CordialUltimate2, consider how there are some things to consider about the exponential growth: First, a "matrioska Fab" is possible, but not widely used. The bottlenecks will be Energy and the less common elements required for the morphs (usually, energy-storage/generation materials and the like). You have abundance of matter in the Belt, and abundance of energy near the Sun, with Mercury being the best place (and also the most dangerous!). Jupiter can also be mined for energy, but... Jovians. Anyway, if it were as simple as "make more fabbers, use them to make more, etc..." then the rimward habitats could go that way, it's a matter of making an extra fabber and start the process... but they don't, and I doubt it's just because they don't wanna sleeve infugees. Second, having those things around is a security threat, and I'm not talking about a loony transhuman assembling a nuke (again, that is simply controled by not having that feedstock connected to the fabber, so you need to go to a protected, isolated one to assemble that last piece), but the exurgent virus... especially the biostrains (there are few, if any, restrictions for assembling flesh). Third, this is applied only to synthmorphs. Pods can be fast-produced because you assemble the organic parts in small healing vats, and the mechanical ones in fabbers, reducing space requirements drastically (a Just in Time production schedule would work wonders here), but you still need to make the brain (even if it's a half cooked one who needs electronic augmentation to host a transhuman mind!). Remeber Biomorphs take more time, and the more expensive they are (in CP, I'm assuming) the more time they require, with a Healing Vat all by themselves... with all the energy that entails. The books give an approximate time to assemble each type of body, and in fact you can churn out cases like popcorn, the problem there is that few infugees will use those cases (I imagine the Corps give them some free time so they can know the society outside of the indenture, frankly, and to let them not reach a point where they go crazy, the way of crazy they sabotage the hypercorp I mean... so they know how a case feels), and more expensive morphs require more production (and indeture) time. Then, on the non-capitalists societies, they try to give morphs that are bette than cases or flats, which means more time, and they are also strapped for fabbing time (because of energy demands! and repairs! and...).

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

People hung up on energy costs, because they don't realise how game-changing is fusion tech. Maintenance... I would say automated systems. You would say security threats. I won't push here.

While I'm sure without looking at the physics a fusion reactor is great, I doubt we can go against the matter/energy conservation law here, but anyway my point was that the true currency of a post-scarcity society is time itself (I've mentioned this on another thread, or on the facebook page, I cannot remember), since it's the final bottleneck. So you are limited on the amount of resources you can pour into the making of the fusion reactor by the time it takes to mine them, the time it takes to process them, the time it takes to assemble a fusion reactor and place it in the hab... As for the Maintenance, I wasn't talking about big scale one (people do that to earn rep at basic levels, of course a robot could do that but I'm thinking it's a way to educate the newbies on the layout of the hab, on the rep system, and to both let them practice skills and feel useful and part of the community), but morph-scale maintenance, which I assume is done on healing vats for biomorphs and fabbers for synthmorphs. At the end, however, I'd say that the main "total postscarcity arrives in..." will be determined by the people's mindset. Until transhumanity gets over the Fall (which is something hard, and most likely won't happen until the last infugee has been instantiated for a decade or more), they will be reticent to shake the boat too badly. And the TITANs are out there, with the QZs to remember everybody of it.

Shrekgrinch wrote:

Phase One: 1) Nanofabricate General Hive minds & fractal robots. 2) Send them out to asteroids with programmed instructions to mine them -- with some resources dedicated for power generation and making automated cargo ships or containers for cargo ships to pick up. Cargo ships would be piloted by AI or infomorphs. For the really big ones like dwarf planets, Dwarf mining bots (EP p345) can be built onsite, too. 3) Build a lot of beehive/cluster habs. 4) Build a lot of synths to populate them and to work on Phase Two. Viola! Rinse and repeat until you have enough of these Synth colonies for Phase Two

