09-08-2017, 10:37 AM | #31 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
The things where THS catches flak are not cases where 3D printing is useful. The general wealth level of the society is way too low for 3D printing to work the way it works in UT. It can work the way it works in the THS core book as long as it can't be used to produce feedstock (or if it can, does so 2 orders of magnitude slower than its general production rate; 'divide production rate by 100 if working from raw materials' eliminates the problems).
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09-08-2017, 11:54 AM | #32 | ||
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
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09-08-2017, 12:01 PM | #33 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
If I am bot-bossing an asteroid mine why don't I pirate the proprietary control chips for my air filtration system, rather than suffocate?
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09-08-2017, 01:19 PM | #34 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
Is this a common issue? I imagine people do do it in an emergency. Corporations that want to remain on good terms with Earth will avoid it for fear of being fined or, in extreme cases, embargoed. Of course Red Duncanite asteroids engage in rampant intellectual property theft.
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09-08-2017, 01:25 PM | #35 |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
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09-08-2017, 03:10 PM | #36 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
Realistically, there's a couple of ways this could play out (all of which directly parallel software):
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09-08-2017, 04:14 PM | #37 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
For the THS characters I played, because they didn't want to get in legal trouble. In both cases, this would have removed them from being useful in the campaign. One was the business manager for the PC's group of Vacuum Cleaners; the other was an EU diplomat, legal guardian of one PC, and a director of the company that owned another PC.
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09-08-2017, 09:40 PM | #38 | |
Wielder of Smart Pants
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Ventura CA
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
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09-09-2017, 03:50 AM | #39 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: U.K.
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
More or less, though actually, I only ran one of those campaigns. (I played the vacuum cleaners' ships AI.) Frankly, the 3D printing stuff is an aspect of the setting I don't tend to get into much when I'm designing campaigns or scenarios; whatever's going on, whether or not it matches the main book text, it evidently supports and works within the society as described in the books generally, and provides a handwave explanation of how thin-spread outer system societies survive, and as a GM, that's all I really care about. 3D printers are like delivery trucks or gravel pits in a modern-day game; they exist, but PCs don't get to do much with them, because that'd just be Adventures in Basket-Weaving.
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09-09-2017, 04:20 AM | #40 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: How hard is it to acquire raw materials for 3D printing?
In that Vacuum Cleaners game, I tended to leave 3D printers as background colour. Nobody ever had to say "oh, we don't have a wrench that fits the hatch on this 50-year-old satellite we're salvaging".
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