Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

tlb wrote:Obviously I was wrong about hydrogen, I thought that they would have to get it from water (however it would become much easier once contra-gravity was available).

I didn't either. I hadn't remembered that detail until rereading the relevant sections.

But still; the planet had been surveyed, so going there was no more reckless than sailing to the new world in the days of pirates and before weather knowledge. It is always "reckless" to leave certainty behind.

There was no direct survey of the Calvin System. They said they had sufficiently-detailed images of it, indicating that the Sol System probably had light interferometry arrays (something that we are actually quite close to developing), possibly multiple AU-wide (something we're not). They said they had seen forests.

But all the spectrography, images, radio and other EM radiation wouldn't tell you if the planet was actually toxic or had untameable large predators. Therefore, going out there and being unable to redirect elsewhere was reckless.

Though I'll grant them one thing: maybe they hadn't been, if the 75-year surplus was meant to allow them to establish a space-borne infrastructure I've been talking about, if needed, near the time of landing. So if it was toxic, they could live in space while working to de-toxify sufficient areas (Grayson did). It's just that no one accounted for the planet being boiled over as a contingency.

And yet, we know the Calvin expedition was launched trying to get away from Sol. They didn't wait; so I do feel correct in saying they were somewhat reckless.

Should there be a problem with food on a cryo-ship? Shouldn't there be some hydroponics to feed the small fraction of people that are awake at any time? Now that does require minerals (some of which can be recycled); but wouldn't that be even easier to replenish than the hydrogen?

That was a generational ship, not cryo. So people were alive aboard all the time, keeping probably the same level of population as originally, possibly even growing along the centuries if that was the plan. The text does say that they would need to limit population (my guess is by limiting growth, not voting some people off the ship).

So it's weird that they had hydroponics to keep people alive and fed for ~400 years, but couldn't stretch that by more than 20%. It's true that no regenerative system is perfect - there are always losses - but they weren't out of power, air or water. So I agree with you, they should have been able to add minerals from the Calvin System, especially with the amount of debris that would have been around the orbit of their originally intended home. And carbon, for the organic compounds, is after all the fourth most abundant element in the universe..

What are the major differences between a generation and cryo ship? I thought they are essentially the same.

Please see the new thread created for the topic.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Water collected in space has to be processed. Fresh water sources groundside might not have to be processed and filtered. Mother nature has been doing that to fresh water sources for eons. Barring any toxicity from a planet, which I think is the exception and not the rule. Like Grayson.

I'm not arguing it doesn't have to be. But please consider:

a) there is no plumbing on a wild planet, so some processing is still necessary on your new colony;

b) the problem of processing water in space will have long been solved in the Sol system by the time of the launch of the majority of those colony expeditions.

Besides, as I argued before, you will need water, food, and air in space anyway.

In the wild wild west people just dipped their canteens into a stream and collected water. It isn't recommended because there could be viruses and bacteria present. Not always, but there is a possibility. Water should always be collected from a moving source such as streams and rivers and water falls. Or from higher grounds that are away from animals grazing. Standing water is a breeding ground for mosquitoes and viruses. But in the wild west there was no way to test it for viruses and bacteria on the spot. I am sure the colony ships brought along tons of chemicals to purify water found on the planet. Enough to jumpstart an operation, but it will not last.

Also consider that water collected in space might have to be processed and filtered for many more different contaminants than water groundside. Which will increase the conversion process greatly.

But sure, processing water in space would have been solved by the HV. Reverse osmosis, electrodeionization (EDI) and a slew of other filtration methods that are present today and even more will certainly be available in the HV. And purification techniques such as UV light to treat the water for bacteria and viruses. But do not fall into the same trap. Whereas these techniques very well might be more productive and efficient, they will never be a magic bullet. They will still have an overall production rate. And in the HV the populations are ridiculously high.

On the planet you can just dig wells. In the wild west wells were dug with a shovel in a matter of days. A well can be dug in an hour on the planet. And wells are bacteria free. They will be sediment free in at most thirty days. Gravity could be your plumbing system. IOW, back to basics.


An aside: I would imagine modern HV ships should be able to process salt from water very quickly with the very high temperatures found on a warship from the plasma conduits. Evaporation and killing bacteria should be possible and accomplished very quickly. But there will still be an inherent production rate as there is in any production system.

Brigade XO wrote:Probably not so much food, since they would have had hydroponics (except for critical trace nutrients that they may or may not have been able to recover in recycling human waste and bodies of the deceased), but parts and other equipment consumables that were wearing or for which they had no way to rebuild. The ship was "banged up" and much of it-including the fusion power plant- was was within 20 to 30 years of their design lives with no tech enough to rebuild it. That ship was 402 years old when they got to their original destination.

