually a lot of storage devices containing technical and scientific data, every person household has some of them. A typical USB Stick or memory card can store whole librarys. Wikipedia can be downlowded and has been several 1000 times. Even a few books for pupils can teach a future generation a lot, and books will survive, quite long if forgotten in the right places. Of course someone needs to be able to read them and speak the old tongue.

Searching for this vaults and sieving through the old citys is good adventuring stuff. Also you can reverse engineer most parts once you get a general knowledge how something works. Alone KNOWING that a certain device and solution has existed will spark the imagination of future scientists and researchers. That is if the new society doesnīt consider the bigone age as a time when our ancestors were punished by the gods and thrown out of the paradise. Donīt even touch this unholy items, and avoid the places they lived forever!
Willy is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 05:59 PM   #58
Astromancer
 
Astromancer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: West Virginia
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Bio fuels, particularly algae based bio fuels and cellulosic ethanol (which uses molds to break down cellulose) could replace fossil fuels. The price would be higher, but with fossil and fissile fuels gone, these would get used.

Hydro electric isn't just dams. Any flow of water can be used to generate electric power.

Sterling engines, which turn a flow of heat into mechanical power, have been around since the 18th century. The earliest solar powered machinery, which also dates from the 18th century, used sunlight to power a sterling engine. Thomas Malthus predicted that after fossil fuels were depleted, industry would use solar power. He thought California would become a great manufacturing hub.

If most people in this world would live in TL5 poverty (think the 1770s), narrow groups would live at higher tech levels. These would be the power elites (both in the sense of political dominance and they have access to energy) and elite researchers trying to improve sources of energy.

There have been Sci Fi stories print and film similar to this premise. The infamous Zardoz has a touch of this to it.
__________________
Per Ardua Per Astra!


Ancora Imparo

Last edited by Astromancer; 06-27-2022 at 06:05 PM.
Astromancer is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:26 PM   #59
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

As Karl and John said, most modern farming is heavily dependent on fossil fuels - fleets of petrol-driven tractors, combine harvesters and other machinery, tending temperamental, high-yielding crop varieties dosed regularly with pesticides (often from petrochemicals) and fertilizers (made by the Haber process using hydrogen from natural gas).
Some sustainable farming experts claim that as high or almost as high a yield is, in fact, possible with other methods. Even if that's true, those methods are not what's being employed in most places now. So until things can be rearranged, and possibly after if the experts were being too optimistic, you'd have a drastic food shortage on your hands.

Cellulosic biofuel would make a huge difference, if there was enough of it. The Wikipedia page and one or two other things I saw suggest that the technology is basically there - quite a lot of small pilot plants were built, but closed down because it wasn't economic compared with ethanol from maize. With no fossil fuels and a shortage of maize, it would suddenly become very economic indeed to be able to produce even a small amount of usable fuel from what is basically rubbish - straw, wood offcuts, even waste paper. There's also some production of methane from similar stuff.

(Apparently there are several small cellulosic ethanol refineries in Brazil, I don't know whether KarlKost has any local knowledge about how that's going!)

If nations did, in fact, know this was coming and did, in fact, prepare for it and get that well under way, the effects might not be too drastic, depending on the amount of biofuel they were able to produce. They'd probably have to cut their use of motor transport a lot, but they might be able to keep enough going to keep the basics of modern civilisation running until they could rearrange things to get by with less driving around.
If they didn't, then it would be a race to commandeer all the production from the small experimental plants and get as many new ones open/un-mothballed as possible (and how do you build a refinery when you have more or less no trucks to carry materials?) in a desperate attempt to at least keep the farm machinery running.
__________________
Looking for online text-based game at a UK-feasible time, anything considered, Roll20 preferred. http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=168443

Last edited by Inky; 06-27-2022 at 10:30 PM.
Inky is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 06-27-2022, 10:47 PM   #60
Inky
 
Join Date: Sep 2019
Location: UK
Default Re: Deindustrialized World3 22nd Century

Quote:
Originally Posted by Willy View Post
There are worldwide some projects to store and preserve the knowledge of our world for further times. The smallest are time capsules others are whole bunkers filled with special treated Discs with a shelf live of up to 2000 years. Or barrels of stainless steel filled with documents.

Also we have actually a lot of storage devices containing technical and scientific data, every person household has some of them. A typical USB Stick or memory card can store whole librarys. Wikipedia can be downlowded and has been several 1000 times. Even a few books for pupils can teach a future generation a lot, and books will survive, quite long if forgotten in the right places. Of course someone needs to be able to read them and speak the old tongue.

Searching for this vaults and sieving through the old citys is good adventuring stuff. Also you can reverse engineer most parts once you get a general knowledge how something works. Alone KNOWING that a certain device and solution has existed will spark the imagination of future scientists and researchers. That is if the new society doesnīt consider the bigone age as a time when our ancestors were punished by the gods and thrown out of the paradise. Donīt even touch this unholy items, and avoid the places they lived forever!
Yeah, loss of information probably wouldn't be a huge problem if they were careful, at least over the 100-200 year timescale Tom Mazanec mentioned. (And it sounds as if this is an area where some kind of precautions have been taken already). Settings where somehow civilisation has reverted to the level of scientific knowledge of several centuries ago, and modern technology has faded into myths and legends, over the course of a hundred years, are picturesque (and there's no law against playing them!), but possibly not logically likely.

But yes, there's bound to be some information that in all the confusion they've lost track of where it is and would have to be hunted out from some obscure place in another city, and that might be very useful McGuffin material! If it was on a computer disc and they hadn't included the machine to read it or the machine had failed, more quests might be needed to track down working machines that could read it, too.

(In this scenario, the loss of the equipment might be more likely than the loss of the library - manufacturing new computers might be a very tall order in this scenario, so a lot of places might be reduced to hoarding the computers that were still working. Finding a working computer, or even a working component in a broken computer that could be used to repair another broken computer, might make an adventurer rich).
__________________
Looking for online text-based game at a UK-feasible time, anything considered, Roll20 preferred. http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=168443
Inky is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 07:04 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.