GURPS Space: Stardrives

[Apache]

Yeah, the 2300AD stutterwarp was quite elegant.

Originally Posted by Sanity

I have a hugh problem with that - it makes any military action idiotic.

Figured that out all on your own, did you? And wrong, as shown below.

Originally Posted by Sanity

You simply can not attack any world. You come out of hyperspace, with your primitive weaponry......and get destroyed by computer controlled missiles from automatic defense satellites.

Ding! You get a cookie. However, it means you can't attack ADVANCED worlds. The Core worlds, for instance. Most colony worlds aren't going to have advanced orbital defenses, so they can be raided/invaded.

Originally Posted by Sanity

See, just because they discovered hyperspace made not made electronic disappear. And as long as my defense systems are not traveling through hyperspace... they can use all that electronic equipment. This gives a TREMENDOUS advantage to any local defense, to a level that makes fighting non-sensical.

Even if you look at ships - system defense boats, without hyperspace capabilities, never intended to travel, will...
...have modern computer controlled equipment.

Yup. Figured this out on your own, hmmm?

Originally Posted by Sanity

If you wan tthis to work, you ahve to go full retro and just ban electronics, but hyperspace disabling it does... have side effects.

Actually, it works quite fine the way I described it.

The 'side effects' are intentional.

[AstralRunner]

No need to be a condescending jerk, Apache.

Anyway, I'm not seeing colonies as being that much more vulnerable either. Surely one could bring along machines for making chips. Without precision electronic control, they'd have to be privative, but see, when you arrive, you manually operate your privative electronics making process, and plug those parts into machines capable of producing advanced electronics (which you've brought with you ready made, so you can avoid the problem of not having precision machining available), and if the chips producible by machines run by privative chips aren't good enough, you bring another set of machines into which you plug the better chips, and so on.

If you're moving the sort of material and personal required for colonization anyway, bringing along enough prefab parts and specs to get a modern electronics fabrication facility operational shouldn't take any longer than a year. I imagine generations of engineers could probably fine-tune the process down to weeks.

[Apache]

Actually, the first priority of a colony is survival.

Once they get the whole 'generate enough food/energy surplus' thing down pat, then you might see some efforts to start a electronics industry.

And making electronics components...from scratch....isn't as easy as you seem to think it is.

Just ask any electronics engineer.

[AstralRunner]

Originally Posted by Apache

Actually, the first priority of a colony is survival.

Once they get the whole 'generate enough food/energy surplus' thing down pat, then you might see some efforts to start a electronics industry.

And making electronics components...from scratch....isn't as easy as you seem to think it is.

Just ask any electronics engineer.

If colonies tend to get raided and invaded, I can easily see the production of guided missiles being classes in the "survival" category of things. Besides that, they wouldn't have to build the components from scratch: they could bring along everything that wouldn't be fried by the trip. If you take a modern chip fabrication facility, for instance, and remove only the electronics, you still have a whole lot of expensive high-technology that does itself require electronics to manufacture but that presumably wouldn't be damaged by your FTL engines.

[Sanity]

On top, unless your world is going to run primitive all along, you will have a hugh demand to get electronics going fast.

You can possibly ship in most of the raw materials anyway. Getting electronics going gives so many benefits (also in terms of the mass of equipment you need to transport) that it could possibly be a very high priority item.

Add to that that any world that is so struggling it does not have that possibly is not worth raiding - you have a dead end again. Anything worth raiding will have a high pressure of getting something going.

I am not even going into the tricky part of defining what exactly IS electronics. Both operate on the same principles, so it must be a matter of size - which means you can possibly do something that is larger than a typical microchip, but still avoiding the vacuum tubes. If that is too large - imagine you have a high tech level society, with nano fabrication etc., deciding to solve that whole problem. Old type vacuum tubes are so big also because noone worked on making them really small. if a TL 10 society has pressure to do so, they may be a lot smaller than what you know as vacuum tubes.

Do not even talk of a lot of more search going into advanced computer technology that is using - light instead of electrical charge. Research on that is done today, and with the fact that this is not electronics you suddenly have a real reason to do so - there is your electronics again, albeit without electrons. Does not change the result, though.

So, in general - the proposal just does not work out. Logical holes you can fly the alien mothership from Independance Day through. Which means it needs at least a lot of handweaving through social pressure etc. to make it at least partially plausible.

Sorry if that is insulting to the poster (as his jerky reaction seems to indicate), but reality does not bend for him, sadly.

[AstralRunner]

I also just realized something else that would work: organic computers. Since the stardrive doesn't fry the brains of the ship's passengers, much more advanced applications of this technology could be employed for some things.

[Sanity]

Interesting link. Yeah. I would assume with all the pressure you get from hyperspace, a lot of resources would go into this. I particularly like this bilogical part. It has a nasty side-effect - maybe some company has much better computers, using human brains - nice, nasty, perfect for a darker spin for the PC's to get into.

I am, btw., not so sure how much electronics you would need to kickstart electronics. Heck, I could imagine a "boostrap ship" provided by the government or a company that has a mobile primitive electronics factory on board. It is not so hard to make a chip, if you have the waver in a prepared form. You can prepare the waver to pre-dotting process on earth, then the ship just needs to have the parts to make the dotation (not THAT hard, seriously) and turn the resut into chips.

Or, if ships can land, it has a hugh primitive tech computer with the same interfaces like the fab equipment for a standardized small fab. Just getting a small fabrication going ;) I think people seriously overestimate the amount of control you need for this - do not forget, the ship brings you the wavers with prepared for dotation.

A specialized ship could be used to kickstart colonies with their own manufacturing abiligies - done. Not even that expensive, compared to the tremendous amount of material you need to move for a proper colony. The savings compared to shipping vacuum tubes (from then on you only ship wavers) are extreme alone.

[CraigR]

I always thought as variations on warp drives, "Distance Nullification" drives were cool for standard one-universe campaigns. A ship caterpillars through space contracting space in front of it and expanding it behind. This would limit space battles to sublight speed, or between ships travelling single-file matching FTL speed.

It steals from the stutterwarp school of thought that you go slower in some situations, in this case, density of interstellar gases. You go slower passing through a nebula and a heck of a lot faster between galaxies. This makes for the mapping of interstellar causeways where the best speeds have been charted, trade routes ripes for piracy.

[AstralRunner]

Originally Posted by Sanity

I particularly like this biological part. It has a nasty side-effect - maybe some company has much better computers, using human brains - nice, nasty, perfect for a darker spin for the PC's to get into.

Unlikely. You'd probably get something like the smart-gels from Starfish.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by AstralRunner

I also just realized something else that would work: organic computers. Since the stardrive doesn't fry the brains of the ship's passengers, much more advanced applications of this technology could be employed for some things.

Unless you're handwaving about psychic effects, there's basically nothing you can do that is survivable by humans and not by properly designed computers. If you're incorporating psychic effects, it doesn't matter whether the 'computer' is biological, only whether it's sapient.