(Spoilers) Future technological developments.

Theemile wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm not even approaching it from a defensive standpoint. Strictly from an economic standpoint they make no sense. Despite being settled that long they didn't have an overcrowding problem to the point where that much residential capacity was needed to be located in space simply because there was no room on the surface for them any more. Earth might have had that problem - maybe - but not anywhere else.

Nor do they have the reason somewhere like Grayson does: an existential threat by the planetary environment. There it would make sense to move large numbers of the population off the surface and they didn't because they couldn't afford to.

Nor were the orbital habitats dedicated to industries that needed access to space or to the support systems needed to run those industries. Manticore's habitats were; so were things like Blackbird and the Bolthole stations. Beowulf Alpha seems to be nothing more than a really freaking expensive unnecessary city in space for no particular reason.

The whole discussion revolves back to the discussion of what the 300 Million people in Manticore B space do. Originally, it was assumed that many were on Weyland - nope, only about 1.5 million or so. Do they build ships - no - all the shipyards in Manticore B space were at Weyland. Factory workers? - no - industry was also focused at Weyland. We know some work in Ore extraction - but a study showed that fewer than 20 million people on Earth directly work at ore extraction, and less than 70 million are directly employed in the industry world wide - for a 21th century tech planet with 2x the population of Manticore - Total.

So what do the rest of the 300 million do? Adult entertainment and Medical support for the mining ops? Telemarketers? (that would explain the long pause before people answer...)

Mostly in ore extraction and refinement and supporting that, I'd assume. Say 5 million work directly in ore extraction - that is, directly on the ships extracting ores and transporting the ore to nodal refiners. Another 5 million work directly on refining and transporting metals to end users.

But keep in mind the nodal stations aren't just "mining camps". They're not hardship positions like today's offshore oil platforms. They're small mining cities, and mostly self sufficient. That means millions more working upkeep on the mining ships. Support services for the miners. Dependents of the miners. Support services for the dependents. Station crew to maintain the physical plant supporting all those supporters.

It's basically what they say about today's military: it takes ten people working behind the scenes in theater to keep one guy on the front lines. Then it takes another 5 people working stateside to keep each of those support workers supplied in theater. Today's mining towns often have 10 to 1 ratios - ten people in the town for each person working in the mine. And that's without needing to have people running the air and water recyclers, the hydroponic gardens, and most of the support machinery supplied from out of town. It's pretty easy to see how 10 million people working directly in asteroid mining could require a 20 or 25 to 1 ratio and account for most of the space-based population.

And that makes economic sense, because those platforms are far enough away from the planet that supporting them from the planet would take hours each way. No one wants to spend 4 hours each way every weekend to spend time with their family, at least not on a long-term basis. A year contract, maybe, but not as a career. From what we've seen of Weyland, only a few tens of thousands on the station were probably directly employed in research, shipbuilding, or manufacturing. The rest were there as support work.

None of this seems to have applied to Beowulf Alpha. There doesn't seem to have been a major industry that needed to be in space being supported by that massive population. To be fair there were some things on Hephaestus that couldn't be reasonably justified, such as corporate offices. No matter how cheap space construction is it can't possibly compete with groundside real estate without some overriding reason why it must be in space.

In the same sense, the power supply for warships (and freighters) comes from fusion bottles that have a strict lower limit: the smallest possible fusion bottle can power an old-style destroyer. It also requires a significant amount of infrastructure in the ship.



I think it's a good idea, but I'd want to design and build something specific. That would let you create an impeller wedge that's designed for the function, and possibly use the new mini-fusion plants.


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Actually would not need fusion bottles -- take a page from the older Grayson ships and Alliance LAC's -- Fission power sourced impellers --

On-line, impellers in Standby, minimal fissionables consumed.
Good market for Grayson and Tallbot Quadrant systems with fissionables to mine/export

-- Stewart

JohnRoth wrote:In the same sense, the power supply for warships (and freighters) comes from fusion bottles that have a strict lower limit: the smallest possible fusion bottle can power an old-style destroyer. It also requires a significant amount of infrastructure in the ship.

