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Cost of items and nanofabrication

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Fri, 2012-12-07 06:51
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Lorsa Lorsa's picture
Cost of items and nanofabrication
I have recently started to wonder what would happen to the cost of items if a player had their own Desktop Cornucopia Machine. The cost of items seem to be based on characters trying to get their hands on them through credits, favors or similar, not when they produce them on their own. If you have a blueprint for a high cost item why would it cost you ~5000 credits (or similar favor) to produce it every time? It only takes some basic raw materials, a bit of energy and time. So, if a player did have a nanofabricator what would be the costs involved? Blueprints - How expensive / difficult are those to get a hold of? Raw Materials - Feedstock can be bought at a cost of trivial according to the rulebook. It doesn't say how much material that is though which seems to be a flaw. When does your raw material run out? Energy - The book never mentions any electricity costs or favors required to be supplied with such to where you live so is that something that needs to be taken into account with nanofabrication at all or is the energy consumption really trivial? In addition to the above questions I guess I am also asking if it is a doable in a campaign to let a player have their own CM or if I should simply avoid it altogether.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 12:33
mkn mkn's picture
I think it's an unavoidable
I think it's an unavoidable quandary in this setting (and, soon, in real life)--how is anything worth anything if you can make anything? TL;DR: it's part of the setting, just go with it--although there are some fun obstacles and ramifications. --there are costs listed for blueprints in the core book (I think)--but they probably just run the gamut from Trivial (for run of the mill items) to Expensive (for high grade military hardware, or anything with extraordinary physical complexity) and I don't think it would be too mean to have a strong DRM regime in place--ie, if you don't have a license (or an expert crack) for that new Direct Action plasma rifle, their blueprint will just brick your CM and erase itself. Also, even on a large hab maintained by AI drones and powered by a fusion reactor, it's probably not cool to just set up a big piece of hardware on the sidewalk and plug it into a courtesy outlet (or dial it to a courtesy beam? whatever)--so maybe you need to pull a favor/spend credit for a place to stay before you can set up a big CM. I guess it depends on how easy/hard you want to make things for your PC's. If they're egocasting and morph swapping all the time, it's not such a bad thing if they can just carry along blueprints for important gear and crap out identical copies when they reach their destination. Another obstacle--if your CM isn't big enough to fit the object, you might need some programming or hardware expertise to divide up the blueprint and assemble all the parts. In that case, it might be easier just to buy it off the rack. --and on that note, any hab that uses credits probably restricts CM's, to protect the consumer economy (and keep people dependent on the hypercorps). So if the players have one, it's like owning a counterfeiting operation--very illegal.
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“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” -William S. Burroughs
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Fri, 2012-12-07 13:08
Erenthia Erenthia's picture
Ok, the easy answer first:
Ok, the easy answer first: The cost of a blueprint is one cost category higher than the final product. The rest is a lot more difficult. In principle it would be possible for players to get their hands on power source AND raw materials at the cost of the energy to mine it. (There are purchasable mining robots IIRC). If you want to model this realistically then good luck, but for game balance purposes then I'd suggest the following: If the players have only the CM and have to use power from their Hab (or wherever they happen to be) I'd have the cost of the final item be the same as market value. Realistically it'd be a least a little less, but I'd rule that the profit margin is very slim because all they need to do is perform a little upkeep. Market forces would tend to keep the price of assembled goods VERY near raw materials + power + machine upkeep. However, if the players were able to produce enough energy to power the CM then I'd have finished goods cost one category less than the book price. It's almost certainly not a reflection of real life, but it's close enough conceptually to get the point across. In the future, it's all about energy. That's what you're selling people when you sell stuff from your CM, the raw materials and the energy to change it to a finished good. How MUCH energy? Trick question, how costly is the energy? I'd recommend that whatever form it takes, power generation to feed the CM be an Expensive purchase, which makes it quite an investment to get any price reduction from a CM, BUT if the players