C'mon, they couldn't build a fusion reactor? Were they planning on living on their planet with just solar energy when they landed? It couldn't have been hydro power because building a dam is extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming; it wouldn't have been coal or gas (takes time to find and mine, plus the ecological damage they create). That's what I mean about poor planning: they had to have the capability to build new fusion power plants when they arrived, so why the hell not in space? And why not service the ones they had?

They had 75 years to build new fusion reactors in the Calvin System if they had chosen to stay put. That's more than enough time to overhaul their entire ship. They had the entire database of known technology up until the moment of departure, probably even decades later. They had the knowledge and I would guess they had the skills because they had known their predicament for a century, so they would have trained people before deceleration and arrival.

No, the limiting factor can't be technology. To properly found a colony, you'd have everything you need to bootstrap that colony to your desired level of technology. Since that was not a "back to basics" colony, that level would have been "state of the art." It can't be something that can be stored digitally either, since that's cheap compared to the value. It can't be something that can be found in any system, like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, water, carbon, silicates (rock), iron, etc. And it can't be something they could have just had a massive overkill for aboard.

Instead, the limiting factor must be something that is either massive (so they can't depart with a lot of) or prohibitively expensive to acquire a sizeable surplus of on Sol, that can't be reasonably perfectly recycled, and which isn't readily available in Calvin either. One of the possible explanations for Fermi's Paradox is that certain elements might actually be rare outside of the Sol System (and the stars themselves), like for example phosphorus. We currently don't know if that's the case.

But it might be that such elements are rare enough even inside our system, in which case they'd be expensive to load a lot of aboard.

So there probably was no way they could expect to build some sort of orbital habitat if for no other reason than the were going to not be able to keep it running once the fusion plant stopped working. They were lucky to find the planet they did but then Murphy came to call and they were in still in the process of drawing themselves back to about the Steam Age after more than 1,000 years when the PRH survey ship showed up.

They had an orbital habitat: Calvin's Hope itself! That was not a cryo ship, so it had been home for a substantial population for 400 years. All they had to do was to keep that ship working and habitable for its population. The techniques for doing so were proven already, many times over.

(Note, I am talking about Calvin's Hope arrival in the Calvin system, not in the Refuge system)

So, no, it can't the the techniques or raw ore.

We go back to the possibility of their being constrained by the relative lack of certain elements or minerals in the Calvin System. That might be why they decided to leave instead of staying and improving their ship so they could go somewhere else much further out, with again a reserve.

But do note they had intended to stay in the Calvin System. So either the system had those minerals (and again, the planet was smashed so a lot of it was flung into space, making collection easier, not harder), or the system was a poor choice in the first place even if the planet hadn't been smashed.

So the only facts that fit are that the Calvin System wasn't a good destination at all, only they hadn't known before arriving.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Probably not so much food, since they would have had hydroponics (except for critical trace nutrients that they may or may not have been able to recover in recycling human waste and bodies of the deceased), but parts and other equipment consumables that were wearing or for which they had no way to rebuild. The ship was "banged up" and much of it-including the fusion power plant- was was within 20 to 30 years of their design lives with no tech enough to rebuild it. That ship was 402 years old when they got to their original destination.

C'mon, they couldn't build a fusion reactor? Were they planning on living on their planet with just solar energy when they landed? It couldn't have been hydro power because building a dam is extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming; it wouldn't have been coal or gas (takes time to find and mine, plus the ecological damage they create). That's what I mean about poor planning: they had to have the capability to build new fusion power plants when they arrived, so why the hell not in space? And why not service the ones they had?

They had 75 years to build new fusion reactors in the Calvin System if they had chosen to stay put. That's more than enough time to overhaul their entire ship. They had the entire database of known technology up until the moment of departure, probably even decades later. They had the knowledge and I would guess they had the skills because they had known their predicament for a century, so they would have trained people before deceleration and arrival.

No, the limiting factor can't be technology. To properly found a colony, you'd have everything you need to bootstrap that colony to your desired level of technology. Since that was not a "back to basics" colony, that level would have been "state of the art." It can't be something that can be stored digitally either, since that's cheap compared to the value. It can't be something that can be found in any system, like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, water, carbon, silicates (rock), iron, etc. And it can't be something they could have just had a massive overkill for aboard.

