Shepard Quest Mk VII, Age of Revy (ME/MCU)
- Thread starter tri2
- Start date
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
Regarding arcologies:
I don't see why we have to get directly involved. We should just offer our services and products on the market, and let other organizations decide whether they want them.
We could provide discounts/subsidies for poorer nations and accredited charities, kind of like what we've been doing with Sirta. As this isn't critical technology for us, I'd also be fine with leasing such tech and/or subcontracting parts to other firms, even non-human ones. This would help sidestep most political concerns, putting the onus on the organizations rather than ourselves.
Regarding colony populations and emigration from Earth:
I do think we should encourage it, but again, I'd prefer Paragon Industries to market its services rather than get directly involved. That is, build and sell/lease our transports rather than providing transportation service ourselves (except for PI itself and emergencies).
I'm also not particularly worried about massive population growth in colonies, because with all our other distractions, it's going to take a while to ramp up transport production. Unless we're going to be thousands of transports at once, there's not going to be some massive lump of migration that starts all of a sudden. Indeed, I expect colony population growth to eventually grow faster than available transport capacity.
And speaking of transports, I know UberJJK statted out a civilian transport ship, but I figure that's underselling what we could actually build. Cryogenic stasis is a mature technology in Mass Effect, so if we really want to max out capacity, we could transport people as "bulk cargo". Additionally, for colonies directly connected to the relay network, we could skimp on FTL speeds, requiring far smaller eezo cores (heck, FTL may even be optional with the relays providing practically intrasolar distances).
I don't see why we have to get directly involved. We should just offer our services and products on the market, and let other organizations decide whether they want them.
We could provide discounts/subsidies for poorer nations and accredited charities, kind of like what we've been doing with Sirta. As this isn't critical technology for us, I'd also be fine with leasing such tech and/or subcontracting parts to other firms, even non-human ones. This would help sidestep most political concerns, putting the onus on the organizations rather than ourselves.
Regarding colony populations and emigration from Earth:
I do think we should encourage it, but again, I'd prefer Paragon Industries to market its services rather than get directly involved. That is, build and sell/lease our transports rather than providing transportation service ourselves (except for PI itself and emergencies).
I'm also not particularly worried about massive population growth in colonies, because with all our other distractions, it's going to take a while to ramp up transport production. Unless we're going to be thousands of transports at once, there's not going to be some massive lump of migration that starts all of a sudden. Indeed, I expect colony population growth to eventually grow faster than available transport capacity.
And speaking of transports, I know UberJJK statted out a civilian transport ship, but I figure that's underselling what we could actually build. Cryogenic stasis is a mature technology in Mass Effect, so if we really want to max out capacity, we could transport people as "bulk cargo". Additionally, for colonies directly connected to the relay network, we could skimp on FTL speeds, requiring far smaller eezo cores (heck, FTL may even be optional with the relays providing practically intrasolar distances).
Just to be clear the proposals are entirely about paying for other people to do things. It functionally doesn't make a bit of difference if we directly hire construction companies to build Arcologies on Earth or if we set up a charity that provides money for poorer nations to do so. None of this discussion is about Paragon Industries building it ourselves.
Right now PI Arcologies are identical to normal Arcologies. The only advantage we have is our various construction technologies that let us build faster but as seen in the Buildings list:
| Arcology (non PI Built) | A self contained city for 10 million citizens | 1 | $1,000,000,000 | n/a | 4 |
| Arcology (PI Built) | A self contained city for 10 million citizens | 1 | $2,500,000,000 and 100 production | n/a | 1 |
Basically this whole discussion is "In a year or so we'll have trillions of credits and little we need to spend them on; so what can we do with them?"
Legally speaking we can't do this. Repuslors are our biggest advantage, and one of the biggest factor in our cheaper ship prices, and they are restricted to military and PI usage. So we have to sell the service ourselves if we want to get into the game.