are willing to put in the time and effort they deserve to profit from it. Also don't forget that CMs are relevant in the favor economy as well. Just getting access to CM is a favor if I remember correctly (I forget at what level) and that's if the person provides their own raw materials and energy. If someone wants to use your raw materials and energy, then it's certainly at least the level of favor required to get the item. This allows players to "convert" between the two major economies (and one reason why a CM that doesn't give you a discount is useful, aside from the obvious getting anything you want regardless of whether or not it's legal and ignoring price modifiers for illegal items) Edited to add: If the players do go out of their way to get a mining robot and are able to realistically use it, I'd lower costs by two. There's all kinds of fun trouble they can get into with this. Be creative.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 14:22
NewtonPulsifer NewtonPulsifer's picture
I'd ignore the energy cost in
I'd ignore the energy cost in areas with fusion/fission power. It'd be a pittance. Your cost would be the hookup - lots of power would be included free. It would be like an internet connection plan nowadays. You even have affordable micro-sized fusion reactors. "Passenger Airship: A major method of intra-aerostat transport on Venus, these huge vehicles are 250 meters long and 40 meters in diameter and can carry up to 100 passengers and 20 tons of cargo. Powered by [b][i]small fusion reactors[/b][/i], these vehicles can operate for weeks at a time, but most journeys take less than 5 days. [Expensive]" Since the airship is [Expensive] I imagine its small fusion reactor is somewhat less than that. Also, nuclear batteries put out 1 kilowatt for 3 years in EP. At a cost of [Low]. That's 26297.4 kilowatt-hours. That's 0.0095 credits per kilowatt-hour (about 1 centicred). If dollars equals credits, even portable nuclear battery power is vastly cheaper than what you and I pay today. I'm sure wall power is even cheaper - probably 10x cheaper. Or rather unlimited with a 50 credit a month payment.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 14:28
RustedPantheress RustedPantheress's picture
Also, keep in mind the time
Also, keep in mind the time requirements to make something in a CM: Right about 1 hour per cost category, with variances depending on how simple or complex it is. So you can make 24 trivial cost items in one day, assuming average complexity, although you can make them in batches (which is again, dependent on how complex they are). Trivial: 1 hour Low: 2 hours. Moderate: 3 hours High: 4 hours Expensive(10k to 29,999): 5 hours Expensive+(30k): 6 hours Expensive++(40K): 7 hours Expensive+++(50K): 8 hours While I might disagree with the amounts for Expensive+ to Expensive+++, you get the point. All of these times assume that they are produced in 1 CM, which is kind of impossible for smaller ones, and harder for larger items (IIRC, the maximum size for a CM is 10meters x 10meters x 10meters, or 1000m^3). So what is valuable is materials, CM time, and CM access (and I keep calling them fabbers. Damn you Schlock Mercenary for making call them that). Here's my take on time requirements: Determine the complexity, and apply an appropriate time modifier. I would vary it by +/-50% at maximum. Really Simple: -50% Simple: -25% Average: +/-0% (this is where most items fall. Ectos, guns, the like) Complex: +25% Really Complex: +50% (Like an engine, or a synthmorph) Multiple Copies: -50% of the time remaining after complexity modifiers Size also matters, so an item larger than your CM is going to need to be produced in multiple pieces and assembled by hand. One way around the time restrictions is to just have the CM print out the components in bulk and then assemble them by hand (So you can produce multiples of the same thing by splitting them into simpler components, thus reducing time cost), which still requires someone who knows the hardware in question. Yep, IKEA would make a killing just releasing flat-pack blueprints for almost everything. (Actually, can we keep IKEA as a project of the Argonauts dedicated to producing flat-pack blueprints of everything?)
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Fri, 2012-12-07 16:47
NewtonPulsifer NewtonPulsifer's picture
Honestly power, materials,
Honestly power, materials, and maintenance are going to be negligible in price for most anything worth fabbing (valuable and less than 40 liters). A humble 250 credit card sized ecto is probably 5 grams - that's 50 credits per gram. That's already as valuable as gold if credits=USD. So basically, not counting blueprints, a Desktop Cornucopia Machine prints money/gold. How much money should one be able to print from a 20,000 credit investment? What about 1 percent return per day (which is awesome)? That would be 200 credits. So how about for an input of 50 credits a Desktop Cornucopia Machine can fab 250 credits worth of stuff per day. So an ecto would take one day and 50 credits of raw materials. A quantum computer would take 80 days and cost 4000 credits of raw materials. EDIT: You need to keep it linear or the economy breaks.
