Recent content by swordtart

Or cast resins or injection moulded plastics, or formed ceramics or any one of a gazzilion other methods that are already part of the diversity of conventional manufacturing methods. The benefit of fabricators is that you can make most things cheaper than buying the finished product at retail...

I think fixed costs for a standard distribution of inputs to fabricators adds a lot of complication without adding much value. We know how much the things should cost as we know the price from CSC and we can take a stab at the factoring or use the roll 1D or 2 D and multiply by 10%. The idea...

Nanobots can be constructed in specialised facilities or enhanced fabrication chambers at TL13. TL13 Nanos can only construct basic facilities. However the fabrication chamber that produced them can also produce the more advanced electronics that they cannot and the construction robots can fit...

I have avoided going into too much detail as there is quite a lot of "fuzzy" in the Robot Handbook and panaceas like nanotech and fabricators produce problems of their own. The description of the Hive Queen however is that it starts off building robots (a human sized one every hour) and they...

Robot Handbook. It was a game changer for me. I went from a no-robot universe to a robot heavy one in a few months of reading it (fortunately with Traveller you just have to move to another planet and you can make a flip like that without creating inconsistency). The driver is really the...

A million times any number is a big number unfortunately. Even the half million tons of excavation to put biospheres in is going to cost you 2 billion. But that is a retail price. If you instead spend 1 billion on construction robots, nano hive queens and nano feedstock then it will cost you...

And arguably the wrong 99.9% :)

Whilst that is true, we don't have much else to go on in Traveller terms. It depends on whether the planet is in the habitable zone. Many asteroid bases may not benefit greatly from sunlight and will be reliant on artificial lighting. Space might also be an issue if the surface is subject to...

Boy scout training originally was to prepare boys to run an empire. They were supposed to be running the troop with the assistance of the leaders not simply be lead. This was based off the use of boys during the siege of Mafeking where there were trained to relieve the adult soldier to free...

The Robot Handbook also has information on clones. These are effectively children as they mature in a much shorter time frame. The information on clone creches might be helpful as a hand rail to what an intensive education might generate vs a generalist (and possibly less stressful) schooling...

I think we are talking at cross purposes. I was talking about the normal non-agricultural WORLD rather than a spaceship. DTon is only relevant where you need to consider a volume limited environment. The majority of non-agricultural worlds might have sub optimal atmospheres, but even on worlds...

The numbers don't even support Common Consumables being that expensive. On a non-agricultural, high population world you are still only adding a modifier of +1 to the sale price. That normally adds around 10% (assuming a roll in the middle of the range). The worst case scenario is an airless...

I also have a real problem with this number. Since a biosphere can produce 2 persons life support requirements for 1DTon, you only need to provision the 1 point of power in less than the remaining 89.5 tons to make this figure illogical. That isn't much and a TL8 society has access to fusion...

Where is it written that NA worlds cannot support their own populations food requirements? All worlds produce common consumables for trade. On Non Agricultural and High Population worlds these will be more valuable for trading purposes, but it is baked into the the rules that they are...

Jump space theory is like theories on how to argue successfully against a woman. There are many and they are all wrong.