Suspension of Disbelief.

What if it's nothing more than providing room/employment for malcontents, oops, organizationally challenged individuals?

Dan

P.S. I spent 30+ years in the computer field, so I also find the entire computer situation at least ludicrous, especially in view of how close we are to self driving vehicles with such cludgy hardware/software. Can you imagine just 20+ years and what is going to be "normal"?

Look around you at everyone with a personal computer greater than anything available 20 years ago, and that is in their pocket!

Image Watson times 1000 with the cloud times 1,000,000 as a data base? I don't know at what point a computer becomes an AI, but whenever it happens, humans better watch out, 'cause it might decide to to a little planet cleansing.

Jonathan_S wrote:It's not. IIRC the basis for kzt's hyperbole goes back to the threads about what industrial resources Manticore had left after Oyster Bay (and specifically the "Unicorn Yards" where the Navy built their prototypes and most secret ships).

kzt please correct me if I'm misrepresenting your position on any of this; or even if I'm misremembering how it came together.


We had a population number for the outer belts prior to that (the 300 million kzt referenced), but David came along as said there were no shipyards out there and no industry; that they'd be basically no help rebuilding the destroyed stations, shipyards, and industry in the wake of OB. (Specifically that the Unicorn Yard" was on the Wayland station over Gryphon -- despite EoH giving the strong impression that it was out in the Unicorn Belt)
Which left a bit of a question of what the heck 300 million people were doing out there if the mining is presumably pretty automated; yet there's no other industry.

First of all, "no industry(useful for rebuilding one of the largest concentrations of spaceship building capacity)" does not equate "no production(or minor industry)".

Secondly, as already mentioned, only a very small portion of those millions are likely to actually be involved in the mining itself.
And we DO get a glimpse into it in the Susan Hibson story, with her at 12 being the youngest of 8000+ people on "Unicorn Eleven", a newer habitat with all the conveniences and entertainment.
And rather than "miners" the single most common job directly related seem to be geologists employed to FIND where to mine.

And with 12+ minutes by lightspeed, you´re going to want everything onsite, so service work will end up the primary business.

And i bet there´s a fair share of the "excentrics" of the starsystem around there as well, it´s a perfect place for it.

Tenshinai wrote:.
And with 12+ minutes by lightspeed, you´re going to want everything onsite, so service work will end up the primary business.

The problem is that the belt is a huge space, and traveling to another part is pretty much equal to going to the inner system. And the inner system gets the economies of scale. The difference between going 30 degrees along the belt and getting to that spot from the inner system isn't really huge. In either case, if you can't take care of the immediate issue you will be dead by the time help arrives, and both will require a full up impeller drive vehicle to get their in a reasonable time period.

kzt wrote:The problem is that the belt is a huge space, and traveling to another part is pretty much equal to going to the inner system. And the inner system gets the economies of scale. The difference between going 30 degrees along the belt and getting to that spot from the inner system isn't really huge. In either case, if you can't take care of the immediate issue you will be dead by the time help arrives, and both will require a full up impeller drive vehicle to get their in a reasonable time period.

Which of course is why they put "everything" in each major habitat, and wont be travelling any "30 degrees along the belt".

And btw, if a "normal" habitat is 10k people (based on the in-book mentioned one with 8k as a basic assumption and even spread ), that means there´s 30000 habitats spread out along the belt, even if only 1/10 has something specific you want, any travel will be single digit degrees nearly all the time.
With around 80 habitats per degree, so your 30 degree of travel would mean someone is intentionally bypassing over two THOUSAND habitats.

Yes i´m oversimplifying, but it still shows just how much there CAN be. And if you have a choice between a 15 minute flight to get to something your own habitat doesn´t have, and a flight of some/several hours, uh yeah, most of the time, unless the service is drastically worse, you´re going to go with the local places.

And again, the text-ev specifically states even a habitat with just 8k people total has all the bells and whistles.

What's the cost per habitat, and who is paying, and how do they pay the bills? Note that David has pretty much said that anything significant is built at the big orbital platforms, so why are there being hauled out 2-4 AU? What makes this a money making proposition sufficient to support housing minor children, with all the additional issues that implies?

Why is this cheaper than just importing material, since mass shipping is so damn inexpensive?

What are they doing that makes it worth the huge premium to do it in a man made habitat out in the belt?

kzt wrote:What's the cost per habitat, and who is paying, and how do they pay the bills? Note that David has pretty much said that anything significant is built at the big orbital platforms, so why are there being hauled out 2-4 AU? What makes this a money making proposition sufficient to support housing minor children, with all the additional issues that implies?