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"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."- Isoroku Yamamoto
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Fri, 2012-12-07 18:31
Erenthia Erenthia's picture
no matter what you do in the
no matter what you do in the end, game economies always break if you look at them too closely. Economics is an incredibly complicated subject, but you only have to deal with the parts that are closest to the players. If CMs are affordable to a single well-off person (or easily affordable to - say - a group of five people) then they should be fairly common place. If they are common then market forces drive the profit margins down. Even if things started out with rare CMs and high profit margins, the affordability would push the economy towards this end. But game balance would be pretty difficult if every item in the game (and indeed every conceivable item) had a cost of Trivial. House-rules are best when they adjust the system in slight ways (unless it's your intention to create a vastly different experience). The intended effect of having a CM would seem to be 1) gain unrestricted access 2) reduce cost of items and 3) circumvent laws against creating certain items. While I'm a big fan of players making things (items, institutions, and pretty much anything that has a lasting impact on the setting) if the Players having a CM means they can churn out anything they want with massively reduced cost the question you will have to answer is "Why can't everyone else with a CM do it?" and "Why do these items cost what they cost?" I strongly recommend the mechanics I gave above. If you don't like the excuse/flavor then obviously change it. Of course, on the other hand, breaking the game balance could very well be appropriate to EP as a setting. If a CM lowers the costs of other items by even one cost category, the players wealth will increase exponentially. Create an item, trade it for something more expensive, sell it, build a more expensive item, trade it for something more expensive, etc until you can build a SECOND CM (perhaps printing the pieces and assembling it yourself. The hardware skill is good for this). Repeat the above ad infinitum ad nauseum. While the above scenario is the reason why I recommend requiring additional purchases/maintenance for the full benefit of the CM that kind of exponential growth is exactly the kind of thing EP was designed to explore. In short: do what you want just know what you're getting into.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 19:28
mkn mkn's picture
game economies
Yeah, if your economy has a reasonable illusion of realism, all you have to worry about is keeping the game balanced in a way that keeps it rewarding for you and your players. A few ideas-- I'll use the example of powerful weapons (including advanced nanoswarms, poisons, or armor), since it's one of the things that's most likely to break your game. In my interpretation of transhuman culture, any habitat, whether it's in the Consortium, or the Autonomist Alliance, restricts deadly weaponry *at least* as strictly as a modern city, like New York. Even with nanoswarms and repair drones, a blow-out or fire could cause massive collateral damage. The risk is just too high to let someone walk around with a military grade rifle slung over their shoulder. Trying to settle petty disputes with weaponry that can damage the habitat is enough to get you thrown out the airlock, even on the average scumbarge. With transhumanity on the brink of extinction, and not enough living space (or even morphs) to go around, there's no reason to waste resources letting people walk around playing cowboy--and most people just want to fulfill their basic needs and enjoy their lives to whatever degree possible. Microwave agonizers and dazzlers, on the other hand, might be the equivalent of pepper spray in some places--and you can buy pepper spray in the checkout aisle for like six bucks. Part of the "retail" expense for these items (either in credit or favors) must then come from finding someone who's willing to do something equivalent to a mid-level felony for you. Even in rep economies, it must be very risky to supply low-rep outsiders (or really anyone) with such weapons. So that's my justification for why certain items cost more. Obviously, that's irrelevant if someone with real power or tremendous rep is outfitting the group for a military op. Not only that, but with omnipresent surveillance, it seems unlikely that you could even walk around with an illegal or frowned upon weapon without getting flagged by any one of thousands of sensors--much less print them out in your CM. I imagine it's like having the "naked" scanners at the airport--only everywhere, and they're being monitored by powerful security AI instead of a bored TSA agent. And that's why everyone isn't walking around with a charged plasma rifle in my games. Not to say that's how it must be, but it's one way to keep things from getting ridiculous. --one of the fun things about this strict weapons enforcement is that suddenly, hand to hand combat and "accident engineering" is a very valuable skill for assassins and security specialists who are working in major population centers.
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“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” -William S. Burroughs
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Fri, 2012-12-07 20:11
Fion Ravenwater Fion Ravenwater's picture
Actually, on more than one
Actually, on more than one occasion it's mentioned that anarchists are armed to the (literal or figurative) gills as a general rule. Habitats are tough enough to withstand really any stray small arms fire (and auto-repairing nanobots will seal small holes), but I'd guess that plasma rifles are a bit too much to be walking around with. The Consortium or Morningstar will definitely have tight weapon control, though, which is why my character has his guns in hidden weapons mounts inside masked cyberlimbs.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 20:44
mkn mkn's picture
Armed anarchists
Yeah, what I described was more my own tweak to the setting--I think having anarchists and libertarian types strapped with knives, dazzlers, microwave weapons, etc keeps the feeling of rough and tumble danger, and makes real gun battles all the more fun for their relative rarity. I suppose habs would have to cope with micro debris that are much more dangerous, but even so--letting people poke holes in the pressure vessel that keeps you alive is never a good idea. Plus, you've got the more familiar danger of hitting some passerby with a stray bullet, which at the very least would be a serious property crime. So even if they're basically ok with responsible gun ownership, I figure armorers would risk a serious downrep if they build serious weaponry for people not vetted by the community. Just my own approach, to justify not allowing players to be out-of-control gunbunnies.
