Sectors of an Ultra-Tech/Bio-Tech economy

[nick012000]

EDIT: Accidentally posted. Making edits to answer everything now...

Originally Posted by SuedodeuS

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?

Because the thread is about that setting?

Also, I'll note that your "huge blocks of thermite" plan for securing nukes is, unfortunately, quite flawed.

"Huge blocks of thermite" isn't being used to secure the nukes, it's used to secure the hypothetical drives.

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.

*confusedface.jpg* No, it doesn't. Not without the government giving each company that wants to build them the go-ahead. Besides, the resources to build nukes are already on the public market. Nuclear power stations are run by private companies, and some varieties can use the left-over waste to make nuclear bombs.

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.

Again, the whole "blow them up" plan was for the FTL drives, not the nukes. The nukes would simply be designed so that they wouldn't go off within the atmosphere. Well, the big ones for extra-atmospheric use wouldn't, anyway. You don't have to worry about them falling into enemy hands, because the personelle processes are such that they'll never fall into the hands of anyone that might be an enemy in the first place by subterfuge, and sufficiently guarded to fend off anyone short of a nationstate that could build their own just as easily anyway.

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?

Of course not. That's why I said it was for the FTL drive. The nukes are simply designed not to fuse within the atmosphere. Without the fuses setting off the critical mass, it's just a dirty bomb.

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?

Firstly, blowing up a city with an Orion bomb wouldn't work. Do some research. The extra-atmospheric bombs are designed to fail to go off in the atmosphere, and the intra-atmospheric ones are only .35 kilotons; they'll only destroy things within a few hundred yards of the blast site. You can do that more easily with conventional bombs.

Secondly, social engineering doesn't count as bypassing the technolgy itself. It counts as bypassing the social structure around it, and that's an entirely different issue. Making a suitably strong structure will keep out anyone who wants to steal nukes. Just witness the US's nuclear security; noone's stolen any of their nukes to date.

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.

The New Inventions rules are in the Core, they aren't cinematic, and they only require one person and a lot of money. Someone with Engineering in the mid-20s and the Multimillionaire advantage can easily produce Amazing inventions without much difficulty, for only about 200-220 points (IQ 15 [100], Multimillionaire 1 [75], Engineering (specialty) 25 [44]). None of those traits are cinematic.

Originally Posted by Icelander

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.

No, I didn't. You specifically said that they could only sell things to the Empire, for the Empire to use. You used a world that made lasers as an example.

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.

And that individual uploads him or herself, escapes onto the wilds of the net, and begins cracking it. Or, in the case of a government, they crack other people's comms or work through third parties (in a fashion similar to an interstellar Tor network), and then freely give away the IPs to anyone who connects to them.

Originally Posted by Brett

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

I get it, alright. Build it far enough underground, and you'll be fine.

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.

Okay. That just means you have to build it a hundred times as armored.

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

It's possible to build something to survive being inside a nuclear fireball. You just have to build a suitable method of heat dissipation or storage for the duration of the fireball. Fortunately, you're sitting on top of a very large heat sink: the planet. A suitably designed heat exchange system might let you survive for a few hours of nuclear fireball (and for multi-gigaton explosions, that's probably about how long the fireball would last for).

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.

Now? Maybe not. With improve technology? I have little doubt.

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

There's a NASA design for a self-replicating robot probe, and that was decades ago. We could have built it, if we had wanted to. We could build one now, if we wanted to. The problems we have had with our space program for the last forty years has not been technology but lack of political will and inadequate funding.

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

No, it isn't. All you need is the following:
A space ship.
A bunch of frozen embryoes.
A factory capable of building other, more specialized factories.
A bunch of robots capable of harvesting materials to feed said factory.

We have all of the above, in varying degrees.

[AmesJainchill]

nick, can we move away from discussing setting-breaking of Flat Black, please?
This was a somewhat-over-my-head-but-interesting discussion before all this business started. They're answering your objections fairly well, to their and the setting's credit.
I'm not a fan of the Imperium's policies on FTL drives, weapons smuggling, or spaceships, either (cuts off too many fun adventure possiblities, IMO), but I solve that problem by not playing in that setting.
Nahal's a neat place to visit, though. ;D

[nick012000]

Oh? Really?

Yes.

No it isn't.