Instead, the limiting factor must be something that is either massive (so they can't depart with a lot of) or prohibitively expensive to acquire a sizeable surplus of on Sol, that can't be reasonably perfectly recycled, and which isn't readily available in Calvin either. One of the possible explanations for Fermi's Paradox is that certain elements might actually be rare outside of the Sol System (and the stars themselves), like for example phosphorus. We currently don't know if that's the case.

But it might be that such elements are rare enough even inside our system, in which case they'd be expensive to load a lot of aboard.

So there probably was no way they could expect to build some sort of orbital habitat if for no other reason than the were going to not be able to keep it running once the fusion plant stopped working. They were lucky to find the planet they did but then Murphy came to call and they were in still in the process of drawing themselves back to about the Steam Age after more than 1,000 years when the PRH survey ship showed up.

They had an orbital habitat: Calvin's Hope itself! That was not a cryo ship, so it had been home for a substantial population for 400 years. All they had to do was to keep that ship working and habitable for its population. The techniques for doing so were proven already, many times over.

(Note, I am talking about Calvin's Hope arrival in the Calvin system, not in the Refuge system)

So, no, it can't the the techniques or raw ore.

We go back to the possibility of their being constrained by the relative lack of certain elements or minerals in the Calvin System. That might be why they decided to leave instead of staying and improving their ship so they could go somewhere else much further out, with again a reserve.

But do note they had intended to stay in the Calvin System. So either the system had those minerals (and again, the planet was smashed so a lot of it was flung into space, making collection easier, not harder), or the system was a poor choice in the first place even if the planet hadn't been smashed.

So the only facts that fit are that the Calvin System wasn't a good destination at all, only they hadn't known before arriving.

I think part of the issue was the early colony ships were designed to be taken apart to build the Colony - it was the intent to scavenge them to build the colony.

And this is the limitation of having 1 ship that is only so big, you can only bring so much stuff with you - and generation ships need more room per person than other types - each person needs more space for long voyages - plus you need to bring more resources for the population to survive - all of that cuts into Colony development resources.

in "Modern" times a colony would be a fleet of vessels, or multiple fleets - bringing the basis of planetary and orbital infrastructure with them.

Even at that, what is the smallest viable population for an independant, sustainable industrial colony? How many industrial resource steps are there in a modern, finished good? Do you have the hardware and population to do every of these steps? For example, there are 400 assembly steps in the Iphone factory - but these are just assembly steps of pre-manufactured components. How many steps from mineral extraction to packaging are there in the lithium battery creation alone? Add in the Aluminum and Titanium sides, the glass front and back - even the injection molded plastic bits have fiberglass reinforcements in them, that require a completely different supply chain than the petrochemical cracking plant making the plastics.

There is going to be a finite limit of the industry you can bring with you no matter what, and only so many people able to control and fix the hardware.

But agreed, with the proper resources, there needs to be a remaining orbital presence, and the basics of orbital extraction and production industry baked into the colony design, as well as defined steps to build the next several levels of tools as the colony expands.

Theemile wrote:I think part of the issue was the early colony ships were designed to be taken apart to build the Colony - it was the intent to scavenge them to build the colony.

All the more reason to start your colony in space, using your ship as the orbital habitat. The only difference between an orbital habitat and a generation starship is how fast they're moving.

You've been living aboard that ship for centuries. You know what works and all the issues with it, plus all the necessary solutions even if you don't have the means. And I argued that the Sol system would have had orbital habitats for centuries prior to launch too, so all the techniques are known.

So you wouldn't introduce a lot of unknown variables into your colony by immediately landing everyone and making your ship uninhabitable. Do colonise the planet, but do so slowly and managing the risks. This is especially true for early colonies, those started without a proper survey, but my argument holds for those with surveys too.

Even at that, what is the smallest viable population for an independant, sustainable industrial colony? How many industrial resource steps are there in a modern, finished good? Do you have the hardware and population to do every of these steps? For example, there are 400 assembly steps in the Iphone factory - but these are just assembly steps of pre-manufactured components. How many steps from mineral extraction to packaging are there in the lithium battery creation alone? Add in the Aluminum and Titanium sides, the glass front and back - even the injection molded plastic bits have fiberglass reinforcements in them, that require a completely different supply chain than the petrochemical cracking plant making the plastics.

Maybe you don't need all those goods, but I do assume you'll want whatever passes for communication devices in your era and everything that modern life is used to. Either you'll have to build those locally or you'll need to import it -- something that is only possible with safe hyperspace travel, and even then for items whose cost wouldn't be prohibitively expensive after freight costs are factored in.

