I'm seeing a conflict, here.
Actually, a few conflicts/issues.
First: an easy one: we need a consensus on how long it takes to go from orbit to the surface and back. "grumble grumble seven hours each way" and "I spent a lot of money on this really interesting thing, and now I'm one of the few who can make it in under a day" just don't mesh.
Second: more difficult. We've established that most fen just soup up the family car and roll. This fits in well with the genre. We've discussed the unpleasantnesses associated with this means of transport. Various people have come up with significanly larger hulls, and waxed rhapsodic about the monetary benefits of being able to run really large loads. The difficulty is this: handwavium is relatively easy to produce in bulk. It takes some time to grow the stuff, but it doesn't take much money, and a lot of fen tend to be long-road thinkers. It's also tremendously magical in that "no fuel costs" sort of way, and provides a livable seal all by itself. Cargo containers are *cheap*. "Thing with space inside" is not expensive, as far as ground economies go, and having space to stretch out in once in the solar system at large, is precious indeed. So... why are all of these people dinking around in tiny, cramped spaces?
My thought would be to have default speeds of handwavium vehicles in a pretty clear inverse curve with size. You can get more space, but it'll take longer to get there. If you happen to get a special drive along with the rest of your devices, it can bend that to a degree, but should have its own disadvantages. This has the avantage that "big ships go slow, small ships go fast" is a genre trope already.
Alternately/additionally, play up the bio side (or maybe that's just what they want you to think). Handwavium generally needs a degree of direct personal attention to thrive. If your ship has too much of the stuff (often by dint of being too big) then the amount of time it takes to run around and keep all of it happy starts getting to be severe.
Third thing: So far, the major industry up in orbit seems to be... transport, to people in orbit. We need exportable stuff, too. Admittedly, we've seen a spot of bounty hunting, some astronomy, and a bit of satellite lift/maintenance, but it looks like most of the folks who hit the skies are going up there to *live* - and they're still consuming earthstuffs, in the form of food and hardtech for upgrading. They're going to need some sort of industry up there, or something like it, and if we're going to be supporting a significant population of transport types (and that's the niche that almost everyone is going ot think of first) then they're going to need a lot of it, emplaced at various points around the solar system that don't move all that well.
suggestions:
- asteroid mining: as soon as someone says "we need an industry", this is going to be the first thing through the minds of at least 80% of the fen. Many people will be trying it, and some will likely succeed. They may not succeed well enough to be worth sending much of it down the gravity well to sell on the open market (except for the points when you luck into platinum or something) but they might well succeed well enough to be worth setting up orbital smelters for. Given the likelihood of lucking into that *particular* effect again, though, those orbital smelters are going to be a precious resource indeed.
- satellite frobbing: lift, recovery, repair, sabotage, running stand-in duty in times of immediate need, and so on. A fair amount of opportunity here.
- various scientific applications: an excellent justification for Emplaced Industry that can then require transport work
- telecommuting
- tourism: However obnoxiously long it takes to get up and back, I gurantee you there's people who spend more time to see less. A well-mannered team with a nice, reliable, classy means of transport and large viewing spaces could make a *lot* of money here. Of course, there would be a fair number of mundane tourism companies that tried to get in on this one, but tourism tends to dump money into the local economy anyway.
Incidentally, we've been writing some stuff (the basics, really: hull-sealing, getting to orbit, tooling around the solar system, and a degree of environmental) as if it's not just totally reliable, but almost totally quirk-free. Part of the point of handwavium to me was the stage after you get your vehicle of choice, after you breed up your appropriately-sized block of the stuff, after you apply thing B to thing A, but before you actually can use it, where you figure out what bizarre little details there are that you're just going to have to live with/compensate for. That's one of the major things that keeps space in the hands of the Fen, rather than the wage-slaves.
Feel free to ignore me, if you want to, but it seemed to me that these were things that needed fixing - or at least consideration
Actually, a few conflicts/issues.
First: an easy one: we need a consensus on how long it takes to go from orbit to the surface and back. "grumble grumble seven hours each way" and "I spent a lot of money on this really interesting thing, and now I'm one of the few who can make it in under a day" just don't mesh.
Second: more difficult. We've established that most fen just soup up the family car and roll. This fits in well with the genre. We've discussed the unpleasantnesses associated with this means of transport. Various people have come up with significanly larger hulls, and waxed rhapsodic about the monetary benefits of being able to run really large loads. The difficulty is this: handwavium is relatively easy to produce in bulk. It takes some time to grow the stuff, but it doesn't take much money, and a lot of fen tend to be long-road thinkers. It's also tremendously magical in that "no fuel costs" sort of way, and provides a livable seal all by itself. Cargo containers are *cheap*. "Thing with space inside" is not expensive, as far as ground economies go, and having space to stretch out in once in the solar system at large, is precious indeed. So... why are all of these people dinking around in tiny, cramped spaces?
My thought would be to have default speeds of handwavium vehicles in a pretty clear inverse curve with size. You can get more space, but it'll take longer to get there. If you happen to get a special drive along with the rest of your devices, it can bend that to a degree, but should have its own disadvantages. This has the avantage that "big ships go slow, small ships go fast" is a genre trope already.
Alternately/additionally, play up the bio side (or maybe that's just what they want you to think). Handwavium generally needs a degree of direct personal attention to thrive. If your ship has too much of the stuff (often by dint of being too big) then the amount of time it takes to run around and keep all of it happy starts getting to be severe.
Third thing: So far, the major industry up in orbit seems to be... transport, to people in orbit. We need exportable stuff, too. Admittedly, we've seen a spot of bounty hunting, some astronomy, and a bit of satellite lift/maintenance, but it looks like most of the folks who hit the skies are going up there to *live* - and they're still consuming earthstuffs, in the form of food and hardtech for upgrading. They're going to need some sort of industry up there, or something like it, and if we're going to be supporting a significant population of transport types (and that's the niche that almost everyone is going ot think of first) then they're going to need a lot of it, emplaced at various points around the solar system that don't move all that well.
suggestions:
- asteroid mining: as soon as someone says "we need an industry", this is going to be the first thing through the minds of at least 80% of the fen. Many people will be trying it, and some will likely succeed. They may not succeed well enough to be worth sending much of it down the gravity well to sell on the open market (except for the points when you luck into platinum or something) but they might well succeed well enough to be worth setting up orbital smelters for. Given the likelihood of lucking into that *particular* effect again, though, those orbital smelters are going to be a precious resource indeed.
- satellite frobbing: lift, recovery, repair, sabotage, running stand-in duty in times of immediate need, and so on. A fair amount of opportunity here.
- various scientific applications: an excellent justification for Emplaced Industry that can then require transport work
- telecommuting
- tourism: However obnoxiously long it takes to get up and back, I gurantee you there's people who spend more time to see less. A well-mannered team with a nice, reliable, classy means of transport and large viewing spaces could make a *lot* of money here. Of course, there would be a fair number of mundane tourism companies that tried to get in on this one, but tourism tends to dump money into the local economy anyway.
Incidentally, we've been writing some stuff (the basics, really: hull-sealing, getting to orbit, tooling around the solar system, and a degree of environmental) as if it's not just totally reliable, but almost totally quirk-free. Part of the point of handwavium to me was the stage after you get your vehicle of choice, after you breed up your appropriately-sized block of the stuff, after you apply thing B to thing A, but before you actually can use it, where you figure out what bizarre little details there are that you're just going to have to live with/compensate for. That's one of the major things that keeps space in the hands of the Fen, rather than the wage-slaves.
Feel free to ignore me, if you want to, but it seemed to me that these were things that needed fixing - or at least consideration