You did read my post on our potential future transport capabilities right? Just in case you missed it; 1.2 trillion credits + 3,325,200 Production gets us 10,000 transports each capable of carrying 2,250 people for a total simultaneous lift capacity of 22.5 million. Just two trips would double Earth's current colonies populations and realistically given the speeds and Relays we are probably talking a trip per week for ~1.1 billion people per year at maximum capacity. Well beyond any reasonable level of demand given our total population of around 12 or 13 billion humans.
For reference next quarter we have 13.74 million Production coming online by my count (198 x Factory IIIs + 26 x Space Factory Is). Even converting Production to credits at the base 260,000cr/pr the above 10k transports would only consume ~57.8% (~7.94 million Production) of that increase. So if we wanted we could probably afford to deploy the massive transport fleet and house Earth's population in Arcologies all in the same quarter.
We almost certainly won't since I expect that massive glut in Production to be dumped into reinforcing the Alliance's push into Batarian space. But the Arcology thing came up in the first place because we've got planet loads of credits coming in in the next couple quarters and PI is starting to hit the point of diminishing returns for continual reinvestment.
That is why now is the time to start talking about, and just generally brainstorming, ways we (IE: Revy) can spend he prodigious wealth in meaingful ways.
Good idea. We can recruit from there as well. I am certain that a staff of Krogan scientists will bring a...new perspective to our scientific efforts. One might even call it an explosive revelation.
- Location
- 47° 09′ S, 126° 43′ O
I hope that if we do this it will keep some young krogan away from death in combat in favor of a life of science.
Maybe we can ask our staff / friends / family if they know of any other good causes to support.
- Location
- Red Blood on Golden Shield
Tri2, I got to ask:
Why did you use the same tally you did the 30th of August. Instead of making a new one to close the vote?
Because Sunday was 5th of September and some votes like mine aren't counted in the post you made.
Edit: I don't think it changes the result at all,
but I always believed that authors liked to see as many people interested in their quest as possible.
Last edited:
- Location
- Red Blood on Golden Shield
It's ok, just as I said I don't think it changes the result.
Just wanted to let you know that more people appreciated the Quest than the tally showed, (Even not counting to people that lurk eternally who also appreciate it).
Cryostasis only makes sense for long journeys; AIUI, with our tech, the trip to the colony will be days at most.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
I thought the context was yet-to-be-researched advanced arcology tech, and what the point of it would be?
Why would we need repulsors? Sure, they increase throughput via reduced travel time, but a more efficient way to do that is to increase capacity. As I pointed out, cryogenic stasis is a mature tech, so we could pack people like sardines in cargo holds. Of course, there's no option for this on the ship design spreadsheet, but I expect far greater efficiency than ~4.7 cubic meters per person that's implied (cargo bulk m^3 / bulk people transport # people); even taking into account the volume taken by cryostasis equipment, I'd expect an order of magnitude improvement.
I believe the transport you've stated out is: civilian frigate, standard hull, navigational shields, arc reactor, primary and secondary bulk people transport, tertiary cargo bulk, single eezo core with low purity, PI FTL drive, repulsors. 2250 people + 700 m^3 cargo that travels 24 ly/day.
I propose switching out all payloads to cargo bulk (or rather a special cryostasis version of it) and using ion drives rather than repulsors. At 4 ly/yr and 8.3 ly range outside the relay network, it should be able to reach plenty of systems in SA space. It's not stat-able on the spreadsheet, but this should be more efficient, with the bonus of being purely civilian-grade tech. If you only need intrasolar and relay travel, could even downgrade to the bare minimum FTL specs - 1 ly/day is plenty sufficient for that (indeed, the travel time may so short that throughput is high enough to revert to standard bulk people transport).
Heck, if it's not using PI FTL drives, then there's no PI-specific tech, so other ship production firms can also produce them. As such, I have no doubt that such ship designs already exist. Then why aren't we seeing thousands of such transports? Because they don't have our insane wealth (and soon, insane production) to spend on ships that are surplus to demand.
