That doesn't apply if everyone is educated.The thing about education is that the price the market will bear is linked to the expected earnings of the educated. If increases in productivity increase lifetime earnings the price of education will expand to keep college administrators in the upper class.
Ah! Ferian warriors! Thank you!Using the ISS as an example only helps if we're talking about stuff that looks like the ISS. The method of construction dictates the architecture. Show me a ship in Transcendence that looks like it's made from tinkertoys. Even a ship built in sections would have to be welded together in one place and then have the armor installed on the finished hull if it's going to have the smooth lines we see in the game. And only a few ships have potential repeating units and those units are themselves too large to build in a pressurized space, like cross sections of a Phobos. The only ship that can be build your way is the Ferian warrior.
There. We have a description of a shipyard, and it's both in a building, and partially pressurized. Also, t55, drakes, aurochs, dwarg behemoth... LOTS of ships have what appear to be section lines.You enter into a vast chamber, only partially pressurized. Large metal maws consume a small fortune in rocks and ores delivered by Ferian miners. Beneath them you see various vessels shrouded by the cranes and girders of a shipyard. Most of the vessels are new Ferian miners being created out of raw materials. A few are much larger and have a more sinister shape.
Why would all the sections have to be the same? When you're making fifty ships, you can still make one part fifty times even if it isn't used more than once per ship.What same stuff? You can point to the reactors and weapons. Hey, junction boxes and light switches are standardized too but it doesn't mean every house has the same wiring diagram. Very few ships have identical sections. Just the freighters, the ferian warrior, and maybe the Phobos, though the latter looks cigar shaped rather than cylindrical to my eye and I can't find where I put the converted meshes to check.
You might have a point here. On the other hand, you still haven't shown that workers earn a significant wage. Besides, even with a significant wage, how much work can a human do for that wage? I'd bet a lot.Besides, the ability of non-Luminous robots to operate autonomously is belied by the existence of human miners, human freighter pilots, and, to be blunt, humans doing anything but research and bureaucratic makework. Think about it. Even for the ringers it's more practical to provide technology to zooanthropes than to design robots for the job. Asteroid mining is a lot more forgiving than ship construction. The Commonwealth finds it worth employing actual human beings even in Eridani where they're mostly mining titanium and the Centauri Warlords are preying on them.
And most bigger ships don't have drive plumes. So, by that indicator....Inertialess drive is not the same thing as reactionless drive. Try it some time. You still get drive plumes. That means you're still throwing reaction mass out the back of your ship to move, you just get wiggy inertia dumping in relation to the local reference frame. The only ways to make space lift cheaper are to reduce the effects of gravity or move without expending reaction mass and the Transcendence inertialess drive does neither.
No, I just think that it will be within the allowance I already gave for the hull costs.So now you're saying that you shouldn't get prices by scaling up the existing drives? Then how will you price propulsion for larger ships? If you just leave it out your numbers will become even more worthless.
Tell me about it. For another example, the mass of a non-playership wolfen is only 20 tons.It looks like George is being inconsistent here. The masses of the Scarab, EI500, and EI100m appear to include the cargo mass. The mass of the Korolov freighters clearly do not. Especially compare the EI100 in korolov.xml to the EI100m in transcendence.xml. In 0.7, which is the only pre-korolov resource set I have, the EI100 is the same mass as the EI100m remains. It was re statted when the other freighters were added, but the superfreighter was not.
Oh, if you have a suggestion for a formula for costs, you're more than welcome to give it to me, so I can put it in the new spreadsheet.