DivineWrath wrote:

First off, are we using a protean swarm or a protean swarm with specialized hive? I ask because nanoswarms tend to last 2 weeks without a hive.

Let's assume that our ego is preparing to be marooned on his asteroid, until either someone randomly prospects the place a few years, or he can call for help, or he can make his own way off. So preparing to hole up for a few months is the basic plan, meaning hives instead of loose swarms.

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If you had the right blueprints, I think a protean swarm could go strait to building whatever nanofabber you wanted, including desktop cornucopia machines. However, the transhuman book warns about open air fabrication. It might be safer to have the swarms build a specialized fabber first - to build the parts you need for the CM and tools you need to to assemble it. Or maybe start with building a simple building to make a clean room.

Sounds mostly reasonable, though I'm still looking askance at a protean swarm with a cost of High being able to make a desktop cornucopia machine with a cost of Expensive in a mere handful of hours.

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What kind of power sources are we working with? Solar, Nuclear battery, Fusion? Batteries, while nice, will eventually run out of power. You probably wouldn't need a large power source right away. You could slow down production if there is a shortage of power.

Let's go with a hive with a protean swarm that can produce 1 kW of solar panels per hour - though that solar output will be reduced by the square of the asteroid's distance from the sun, as measured in AU. That is, an asteroid in the Jovian Trojans, roughly 5 AU out, would need 25 hours of production to produce enough panels for each kilowatt. (Gatecrashing p155 gives a kilowatt of solar panelling a cost of Trivial.) Once any need of hiding from immediate threats is over, our ego could just set the hive and its swarm to work, and leave it running and building more panels until it's time to leave. ... Come to think of it, that opens up an only semi-related new idea, which I'm going to start a new thread on.

DivineWrath wrote:

How many steps and what kind of complications were you expecting when going strait to CM? Would you be happier if it took 10 or 20 hours to build the CM from protean swarms? Would be happier if you needed your protean swarms to build 5 or 6 machines to fab the parts needed for the CM?

To try to explain my thought processes underlying my objection here... Back in the days of earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons, if you went strictly by the rules-as-written, it was possible to buy some number of ten-foot ladders for 5 copper pieces each, remove the rungs, and then sell each new ten-foot pole for 10 copper pieces each. As there were no official rules for merchants running out of inventory or for prices to change due to supply-and-demand, it was technically possible for characters to grab unlimited amounts of cash. Eclipse Phase has at least a /slightly/ more realistic economy than that "technically..." D&D one. Which means that there should be /some/ reason preventing PCs from buying a protean hive and nanoswarm for 6,000 credits, and then, every five hours, selling cornucopia machines for 20,000 credits apiece. I'm quite happy to toy around with Von Neumann scenarios, but if proteans could manufacture desktop CMs the way the rulebook technically implies they could, then the listed prices for each wouldn't be what they're listed as. Either protean swarms simply can't make CMs at all, or it takes so long to get from an initial set of protean swarms to a finished CM that (in a market large enough for other people to have had the incentives to have already found the obvious clever tricks to make money) the user's costs would exceed their potential profit, or there's some other limit in place. The limit which seems to be most in-line with the general themes of the EP setting is, in my inexpert opinion, not simply preventing proteans from making CMs outright, just making it awkward enough to be useless in an efficient market but potentially useful in places outside typical efficient markets, such as when a PC is unable to trade with other people (like being marooned on an asteroid) and is willing to wait for however long it takes to get from an initial set of swarms to a finished CM. This particular approach opens up a few interesting potential plot points, such as an espionage agent in a society that frowns on unlocked desktop CMs arranging to smuggle in enough hives, collecting the right raw materials, and keeping the whole apparatus from being discovered by whatever clever egos and nonsapient analysis software are in place to watch for exactly that. Thus increasing the amount of storytelling that a GM and players have potential access to, instead of reducing it. Put another way, having known limits to what can be accomplished - boundaries between what tech can do and what it can't do - introduces challenges for characters to try to overcome, which in a very broad sense are what RPGs are all about.