In fiction, how much does it typically cost to produce an average space-faring warship?

[Evil_Captor]

Basically, mfring power in space will be very cheap because you can build huge solar arrays in space … no gravity so you can make them very flimsy. Also, you can create space smelters just by constructing huge lenses that concentrate sunlight to industrial smelter temperatures at a given point … once again, very flimsy, very light, transparent mylar maybe, or some more futuristic material.

You get your materials by putting small solar-powered motors on asteroids then, slowly and over time, alter their orbit so they end up going to the space mfrg site (probably not in near-Earth orbit … and lenses to create space furnaces prolly work better a little closer to the sun anyway.

Anyway, you run the asteroids thorugh the solar furnaces a time or two … first to blow off the volatiles and get all the elements purified … in space, the tendency will be for the different materials to blow off in concentric rings distributed by mass … no gravity to mix em together you know … then you take the nickel, iron, maybe some carbon from a carbonaceous asteroid (they are known to exist) and run them through your lens furnace, you got a molten steel blob. Pump some gas into it and you got a perfectly formed molten steel bubble … a ship’s hull. Hell, get real clever with how you pump the gas in and you could have concentric molten steel bubbles … basically, the entire superstructure of the ship is constructed by the furnace itself. Manufactuing is DIFFERENT in space … and very possibly, much, much cheaper.

I’m a goin with the “really cheap” end of manufacturing in space. Course there could be some fly in the ointment, but overalll … millions of ships … easily … once you get all the parts set up. It’ll take years to get those asteroids from the ateroid belt to smeplace between Earth and Venus. But once that happens … BAM! Space fleets are easy! As are space habitats.

[silenus]

@Lemur866

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.

Thos sort of stuff always bugs me, along with RealityChuck’s whole argument. Laws of physics? Those have “changed” every century since Man has started examining them. Our understanding of them now may say that FTL is impossible, but that means nothing. Who knows what we will discover tomorrow?

I for one am always willing to embrace possibilities.

[Lumpy]

@Der_Trihs

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.

The novella The Outcasts of Heaven Belt by Joan Vinge has a (admittedly poor, struggling) planet be just able to afford a single ramscoop ship to carry seven people to another system on a trading expdedition.

With realistically foreseeable technology, the ship itself would probably be cheaper than the energy needed to propel it. Antimatter or beamed power for example imply a humungous infrastructure just to make the trip possible.

[Der_Trihs]

@Lemur866

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.

Or by machines or by fanatics who don’t care about the time involved. Warships are less likely in such a scenario, but not “incoherent”. For example, a warship could be sent to destroy a colony founded by people that the people sending the ship have a fanatic hatred for. Not a very practical thing to do, true, but presumably the people sending and crewing the ship just don’t care about that.

[Alessan]

@silenus

Thos sort of stuff always bugs me, along with RealityChuck’s whole argument. Laws of physics? Those have “changed” every century since Man has started examining them. Our understanding of them now may say that FTL is impossible, but that means nothing. Who knows what we will discover tomorrow?

I for one am always willing to embrace possibilities.

Amen. The most arrogant think a scientist can say is that something is impossible.

[JoelUpchurch]

@RealityChuck

Oh, please.
4. No matter what advances are made in technology, the laws of physics and chemistry aren’t going to change. We would have to build ships out of materials that exist today. Any advances involve new combinations of the building blocks we already have. And any new combinations are going to be far more expensive than what we’re using now.

It is interesting that Lord Kelvin declared that there was no way that the sun could be billions of years old, since there was no source if energy that would allow it to shine for billions of years. His estimate of the age of the earth was 20-40 million years. The thing is that Lord Kelvin wasn’t an idiot. He was a brilliant scientist.

There is no final word in science only the latest word. At one time aluminum was a precious metal and we now use it to hold our beer. Even in my youth the carbon fiber and ceramics we use routinely today were science fiction. In 1974 an iPhone was science fiction (The Mote in God’s Eye) and now the author owns one.

Now scientists are predicting that diamond will be so cheap we will be building our houses out of it. Do you want to bet against them?

[AncientHumanoid]

@MostlyClueless

I’m signing up for the telephone sanitizers.

Your agonizer, please.