Yep, I read it. But as you already pointed out, transport supply isn't the issue: immigration demand is. Even if we have sufficient transport, can colonies handle all the new immigrants? Disregarding immigration quotas, as a colony becomes overcrowded (with respect to infrastructure, rather than space), standard of living will drop, and at some point you'll reach an equilibrium for prospective Earth emigrants between their current SOL versus colonial SOL. Basically, there's only so much immigration demand that transports can supply, and colony populations growth scales with that demand (assuming supply is met). Hence why I said I'm not worried about a colony population explosion problem.
That said, if we're building self-sufficient arcologies (or equivalents) with all the infrastructure necessary for all its inhabitants, then the bottleneck shifts from infrastructure (and transport) to available skilled applicants for the necessary jobs in the arcologies. Which is something plug & play tech can help with, but depends on how restricted/widespread that tech will be.
See above - the point of cryostasis is to maximize throughput by focusing on capacity rather than speed.
- Location
- United states
IIRC weren't modular building and colonies a thing we did to make setting up colonies a lot easier?
- Location
- U.S.
yes, but not everyone wants to live in basically box shaped houses. The ones on a budget yes, but those who can afford it want to have pretty buildings. We basically had a modular hotel building in RL before, it quickly died out IIRC and no one else wanted to build that kind of building.
- Location
- United states
Admittedly it's been a while since I checked but could have sworn that we also made said houses highly customizable as well to make them a lot more appealing.
- Location
- U.S.
Ironically enough I see the colony modular building selling more popularly on civilized and developed worlds, for mass slum building or cookie cutter housing communities.
- Location
- United states
To go back to this no doubt that a lot of people would probably prefer a more custom house, even though I imagine that most wouldn't care that much. It's just that the point is that the tech we made made founding colonies a lot easier. On top of that nothing is stopping certain people from saving enough to be able to afford a proper house down the line.
I imagine that one of the main appeal of colonies is being able to afford land more easily which people can build their houses on.
I can see that being the case.
If it was then I completely missed it. Honestly I'm not sure we'll ever bother researching Advanced Arcologies because current Arcologies are more then sufficient. With the already publicly available Arcologies the only reason slums, housing shortages, and general population crunch exists is poverty. Hence the discussion of solving the housing crisis back on Earth by throwing credits at it.
A single bed is about ~1.5m^3 in volume and probably comparable to the size of cryostasis gear on the low end. That triples the ship's carrying capacity which is certainly an improvement. However even stepping down to just fusion torches from repuslors cancels out the gains since travel.
Mass Effect is pretty vague regarding travel times/distances and so is the quest. So we don't have any hard numbers to go off so the accuracy of this example is completely unknown. However I don't think it is too unreasonable.
If we say we can load/unload ten passengers per minute (slightly higher then today's nine) then my design should take 7.5 hours in total to load and unload while the more densely packed (I'm being generous and assuming cryostasis takes the same time when in reality it should really be slower) cryo design takes 22.5 hours. That handles the fixed times.
For the distance traveled lets go with a total one way distance of 20LY. One of the few numbers we know is that Mindoir is 24 hours from the nearest Relay and we were probably using a 10LY/day ship so I figure double that figure for all legs of the journey isn't unreasonable. My design can cover that in 20 hours. A cryo design using fusion torches only manages 8LY/day so a oneway journey then takes 60 hours while an ion drive at just 4LY/day is down at 120 hours. Round trip time doubles everyone to 40 hours, 120 hours, and 240 hours respectively.
So for my design we're looking at a total time between trips of 47.5 hours vs. 142.5 hours for a fusion cryoship and 262.5 hours for an ion cryoship. Of course the cryoships hold three times as many people but at 47.5 hours per trip my design can complete 3 laps in the time it takes a single fusion cryoship (equaling passenger delivery) and 6 laps in the time of a single ion cryoship (doubling passenger delivery). In terms of passengers per hour this all translates to 47.4 for both my design and fusion cryoships and just 25.7 for ion cryoships.
