I gotta prepare a Fleet Intelligence game that involves infiltrating and wiping out the KPA now.

Chernoborg wrote:

Ooh, careful with that. Messing with a well established hierarchy of gangs and armed militias could make things far more violent than they already are.

Depends. Do they plan to just wipe out the biggest, scariest mothers in town, the guys who've been keeping everyone else suppressed, then fuck off and call it a job well done? Because that's [i]totally[/i] going to lead to worse violence and power struggles. If wiping out the KPA is the prelude to a general invasion by the Titanian military in the interests of restoring order at gunpoint, it could work. Basically, they'd need to shoot all the Ultimates and the gangs and let the Anarchists take control.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea for a long term adventure. Even better is it's the kind of story that doesn't involve the fate of humanity - unless you want it to. It occurs to me that since the habitat doesn't have artificial gravity Kronos has to have biomorphs shipped in. This is another reason for the spaceport -and- a potential avenue of infiltration.

Technically, the Titanians are Technosocialists, not Anarchists, they just stress egalitarianism/widespread democracy and the new economy, which is why they are Autonomists rather than Hypercapitalists. They have a government and bureaucracy and thus hierarchies.

Awesome!

MysteryCat wrote:

I guess to a certain extent this is part of a larger discussion about how relevant space-travel and trade are in a setting where nanofabbers and farcasters are a thing

As already pointed, nanofabbers need two things: raw materials and power (and templates, that's three things... ;) ). As it happens, Inner System is low on water (and volatiles) and Outer System is low on heavy elements. So we either have fleets of freighters coursing to and fro with raw supplies or haulers that bring entire asteroids (or iceteroids) where needed. As of farcasting: to be able to do it you need sending station, receiving station, clear path between them and... well, some morph to sleeve into (if you don't want to rely on infomorph/robotic shell). As biomorphs can't be just nanofabbed you have to grow them in vats and physically distribute around the System. There is more to egocasting (and communication) though: some information *really* must be sent securely. That means that on both communicating nodes you need cubit reservoirs and they must be physically (and periodically) delivered to stations that want to make QE transmission. Arguably, all egocast transmission would require sending some information (like certificates, encryption keys) by QE and that means that each egocaster (at least secure one) would have a directory of possible destinations just like Pandora Gate. And that means that to reach some remote, obscure destination you have to engage in several egocasting "hops" through communication hubs. That could mean several sleeving (into infomorph) for customs procedure and such. Well, sometimes it could be preferable to get to the destination the old-fashioned way: by spaceship. Last thing: in my humble opinion, the nanofabbers are wonderful technology, very in the way of the Toffler's "third wave". It permits lone few brinkers to live comfortably in a middle of nowhere, eases space travel accomodations and so forth. But for large-scale production it is simply inefficient. Imagine zillions on nanobots working to build your thingy atom-by-atom. Daunting. It is flexible, it allows customization, it could be cost-effective if you want complicated, interwoven designs but a fabber will deliver each thing quite *slowly*. It isn't the speed even remotely close to that of old-fashioned production line. And it can produce only one product a time - how many fabbers there is in a household? It wouldn't be good to chose: should we make meal or clothes? Yes, there could be fabbing services but they too have some output that cannot be exceeded. Now, imagine you have to feed few millions of biomorphs - would you produce the food out of atoms or by wholesale industrial process? And medications? Same with all the things that are quickly spent, needed in great quantities, similar or are easy to produce on production line (like having simple internal structure). Also, that doesn't mean finished products, it could be semiproduct that is then shaped in low-grade maker (like food pulp). So, it is still efficient to have a factory and transport its products around the System. For that you still need a fleets of freighters and hypercorps like Comex. Comex also transports precious items that should not be disassembled and sent as information to remote assembler: various samples, original art, vanity items and such. As you can see, there are still many reasons for space-faring couriers and freighters and for spaceports to serve them.