Re: Generation Ships
 

The real potential of solar sails (and probably magsails too) requires boosting with external projectors from the launch system. Simple calculations are probably not possible.

But with the self-contianed hard science drives from Spaceships your maximum mps per tank at various TLs is:

TL9, 20mps for the Advanced Fusion Pulse Drive

TL10 120 mps for The Antimatter Plasma Rocket

TL11 3400 mps for the Antimatter Pion if you can produice and store the required quantities of antimatter which is not a given without superscience.

So if you use my staged proplusion scheme with the above drives the trip time to Alpha Centauri is still c.3400 years at TL9 and a probably manageable 570 tears at TL10. If you can go to the TL11 antimatter drive it's down to 20 years or so.

The TL11 drive would be good as Alpha Centauri isn't really a _good_ candiate for a habitable or terraformable planet. It might be just barely possible if Alpha Centauri A and B are far enough apart (Gurps seems to assume 10 AU is the magic distance) not to interfere with each other's planet-forming. They might be. It's a surprisingly hard subject to research.

So TL9 propulsion alone doesn't seem to make enough difference really and I'm not seeing why we're trying to assume only TL8 in anything else.

Perhaps someone else can tell you if the numbers for a solar sail vehicle would be a lot better.

If you don't want god-like AIs running everything at TL10 then don't go with the optimistic numbers for them in UT. In the late 60s Arthur Clarke did his best to make human-level AI (HAL) look reasonable for 2001 (note that he also assumed much more capable space tech than was actually present in our 2001).

In 2012 does AI really look closer to us that it did to the moviegoers who went to see 2001? Not really. If anything it looks farther away becaue we have a better idea of the problems. Currently we need to mount a custom mainframe froma major research university in an SUV to equal the independant terrain navigation capabilities of a lizard.

So while there's no great reason to think Human-equalling (much less exceeding) AI is impossible there's no reason to think it's around the corner either. AI is plausibly a yes or no item in hard SF for a truly forseeable future.

Hard cryo freeze that stops aging is even more dubious tech. It actually might be impossible. The TL9 Hibernation Capsules that slows aging to 10% looks more likely.

So you do not have to have low tech to make genships the choice over AI or sleeper ships. Genships are so difficult to produce that even at High TLs their exisitence is not without difficulty in plausibility.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Even 10% aging for deep hibernation is rather dubious. Most animals that deeply hibernate do not live any longer than relatives in areas in which they don't have to hibernate.
It's probably an issue of yes, you reduce the rate at which free radicals etc. damage you, but you also reduce the rate at which your cells can repair themselves resulting in not much change with regards to aging.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Fred, I never dismiss anything you have to say. That is not to say I agree with your word or treat GURPS SPACESHIPS' word as gospel.

Yeah, I was on that page last week.

Re: Generation Ships
 

That was a joke.

Well, I'm pretty sure robocop-level has its flaws. Murphy is a headache in terms of maintenance, and I'm sure that even synthetic hearts from the ads have this flaw (to a lesser extent). I'd really want to talk this over with Flyndaran, though. I'm aiming for a similar somewhat-advanced replacements in my own setting.

Re: Generation Ships
 

It occurs to me that a TL10 ship trying to rescue the passengers and crew of a failing TL8 generation starship might make a decent short campaign.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Dismiss my opinions with airy handwaiving is exactly what you appear to do.

If it's not what you actually intend to convey you have a nigh-catastrophic communiucation skills problem.

If you don't want to use Spaceships numbers (or those from any other Gurps publication) I'm not sure what you're doing discussing it on a Gurps forum.

Re: Generation Ships
 

Yeah, it could be, in theory, just as in theory a dictatorial human could have taking care of his/her subjects as agenda. But 'could be' isn't good enough, the only reason to prefer an AI to a human in a position of power is if there's some way to ensure that.

On the contrary, immortality and reproduction are conflicting states. Children would be dangerous and indeed eventually deadly competition to a race of immortals, since the previous generation isn't going away, each new generation divides finite resources and possibilities ever more thinly. A race of immortals is going to have to restrict reproduction to levels that match their death rate (for whatever cause) from cold Malthusian necessity.

Not to the species as a whole.

Uh...no. We haven't. Those we have domesticated are, for the most part, only partial successes. Dogs come closest to full success, and there are quirks in the canids that make them easier to domesticate than most species.

Nobody said anything about magic or the supernatural. Just because a process or phenomenon is mechanistic doesn't necessarily mean it can be duplicated any way you want to do it. U-235 works as fission fuel. Iron-56does not. Carbon serves as a workable chemical basis for biology, as far as we can see even the other elements of Column 14 do not. Maybe they could, under some conditions (there have been unconvincing speculations about silicon), but nobody knows.

That said, nobody knows if life is purely mechanistic or not.

But it can not tell us whether it's more probable or not that conciousness is confined to biology or not, because it has no data.

There was extensive data and workable theory applying to the physics of the LLC. There's none applying to the processes of consciousness, we can't even usefully define what consciousness is, other than in loose-contextual ways.

When there's no data, science must be silent.

And equally nothing to suggest that it can. No data, no science. Absent data, science can not speak.

Re: Generation Ships
 

I have been reevaluating how Gurps does cyborgs, especially the full brain in a box type. Though realistically that would require an odd setting assumption to make plausible.
Robocop personifies the sadness of low empathy but still having emotions. Coupled with what I call OPH: overly stoic.

Re: Generation Ships
 

the same thing that people who say "I don't want to use the Gurps magic system, because in this world the system works differently. How can I make the system work?"

The thing that makes Gurps different is the G for Generic. We have different vision of the future (surprise!) and are trying to figure out which numbers fit.

Re: Generation Ships
 

The OP requested an airy, handwavy sort of thread. It's not personal, I had people blowing off my perfectly good precepts for the last two weeks.