This of course ignores the issue of range. Over a 20LY trip the fusion cryoship needs to stop to discharge once each way (starting from 0 charge since the loading and unloading process is easily long enough to discharge before setting off) with it's 16.7LY range. The ion cryoship is even worse needing to discharge twice per lap. Even if each discharge takes just one hour (which going by the codex is a best case scenario) the added delay drops fusion cryoships down to 46.7 passengers per hour and ion cryoships down to 25.5 passangers per hour.
If we say we can load/unload ten passengers per minute (slightly higher then today's nine) then my design should take 7.5 hours in total to load and unload while the more densely packed (I'm being generous and assuming cryostasis takes the same time when in reality it should really be slower) cryo design takes 22.5 hours. That handles the fixed times.
For the distance traveled lets go with a total one way distance of 20LY. One of the few numbers we know is that Mindoir is 24 hours from the nearest Relay and we were probably using a 10LY/day ship so I figure double that figure for all legs of the journey isn't unreasonable. My design can cover that in 20 hours. A cryo design using fusion torches only manages 8LY/day so a oneway journey then takes 60 hours while an ion drive at just 4LY/day is down at 120 hours. Round trip time doubles everyone to 40 hours, 120 hours, and 240 hours respectively.
So for my design we're looking at a total time between trips of 47.5 hours vs. 142.5 hours for a fusion cryoship and 262.5 hours for an ion cryoship. Of course the cryoships hold three times as many people but at 47.5 hours per trip my design can complete 3 laps in the time it takes a single fusion cryoship (equaling passenger delivery) and 6 laps in the time of a single ion cryoship (doubling passenger delivery). In terms of passengers per hour this all translates to 47.4 for both my design and fusion cryoships and just 25.7 for ion cryoships.
This of course ignores the issue of range. Over a 20LY trip the fusion cryoship needs to stop to discharge once each way (starting from 0 charge since the loading and unloading process is easily long enough to discharge before setting off) with it's 16.7LY range. The ion cryoship is even worse needing to discharge twice per lap. Even if each discharge takes just one hour (which going by the codex is a best case scenario) the added delay drops fusion cryoships down to 46.7 passengers per hour and ion cryoships down to 25.5 passangers per hour.
Although we could always combine the two ideas for ever more transport capacity (not that we'd need it since we both agree that isn't the real limiting factor) but I think cryo transport is probably less preferable to cramped (think international airline flight) but awake transport.
lbmaian
a thirsty squirrel
I agree. That said, it's possible future events provide cause to revisit it (ala dream drugs or something politically motivated), or a new researcher that somehow specializes in them, or it ends up being a prereq and/or synergies with other future tech (such as supermassive structures).
Considering how capable tech like cryo ammo/blast are along with mentions of how mature cryostasis technology is in ME, I'd expect the amortized volume of a cryostasis pod to be similar to a coffin, which is less than 1m^3 in volume. (Also BTW, 1.5m^3 is quite large for a single bed.)
Regardless, the main advantage of the cryostasis + ion/fusion engine approach is that there's no restricted technology involved. Such designs can be built by anyone, and we don't have to get involved at all. If we can license out our other FTL technologies, then that would also eliminate the range issue while doubling speed, though I expect only a minority of transports would be of this more "premium" design.
Carrnage
Human
- Location
- New Zealand
IIRC we even host a open source library of customised designs and run a competition for new designs.
Drucchi
Wasp Guy
- Location
- Beneath the Bug Exhibit at the Zoological Museum
With us accidentally creating an AI, does it mean we are going to have to get that council license? Maybe even just for Cortana if it will make the Council less likely to get angry with us? I mean I doubt that they will accept the: "I made an AI accidentally, totally honest guvna." excuse even if it is the truth.
Another cool quest with such a deep history that I can't get into it....such is the life of the new-comer...
That's what I thought too. But there are surprisingly few chapters despite how long this has gone on.