[Chimera]

In the Star Wars Universe, Han won the Millenium Falcon from Lando in a card game. Early on, Luke told Han that they could almost buy their own ship for the 10,000 credits that Han wanted. So clearly, ships are dirty cheap. Of course, I wouldn’t consider George Lucas and the Universe he created to be any model of proper economics when Lando’s Cloud City is friggin IMMENSE and yet is “small enough” to be overlooked by the Guild and the Empire.

The Star Trek Universe is even worse. There allegedly is no money and they have “replicators” that make things from “energy” which seems to be unlimited and cheap (and extremely unrealistic).

[Lemur866]

The Star Trek universe makes perfect sense, given the premise. You have cheap energy, you have replicators that can make any damn thing you can imagine except living organisms, and that’s only because the writers didn’t want to have to deal with the implications.

So what the hell would you need money? What are you going to buy with it? With everything coming out of a replicator you don’t need money for 95% of everything you need.

Yes, there will still be scarce resources like land or starships. But it’s perfectly feasable to exchange those things on a non-monetary basis. After all, most people are going to be incapable of providing valuable goods and services, because replicators and automation could do almost everything better. How are you going to make a living as a prostitute when people can visit holosuites? How are you going to make a living as an entertainer when there are 300 years of recorded entertainment on file? And even if people still want new stuff, how can you compete against amateurs who write for free, like we do here on the Straight Dope?

You’d have to have something special to offer to hope to be compensated for the pathetic work you’d be able to do. But luckily for you, you don’t need money, because everything comes out of a slot in the wall. You never produce anything anyone wants, but that’s OK because you never need to consume anything produced by other people.

And for those few things that are still scarce, there are other was to distribute them than money.

During the feudal era, it was almost impossible to buy land with money, because land was regarded as a special sort of good that belonged entirely to the king, who handed out grants of land to his cronies in return for their pledge of military service and fealty. Those cronies handed out land to their cronies, and so on, until you got to the serfs who were regarded as part of the land deals.

So even though it might be more efficient in the 23rd century to use money to exchange the few scarce goods that are left, it’s also possible to imagine that people find it distasteful and did away with money entirely. Imagine going up to the king of England in 1342 and offering to buy a manor for a sackful of gold. You’d get slapped in the face. Yes, you could be elevated to the aristocracy for certain favors, including helping the king monetarily, but such things were never done openly. It would be honorable to march an army into someone’s land and kill them and take all their stuff, it would be dishonorable to buy it from them. Different mindset.

And so, if you want to travel in space on the coolest starships, you can’t just buy a ticket. You have to get a place there by other means. You have to join Starfleet. But luckily for you, Starfleet isn’t supported by taxes or workers back on Earth, because those chumps can’t do anything worthwhile anyway. It’s created entirely by volunteers who do that work for fun, and anyone who doesn’t like doing it for fun can go back home and get everything handed to them out of a replicator slot, just like the other 99% of humanity.

[msmith537]

@Chimera

In the Star Wars Universe, Han won the Millenium Falcon from Lando in a card game. Early on, Luke told Han that they could almost buy their own ship for the 10,000 credits that Han wanted. So clearly, ships are dirty cheap. Of course, I wouldn’t consider George Lucas and the Universe he created to be any model of proper economics when Lando’s Cloud City is friggin IMMENSE and yet is “small enough” to be overlooked by the Guild and the Empire.

Clearly it’s difficult to make equate made up currency from a ficticious Galactic civilization to our own. However they were able to book passage on the Millenium Falcon for the price of Lukes piece of shit used land speeder.

Again, Cloud City might be immense by our own terrestrial standards. By the standards of a Galactic Empire spanning thousands of systems with the ability to create (that’s not a) moon-sized space stations and miles long battleships, Cloud City might be the equivalent of some wildcatter well. A “large” mine might be on a planetary scale.

@Chimera

The Star Trek Universe is even worse. There allegedly is no money and they have “replicators” that make things from “energy” which seems to be unlimited and cheap (and extremely unrealistic).

They can’t replicate people. The Federation can replicate ships as fast as they like, but they still need crews to pilot them. Although between the ships AI and androids like Data, I have no idea why.

@JoelUpchurch

Now scientists are predicting that diamond will be so cheap we will be building our houses out of it. Do you want to bet against them?

Probably not, simply because diamonds are hard, but very brittle.

