Yes, but if the drone production is integrated into the 3I bureaucratic infrastructure as a requirement for jump operations anywhere....
What you get is an automated plant making these the way all new housing gets smoke alarms. Plug this factory into the system salvage and recycle process, and they just build away with the occasional block update.
So the USA built 35k Sherman tanks in five years. Now think of all those system building through TL10-15.
Cheers
Greg C
Well why don't you choose the particulars of what you want that S&R drone to do then set a price on it and then calculate how many the 3I needs for the coverage you are comfortable with and we will see if it breaks the bank? One of the problems of course is that the 3I is treated like Flatland when it would in fact be fully cubic. So the cost for a program that has to cover the width and breadth of the Imperium to a depth of 1000 light years - average thickness of the galactic disk along the Orion Spur where Terra at least is located - is going to be pretty steep.
Joseph Paul By My Hand Designs LLC 4221 N Park Ave Indianapolis, IN 46205 317-931-0561On 2/21/2016 3:23 PM, Greg Chalik wrote:
Yes, and in the 3I there may be very many fully automated assembly plants just making deep space S&R drones, seeding local space with them, tens, maybe hundreds of millions of them, maybe billions, etc. Low tech, low power systems that just drift, passively scanning maybe 1AU, maybe 10AU, until needed
Cheers
Greg
On 21/02/2016 11:24 AM, <xxxxxx@shadowgard.com> wrote:
On 16 Feb 2016 at 7:11, Greg Chalik wrote:
> My thinking was that all spaceships can have an emergency transmitter
> like IFF, and search vessels, probably robotic, can just traverse the
> space pinging away until they get a 'target'.
The sheer *size* of space renders that unworkable.
That plus speed of light limits.
Ignoring signal strength, it'd take 5 hours for the ping to go from
here to the (average) distance of Pluto, and another 5 hours to
return.
It'd take 7.2 years for the round trip over a parsec.
To give another idea of the scales involved, the distance from the
earth to the sun is 150 million km. That's one astronomical unit
(AU).
Pluto averages 39 AU from the sun. A parsec is a bit over 200,000 AU.
So if one AU is a meter, a parsec is more than 200 km.
Add in issues of speed-of-light lag and signal strength and it'd
taken *generations* to cover one hex with any reasonable number of
ships.
It'd be like looking for a person lost on an empty North america by
using people walking a search grid, yelling, and hoping to hear an
answer.
Let's try another analogy. The Us is about 3000 miles wide. Let's map
a subsector onto that (sideways). So a 10 parsec long by 8 parsec
wide subsector would be 3000 miles by 2400 miles.
One parsec would be 300 miles. and one AU would be about 8 *feet*.
And one inch would be about a million miles....
A misjumped ship can be up to 36 parsecs away from its starting
point. On the above scale that's almost 11,000 miles. Big enough that
the curvature of the earth starts affecting the analogy badly.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com
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