> On Mar 28, 2016, at 10:55 AM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
>
> *Common, convenient space travel* implies/requires "cheap, abundant energy".  Which is why, among other things, we're still mostly stuck at the bottom of our gravity well, and ship's boats make great WMDs.
>
> A low-energy TU is one where most people don't do much Travelling. Conversely, a high-energy, high-traffic one is one where the genie is already well and truly out of the bottle.

Moreover, a TU where people don’t do much Travelling pretty much excludes PC-scale ships. If ships are rare, they’re really expensive, and only governments can afford them.

A TU that doesn’t have much trade has no need for an Imperial Navy, or an Imperium, as such.

You cannot have both a universe where PC's have a Type A far trader, that Far Trader is the standard mode of interstellar trade and an Imperial Navy patrolling a couple thousand subsectors.

The economics simply don’t make any sense at all. A low-trade TU cannot generate sufficient taxes to sustain such an Imperial Navy. Certainly not one with Tigress battleships and the like.

You can HAVE such a TU, it just won’t have internal consistency.

A relic-based TU like Carlos is proposing can work, but it’ll be far more anarchic and disorganized than he thinks, I think. PC’s will acquire ships by finding wrecks and bolting various bits of alien technology together until it works..kind of :-) Their ships will be far more Mad Max than the OTU.  Fun to play in, though ….

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs