Dave
I got the impression from the published material that the Clippers in particular were built at varying tech levels from hull structure and modules to the J drives and weapons. Wasn't there a few multimission ships that were built with drop in, lower tech modules as well?
Matt
---In , <dcndcn13@...> wrote :
I don't know if this was clear in the published materials, but RC ships
were definitely intended to be built the way you describe, big hulls built
as economically and at the lowest TLs possible, with key force-multiplying
systems (jump drives, power plants, computers, sensors, weapons, etc.)
dropped in from higher TLs so the higher-tech worlds could focus their
labor force on manufacturing key technologies that would be used
elsewhere. If that wasn't clear it was probably because we had to publish
ships that followed the "classic" approach of an entire ship being
manufactured at a single tech level as examples of the normal approach.
There were also limitations on plug-and-play, as you can't drop a TL 15
computer onto a TL 10 network with a TL 12 databus and expect to get full
TL 15 performance out of it.
But the idea of maximizing production efficiency was embedded in a bunch
of places, the one I'm thinking of right now is in the Covenant of Suffren
where the waterworld had a big submarine hull industry that was going to
provide a lot of help in producing kludgy spaceships. Going down an
atmosphere is a lot easier than going up one atmosphere per 10 meters, the
problem would be that off-the-shelf submarine hulls would be heavier than
necessary, but they should have good G performance, and you could get SDBs
or starships that look like Star Trek's SS Botany Bay.
I got the impression from the published material that the Clippers in particular were built at varying tech levels from hull structure and modules to the J drives and weapons. Wasn't there a few multimission ships that were built with drop in, lower tech modules as well?
Matt
---In , <dcndcn13@...> wrote :
I don't know if this was clear in the published materials, but RC ships
were definitely intended to be built the way you describe, big hulls built
as economically and at the lowest TLs possible, with key force-multiplying
systems (jump drives, power plants, computers, sensors, weapons, etc.)
dropped in from higher TLs so the higher-tech worlds could focus their
labor force on manufacturing key technologies that would be used
elsewhere. If that wasn't clear it was probably because we had to publish
ships that followed the "classic" approach of an entire ship being
manufactured at a single tech level as examples of the normal approach.
There were also limitations on plug-and-play, as you can't drop a TL 15
computer onto a TL 10 network with a TL 12 databus and expect to get full
TL 15 performance out of it.
But the idea of maximizing production efficiency was embedded in a bunch
of places, the one I'm thinking of right now is in the Covenant of Suffren
where the waterworld had a big submarine hull industry that was going to
provide a lot of help in producing kludgy spaceships. Going down an
atmosphere is a lot easier than going up one atmosphere per 10 meters, the
problem would be that off-the-shelf submarine hulls would be heavier than
necessary, but they should have good G performance, and you could get SDBs
or starships that look like Star Trek's SS Botany Bay.