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft Congratulations! You are 1 bug away from gray goo overload in the doorstep of Humanity's cradle (the stuff you send stuck on step 1, self replicating unsupervised until it's too late). If it were as easy as sending automated building nanobots, it would have been done already. The problem is that people has this view of nanotechnology as some sort of macro-affecter at micro-levels... While the truth is that you need macro machines to do macro things, and micro machines to do micro things. For example, disassembler nanoswarms are dangerous to an extent, but largely static because the smaller a thing is, the longer it takes to move unless it has oversized dedicated motor systems. A disassembler nanomachine is there, floating, and you walk through it... it gets inside you... and your circulatory systems moves it around (or in the case of synthmorphs, they move slower, but you never know if they had some magnetic grapplers... and you tend to detect their presence once the bugger are all over you anyway). Another reason for why it doesn't work that way: Gatecrashing. If it were that simple, a nanohive, a solarchive and a single morph carrying all that with enough feedstock could establish a beachhead in an exoplanet with the sleeve on synthmorphs for a dozen of egos in less than two weeks, with the transit cost through the gate reduced to the bare minimum. Yet nobody does that (but firewall, and only in comparison, since they send precisely that with a ton of frozen egos with a gatecrashing team that works like regular ones).

I suggest using quote and unquote for better work, but... here we go ;)

Shrekgrinch wrote:

Then you wouldn't have much of a game like EP, which needs conflict. Nova Praxis managed to do this in its setting while finding other background sources for conflict.

Why for? If you wanna play Happy Colonies, you can do so. After a few months, however, other colonies might have a go at you because it's easier to take than to make... Unless you take measures so the Pandora Gate is not accessible anymore (like throwing it at the local sun, if you can move it). Or the colonists might get angsty. Or there might be a mole. Or an Exhuman. Or an Exurgent-Infected ego... Or you can play Minecraft with P&P, that is. The main point, though, is that nanotech is not trusted. The Fall, and all those details... ten years is not so long ago when people who died there gets resleeved and/or liberated every day.

Shrekgrinch wrote:

Xagroth: The problem is that people has this view of nanotechnology as some sort of macro-affecter at micro-levels... While the truth is that you need macro machines to do macro things, and micro machines to do micro things. You mean people like K. Eric Drexler and Richard Feynman?

I find hard to believe that dumping dissassemblers at an asteroid is less time-consuming than throwing dedicated mining equipment (the PC would do so in a heartbeat if it were like that). Or that nanomachines can move fast enough, while being able to self-replicate and fulfill all of their energy needs to build anything as fast as you seem to think. Anyway, page 285 of EP corebook lists 1 hour per cost category, while the EP2Beta lists up to 24 hours... However, making biomorphs takes months, while making Pods takes weeks. So the rules are a little fuzzy here. You are, of course, welcome to bring Drexler and Feynman works to the talk. It tends to be of good manners, however, to provide an exact pointer to what parts are you referring to, since not all of the people here has to be familiar with the whole of their works.

Shrekgrinch wrote:

Xagroth: Another reason for why it doesn't work that way: Gatecrashing. If it were that simple, a nanohive, a solarchive and a single morph carrying all that with enough feedstock could establish a beachhead in an exoplanet with the sleeve on synthmorphs for a dozen of egos in less than two weeks Just because it doesn't fit in your view of the game background doesn't mean it can't be done via the technology described in the EP books. In fact, someone already came up with how to do EXACTLY that with EP rules. Here it is: http://eclipsephase.com/self-constructing-outpost-how-turn-eclipse-phase...

Please do read it with attention, since it seems like some parts of that same document run against your preconceptions. Namely:

Quote:

[b]while a swarm of nanobots unleashed into an environment are capable of doing the job, from that sort of start it would take forever[/b]. The SCY builds robots to level the grade install what foundations are required (if any,) to lay, elevate, or bury conduits as appropriate, and to shovel resources into its recycling center, again, as appropriate. This is typically a careful balancing act between the resources available (remaining feedstock and locally-sourced materials,) the power generation available (on full batteries the SCY can go for two days, maybe two and a half if life support is turned off, but when its batteries are wholly exhausted, it takes the nuclear batteries a week to recharge,) and time.

And

Quote:

What does one do with an SCO? It’s not something one simply fires-and-forgets, usually, though some gatehopping groups will set an SCV on auto and then crash the gate again, intending to return in a few months to find a base-camp already settled. It even sometimes works.

