Fabricators

Makes me wonder if the asteroid base will show up, maybe parked in the next system over. Jump shuttles pretty much resolve gravity well issues so surface mining would work.

I think due to history AI and automAtion is not looked on as a good thing

If not automated could be a small base. Even family run. They could expand their living quarters while stocking supplies from the fabricator. LOL a book there all by itself. Designing the base. Bootstrapping the initial setup with the ability to make anything but limited supplies at first as the need for a base of operations is lacking. Ingenuity comes to rescue and creative solutions. The base expands through the asteroid exponentially and also the living quarters. People bring in their family's. It becomes a home/base in its own right. Maybe a backup for humanity.

Also with time could not emitters be placed around an asteroid? Could it be jumped as an ability to escape or just re-position it. Maybe a super long recharge time.

I like it. For food on the asteroid, see "The Martian" by Andy Weir. Lots of Potatoes... 🙂

I have not read that but I just added it to me list.

Ah, reminds me that I have 4 baked potatoes in the fridge we need to eat up. Yummy.

In in, the guy stranded on Mars starts taking Martian soil into his hab, and mixing it with his waste material. He could only mix in a certain amount of new soil per week, to keep the microbes growing at the proper rate. Once enough soil had been created, he could use that to grow potatoes with the highest carb/space. Then it was a race to get them matured in time before he ran out of consumable pre-packaged food. He also had to supplement vitamins to meet his nutritional needs.

Lots of complex chemistry, but it sure seems realistic. Definitely worth a read.

Thread drift. There is a movement afoot in the boating community for the use of composting heads. #1 goes in a bottle and #2 in a bucket of peat moss.

In space the system makes sense as you can use the compost to grow stuff and réclame the water in the urine. I still can't see the point on a boat as you end up with a bottle of urine and a bucket of poo compost you have to deal with. Ehhhhh, indoor plumbing has its advantages.

On a boat I wonder how many people are "Sure I compost everything. Yep on top of it...". Then later that night splash....

Just seems like so little of a overall problem. Besides sometimes the solution causes worse problems. Like now you have then end product of the composting. Where can you put it that won't harm something.

Back to the thread

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I thought the fabricators could produce food. Do I have that wrong? I thought they didn't just to keep the load down. If they can't of course a system of recycling would have to be created. But with access to the resources in a system. Water should not be a real problem.

The fabricators aren't the issue. The raw materials refined, synthesized, and/or purified for use in the fabricator would be the bottleneck. It's not like you can just dump in a lump of coal in the fabricator and collect diamonds. Perhaps methane, ammonia, and carbon dioxide could be turned into Soylent Green.

Corinar, being an advanced industrialized planet, was able to provide those inputs to make copies of the fabricators. There are some limited supplies on board the Aurora. Earth should be able to provide them as well, so either Earth starts duplicating them or they get them shipped in from the Pentaurus cluster.

No, Can't produce food but they do make a hell of a good Twinky.

😉

Yep kinda like the 3D printers we are just getting into nowadays. If I remember correctly the Aurora was using something like a 3D printer in the first set of books before the knocked off the Takaran ship had the fabricator. I would love to get my hands on a real fabricator (I hope I live long enough to see a real fabricator).

I have been thinking of the fabricators lately. The use is so open. You could eventually have a fabricator reproduce itself. With some automated mining ships with a jump drive you could have them retrieve base materials and the fabricator just keeps going. Automated.

The idea of self-replicating machines that you dump no an asteroid/plant and some time later you got a new shiny space port or some facilities ready for you.

Still the combination of both instantaneous space flight and fabricators would change economy immensely, with transport and manufacturing prices dropping to nothing, while demand for natural materials should sky rocket, and will likely cause rapid expansion into space. I can already see containers trains blinking across the galaxy from asteroid to planets.

I like it. For food on the asteroid, see “The Martian” by Andy Weir. Lots of Potatoes…

I am not sure that our repl/fabr-icators can manufacture food e.g. Takara still require to import a lot of food, but I think that they can fit perfectly in some sort of waste/sewage recycling system.

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I have been thinking of the fabricators lately. The use is so open. You could eventually have a fabricator reproduce itself. With some automated mining ships with a jump drive you could have them retrieve base materials and the fabricator just keeps going. Automated.
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The idea of self-replicating machines that you dump no an asteroid/plant and some time later you got a new shiny space port or some facilities ready for you.

Still the combination of both instantaneous space flight and fabricators would change economy immensely, with transport and manufacturing prices dropping to nothing, while demand for natural materials should sky rocket, and will likely cause rapid expansion into space. I can already see containers trains blinking across the galaxy from asteroid to planets.

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I like it. For food on the asteroid, see “The Martian” by Andy Weir. Lots of Potatoes…
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I am not sure that our repl/fabr-icators can manufacture food e.g. Takara still require to import a lot of food, but I think that they can fit perfectly in some sort of waste/sewage recycling system.

It would need an AI to run it as problems crop up and need solving. The fear is that the AI turns rogue.

We don't need to go as far as completely automated miningproduction operations, regardless you have to realize that 'jump drive' + 'fabricators' combination is a complete game changer.

Jump drives will allow to over come the biggest hurdle of Terran return into space i.e. the astronomical cost of overcoming the gravity well, sending components from the surface into orbit. Jump drives (or even Jung accurate FTL) will allow quick, cheap and fast access to natural resources in the asteroid belt. As well as establishing longerfaster communicationsupply-lines extending Earth sphere of influence. Additionally fabricator equals fast growing industrial base (as long as you have the resources you can grow exponentially) and independence (if that colony in BD+25 had a fabricator, it could easily establish a colony, and who know maybe avoid its fate due to the volcano). We also got new shiny power source..

Overall you got everything you need for a golden age. Well at least after Jung are dealt with, and that tech is deemed safe enough to be released to the general public.

p.s. I don't know why but quotes keep getting messed up in your post (from the looks of it you are missing the first two lines), also quote only the relevant part of the post to your reply, otherwise why full quote, when the same thing is written in the post above, at least IMO.