Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Brett

I'm dead certain that it wasn't. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neu...al_constructor

I think sf has led to "Neumann machine" referring to any self-replicating robot not just his cellular automata experiment.

[nick012000]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Interstellar trade is a central facet of the setting; whether you think it is probably or not, it must exist.

Except without spaceships to trade goods with, there's no trade to be done, unless it's all done in relativistic rockets that aren't controlled by the Empire. "Trade in intellectual properties" will last exactly as long as it takes for someone to crack the coding and spreading it around for free.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Because we're capable of building things capable of surviving a catalcysmic nuclear reaction now. Witness Cheyenne Mountain and its Soviet equivalent. Both of those were underground, but with proper arcology design, people won't mind living underground.

When Earth was destroyed the surface of the planet became fusion fuel. I doubt Cheyenne Mountain survived.

Except without spaceships to trade goods with, there's no trade to be done, unless it's all done in relativistic rockets that aren't controlled by the Empire. "Trade in intellectual properties" will last exactly as long as it takes for someone to crack the coding and spreading it around for free.

Who said there are no spacecraft?

[nick012000]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Who said there are no spacecraft?

If you can't use them to trade with, there might as well not be. Intrastellar trade is possible, I suppose, but the way you've set your empire up means interstellar trade isn't.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by nick012000

If you can't use them to trade with, there might as well not be. Intrastellar trade is possible, I suppose, but the way you've set your empire up means interstellar trade isn't.

You can use them to trade with.

You just don't get to own them or drive them.

That hasn't stopped all the people in the real world who don't own oil tanker ships from buying oil.

[SuedodeuS]

Originally Posted by Brett

No, there is FTL which does about 1,000 c. Switching on an FTL engine in a planetary atmosphere is dangerous: Earth and one populous colony were wiped out by this effect, resulting in tens of billions of premature deaths.

Ah, so that's why you've made references to New and Old Earth.

Also, nick... wtf? You've derailed what looked like it would be an interesting discussion on Ultratech economies in order to complain about the laws surrounding FTL in the setting. Why?
Also, I'll note that your "huge blocks of thermite" plan for securing nukes is, unfortunately, quite flawed. First off, putting the nukes on the open market, even if they can't be immediately used, also puts all of what is needed to build a nuke on the open market. Unless your failsafe actually detonates the bomb (in which case, hey, you've just made an easy-to-use trigger), blowing up that thermite probably isn't going to get rid of all the enriched uranium. All a terrorist group would need is a good enough bunker to contain the explosion and they could get virtually all the uranium out. There's also the fact that, the better protected you try to make the item, the more difficult it is for the intended user to actually, you know, use it. You think Orion drives will work if every jolt risks blowing up the fuel? Oh, and social engineering does count. Why? Because it works. If someone blows up a highly-populated city with one of your Orion bombs, does the fact he used social engineering to "hack" it change the fact that millions of people just died?
Finally, just because the GURPS rules allow for something, doesn't mean it can actually happen. Yes, someone could go off on their own and build a FTL drive from first principles, all while shouting about making those fools understand, under certain GURPS rules. From what I've read, however, this is a realistic campaign. In reality (or, rather, a reality in which the FTL drives of the setting function), you would need large amounts of funding, access to previous research, a state-of-the-art research facility, and likely a dedicated team to get it done within your own lifetime. You could work around 1 and 3 with a huge personal fortune, 2 with some stealthy methods of gathering information, and 4 if you somehow could assemble enough individuals willing to work for you and with the proper skill sets. Note that in all cases, you have to do this without the Empire finding out, despite the fact that they have people specifically looking for this kind of stuff. Also, with the kinds of energy apparently involved, good luck testing your prototype without someone noticing.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Except without spaceships to trade goods with, there's no trade to be done, unless it's all done in relativistic rockets that aren't controlled by the Empire.

You've ignored every single reference to the Empire being the transport sector for the economies of the Suite and managed to reach a counter-intutive, illogical and wrong conclusion.

Do you want a reward?

Originally Posted by nick012000

"Trade in intellectual properties" will last exactly as long as it takes for someone to crack the coding and spreading it around for free.

Indeed.

But if a person does that, he or she can be punished. It doesn't always work, but it certainly makes for a disincentive. If a government has that as its official policy, well, there will be no trade with it.

And hence no new IPs to crack.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Because we're capable of building things capable of surviving a catalcysmic nuclear reaction now.

I don't think you get what Icelander means by "cataclysmic"

Witness Cheyenne Mountain and its Soviet equivalent. Both of those were underground, but with proper arcology design, people won't mind living underground.

I doubt that they would survive a kiloton per square metre over the whole surface. A 10-megaton warhead produces a fireball about 1.1 km in radius, or about 2.6 tons yield per square metre. So we are talking about a phenomenon hundreds of times as intense as a direct hit from a fusion bomb.

It sounds like building them underwater might be a bad idea, though, with all the florine.

And what with it being the equivalent of building them inside a fusion warhead.

We could do this now, if we wanted to. It'd just be fantastically expensive, like you said.

And not work. The weapon we are talking about turns a planet's air and seas into a fusion bomb. Would cannot now build an arcology that could survive inside a fusion bomb.