So please place yourself on the shoes of a gatecrasher. You have to pay (in advance) for each second the gate remains open, for your morph and its implants, for the survival gear you will be using the first days (or more), and that is assuming you are crashing into a known target, since some gates open to orbit or non-atmo places (welcome, Space Engineer!). Then you need to fork enough money to acquire all that stuf. While an SCV is quite nice, it has no listed cost (but it would be, at the very least, the same of a solarchive + expert AI + the most expensive CM + feedstock... plus the assembling time and all that), then you need to cross the gate (that drives some people mad), get to the planet, deploy some sat-in-a-can (you better bring one...) and make surveys to decide where to plant the SCV. So no. Still not as easy as "drop a nanohive with a solarchive, some feedstock and a controlling intelligence". A Month (once you deployed the SCV) can be a long time when you are on an unexplored planet.

CordialUltimate2 wrote:

Everybody seems to forget that in terms of real world physics EP nanotech is magic. There are already very efficient nanomachines that are in use today. They are called microorganisms.

Yup, however "nanomachine assembly" does not equate "ignore logistics". The amount of energy required to walk a meter is irrelevant to us, but a bunny requires more effort. Now consider a nanomachine, which has to fulfill, magic or no magic, a set amount of requirements: first to have enough energy to perform its task (requiring batteries or something that lets it feed from something), second to carry the atoms or molecules to build whatever they are building, and third the required tools to move those things around. Now, we can go the "vacuum assembled" route, in which case scaffolding is needed for the machines to move around (and more importantly, refuel and get the raw materials), which means making the scaffold and retracting it adds to the time of build. Or we can go the "organic" route, and look at the most common "toilers" we all know about: blood. This means step 1 is to enclose the printing area, step 2 is to fill it with a nutrient solution that won't interfere with the crafting process (and that might need to be replaced depending on the materials that are being assembled at any given moment) and that let the nanomachines to move easily carrying those molecules and atoms. This system can be faster and cost-effective enough for smaller and complicated builds (up to human size biomorph), but bigger things just require too much resources invested on the solution, being more effective just to use the scaffolding. Heck, even in Star Trek where they would "summon" stuff from energy with the replicators, the ships were crafted piecemeal and then assembled, instead of using big replicators to "make" solid pieces like the saucer! (some more modern episodes aside, like the "space garage" the Enterprise NX-01 stumbled on that used living people as auxiliary processors). Not to mention even the TITANs used macro "tools" (there is a bit of fiction about the investigations on the computronium planet Iapetus where we get a descritpion of a "peon" made from a colonist the TITANs used to toil there. If nanomachines were THE solution, they would have simply launched a seed nanohive and wait). Or, ALL the planets and asteroids on the Solar System would already been seeded with nanotech to mine all valuables. It's as "cheap" as assembling a rocket, place a nanohive and landing gear, and launch. Anyway, my point is simple: for some things, nanotech is better, but for others you need an old macroscale worker if you want things done in a reasonable amount of time.

Shrekgrinch wrote:

. . .1) Nanofabricate General Hive minds & fractal robots. 2) Send them out to asteroids with programmed instructions to mine them -- with some resources dedicated for power generation and making automated cargo ships or containers for cargo ships to pick up. Cargo ships would be piloted by AI or infomorphs. For the really big ones like dwarf planets, Dwarf mining bots (EP p345) can be built onsite, too. . .