I think it's a good idea, but I'd want to design and build something specific. That would let you create an impeller wedge that's designed for the function, and possibly use the new mini-fusion plants.

stewart wrote:Actually would not need fusion bottles -- take a page from the older Grayson ships and Alliance LAC's -- Fission power sourced impellers --

On-line, impellers in Standby, minimal fissionables consumed.
Good market for Grayson and Tallbot Quadrant systems with fissionables to mine/export

-- Stewart

I now see that the discussion is about putting an impeller shield around an orbital station; such as was done with the Beowulf factory line in UH. Why not build more tugs than you need for their normal duties and rotate them as guard ships around orbital structures?

PS. I just saw that it looked as though you were taking credit for the John Roth statement; please take more care with the quote structure. People want to know who said what.

I’d guess more like 50,000 miners. You don’t take apart an asteroid with picks and shovels, you do it with wedges, tractor beams and lasers. Then you sort the dust produced and feed extremely pure materials into tanks on freighters.

It’s a lot more like a deep sea drill rig than an open pit mine.

Potato wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:having platforms like Beowulf Alpha solely as residential platforms makes sense solely as a plot device.

Beowulf has been settled for the better part of two millennia, and has not been involved in a shooting war before. That spaceborne population exists because of decisions made centuries ago. It should not be held against Beowulf for somehow not magically predicting an existential foe using wholly unknown capabilities.

You can have a swarm of habitats, each with populations in the 10k – 100k range. You're not going to be walking from one end of a 1M pop. habitat to the other, so what difference does it make if you're using an internal 'turbolift' or an Uber space-taxi? If you're worried about station keeping, well, anchor the habitats to a framework of very long trusses.

Galactic Sapper wrote:having platforms like Beowulf Alpha solely as residential platforms makes sense solely as a plot device.

Potato wrote:Beowulf has been settled for the better part of two millennia, and has not been involved in a shooting war before. That spaceborne population exists because of decisions made centuries ago. It should not be held against Beowulf for somehow not magically predicting an existential foe using wholly unknown capabilities.

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm not even approaching it from a defensive standpoint. Strictly from an economic standpoint they make no sense. Despite being settled that long they didn't have an overcrowding problem to the point where that much residential capacity was needed to be located in space simply because there was no room on the surface for them any more. Earth might have had that problem - maybe - but not anywhere else.

Nor do they have the reason somewhere like Grayson does: an existential threat by the planetary environment. There it would make sense to move large numbers of the population off the surface and they didn't because they couldn't afford to.

Nor were the orbital habitats dedicated to industries that needed access to space or to the support systems needed to run those industries. Manticore's habitats were; so were things like Blackbird and the Bolthole stations. Beowulf Alpha seems to be nothing more than a really freaking expensive unnecessary city in space for no particular reason.

People make many decisions for reasons that have no rational basis. When hybrid cars were first produced, economics professors pointed out that the fuel savings would not cover the extra cost; but cars are also status symbols and only the lowest cars are really bought for purely economic reasons. So why deny that some people will want to live in space; and if that allows more land to be set aside for parks and natural preserves, why not?
Personally I like the idea of a domed city where programmable coatings help regulate the internal temperature. Then residential towers do not need external walls, only privacy curtains. Rain on the dome would be used to supplement the water supply and irrigate the parks.

tlb wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:having platforms like Beowulf Alpha solely as residential platforms makes sense solely as a plot device.

Potato wrote:Beowulf has been settled for the better part of two millennia, and has not been involved in a shooting war before. That spaceborne population exists because of decisions made centuries ago. It should not be held against Beowulf for somehow not magically predicting an existential foe using wholly unknown capabilities.

Galactic Sapper wrote:I'm not even approaching it from a defensive standpoint. Strictly from an economic standpoint they make no sense. Despite being settled that long they didn't have an overcrowding problem to the point where that much residential capacity was needed to be located in space simply because there was no room on the surface for them any more. Earth might have had that problem - maybe - but not anywhere else.

Nor do they have the reason somewhere like Grayson does: an existential threat by the planetary environment. There it would make sense to move large numbers of the population off the surface and they didn't because they couldn't afford to.

Nor were the orbital habitats dedicated to industries that needed access to space or to the support systems needed to run those industries. Manticore's habitats were; so were things like Blackbird and the Bolthole stations. Beowulf Alpha seems to be nothing more than a really freaking expensive unnecessary city in space for no particular reason.