There is going to be a finite limit of the industry you can bring with you no matter what, and only so many people able to control and fix the hardware.

But agreed, with the proper resources, there needs to be a remaining orbital presence, and the basics of orbital extraction and production industry baked into the colony design, as well as defined steps to build the next several levels of tools as the colony expands.

Agreed. You may not be able to nor even need to bring all the tools and machines for all the industries. But you do need to bring the tools to make the tools.

I suppose even high-tech companies would allow their cutting edge technology to be used for a fixed licensing fee on the colony, because it wouldn't get used for 200 years, way beyond the horizon for amortising the investment in the technology. It should be obsolete in the source system by the time of arrival.

BTW, before safe hyperspace travel, the only form of interstellar commerce would be data.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:I think part of the issue was the early colony ships were designed to be taken apart to build the Colony - it was the intent to scavenge them to build the colony.

All the more reason to start your colony in space, using your ship as the orbital habitat. The only difference between an orbital habitat and a generation starship is how fast they're moving.

You've been living aboard that ship for centuries. You know what works and all the issues with it, plus all the necessary solutions even if you don't have the means. And I argued that the Sol system would have had orbital habitats for centuries prior to launch too, so all the techniques are known.

So you wouldn't introduce a lot of unknown variables into your colony by immediately landing everyone and making your ship uninhabitable. Do colonise the planet, but do so slowly and managing the risks. This is especially true for early colonies, those started without a proper survey, but my argument holds for those with surveys too.

Even at that, what is the smallest viable population for an independant, sustainable industrial colony? How many industrial resource steps are there in a modern, finished good? Do you have the hardware and population to do every of these steps? For example, there are 400 assembly steps in the Iphone factory - but these are just assembly steps of pre-manufactured components. How many steps from mineral extraction to packaging are there in the lithium battery creation alone? Add in the Aluminum and Titanium sides, the glass front and back - even the injection molded plastic bits have fiberglass reinforcements in them, that require a completely different supply chain than the petrochemical cracking plant making the plastics.

Maybe you don't need all those goods, but I do assume you'll want whatever passes for communication devices in your era and everything that modern life is used to. Either you'll have to build those locally or you'll need to import it -- something that is only possible with safe hyperspace travel, and even then for items whose cost wouldn't be prohibitively expensive after freight costs are factored in.

There is going to be a finite limit of the industry you can bring with you no matter what, and only so many people able to control and fix the hardware.

But agreed, with the proper resources, there needs to be a remaining orbital presence, and the basics of orbital extraction and production industry baked into the colony design, as well as defined steps to build the next several levels of tools as the colony expands.

Agreed. You may not be able to nor even need to bring all the tools and machines for all the industries. But you do need to bring the tools to make the tools.

I suppose even high-tech companies would allow their cutting edge technology to be used for a fixed licensing fee on the colony, because it wouldn't get used for 200 years, way beyond the horizon for amortising the investment in the technology. It should be obsolete in the source system by the time of arrival.

BTW, before safe hyperspace travel, the only form of interstellar commerce would be data.

There was an ongoing discussion a few years ago in several points on the internet (and a discussion of the conversation on Baen's Bar) about what should go into a colony expedition, and while quite in depth, it boiled down do to:

1) ruggedized designs
2) standardized parts
3) modular designs
4) simplified designs
5) Energy independance/multiple energy inputs
etc

So (for ex) you might have 50 different needs for vehicles, but you might only have 10 or 15 different vehicle types, with each type designed to fill multiple different needs, even if they are optimized for the job. Moreover, everything is based off 1-3 chassis and cabs, with 1-3 motor combinations (usually aligned with the chassis). every component possible will be reused across all vehicles, so any vehicle could be repaired out of common parts, and any vehicle could have it's modules rearraged for a different job. An example, a colony might find it needs more trucks than busses initially, and converts all the common chassis to trucks. after a period of time, busses are required, so some of the chassis are rebuilt as busses. Today's equivalents of this concept are the Unimog, the Farmall, and the Willis Jeep.

Space vehicles would probably be something like Space 1999's Eagle - common command modules, propulsion modules, and landing/rct modules, with a sturdy, simple frame, and a mission module. Change frames and rearrange the standard modules and you can create a series of different craft fitted to different roles.

Nothing should be cutting edge or unique, everything should be modular, standardized, and overpowered for it's job, usually using technology that is a step or 3 behind the consumer standard, but well understood, ruggedized and easily repaired/replaced with other common parts.

And the tools (and designs) to make everything are within the capabilities of the colony, so if they find they need more of "y", they can focus on building that supply chain.