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“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” -William S. Burroughs
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Fri, 2012-12-07 21:38
Fion Ravenwater Fion Ravenwater's picture
Yeah, that's an interesting
Yeah, that's an interesting paradigm, but I'd think it would quickly end up with synthmorphs being the only real option for combat. With the sheer damage output of guns not an option, you'd turn to easier methods of incapacitation like toxins (BTX-Squared is a good one) or Shock, both of which synthmorphs are immune to. They're also immune to dazzlers and the stun setting of microwave agonizers (and the "burn" setting is very weak as fireproofing costs Trivial) and the Pneumatic Limbs mod gives them a huge advantage in melee damage over biomorphs. And habs are really tough. Micrometeorites can be going at up to 7 km/s and micrometeorite impacts are a common occurrence. A railgun round goes at Mach 6 minimum (EP 336) which translates to about 2 km/s. I think that a hab designed to take micrometeorite impacts on a regular basis won't have too much trouble with small arms fire.
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Fri, 2012-12-07 21:52
RustedPantheress RustedPantheress's picture
Hmm... The Eye issue 2 had
Hmm... The Eye issue 2 had some stuff on Nanofabrication, including expanding the feedstock and its costs...
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Sat, 2012-12-08 00:36
mkn mkn's picture
--as an aside, I'm not
--as an aside, I'm not picking a fight here. Assuming there's no extreme magitec to soak up kinetic energy, micrometeor shielding would be optimized for external impacts. Fire and shrapnel can still be a big hassle for the average schmo. And pop density in even a luxurious hypercorp hab would probably surpass modern Shanghai or Tokyo, so stray bullets would be a real problem. Them slugs have a way of traveling in microgravity, and Coriolis effects can make ballistic trajectories... unpredictable. Having robocops as the norm doesn't strike me as a problem. Is there synth specific weaponry available?
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“Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.” -William S. Burroughs
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Sat, 2012-12-08 01:07
Fion Ravenwater Fion Ravenwater's picture
I'll give you that, but I
I'll give you that, but I still don't expect bullets to be a hull-breach problem in any hab except the most shoe-string ones. There really aren't any anti-synth weapons except for saboteur swarms and they're hard to weaponize due to slow speed and lack of good delivery systems. You can try to hack synths but that's quite time-consuming. Synthmorphs can also have much higher amounts of unobtrusive armour. It would be kind of frustrating because as there are no good anti-synth weapons, you just have to hammer away at them with tons of damage which is the exact thing that removing gun-type weapons destroys, and it completely removes the point of, say, Furies as they're totally outclassed by much cheaper synthmorphs.
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Sat, 2012-12-08 04:58
Lorsa Lorsa's picture
Thank you all for your
Thank you all for your comments. It seems that noone really knows how much stuff you can assemble from one feedstock and / or exactly what the dissasemblers breaks things down to. I'm assuming here though that if you want to nanofabricate gold you have to feed it gold? Also, it appears that most people think that interpreting nanoassemblers as written makes it difficult to understand why not everyone has everything. But then again - maybe they do? Or at least will have in 20 years. I guess the biggest problem in EP right now is that there are a lot of people with basic needs and the time limit on fabricating is the biggest obstacle. I will have to think about how I want to deal with it and please keep discussing the issue.
RustedPantheress wrote:
Hmm... The Eye issue 2 had some stuff on Nanofabrication, including expanding the feedstock and its costs...
Where can I find this? Also, please do not derail the thread. I know that happens a lot but it makes it difficult for others to find what they are looking for. How armed the general populace is deserves a thread of its own does it not?
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Sat, 2012-12-08 13:20
NewtonPulsifer NewtonPulsifer's picture
If you could build a Desktop
If you could build a Desktop Cornucopia Machine from another one in one day, you could have over a billion of them in 30 days.