[Merijeek]

@msmith537

Clearly it’s difficult to make equate made up currency from a ficticious Galactic civilization to our own. However they were able to book passage on the Millenium Falcon for the price of Lukes piece of shit used land speeder.

Not quite. They were able to pay the down payment (with a final price almost twice what Han originally asked for - a price which Luke thought was practically extortion) with the quick sale of Luke’s crappy land speeder. That’s like saying a car dealership is giving away cars for free because they’re not requiring anything down.

@msmith537

Again, Cloud City might be immense by our own terrestrial standards. By the standards of a Galactic Empire spanning thousands of systems with the ability to create (that’s not a) moon-sized space stations and miles long battleships, Cloud City might be the equivalent of some wildcatter well. A “large” mine might be on a planetary scale.

Yeah, that nitpick didn’t make much sense.

@msmith537

They can’t replicate people. The Federation can replicate ships as fast as they like, but they still need crews to pilot them. Although between the ships AI and androids like Data, I have no idea why.

Shitty writing, really. They can transport people (and Data). They can deconstruct them and reconstruct them at the tiniest level. But they can’t be pumping out warships full of mass-produced Data-droids because…?

As soon as they put Transporters into the show all actual logic disappeared from them - at least they way they’ve always worked. If they’d been some sort of gate mechanism, or an actual transporter or something, it would have been fine. But no, they can reproduce people, Earl Grey Tea, and, presumably, starships with the push of a button. The technology is there and it is shown to us.

Hell, their non-sentient ship’s computer can, with one badly-phrased command, create a sentient super-genius intelligence.

-Joe

[Silophant]

@RealityChuck

Oh, please.

1. Galactic empires are a pulp fiction absurdity. They would be impossible to govern, given the limitation of the speed of light. The British Empire had trouble when it took months of travel time, and they weren’t trying to control an entire planet (they also reached their biggest extent after the invention of the telegraph).

2. You’re using pure circular reasoning: If you have a galactic empire, you can build enough ships to create a galactic empire.

3. The idea of FTL travel is a necessary plot device; while it can be theorized, no one has come up with any real-world solution. How exactly do you bend space and time? And how do you do it in such a way that you can send an entire ship across the universe? The power requirements would probably make a supernova seem like a AA battery.

4. No matter what advances are made in technology, the laws of physics and chemistry aren’t going to change. We would have to build ships out of materials that exist today. Any advances involve new combinations of the building blocks we already have. And any new combinations are going to be far more expensive than what we’re using now.

5. We would have to get energy from sources that exist today (at the very basic level, it’s all atomic energy at the root). Antimatter is the magic solution, but on a purely realistic basis, there is no way to create it that won’t cost a fortune, and the idea of being able to harness it dubious, while the idea of being able to harness it safely is absurd.

6. ST may portray starships as being battleships. Science fiction used to portray people building spaceships in their backyards and flying to the moon in them. You can portray whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean it can happen.

It is silly to ask questions about economics in science fiction. Few SF writers care, since it’s not important to the story. The economics never work in any rational way. So pick any number you choose: 50 quatloos, ten HUCs, a billion and half acacia seeds. It’s meaningless.

Says the guy whose current signature is:

[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
“Imperial Battleship, halt the flow of time!”
[/QUOTE]

[Lumpy]

@Merijeek

Hell, their non-sentient ship’s computer can, with one badly-phrased command, create a sentient super-genius intelligence.

-Joe

My fanwank for that is that ever since the events of 11001001, Starfleet’s holodeck computers can sometimes generate true sentience, only no one in the Federation can figure out exactly why or how.

The price that Luke thought was outrageous and almost enough to buy their own ship, was the price a smuggler was charging to break through a planetary blockade.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Merijeek

Shitty writing, really. They can transport people (and Data).

Protein chauvinist!

Data is clearly a person.

Hell, their non-sentient ship’s computer can, with one badly-phrased command, create a sentient super-genius intelligence.

-Joe

I’m not convinced the ship’s computer isn’t sentient.

[Merijeek]

@Lumpy

My fanwank for that is that ever since the events of 11001001, Starfleet’s holodeck computers can sometimes generate true sentience, only no one in the Federation can figure out exactly why or how.

If they somehow hadn’t been able to copy the guy onto a TNG version of a floppy disk it’d make sense.