I think right here is one of the really big disconnections. You have this idea that you fire a bunch of nanoassemblers at an asteroid and it can build whatever you want out of the materials. Eclipse Phase nanoassembly cannot change the elements it is working on (i.e. if a nanoassembler has carbon it cannot turn it into silicon). This is why people need to go out and mine from asteroids in the first place rather than just scooping up hydrogen from Saturn or silicates from the surface of Mars. As a result it isn't all that easy for the nanoassemblers to just dedicate some resources 'for power generation and making automated cargo ships or containers for cargo ships to pick up'. You've probably got three main forms of power generation; nuclear fission, fusion, and solar. Nuclear fission requires fissile material and the odds are good that any random asteroid either won't have it or won't have it in concentrations necessary to really allow things to get going. Yes, some asteroids will have such material but you have to find them and they have to be ones that someone else hasn't claimed (tricky since there's a definite value to them). Fusion is probably even harder to find fuel for on small asteroids since the materials tend to be hydrogen and helium isotopes which won't stick around unless you have some funny conditions such as the Moon has (little to no atmosphere but a noticeable amount of gravity). That leaves solar. Unfortunately solar panels tend to require some elements that likewise might be hard to find. Once you've got power worked out then there's the matter of what are these containers going to be built out of. Iron? Way too heavy. I'm sure that most cargo containers in EP are probably some kind of carbon composite (I actually assume in my EP universe that carbon is the 'go to' material for structural components, even in the case of things such as guns, since it is so prevalent). Now to be fair any of the elements we are talking about absolutely can be found on asteroids. There are asteroids that have tons of water ice and which are probably great sources of fuel for fusion. There are asteroids with all sorts of heavy metals that are probably great sources for fissile materials and elements you might need for solar cells. There are asteroids absolutely chock-a-block with carbon. Unfortunately the percentage of asteroids with any kind of good mix of these materials is probably terribly small. You drop nanoassemblers on an asteroid with a lot of water ice and they can get the fuel they would need for a fusion generator but they can't get the materials they need to actually build the fusion generator. Half those will be in an asteroid that has a lot of carbon for the structure, three eights of those will be in an asteroid that has a decent amount of copper or other conductive metals and the remaining fraction will be scattered among other asteroids that are containing things like rare-Earth metals. And even if you seed those asteroids with nanoassemblers and boot-strap power supplies you're going to have to collect up the materials and then bring them all together so you can actually build your final product.

Shrekgrinch wrote:

. . . Also, despite asteroids being carbonaceous, metallic, etc. each type of one has enough of the other type's elements to build mining infrastructure, in general.

I really don't think that is the case. A FeN asteroid isn't going to contain nearly enough fuel materials (assuming fission/fusion is used for power) or materials for solar cells. Power is an important part of mining infrastructure. A water ice asteroid will probably have plenty of materials for fuel but not enough carbon or metal to build a mining infrastructure. Don't forget that just because an asteroid has a couple of dozen tons of material scattered through it that doesn't mean the material is 'usable'. If the nanodisassemblers have to chew through 1000 tons of ice to get 2 tons of metal those disassemblers will run out of juice long before you're ever able to build a power plant for them.

Quote:

I never said they had to be built out of iron for sure. And what does it matter WHAT they are built of as long as they can be built? I am not sure why you brought that up. Perhaps you meant to finish that but lost your train of thought?

You're right, you didn't specify iron, I did. I chose it because it is what will be in abundance on a FeN asteroid. You aren't going to be able to build a carbon-fiber shipping container (or one from plastics) if there's not much carbon around (which is the situation with your average FeN asteroid).

Quote:

You do also realize that nanofabricated products do not need nearly as much mass as old school manufactured products do, right? In fact, is projected that just a stool would be mostly empty mass. So empty that we'll have to fill it with water to give it some decent weight as people expect it to have. And most things could be built with a lot fewer element types too -- carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon and aluminum, mostly.

Well, yes and no. A stool built out of a honeycomb carbon structure would weigh less than what you might currently expect today but it probably won't be so light that it would have to be filled with water to avoid problems. We can argue back and forth on exactly how light such a structure would be but ultimately it doesn't matter because if you are mining a FeN asteroid you aren't going to be building your container out of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, or aluminum because the asteroid contains almost none of those. You're going to have to build it out of iron and nickel and while nanofabrication might reduce the weight somewhat through structural optimization it's not going to reduce it by all that much. Why is that important? Because every kilogram of weight that container has is another kilogram that has to be accelerated and decelerated when you ship it off the asteroid. Now you are correct that there are c-type asteroids which hold water, carbon compounds, and primitive metals that could be mined and you might be able to do some kind of boot strap operation to get materials, by why? Those compounds are so common there's little reason to go to an asteroid to get them. Titan has vast lakes of ethane and methane (a great source for carbon and hydrogen), a thick atmosphere of nitrogen, and a crust of water ice (hydrogen and oxygen) and stone (silicates). The Moon is an excellent source for aluminum, titanium, magnesium, iron, and manganese. Mars likewise is an excellent source for a lot of materials and all of these locations have the advantage that in the EP universe they are 'easily accessible' in human terms (because they have large human populations).