DangerousThing
SOC-13
Hi,
I'm trying to figure out why, when the 2nd Imperium and the Rule of Man fell there was such a long "Long Night".
This is also about trade and manufacturing.
I'm making one assumption here:
1. Most relatively high population planets are self-sufficient, for the most part.
I can understand that any low population world that needs imports to survive would have problems, but any high population system with a reasonable tech level should have survived without much problems.
I don't know what the TL/populations of planets were right before the Long Night.
I tend to agree in the main with John Sneed's article in Freelance Traveller #11, in which he mainly talks about the background tech in Traveller. The article is "Traveller for the 21st Century" and it talks about increasing computer and genetics technology while still keeping Traveller pretty much the same game.
John has limited nanotech at TL-12, which is merely another, more efficient, way of manufacturing. The nanotech "vats" take programming and raw materials in, and output finished products. It should be possible to sell these "vats" to lower tech worlds (such as Regina at TL-10). The main advantage of using this sort of nanotech is that it is very easy to change a factory from producing steel beams to producing food.
Even without nanotech, lower-tech robots could still do this sort of job. Things would take a little longer to change their purpose, but it could still be done relatively easy.
Therefore, most systems with enough population to need large-scale manufacturing should have it.
As for new star ships, it might take a bit longer for them to be built, but it should be possible to do this with either a robot factory or a nanotech factory, or even with plain basic humans. It wouldn't be as quick to build them on the ground as it would in space, but it could be done. And once you have the ships, you can build the 0-g dry docks to build more. And yes, if the TL is high enough and there are some ships around to hunt for the right rare materials. Lanthanum, which is considered a rare-earth element, is actually much cheaper than gold (also used for industrial uses); unless this is more common on Earth than other systems, it should be found in enough quantity to build more jump drives.
So within 10-20 years there should be enough ship-building around that exploration from pretty much everywhere should begin again.
So my question again is, why the long night?
I ask this because IMTU I also had a long night. This was nothing like the OTU, but there was a large republic (around 2,000 systems) that fell hard due to fighting between the haves and the have-nots (basically). IMTU, one of the groups that lost spread a computer bacteria - a germ that had a long incubation period but that ate modern electronics. I figure this was enough to wreck the local tech levels and ships.
So I have an answer that works for MTU, but not for the OTU.
Any thoughts? Am I missing something obvious?
I'm trying to figure out why, when the 2nd Imperium and the Rule of Man fell there was such a long "Long Night".
This is also about trade and manufacturing.
I'm making one assumption here:
1. Most relatively high population planets are self-sufficient, for the most part.
I can understand that any low population world that needs imports to survive would have problems, but any high population system with a reasonable tech level should have survived without much problems.
I don't know what the TL/populations of planets were right before the Long Night.
I tend to agree in the main with John Sneed's article in Freelance Traveller #11, in which he mainly talks about the background tech in Traveller. The article is "Traveller for the 21st Century" and it talks about increasing computer and genetics technology while still keeping Traveller pretty much the same game.
John has limited nanotech at TL-12, which is merely another, more efficient, way of manufacturing. The nanotech "vats" take programming and raw materials in, and output finished products. It should be possible to sell these "vats" to lower tech worlds (such as Regina at TL-10). The main advantage of using this sort of nanotech is that it is very easy to change a factory from producing steel beams to producing food.
Even without nanotech, lower-tech robots could still do this sort of job. Things would take a little longer to change their purpose, but it could still be done relatively easy.
Therefore, most systems with enough population to need large-scale manufacturing should have it.
As for new star ships, it might take a bit longer for them to be built, but it should be possible to do this with either a robot factory or a nanotech factory, or even with plain basic humans. It wouldn't be as quick to build them on the ground as it would in space, but it could be done. And once you have the ships, you can build the 0-g dry docks to build more. And yes, if the TL is high enough and there are some ships around to hunt for the right rare materials. Lanthanum, which is considered a rare-earth element, is actually much cheaper than gold (also used for industrial uses); unless this is more common on Earth than other systems, it should be found in enough quantity to build more jump drives.
So within 10-20 years there should be enough ship-building around that exploration from pretty much everywhere should begin again.
So my question again is, why the long night?
I ask this because IMTU I also had a long night. This was nothing like the OTU, but there was a large republic (around 2,000 systems) that fell hard due to fighting between the haves and the have-nots (basically). IMTU, one of the groups that lost spread a computer bacteria - a germ that had a long incubation period but that ate modern electronics. I figure this was enough to wreck the local tech levels and ships.
So I have an answer that works for MTU, but not for the OTU.
Any thoughts? Am I missing something obvious?