Like how plastic is so much more expensive than metal or wood?
Well, thanks for that Captain Bring-Down.
Oh, when will Don’t Fight The Hypothetical come and struggle with **RealityChuck **for the soul of this thread?
(Oops. Didn’t realize that poster had been banned. Sorry.)
There are a few fictional universes where this is the case (Dan Simmons and Hyperion, David Feintuch’s Hope series)
Oooh! Oooh! I wanna better myself by working eighteen hour shifts in an asteroid strip mine!
-Joe
Done.
I want to be a Red Shirt.
Okay, now we just need some Space Janitors and some Space Sump Pumpers. Certainly there will be some people who wish to better themselves with Space Mops and Space Shopvacs?
-Joe
I’m signing up for the telephone sanitizers.
Yo. I assume ot comes with holodeck-vixen priveledges? I got the wetvac after all… Once a week aughta do.
Service guarantees Citizenship!
So what you’re saying is that basically every waking moment of every day will involve sucking or…sucking?
-Joe
Sucking, or drilling.
Yeah, that’s the thing with modern scientists. In the past, the great thinkers would tell everyone who’d listen that with science, anything is possible; now they take great joy in telling people that their dreams of the future will never come true. I like the old scientists better. Einstein would never say that fast intersteller travel is impossible - he’d say we don’t know how to do it yet.
That’s never bothered me. They’ve got batteries, and it makes sense that things are set up for artificial gravity and its redheaded twin, inertial dampening, to be a top priority, probably second only to oxygen scrubbing.
Many have indicated that getting the resources to build star-faring ships is not the difficult part. So I guess this is why many science fic settings introduce an unobtainium to introduce some tension…
One of the central premises behind the Hammer’s Slammers series is that it’s too expensive for most cultures to design and build their own ground-based fighting vehicles, let alone starships.
And in Project Mars: A Technical Tale (written by Wernher von Braun!), the first question from one of the project leaders upon hearing the proposal for a Mars expedition is “How much is this going to cost?”
It’s a plot point in Mother of Demons that starships are so expensive (since they have to use slower than light extremely high energy ships with no soft sci-fi cheating) that interstellar expeditions are maybe once in a century or two occasions.
Jake: It means we don’t need money.
Nog: Well, if you don’t need money, you certainly don’t need mine.
yes, we are speculating about the cost of building fictional starships, and having fun with that. Relax and enjoy the ride.
Obviously, it depends on what sort of technology you’re imagining.
If we’re realistic, there’s no FTL, no ansibles, no magic energy sources, no gravity manipulation, no unobtanium, you obey the laws of physics, and so on.
Which means in this scenario the concept of an interstellar warship is incoherent. Who are you fighting? Why? When? How? Craft have to spend decades traveling between solar systems. They aren’t staffed by military people, they’re staffed with people who expect to spend almost their entire lives on a space ship, or spend decades cryogenically frozen. So something like Niven’s “Footfall” is possible. But that’s not a warship, that’s a colony ship that carries weapons.
Of course, even “realistic” SF tends to include things like fusion rockets that can take you to Alpha Centauri in decades. Fusion power is certainly possible and doesn’t violate any laws of physics, and neither does squeezing your fusion generator into a tiny engine you can fit in a car. But turning that fusion reactor into a fusion rocket won’t get you to Alpha Centauri in decades, because you can’t carry enough reaction mass to keep that ship accelerating to a high fraction of light speed. You’ve only got so much delta-v with a rocket, and carrying more fuel doesn’t increase your delta-v very much because now you’ve got to use most of your rocket fuel to move around more rocket fuel.
So it’s not building the space habitat that would be expensive. It’s the energy required to fling that to another star system. Of course, if you imagine cheap antigravity, then you don’t need no stinking rockets, and can just accelerate however hard you like, and since you’ve got antigravity you don’t even need to worry about squishing the crew. But even so it’s going to take a decade to reach even close stars. You’ve still got colony ships, not warships.
If we allow FTL, then all bets are off. I mean, FTL is impossible, so complaining that our fictional FTL is too expensive or too cheap is missing the point. Since we know nothing about how this fictional device works, an FTL drive could be as cheap as an iPhone, or as expensive as the entire 400 year industrial output of planet Earth between 1850 and 2250.