[gurps] Heinlein Battlesuits

[Craig Paskett]

I think it will be take much longer to adopt any new transportation technology this time.  We now have a government willing to bail out failed companies and unions determined to keep existing jobs.  Also the switch from horse to motorized transport used the same basic infrastructure.  Most proposed new transport tech involves a major investment in sometimes radically different infrastructure.  It will be a long time before we see anything new taking the place of wheeled, powered vehicles on a large scale.

CKP

--- On Sun, 11/16/08, Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer at gmx.de> wrote:

From: Onno Meyer <Onno.Meyer at gmx.de>
Subject: Re: [gurps] Heinlein Battlesuits
To: "The GURPSnet mailing list" <gurpsnet-l at sjgames.com>
Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 10:45 AM

> > Once you get sufficiently advanced hover/anti-grav, doesn't it
make
> > legged/wheeled/tracked drivetrains almost obsolete?  Why walk when
you
> > can fly just as easily?
> 
> Price? Polluting side-effects?  

As written in Vehicles, no. Otherwise it would limit CG, of course.

> We don't use motorized shopping carts,
> except as a convenience for those who cannot easily walk through
> stores.  And even those weren't in use for nearly a century after
> motorized vehicles were in common use.  There are still plenty of uses
> for wheeled vehicles for which grav technology would be far too
> expensive for a long time after it's introduced.

Depends on the rules. VE contragrav is AMAZINGLY cheap and
efficient. Just look at the numbers. Small transport carts may 
be an exception, but once the total cost is in the five or six 
digits, the price of CG is no longer a factor.
 
> Momentum is another reality.  We have the technology /now/ to use
> inexpensive one-person motorized or road-bound transport that'd be a
> lot more energy efficient than the cars we use now, and in many ways
> freer to navigate and with less traffic jams.  Why don't we use them?
> They'd be a whole new marketing approach to people who already have
> cars, plus there's a large industry dependent on the cars and buses we
> use now - and they won't exactly support the effort to supplant their
> business with something new.

When the new technology is superior enough, the old falls 
by the wayside. There was a large horse transport industry,
once upon a time. 
_______________________________________________
GurpsNet-L mailing list <GurpsNet-L at sjgames.com>
http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l