I stand corrected. It's not a planned economy, just one with a government-enforced monopoly on products. Monopolies are less efficient that competitive organizations, because monopolies can artificially inflate prices. Even moreso with monopolies run by the government, as they don't need to turn a profit. Ergo, one with free space travel will outcompete one that does not. Additionally, since the locals are incapable of choosing routes, an additional inefficiency is introduced. As goods and trade will flow much more efficiently in a free-market system, the free-market system will outcompete the government-enforced monopoly.

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.

And if they developed it on their own, either because they secretly left the Empire on STL slowships, or because one guy comes up with it on his own, the Empire won't be able to deny them that.

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

I wouldn't. They'd be plug-and-play. One breaks, you pull it out and stick in a new one.

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.

And an eccentric millionaire engineer can defeat all of that simply by not doing any of his work industrially but by his own, private systems, and by simply not living on a planet.

Originally Posted by Icelander

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

Sure I do. It sounds like a high-gigaton to low-teraton explosion. Blast'll last for a few hours, then it'll clear up and if you've designed your bunker to survive the heat and overpressure, you'll be fine.

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.

Cheyenne Mountain was, if memory serves, designed to survive one direct nuclear hit. You'd have to hit it twice to destroy it. The Russian equivalent, I believe, was basically immune to surface-detonated nukes because it was so far underground it wasn't affected by surface overpressure.

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.

Several orders of magnitude? Okay, then. Once I get home, I'll create a TL 10 arcology using the Starship Creation Rules from Starships that'll survive a blast from a nuclear explosion. I'll then work out how many orders of magnitude of size it needs for every order of magnitude of energy to continue withstanding it.

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

Agreed, but with self-replicating factory swarms, the definition of "practical" changes pretty drastically.

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.

You mean this? You'd be surprised how easy it is to do so.

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

Fair enough.

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.

I think you misunderstand. Social engineering is only a threat if someone has the password, or can press a button or the like. There is no secret password or button to press. The drive, on the other hand, is a black box. The other guy can take a look at the schematics, and go, "I can't see any way to bypass this." You have a computer feed saying, "This is where I want to go," and takes you there. Saying anything else to it other than "Are you working?" gets it to self-destruct. Doing anything to it, other than installing it in a ship, transporting it, or telling it those two things, causes it to self-destruct.

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.

I disagree. Such a society is inevitable. It is human nature that there will always be rebels who wish to grasp for the stars.

Planes are fragile, but spacecraft are not?

The spacecraft might be fragile, but the casing around the drive is hard enough that anything that'll penetrate it will destroy the bits inside it needed for it to work.

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?

Don't be facetious. I've explained my position above.

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.

In RL? Maybe not. In GURPS? It does. The rules of the game say so, when PCs are involved.

Originally Posted by Brett

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

Any sort of self-replicating machine is a Von Neumann device, but I was largely referring to the large ones, yes.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by The Colonel

If you are UT enough to be post scarcity - or close enough to post scarcity then more and more of the enconomy is going to be in non-esssentials.

If you are actually post scarcity then by definition you don't have an economy. Economizing is only needed because things are scarce.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

At TL10, actual physical manufacturing is a trivial part of the cost of most common consumer products. The IP fees are the big ones.

You make me think of the SF novel I read—I believe it was Schroeder's "Permanence"—in which a major space battle was settled unexpectedly when one side's ship operation software noticed that the royalty payment deadline had passed, and shut itself down.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Icelander

And pardon me if I'm cynical, but I wouldn't trust nukes on the free market, even with anti-tamper switches on them.

Yeah. Neal Schulman's first novel, Alongside Night, has a scene where the hero and his girlfriend visit an underground black market business that will sell them nukes . . . but only if they pledge that they don't intend to use them to violate anyone's rights. I could just see the vendor's <wink, wink> in the middle of that oration. . . .

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by AmesJainchill

nick, can we move away from discussing setting-breaking of Flat Black, please?

That would be fine by me.

This was a somewhat-over-my-head-but-interesting discussion before all this business started.

It might recover, if we all clap our hands and say "I believe".

I'm not a fan of the Imperium's policies on FTL drives, weapons smuggling, or spaceships, either (cuts off too many fun adventure possiblities, IMO),

The setting design indeed sacrifices almost all space opera tropes. But on the other hand it supports a number of rationalised-planetary-romance tropes that depend on planetary societies being comparatively isolated. It's not a matter of this being an inferior space opera setting, but of it not being a space opera setting at all.

but I solve that problem by not playing in that setting.

Good call.