People make many decisions for reasons that have no rational basis. When hybrid cars were first produced, economics professors pointed out that the fuel savings would not cover the extra cost; but cars are also status symbols and only the lowest cars are really bought for purely economic reasons. So why deny that some people will want to live in space; and if that allows more land to be set aside for parks and natural preserves, why not?
Personally I like the idea of a domed city where programmable coatings help regulate the internal temperature. Then residential towers do not need external walls, only privacy curtains. Rain on the dome would be used to supplement the water supply and irrigate the parks.

Actually, we have plans for some of those on earth. They are called arcologies. The idea was to have people live, work and play in large centers. Just about everything would be produced (or close to it). Life would be nice, sort of like living in one gigantic mall. You could travel to work staying inside and lasting minutes, get the food you want, and everything else. No need for all the scifi high tech. Most of it exists, particularly as vertical farming has begun to be useful. People movers like they have in airports can cover the mile or two to get to anything inside.

As long as you can get good pizza and Chinese food and can earn a good salary, why not? There was actually a book about that, can't remember the name but it focused on an arcology that held a quarter of a million people.

ldwechsler wrote:As long as you can get good pizza and Chinese food and can earn a good salary, why not? There was actually a book about that, can't remember the name but it focused on an arcology that held a quarter of a million people.

"Oath of Fealty", Niven and Pournelle.

tlb wrote:Personally I like the idea of a domed city where programmable coatings help regulate the internal temperature. Then residential towers do not need external walls, only privacy curtains. Rain on the dome would be used to supplement the water supply and irrigate the parks.

ldwechsler wrote:Actually, we have plans for some of those on earth. They are called arcologies. The idea was to have people live, work and play in large centers. Just about everything would be produced (or close to it). Life would be nice, sort of like living in one gigantic mall. You could travel to work staying inside and lasting minutes, get the food you want, and everything else. No need for all the scifi high tech. Most of it exists, particularly as vertical farming has begun to be useful. People movers like they have in airports can cover the mile or two to get to anything inside.

As long as you can get good pizza and Chinese food and can earn a good salary, why not? There was actually a book about that, can't remember the name but it focused on an arcology that held a quarter of a million people.

If Wikipedia is correct, what you are talking about is intended to be self-supporting. I was not going that far; I was proposing a citywide dome that would be engineered to minimize the localized heating or cooled needed by maintaining a relatively constant temperature all year long. That way the upper apartments do not need a solid exterior wall, just screens and curtains for privacy.

tlb wrote:

tlb wrote:Personally I like the idea of a domed city where programmable coatings help regulate the internal temperature. Then residential towers do not need external walls, only privacy curtains. Rain on the dome would be used to supplement the water supply and irrigate the parks.

ldwechsler wrote:Actually, we have plans for some of those on earth. They are called arcologies. The idea was to have people live, work and play in large centers. Just about everything would be produced (or close to it). Life would be nice, sort of like living in one gigantic mall. You could travel to work staying inside and lasting minutes, get the food you want, and everything else. No need for all the scifi high tech. Most of it exists, particularly as vertical farming has begun to be useful. People movers like they have in airports can cover the mile or two to get to anything inside.

As long as you can get good pizza and Chinese food and can earn a good salary, why not? There was actually a book about that, can't remember the name but it focused on an arcology that held a quarter of a million people.

If Wikipedia is correct, what you are talking about is intended to be self-supporting. I was not going that far; I was proposing a citywide dome that would be engineered to minimize the localized heating or cooled needed by maintaining a relatively constant temperature all year long. That way the upper apartments do not need a solid exterior wall, just screens and curtains for privacy.

Our real problem is that there is just far too much we don't know. RFC does not provide a lot of details about many things. We can talk about miners using lasers. Why not robots or waldo-like devices?

We know some elements of what is done for farming on Grayson but not a real lot and we here on earth have come a long way with vertical farming, etc., in recent years.

We know that crew can sleep in mixed sex cabins on Manticore naval ships. Are bathrooms also unisex? Are there changes in what is used (we've only had flush toilets for less than 150 years)? Does crew eat in cafeterias and are there separate ones for rankers and petty officers and chiefs and officers? Are non-officers allowed the drink alcohol?

There is so much we don't know and we can only extrapolate hindered by the fact that we are dealing with 2000 years in the future.