Working man's tech

[Cheomesh]

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.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Cheomesh

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.

Oddly enough you could make a case for anti-gravs and draft beasts. The key is the infrastructure behind it. Grav vehicles might actually be easier to deal with then lower TL moterized vehicles simply because the later require a large amount of maintaining which may no longer be the case with grav vehicles, especially ones built for colony ventures and hence more resilient. At the same time animals have a lot of advantages if the environment is capable of supporting them. You can get along without a lot of spare parts for instance.

[Captain Midnight]

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.

[jason taylor]

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?

[Captain Midnight]

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.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Captain Midnight

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.

The best I can come up with is a limited number of grav vehicles. The question then comes up of why they were able to bring animals. Unless the animals were already there. Then you have to explain why they are domesticable.

[Agemegos]

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.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

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.

A lot of that stuff can be made locally though hardly RPGS.

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.

[srogerscat]

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.

[Peter Knutsen]

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.

Originally Posted by Cheomesh

What kind of "working man's" tech can be expected in these frontier worlds?

What is the TL of the colonists?