Proportions....

[PvK]

But, can you take a ship designed to deploy a single drone or a single satellite or some mines, and use it to transport 100,000 people and all of their possessions and necessities, for several months through space, and keep them alive, without serious amounts of life support equipment? No.

Realistically speaking, cargo should not be completely interchangeable based on equal mass. At the least, units should include the mass and cost required to keep them intact for a long space voyage. Unfortunately, SE4 lacks SE3's restrictions on cargo type. The only way I see to mod in some distinction using SE4, is to make the population units so large that there becomes an incentive to build specialized ships which wouldn't be efficient to use for mundane transport. That is, starliners. If we do as you suggest, except keep the pop mass at 1000kT, then with some changes to starliners and their modules, maybe we can have starliners carrying about 10x as many population units, but remaining relatively slow, so unit transports would more efficiently be built on faster lower-capacity transport hulls, while population transport would more efficiently use starliners.

PvK

[oleg]

Well, single drone weights 15 000 tons. Obviously the ship capable to carry, service and launch such a device should be able to carry few people instead. Or look at small troop transport. It carries enough troops to conquier whole planet

Besides, why are we talking about 2m tall, 70 kg weighting aliens ? Last time I saw UFO crew on TV (in "Taken" I think) were very punny.

[ February 03, 2003, 15:02: Message edited by: oleg ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by oleg:
Well, single drone weights 15 000 tons. Obviously the ship capable to carry, service and launch such a device should be able to carry few people instead. Or look at small troop transport. It carries enough troops to conquier whole planet

I don't take the masses entirely literally, if I did, and I did my math right, I would see the smallest drone is 100 kT = 100,000 TONS. I think this is probably ridiculous for a minimum ship or drone mass, so I consider kT an abstract unit subject to imaginitive interpretation.

I will grant that a drone is very large, and yes you could pack in some civilians and supplies and stuff for them in the same space, maybe, although when you start talking about hundreds of thousands of them, for months, I think you would need major life support systems etc, which would not be present by default on a cargo ship.

Besides, why are we talking about 2m tall, 70 kg weighting aliens ? Last time I saw UFO crew on TV (in "Taken" I think) were very punny.

Well, if I were designing the game system, this might be something you could specify during race design. It's still mostly irrelevant, however. The point is, that large populations and their survival requisites are not generally very interchangable for space transport purposes with machines.

This is also a design goal of the mod. It is supposed to require investment in special transport to move populations around, and those transports are supposed to be relatively slow and vulnerable, so that the concept of escorting infrastructure ships is introduced, and colonizing distant worlds in contested space becomes an interesting challenge, and not something that can be accomplished by single full-speed general-purpose ships in a few turns, as in the unmodded game.

I realize there are degrees, and yeah it would still be quite different from the unmodded game even if population only weighs 100 kT. It's just a question of degree, design goals, and personal taste, and of course people can adjust the settings as they please. I'll test out your suggestion in practice and deliberate more. If/when 3.0 comes out, I think it will be different from 2.x in several ways...

PvK

[oleg]

There is always a possibility that when it comes to space travel, we won't send living humans to stars. The obvious and well explored in S.F. literature suggestion is to send people in cryogenic form. But we can also send just fertilized cells with growth media and equipment programmed to grow humans upon delivery. On the second thought, cells are not necessary either. What we need is just CD with genetic information and some sort of futuristic "incubator". But then, we don't need CD either, just an antenna to receive all the data from Earth...

[PvK]

Well, the unmodded game allows you to replicate a whole homeworld in a year or two, so if you want to play that kind of SF, it's quite easy.

Proportions is about dealing with problems, not hand-waving them with "tech I don't even have to research or build will evaporate the problem". All the things you describe would require major research, and then, if SE4 would let me mod it in, actually constructing the technology. The problem is, SE4 doesn't give me many options for how to include cryogenic storage, that would be any different from the high-tech starliner modules I already have. As for growing clones from CD's and goo, well, I could give organic manipulation's replicant facilities to everyone, though I would say it would be a very high tech, and would also require tech that could raise and educate these people, and probably some population control facilities to control the anger that you want to replace them with clones and robots.

PvK

[Graeme Dice]

The technology level that PvK has assumed the races to have at the beginning of a Proportions game is one that is pretty much where we will be in 50 years, with the caveat that FTL travel is possible in his universe. This is why the mod almost completely lacks high-tech solutions to most problems.

[Krsqk]

"Well, if I were designing the game system, [race size] might be something you could specify during race design."

This would actually be really cool! Spend points to decrease your race's size, which could decrease the number (or more likely, size) of B/LS/CQ comps for your ship. Would also affect the space needed for population. Not a bad idea for SE5.