Nahal's a neat place to visit, though. ;D

Thanks.

I claim that Nahal (and Rohan, and all the rest) make more sense in a setting in which interstellar travel is restricted than in one in which any Tom, Dick, or PC can afford and operate a starship.

And that's without even mentioning Jon's Law.

[smurf]

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.

Both nations had a degree of wastage and in the 1930s the Russian economy was expanding. The real sinker was that the USA could produce specialised equipment at 1/3 of the cost of the Russian equivalent.

But from what has been written so far does not equate to either of them.

Is this Empire more akin to the British Empire, a Free Market closed economy?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by smurf

Is this Empire more akin to the British Empire, a Free Market closed economy?

It is closed to the extent of encompassing all known worlds. And I have borrowed terminology from the British Raj to give terms some immediate value. But I can't say that it is really much like the British Empire.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Brett

High technology is not just a matter of using newly-discovered scientific and engineering principles. The higher a tech level goes the more sophisticated its products become, which means that each product has many sub-assemblies, many, many components, scads of materials etc..

Just to note -- Exceptions exist, where advances in technology allow the simplification of a tool or product (e.g. drop-forged tools, or single-piece plastic/ceramic knives etc.).

Generalists and general-purpose manufactories are dramatically more expensive that hyperspecialists working in assembly lines or distributed manufacturing enterprises.

I'm not sure I'd go along with generalizing that to all times and places. I think it only becomes true when scale thresholds are met. The village blacksmith is an enduring example of a generalist whose service is economical because of his locale and the scope of his coverage.

It follows that an ultra-tech economy can only produce ultra-tech items economically if it has enough workers and capital employed that each worker and machine can be fully specialised to the degree that the sophisticated products require and fully employed in that speciality.

Hm. In a way that statement seems axiomatic.

Integrated over the range of special materials, fabrications, sub-assemblies, and products, this means that there is a minimum economic scale for each tech level, which rises with tech level.

Well, that may be true if you define the accumulated knowledge-capital underlying the TL as part of the what you mean by economic scale. However if you leave out the implied/inherent knowledge capital, I would be hesitant to conclude that all rise in TL must imply an intensification of inputs. In fact, I suggest that the trend of technological progress (toward efficiency) strives against that outcome.

It is a feature of my SF setting (conservative hard SF with radical touches and a minimum of superscience) that the development level of different colonies depends largely on the extent to which they are able to integrate their economies and achieve the scale that will let producers specialise.

Despite my previous theoretical quibbles, I can see that being a valid paradigm for the campaign background (it's just not necessarily a universal condition).

...The question arises from time to time of which colony specialises in what. The Empire specialises in starships, naturally. It has been established that Tau Ceti makes the best beam weapons (probably optical phased array emitters rather than actual lasers) and holographic equipment. Todos Santos has been noted for psychology, pedagogy, brain-hacking, mind-emulations, mind uploads and downloads, and computer software. Esbouvier has been noted as the place for artificial species, parahumans, and the like.

Before I commit myself any further, I'd like to sort out a reasonable division of an Ultra-Tech economy into about ten sectors each making up about 5–15% of economic activity. Would anyone like to suggest a likely division or a few likely economic specialisations for worlds?

Interesting question. One comment first -- it seems like Tau Ceti's specialization is too narrow to form a full tenth of such an economy, unless violence and warfare are major parts of this setting.

I'd propose the following ten broad sectors of a Bio/Ultra-tech economy, starting with expanded implications for the ones you already identified:

Empire - starcraft and their requirements and implications like propulsion systems, life support, armor, astrogation, applied cosmology.

Esbouvier - hard industrial bio-science, species genetic modification, parahumans, planetary eco-morphing.

Todos Santos - psychology, brain manipulation, pedagogy, individual/retail bio and medical.

Tau Ceti - force manipulation technology like beam weapons, active sensor arrays, force fields, magnetic bottle applications.

#4 - Information processing, computers, artificial intelligence.

#5 - Entertainment industry.

#6 - Coordination and adjudication functions and services (the kind of thing generally provided by town-halls and capital cities -- commercial agents, arbitrators, judges, stock markets, regulators yada yada)

#7 - Enclave of Privilege

#8 - Consumer goods -- while most of this stuff would be imported into the Suite from lower-cost places, some niche products would still be necessarily or more economically produced within the TL 11 cluster.

#9 - [I'm running dry here ... maybe a 'pure research' centre.]