[gurps] Tinker's Starship?

[midnightwind at comcast.net]

SNIP
> 
> If it's a ship, and thus mobile, what would prevent the world's 
> government/s or corporations from pooling resources and buying one or 
> two (or more) and keeping them on world and only sending them off world 
> for maintenance?
> 

Infrastructure and know-how.   Assume that the superfactoryship has the transportation and utilities equipment  needed to both harvest and process, as well as transport, the raw materials included.  Who runs and does standard maintenance on all that on a TL6 planet?

Depending on factors like how fast FTL Drive is, or the cost of starships vs. that of more mundane equipment, the customer worlds can get their processed products for a relative bargain compared with investing in all that infrastructure.  Of course, they'll be asking the superfactoryspaceship to help them build that infrastructure, but only after a profit can be had.

Such a ship would be useful for war devastated planets (bombed back to the Stone Age, so to speak).  Instead of waiting for streams of transports to bring in equipment they "think" they need, they have the superfactoryspaceship in orbit until such a time as the infrastructure is adequately restored.

Also, another scenario:  a world that has infrastructure, but uses that infrastructure to keep the planet from slipping back into a lower TL (ongoing natural disasters)?  Bringing in a nanofactory that they can rent when needed, rather than investing in "another" nanofactory themselves... sort of like renting computer resources from Amazon.com... does my company really need to buy $100,000 in servers?  Or can I rent that computer power for alot less-- especially if I don't need that much power all the time?

I can see where it could be viable, depending on the circumstances.  Again, it'd have to be a scenario where nanofacs are pretty expensive, as are ships, compared with more mundane equipment...  Since it's your galaxy, you can manipulate it in any way you like to make it viable... are raw materials common enough that a TL6 planet has no way to make a profit on it, even if it's rich in raw materials, because the cost of space transport is ridiculous?  How adequate are robots for skilled labor?  That sort of thing.

The question is, once you've made such a universe, is it going to be any fun?

-vk