Still, that was an anomaly - even if it was a strange one. Why they don’t have mass-produced Datas on every ship (no, they didn’t need to take him apart to do that, so that episode was silly too) I can’t even begin to fathom. How may times would the Enterprise have been destroyed if they hadn’t had a being on board who was immune to blahblahblahoftheweek?

Other Starfleet ships must be blowing up with pretty frightening regularity due to various anomalies, seeing as how nobody else has a Data that’s immune to one.

@Skald_the_Rhymer

Protein chauvinist!

Data is clearly a person.

Actually, he’s more of a Person+. I could have pointed out that they could have mass-produced Rikers on every ship - but shit, who wants that? I could also have pointed out that Troi would have been possible too, but outside the U.S.S. Brothel Frigate all that would lead to would be all sorts of Trois being choked to death because they just wouldn’t STFU about the completely obvious.

@Skald_the_Rhymer

I’m not convinced the ship’s computer isn’t sentient.

I thought part of what made Data a Big Deal was that he was sentient, and that a person had built him?

-Joe

[foolsguinea]

@Alessan

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.

In his 1843 report to Congress, the then commissioner of the Patent Office, Henry L. Ellsworth, included the following comment: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.”

Often misquoted as, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Quotations Weblog » Archive » Famous misquotes: Everything has been invented
Text of References in the Patent Office Pony

[Merijeek]

@foolsguinea

Often misquoted as, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Quotations Weblog » Archive » Famous misquotes: Everything has been invented
Text of References in the Patent Office Pony

It’s funny how pedants go on about how people are wrong when they misquote it. And, of course, they are wrong.

What he said was so much more shortsighted.

-Joe

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Merijeek

If they somehow hadn’t been able to copy the guy onto a TNG version of a floppy disk it’d make sense.

Still, that was an anomaly - even if it was a strange one. Why they don’t have mass-produced Datas on every ship (no, they didn’t need to take him apart to do that, so that episode was silly too) I can’t even begin to fathom. How may times would the Enterprise have been destroyed if they hadn’t had a being on board who was immune to blahblahblahoftheweek?

Other Starfleet ships must be blowing up with pretty frightening regularity due to various anomalies, seeing as how nobody else has a Data that’s immune to one.

Actually, he’s more of a Person+. I could have pointed out that they could have mass-produced Rikers on every ship - but shit, who wants that? I could also have pointed out that Troi would have been possible too, but outside the U.S.S. Brothel Frigate all that would lead to would be all sorts of Trois being choked to death because they just wouldn’t STFU about the completely obvious.

I thought part of what made Data a Big Deal was that he was sentient, and that a person had built him?

-Joe

There may be whole starships entirely crewed by full Betazeds. I can think of several reasons why, even in a pluralistic society like the Federation, most Starfleet ships tend to be crewed by mostly one species, with small minorities of other species, if any. If Troi’s mother (whose name I’m not even going to try to spell) is any indication, adult Betazeds prefer to communicate telepathically rather than vocally; I think non-telepaths (and even touch telepaths) are going to find that too disconcerting for comfort in the long run.

[Merijeek]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

There may be whole starships entirely crewed by full Betazeds. I can think of several reasons why, even in a pluralistic society like the Federation, most Starfleet ships tend to be crewed by mostly one species, with small minorities of other species, if any. If Troi’s mother (whose name I’m not even going to try to spell) is any indication, adult Betazeds prefer to communicate telepathically rather than vocally; I think non-telepaths (and even touch telepaths) are going to find that too disconcerting for comfort in the long run.

I’m not talking about ships full of Betazoids or whatever. I’m talking about taking the top guy in your class, slapping his ass into a transporter, hitting “1-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-Begin-Copy” and then stepping back and watching the war end quickly and easily.

Do the same with Data. Or your biggest and most ass-kickingist ship. Whichever. They can press a button and spit out ANYTHING.

Is the Enterprise really the best you’ve got? Copy the whole thing. Everything. Including the crew.

-Joe

[msmith537]

Really it’s just lack of imagination wrt Star Trek and their transporter/replicator/holodeck technology. Here is a civilization that can create nearly any object or simulate naerly any environment out of thin air and what do they use it for? Kitchen appliances and an on board glorified Dave & Busters amusement center.

Why wouldn’t there be holo-emitters or replicators all through the ship to produce whatever is needed whenever it is needed? Why don’t we see the crew constantly reconfiguring the inside of the ship at the touch of a button?