Why is this cheaper than just importing material, since mass shipping is so damn inexpensive?

What are they doing that makes it worth the huge premium to do it in a man made habitat out in the belt?

You're assuming a centrally planned economy rather than "it just grew that way"?

We know there are habitats where people live their entire lives; consider Yildun as the poster child for that way of life. I'd assume that the belter population simply grew organically; local manufacturing takes care of local needs. At this point they may not be dependent on the inner system for much of anything. They don't make big ticket items not because they can't, but because trading raw materials for manufactured goods makes more sense. Currently.

By the way; I'd assume that habitats are in clusters rather than singletons of average 10K. A cluster of 100K people makes more sense. I'd also assume that they move around; there's no reason why a space-based culture has to have its habitats in a fixed location. Staying close to, say, a gas giant that can be mined for hydrogen might be more important than always occupying a specific location in a specific orbit.

JohnRoth wrote:They don't make big ticket items not because they can't, but because trading raw materials for manufactured goods makes more sense. Currently..

Right now there is ZERO local demand for raw materials, as all the new construction and manufacturing is occurring on the other size of the WHJ, by people who already have existing contracts with raw material suppliers in their system. There now is a really high demand for manufactured goods, but David has stated that they have essentially no manufacturing ability because of reasons.

So essentially you have to just believe, because this whole arrangement makes about zero sense.

And the whole idea that you are going to get some sort of libertarian commune ad-hock building a huge complex structure in space, where one mistake by anyone kills everyone else, well I have a deal for you if you believe that. Particularly if it is supposed to have a propulsion system.

I don't quite get why families would be out in the various belts, but I can certainly understand there still being a somewhat large, albeit unusable for shipyards, population.

Alot of mineral/geologic experts, trying to determine which asteroids would have higher.... yields? for lack of a better term worth of metals needed. Even if you're using robots to drill core samples and get various depths for surveying, you still need people to process it. Or at least have spent time programming, and building more robots to have a fully automated surveying, processing, and number crunching presence.

Could also just plain be people who don't want to have their feet on solid ground, sort of the opposite of Graysons moving their food into orbit but staying on the planet.

Heck, even at the risk of something like in the Martian movie, if as a 30 year guy that went back to high school just to get his diploma they'd accept me for a possible one-way trip to start a more permanent space presence.... I'd leap at the chance just to get off Earth (feel free to substitute Earth for an Honorverse world if you wish). I'd be unsuitable for rapid rebuilding of Manticoran shipyards, but I'd still be a member of the belter population among thousands to millions of others.

kzt wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:They don't make big ticket items not because they can't, but because trading raw materials for manufactured goods makes more sense. Currently..

Right now there is ZERO local demand for raw materials, as all the new construction and manufacturing is occurring on the other size of the WHJ, by people who already have existing contracts with raw material suppliers in their system. There now is a really high demand for manufactured goods, but David has stated that they have essentially no manufacturing ability because of reasons.

At the time of the story, this is true. What does that have to do with developments in the previous couple of hundred years? They're supposed to be precognative or something?

kzt wrote:So essentially you have to just believe, because this whole arrangement makes about zero sense.

And the whole idea that you are going to get some sort of libertarian commune ad-hock building a huge complex structure in space, where one mistake by anyone kills everyone else, well I have a deal for you if you believe that. Particularly if it is supposed to have a propulsion system.

Who said anything about libertarian? We have lots of evidence in the Honorverse of orbital habitats that aren't anchored to planets. Once again: Yildun, which has no habitalble planets, but seems to have a thriving population servicing the junction, Technodyne and who knows what else.

JohnRoth wrote:Who said anything about libertarian? We have lots of evidence in the Honorverse of orbital habitats that aren't anchored to planets. Once again: Yildun, which has no habitalble planets, but seems to have a thriving population servicing the junction, Technodyne and who knows what else.

Well, let me see. I think it was you who 4 messages back who was arguing that the idea that a Corp would want a reason before building a multi-billion $M habitat and recruiting people to staff it was unreasonable. Instead it was supposed to "just happen", apparently when you recruit a few thousand millionaires who want to build a space station to live in out in the middle of nowhere because why not?

Not how the only example of a habitat discussed in the text was in fact a corporate built habitat that was created for a specific purpose. It wasn't a bunch of millionaires who decided to pool all their money so they could live out in the belt to be all alone, other then their few thousand other millionaire buddies.