PICA updates

Can Owl replace the material? If the stock in question was easy to replace, wouldn't it be mentioned? Ultimately, we don't know what elements of the periodic table are present on Safehold. Most common elements have been mentioned already, but what about the less common ones?

I can accept the notion of time and story being why he doesn't do it. My original notion was to make a personality recording. Reformat the PICA, then restore the personality. I didn't think about how long a recording would take.

ETathome wrote:Can Owl replace the material? If the stock in question was easy to replace, wouldn't it be mentioned? Ultimately, we don't know what elements of the periodic table are present on Safehold. Most common elements have been mentioned already, but what about the less common ones?

I can accept the notion of time and story being why he doesn't do it. My original notion was to make a personality recording. Reformat the PICA, then restore the personality. I didn't think about how long a recording would take.

If OWL can't replace the materials, because they are not present, then they are in trouble, because it almost certainly will not be possible to build the ships required to fight the Gbaba.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

ETathome wrote:Can Owl replace the material? If the stock in question was easy to replace, wouldn't it be mentioned? Ultimately, we don't know what elements of the periodic table are present on Safehold. Most common elements have been mentioned already, but what about the less common ones?

I can accept the notion of time and story being why he doesn't do it. My original notion was to make a personality recording. Reformat the PICA, then restore the personality. I didn't think about how long a recording would take.

If OWL can't replace the materials, because they are not present, then they are in trouble, because it almost certainly will not be possible to build the ships required to fight the Gbaba.

True. Still there might be more than simple availability limiting the supplies of materials. Some of the needed material might require more elaborate production facilities than is currently available.

Bottom line is that more PICAs are possible at some future time to be determined as the story dictates.

PeterZ wrote:
True. Still there might be more than simple availability limiting the supplies of materials. Some of the needed material might require more elaborate production facilities than is currently available.

Bottom line is that more PICAs are possible at some future time to be determined as the story dictates.

Hi PeterZ,

I suspect that you are on to something here. IIRC, most elements are distributed throughout the universe with varying degrees of evenness. So it's not likely that that the elements Owl is short on are completely missing. But the ability to draw those elements into the substances needed might need to be redeveloped.

Should it turn out that an element needed is actually missing, it would mean that alternative elements and procedures would need to be developed. Not neccessarily easy, but there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.

Don

n7axw wrote:

PeterZ wrote:
True. Still there might be more than simple availability limiting the supplies of materials. Some of the needed material might require more elaborate production facilities than is currently available.

Bottom line is that more PICAs are possible at some future time to be determined as the story dictates.

Hi PeterZ,

I suspect that you are on to something here. IIRC, most elements are distributed throughout the universe with varying degrees of evenness. So it's not likely that that the elements Owl is short on are completely missing. But the ability to draw those elements into the substances needed might need to be redeveloped.

Should it turn out that an element needed is actually missing, it would mean that alternative elements and procedures would need to be developed. Not neccessarily easy, but there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.

Don

It might also be that the required materiel is not available on planet and must wait until asteroid mining can begin.

Keith_w wrote:

n7axw wrote:I suspect that you are on to something here. IIRC, most elements are distributed throughout the universe with varying degrees of evenness. So it's not likely that that the elements Owl is short on are completely missing. But the ability to draw those elements into the substances needed might need to be redeveloped.

Should it turn out that an element needed is actually missing, it would mean that alternative elements and procedures would need to be developed. Not neccessarily easy, but there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.

Don

It might also be that the required materiel is not available on planet and must wait until asteroid mining can begin.

And it could be that some extraction/refining processes that OWL can get started on now would either be too slow to be useful starting from what OWL has right now or impractical or impossible to extract/refine without possibly tipping off the OBS.

Everything in the Cave is a matter of what could be safely "lost" and hidden there, and everything being done with a TF tech base is limited to that basis and what can be done with it secretly. It can be limited more or less arbitrarily.

Until rfc desires a new PICA, a new PICA will require unobtainium in order to be built.

The variation in degrees of evenness can be fairly extreme. In fact, in most evolved galaxies there's a gradient from the center outwards for heavy [where 'heavy' = A>4] elements.
What we generally call heavy metals, unfortunately, are difficult to detect and measure accurately even at distances of 8-10 light minutes, so accurate information of distribution and variations in abundances has been hard to come by. However, the evidence does make it clear that local variations of over an order of magnitude in relative abundance are possible, so it is plausible that something critical is in short supply on Safehold.

Given the vagaries of geochemistry on rocky planets, it's equally possible that such materials are hard to obtain on Safefold, but adequate supplies are available elsewhere in the system.

n7axw wrote:

PeterZ wrote:
True. Still there might be more than simple availability limiting the supplies of materials. Some of the needed material might require more elaborate production facilities than is currently available.

Bottom line is that more PICAs are possible at some future time to be determined as the story dictates.

Hi PeterZ,

I suspect that you are on to something here. IIRC, most elements are distributed throughout the universe with varying degrees of evenness. So it's not likely that that the elements Owl is short on are completely missing. But the ability to draw those elements into the substances needed might need to be redeveloped.

Should it turn out that an element needed is actually missing, it would mean that alternative elements and procedures would need to be developed. Not neccessarily easy, but there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.

Don

fallsfromtrees wrote:

ETathome wrote:Can Owl replace the material? If the stock in question was easy to replace, wouldn't it be mentioned? Ultimately, we don't know what elements of the periodic table are present on Safehold. Most common elements have been mentioned already, but what about the less common ones?

I can accept the notion of time and story being why he doesn't do it. My original notion was to make a personality recording. Reformat the PICA, then restore the personality. I didn't think about how long a recording would take.

If OWL can't replace the materials, because they are not present, then they are in trouble, because it almost certainly will not be possible to build the ships required to fight the Gbaba.

If Safehold lacked sufficient heavy metal deposits or rare earth elements, it wouldn't have been selected in the first place as an acceptable option even if it were otherwise perfect. The goal was always to reach back into space, and that would have been impossible without accessible deposits of certain elements. The terraforming team would have made confirming this a priority to avoid forever limiting humanity by an oversight.

And while sabotaging Safehold in this manner might have appealed to Langhorne, it's not something he'd have been able to do since he wasn't present during terraforming operations. Not to mention that attempting to do so would have betrayed his plan from the beginning by making it clear he had no intention for the colony to rebuild its tech base.

On "replacing the materials", I suspect the problem isn't the "availability of elements" but is with refining and processing the elements.

It is possible, that the processing requires a zero-g environment.

Of course, the idea that Nimue's Cave lacks the "tools" is valid.