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Sat, 2012-12-08 19:27
RustedPantheress RustedPantheress's picture
NewtonPulsifer wrote:If you
NewtonPulsifer wrote:
If you could build a Desktop Cornucopia Machine from another one in one day, you could have over a billion of them in 30 days.
If you had the materials for it. But I agree with the slight problems that we have with not having guidelines for how much of feedstock it requires for something.
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Sat, 2012-12-08 21:09
NewtonPulsifer NewtonPulsifer's picture
Another alternative is of
Another alternative is of course increasing the cost of Desktop Cornucopia Machines. 10 cubic centimeter nano-swarms cost on the order of 1000 credits. Desktop Cornucopia Machines probably have the equivalent of 10kg of nanites. That's a 1000x the amount for only 20x the cost. Make DCMs cost say 400,000 credits and that would also narrow the glaring discrepancies down somewhat.
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Sun, 2012-12-09 01:12
RustedPantheress RustedPantheress's picture
That still doesn't solve the
That still doesn't solve the problem of just making more with your current CM. As long as you have enough materials, you can keep going, and increasing the cost doesn't do that much, as most groups would be willing to combine as much of their cash reserves as possible to get one. Also the cheapest one is the smallest: 50cm x 50cm x 50cm. Then cost goes up as size goes up, up to a maximum of 10meters x 10meters x 10meters.
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Somebody is using bad science! Snark, facts, snark. Your body is corrupted: Cool, do more science to it. Your mind is warped: That's nice, want a cookie? What do we say to the God of Death? Not today!
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Sun, 2012-12-09 05:46
Lorsa Lorsa's picture
Perhaps there isn't a
Perhaps there isn't a bluepring for creating nanofabricators but rather it requires some form of combined hardware and academics skill in order to assemble it in the first place?
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Sun, 2012-12-09 12:29
PariahDog PariahDog's picture
With the costs of
With the costs of manufacturing being so low, I don't think that it's very profitable for the players to create items compared to buying them. Based on general item pricing, the blueprints would be most expensive and hardest to get as it would allow you to create an infinite amount of the item. The second highest price is likely for the materials it is composed of. Manufacturing the product should add low value, and therefore only be viable for mass production. Obvious exclusions from this are the easy to get and simple items, where the profit margins are low as well. With the cost of the blueprint alone it wouldn't be profitable to make an item just for the player group, and they would likely have to overextend and sell these items to others as well, which in the long run should be just as profitable as maintaining a job. Exception to this rule would be an exceptionally rare blueprint only the players know of. I wouldn't disallow owning a CM. Instead, the players can use it to craft items that are near impossible to get, provided they found a blueprint. Using it for mass production seems like full-time job to me (managing storage, transportation, market, promotion, etc.). I'm pretty new to Eclipse Phase (but not to tabletop roleplaying) though so I might be overlooking some obvious rules here.
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Sun, 2012-12-09 16:52
Erenthia Erenthia's picture
In terms of feedstock, I'd
In terms of feedstock, I'd assume that the Trivial cost listed in the book is for enough to make the largest item possible in a Desktop CM, and for functional purposes only. If you want something with gold or other vanity items, yes you'd need to buy special feedstock for that, but I can't imagine any need for that other than proving you have more resources/rep than the next guy. In terms of functional items, anything that can come out of a Desktop CM whole. Blueprints though, can be written by a player with sufficient programming skill - and most items aren't that hard. Hell you could probably buy an AI capable of writing blueprints for most common objects. In terms of game balance, this is reflected by the mercurial nature of items themselves. Anything and everything - including the players Morph are subject to arbitrary destruction. Easy come, easy go. Of course it's also possible for players to automate the gathering of resources in ways more difficult to strip from them. Precisely tuned beta-forks that spend all their time rep-grinding or programming Blueprints or doing some kind of brokerage or creating works of art for instance. At this point, it's no longer about game balance and about the players and the GM having a similar idea of what kind of game everyone wants to be playing. There's nothing wrong with a game where the players are trying to accumulate enough resources to found their own little hypercorp as long as the GM can enjoy running such a game. That goes both ways. It's a game, everyone should be having fun, so take time to discuss what kind of game it is you want to run with them. Edited to add: I'm a little incredulous about requiring a hardware test to assemble a large item printed in pieces from a Desktop CM. Presumably if you were going to create a set of blueprints for such a thing you'd take the extra step to make the thing slot together pretty easily. I think modern IKEA furniture is a good example, but I suppose people have trouble with that sometimes. The difficulty couldn't be all that high though.
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