On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 3:00 AM, Timothy Collinson <xxxxxx@port.ac.uk> wrote:

On 27 Feb 2016 06:17, "Richard Aiken" <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 4:05 PM, Craig Berry <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> As soon as you start applying real-world economic thinking to Traveller, you start nudging the game in a post-scarcity, perhaps post-human direction that looks more like Star Trek or Banks's Culture novels than the gritty, hardscrabble Traveller future we all know and love.
>
>
> <trying to think of a non-fiat reason to maintain gold scarcity in the OTU . . . >

Does it work to say that the 'thing' is just an analogue that we all understand as a place holder for the unknown thing that would be scarce or unfixable or whatever?

<snip>

Or does that not work because there's always an expert player who will have the knowledge to point out that, yes but this whole *class* of things will have gone?

The latter, I think.

In order to keep the aforesaid "gritty, hardscrabble Traveller future," I think we need some reason for the prevalence of high tech to NOT substantially alter the laws of supply and demand as we currently understand them. We want a future which is simultaneously familiar enough that players to feel comfortable making assumptions about what is and is not routine, yet strange enough that the occasional surprise is still possible.

I'm reminded of the creative way John Ringo handled this in his Posleen War series. The high tech seen in these works can only be constructed on a handicraft basis, because the exacting construction standards can only be met by using psionic perception to supervise nanobots working on the molecular level. Of course, this specific model doesn't work for Traveller (or else the Zhodani would have long ago eclipsed everyone else). But some such handwavium restriction is needed, if (as Doug pointed out up thread) we want access to TL 15 tech but without a trans-scarcity/transhuman society. As I see it, we need a way to use nanotech to produce items in the factory/lab, yet not allow nanotech to work *outside* such a setting.

I rather hate to propose it but . . . perhaps one reason Grandfather sealed himself away from the rest of reality is that during the Ancient War a truly fiendish nanotech Final Weapon got deployed across Known Space. This weapon is fiendish because it is totally undetectable and unremarkable . . . until someone begins to deploy nanotech outside a carefully-sterile laboratory environment. Once new-build nanotech is detected by the Final Wapon, it activates to completely destroy those primitive new devices in subtle and undetectable ways. To the new devices inventors it appears as if their efforts at non-lab use simply fail. After a while, everybody simply gives up on developing nanotech for any except the most highly-controlled (and thus very expensive) uses.

Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein

"I studied the Koran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as Muhammed." Alexis de Tocqueville (1843)

"We know a little about a lot of things; just enough to make us dangerous." Dean Winchester

"It has been my experience that a gun doesn't care who pulls its trigger." Newton Knight (as portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), to a scoffing Confederate tax collector facing the weapons held by Knight's young children and wife.