On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 11:43 AM, <xxxxxx@mail.de> wrote:

I actually meant something simpler with the "relic-tech" idea. Assume energy is cheap and abundant via fusion. However, energy alone without the technology to transmute elements does NOT yield a post-scarcity society. Most of interstellar space travel in Traveller is a handwave which does not really interact (AFAIK) with the key technologies which imply the capability to transmute elements. The two elements of Traveller which imply a capability to tweak the basic forces are, I think, antigrav and nuclear dampeners. But antigrav can be handwaved away as implying only a control of gravity, not, say, the strong nuclear force. Maybe I am missing something here, but it seems to me that the problem are nuclear dampers (http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Nuclear_Damper). But those are not really such a fundamental element of the setting, just a defensive device. They are not really necessary to explain interstellar travel in Traveller (are they?).

So assume that nuclear dampers are far above TL15/16. However, the imperium has them because of reverse-engineered relic tech. This does not mean that you need to put together your dampers with actual relic tech, merely that you can construct them, but you have no idea why they work. So you have no element transmutation and no replicators. It is a small step from there to large-scale interstellar trade.

--
Carlos Alós-Ferrer
Chair of Microeconomics, University of Cologne
http://www.decisions.uni-koeln.de

Am 28-Mar-2016 20:22:08 +0200 schrieb xxxxxx@Pharmacy.Arizona.EDU:

> On Mar 28, 2016, at 10:55 AM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
>
> *Common, convenient space travel* implies/requires "cheap, abundant energy". Which is why, among other things, we're still mostly stuck at the bottom of our gravity well, and ship's boats make great WMDs.
>
> A low-energy TU is one where most people don't do much Travelling. Conversely, a high-energy, high-traffic one is one where the genie is already well and truly out of the bottle.

Moreover, a TU where people don’t do much Travelling pretty much excludes PC-scale ships. If ships are rare, they’re really expensive, and only governments can afford them.

A TU that doesn’t have much trade has no need for an Imperial Navy, or an Imperium, as such.

You cannot have both a universe where PC's have a Type A far trader, that Far Trader is the standard mode of interstellar trade and an Imperial Navy patrolling a couple thousand subsectors.

The economics simply don’t make any sense at all. A low-trade TU cannot generate sufficient taxes to sustain such an Imperial Navy. Certainly not one with Tigress battleships and the like.

You can HAVE such a TU, it just won’t have internal consistency.

A relic-based TU like Carlos is proposing can work, but it’ll be far more anarchic and disorganized than he thinks, I think. PC’s will acquire ships by finding wrecks and bolting various bits of alien technology together until it works..kind of :-) Their ships will be far more Mad Max than the OTU. Fun to play in, though ….

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

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