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Old 04-22-2018, 10:46 PM   #21
weby
 
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Originally Posted by warellis View Post
Still is there anything about the tech that shows it hasn't advanced beyond the 1980s or whatever? For the rugged exploration stuff I mean.
Some examples:
Cold climate clothing with 8 hour heating elements->much better battery tech.
Pressure-Suits with 15kg weight->much lighter
Biomonitor, a 0.5kg multisensor->much lighter than you could get with 1980s tech specially the edibility of plants.
Binoculars with autostabilize+thermal+nightvision in one 1kg->much more capable and light.
Farseer with rangefinder and 50 times magnification in 1 kg->much more capable and light.
All the satellites->really cheap and light.

Thus my view of the general tech level being about TL9 with the noted exceptions of weapons tech(TL 10 available), computer tech(tl 7+1), communicators(TL 8) and thrusters and stutter warp being maybe 10^
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Old 04-22-2018, 11:00 PM   #22
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Thus my view of the general tech level being about TL9 with the noted exceptions of weapons tech(TL 10 available), computer tech(tl 7+1), communicators(TL 8) and thrusters and stutter warp being maybe 10^
Stutterwarp is completely superscience, and can be what TL you'd like it to be. From memory of when it was first invented in the 2300AD timeline, I'd call it TL9^, with the most recent versions being early TL10^.
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Old 04-23-2018, 10:58 AM   #23
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Fast warships could manage 3-5LY/day. Most would do more like 1.5-2.5LY/day. A liner did about 1-1.5LY/day, as would an unladen freighter. A freighter loaded with ore would do about 0.5LY/day, and for some of them this would make their range limit the fuel for their power-plant when they were that heavily laden.
Okay, that's probably right. I think I may have roughly described it, a long time ago, as about one parsec a day, on the average, and then misremembered it as a light year a day.

If my boxes were unpacked, I'd have looked it up.

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There were a few freighters that would be within reach of a small shipping company, especially if second-hand, and parts of the French Arm were just getting to the point where there might've been room for a few independent operators (though they'd still be running set routes and mainly carrying freight, not speculative cargo, IMO) when the Kafer War went all hot, which would've killed off that budding trade opportunity.
Yeah, one of the criticisms I remembered was that you couldn't really play the merchant game. Tantalum was perceived in the late 1970s and early 1980s as far more rare than it turned out, and that made ships really expensive.

Once Africa started to stabilize, a little, people started to find more. Most cell phones have at least some, in them.

However, at the time, the expense of the tantalum for the stutterwarp coils was so great that nobody but the odd billionaire could afford a private starship.

Discovery of tantalum on a colony world automatically meant it would be profitable to settle, and the find frequently triggered a gold rush.

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One thing about the tech that makes it seem primitive to us today is that most of what we see is stuff intended for explorers, wilderness colonists, and small military units operating with little logistics support, so it's rugged and doesn't depend on other pieces of gear to function. Massively networked, talks to all its friends, uses distributed processing over the whole unit, navigates by GPS and wi-fi hotspots, and so on stuff might exist in the core, but out in the frontier it's seen as unreliable, I think. People want self-contained equipment that works when the GPS sats are down, the comm sats are unreachable because of solar activity, and you're on your own and thus have no network.
Yep, and I found that a particularly elegant design choice. That decision, combined with a quote from Heinlein (I think) that horses can manufacture more horses, but that's a trick tractors never learned, have shaped my view of colonial efforts or AtE survival scenarios, ever since.
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Old 04-23-2018, 12:16 PM   #24
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Originally Posted by tshiggins View Post
Yeah, one of the criticisms I remembered was that you couldn't really play the merchant game. Tantalum was perceived in the late 1970s and early 1980s as far more rare than it turned out, and that made ships really expensive.

Once Africa started to stabilize, a little, people started to find more. Most cell phones have at least some, in them.

However, at the time, the expense of the tantalum for the stutterwarp coils was so great that nobody but the odd billionaire could afford a private starship.
Well, Private starships and small company owned(well the company's bank really) ships are a bit different but the ships are indeed expensive but not all that expensive.

There are freighters in the "Ships of the French Arm" that only cost few million Livre.

English BC-4-class Cargo Carrier is Lv3,420,000
German Krupp 821 Cargo Carrier is Lv3,337,000
and so on. And those are "new" prices.

It is hard to compare the exact price equivalence in our money, but one method is comparing crew salaries.

A crew member of s starship is listed as having a salary from 2,000 to 4,000 Lv/month.

Today sailors from Finland get about 1,500-2,000 Euro/month. So an equivalence of say 2 eur=1lv seems approximately right magnitude for that.

A small new freighter today is order of magnitude 10 million Eur(=5 mil Lv). So one could say that the price of a small sea freighter seems comparable to the price of a small space freighter in 2300AD.

There are quite many small shipping companies in our world today. So the price of starships should not be out of reach for smaller companies in 2300AD either if there is cargo to be moved that pays reasonable shipping costs.

The prices given for shipping cargo in the adventurers guide are however a bit low given the ship prices+crew prices and cargo capacities of the star ships.
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Old 04-23-2018, 01:17 PM   #25
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

The 2300ad rpg came out in 1986, but the first cell phone came out in 1983 in the U.S.
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Old 04-23-2018, 01:27 PM   #26
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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The 2300ad rpg came out in 1986, but the first cell phone came out in 1983 in the U.S.
That's fine, but nobody anybody knew had one; the first one I ever saw was the size of a brick and stayed in the guy's car. The notion that you could carry a phone with you, all the time, remained an "early adopter" idea until Gordon Gecko, really.

In any case, the notion didn't make it into the 2300 AD setting.
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Old 04-25-2018, 01:47 PM   #27
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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You have to remember that the divergence point between AD2300 and out world was in the late 1980s where instead of the Soviet Union getting close to collapsing and then collapsing in 1990s, we had it survive and prosper and then in the middle of 1990s we had WW III including a nuclear war. So any technology after that is understandably on a different path than our world.
Very good point, I had been treating the TL as an extension of ours when it is not. It is an AH with a different technology path. Of course, they might be more advanced as they probably avoided Windows 8. :)
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Old 04-25-2018, 06:58 PM   #28
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Very good point, I had been treating the TL as an extension of ours when it is not. It is an AH with a different technology path. Of course, they might be more advanced as they probably avoided Windows 8. :)
So, you're saying the devastation wrought by Windows 8 rated as comparable to WWIII?

Hmm. Arguable.
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Old 04-25-2018, 07:00 PM   #29
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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So, you're saying the devastation wrought by Windows 8 rated as comparable to WWIII?

Hmm. Arguable.
At thsi point in time it looks more reasonable than French Empire. :)
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Old 04-25-2018, 10:29 PM   #30
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Default Re: 2300 ad tl

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Very good point, I had been treating the TL as an extension of ours when it is not. It is an AH with a different technology path. Of course, they might be more advanced as they probably avoided Windows 8. :)
I would also avoid treating today's tech as being the standard measure for GURPS TLs. We've gone further down the road of miniaturised and massively networked computers than GURPS expected.
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