IWe could almost build seeder probes now, if we wanted to.

We can only just build an robot with a camera to take pictures on the surface of Mars.

All we're lacking at the moment is the biotech to print off new organisms, and we'll have those in ten years or so.

This statement is as dizzyingly optimistic as your plan to start a company building commercial spacecraft powered with atom bombs.

We've already got primitive versions of it that can produce tissue

Oh? Really?

It is relevant. USSR vs USA demonstrated the massive efficiency advantage a free market economy possesses against a planned one. Your Empire is a planned economy on a massive scale,

No it isn't.

and will be out-competed by a Free Market economy on a similar scale.

Disregarding your erroneous assumption that the Suite is a centrally planned economy, you are overlooking the fact that a rival economy on the scale of the Suite cannot exist without interstellar transport. If the Empire denied it that, it would be unable to out-compete teh Suite because it couldn't exist.

This thing would be massively overengineered, and wired to blow at the drop of a hat.

I'd hate to be the technician who had to service such devices.

And one suitably genius-y and wealthy researcher can go from "FTL exists" to "Eureka!", and proceed to build according to the GURPS rules. Then he proceeds to get his hands on autofabs, mining robots, and biofabs, and jumps out to start a new colony.

R&D in a mature TL10 economy is likely to be rather more challenging than you seem to assume. But it is exactly because it fears such things that the Empire (a) monitors research as closely as it can and the same for industries that seem to be related to building FTL drive components, and (b) diligently scouts for and patrols uninhabited but habitable planets.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by nick012000

Because we're capable of building things capable of surviving a catalcysmic nuclear reaction now. Witness Cheyenne Mountain and its Soviet equivalent. Both of those were underground, but with proper arcology design, people won't mind living underground.

You don't really know what a cataclysmic thermonuclear reaction is, do you?

Neither Cheyenne Mountain nor the Soviet equivalents would have stood up to even a TL7 fission device and a direct hit. They were designed to stand up to close hits.

We're talking several orders of magnitude above that of a direct hit with a fission weapon. And two or three TLs don't exactly provide for a way around that.

Originally Posted by nick012000

We could do this now, if we wanted to. It'd just be fantastically expensive, like you said. I think the costs for a few Japanese arcologies were in the billions of dollars. With advancing technology, however, the costs will go down.

The theoretical capability to do something is utterly irrelevant without the practical ability to put it in place.

There is not enough money in the world to build CT-proof arcology worlds for every last human in the Flat Black universe. There probably never will be.

Originally Posted by nick012000

We could almost build seeder probes now, if we wanted to. All we're lacking at the moment is the biotech to print off new organisms, and we'll have those in ten years or so. We've already got primitive versions of it that can produce tissue, all we need is to refine it to make organs and then entire organisms. Everything else you need for one, we have. It'd just be big, stupid, and take thousands of years to reach the nearest star which is why we haven't bothered. With FTL or ultratech relativistic engines, building seeders is entirely viable. AIs are useful, but optional.

EDIT: Nevermind, we could build a seeder probe now. I just remembered about the artificial womb that Australian researchers built for shark embryoes. It shouldn't be too difficult to adapt it to growing human embryoes, and with that, we could build seeder ships to colonize the universe now.

If you're talking about timescales of centuries and millenia, the Empire has more pressing problems.

Originally Posted by nick012000

Encryption, like I said. That social engineering can defeat it isn't a failing of the technology but of the people. The solution for the FTL drives is to take people out of the loop.

People are in the loop. You're trying to remove them by building a bomb, but that's only going to work for as long as someone doesn't figure out how to spoof it.

Originally Posted by nick012000

It is relevant. USSR vs USA demonstrated the massive efficiency advantage a free market economy possesses against a planned one. Your Empire is a planned economy on a massive scale, and will be out-competed by a Free Market economy on a similar scale.

But there is no such economy and probably will never be. Any hypothetical society dumb enough to make CT devices accessible to the public would eventually be an object lesson.

Originally Posted by nick012000

Planes are fragile, and have to be deliberately instructed to self-destruct. This thing would be massively overengineered, and wired to blow at the drop of a hat. Odds are that they'll fail much more often than the Empire's drives would when something trips the self-destruct mechanisms, but that can be avoided by the scale of their production and simply swapping in a new one once the old one goes. Military vessels would simply use unmodified drives, since you don't have to worry about terrorists getting their hands on one.

Planes are fragile, but spacecraft are not?

Originally Posted by nick012000

Usually only through social engineering, which doesn't count.

Great.

Your plan is to tell the CT event that destroys your civilisation that 'it doesn't count'. Will you ask for a time out?

Originally Posted by nick012000

And one suitably genius-y and wealthy researcher can go from "FTL exists" to "Eureka!", and proceed to build according to the GURPS rules. Then he proceeds to get his hands on autofabs, mining robots, and biofabs, and jumps out to start a new colony.

This is not a space opera setting.

Scientific research doesn't work like that. And you won't be able to build your Orion drives alone in your backyard.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

I think sf has led to "Neumann machine" referring to any self-replicating robot not just his cellular automata experiment.

Yes, it is certainly more general than what nick012000 claimed, a self-replicating robot spaceship.