Recent content by dmclean62

I was thinking about the "Check our numbers" post for passenger fares and it occurred to me that we can't check the numbers if we don't have the underlying cost assumptions. For any given transportation service, if there was a standard ship design that did nothing but fulfill that one service...

Yeah, I thought "The Difference Engine" was a fun read, but I wouldn't want to adventure in that universe. "The Diamond Age" though - that would be interesting. I have no interest in pushing my ideas on people who aren't interested, but I definitely have my own ideas on what the future looks...

Yes, the ship would have to have a workshop, and yes, the raw materials, but these raw materials would be easily available at any star port. Plus, they would be cheaper and easier to find than the correct finished parts. Ships also wouldn't have to worry about guessing as to how many spares of a...

Considering our society's experiences with DRM, and how ... well ... it holds up to determined hackers, I don't see that changing. Most people will follow the rules, and I think that will mean new templates will be copyrighted for some period of time and then fall into the public domain. If you...

Mixed bag of comments: In one of Elizabeth Moon's Familias Regnant novels, one of the main characters ends up on a "ship" which is basically a mobile space station. Mobility of an elephant, dedicated escort force, expensive as heck, capable of nearly rebuilding ships from scratch - probably...

I would really like to see an eBook format OTHER than PDF. Preferably ePub (you know, the one which is an actual standard supported by pretty much everyone, except for one stupid company). That would make it so that I can change the font on my tablet making it easier to read.

I was looking at raw flop specs recently. The new iPhone 12 chip is rated at 800 Gflops. The Cray X-MP (worlds fastest super-computer 1983-1985) was only rated 800 Mflops. So yeah, if a Cray could calculate a jump, the my phone could easily do the same calculations. Apple silicon currently...

There's the Crawler Transporter that NASA uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter And then there's the track vehicle city in the Mortal Engines.

That's easy - companies would put a tracking device in the vehicle and would just notify the authorities if something untoward were going on. And off-planet renters would have to leave a security deposit.

In order to determine what the market is like for rental vehicles, I think it would be necessary to understand the economics of vehicles in the place where the rental is occurring. In the US, the auto industry runs on a yearly "model" cycle, with older models generally being viewed as less...

I would love to add the JTAS entries, though I'm not entirely sure how they should be listed in an index, which goes by a high level description of the content. The category is too high of a level, the description is often too detailed, and the title doesn't always make the subject clear. Or am...

I have been working on compiling a comprehensive index (of everything that I own, anyway). For the Core book, I started with something that was posted somewhere and have been adding to it. I am not yet finished. For everything else, I took what was in the published index (with permission) and...

Well, one thing that we know now about quantum computing is that there absolutely are crypto algorithms that are quantum secure. So the future of money in societies that have quantum computing is probably not any different than what we have right now. Though probably faster, and with better...

Excellent, thank you. And that clearly disagrees with what is in the Wiki article on at least two major points.

Are there any parts of the official Mongoose second edition rules that discuss banking and the monetary system? There's a page on the wiki, but it has at least one serious reality error on it. I wasn't sure where to look. A comprehensive index would be really handy about now.