Re: Colonial powers and battles

>Someone pointed out that the "low-tech" colonial systems of the
future
>for metalwork might easily churn out military designs of today. Let
me
>put it this way, the 2185 Newest AutoFactory from UberZaibatsu might
>well manufacture a state of the art grav tank from scratch in about 2
>hours, without any human intervention, and might also be capable of
>building passenger cars, trucks, LTA vehicles, etc. all without
>anything but a setting switch.

(snipple)

>Would they have the designs? Probably 100 year old designs
>de-classified would be easily available. 50 year old designs would
>probably be common. 20 year old designs might need permission. new
>designs would not be. But if computer memory has increased say 1000
>fold in the last two decades, and it keeps going, we'll have many
many
>orders of magnitude more data storage for a neglibible cost so
sure...
>I'd load up every conceivable design into my AutoFactory Colonial
>(2180 edition... we couldn't afford the new one...we're a poor
colony)

And how many AutoFacs will you have?  If they're cheap and every
village will have one, then every insurgency will also have one.  If
they're expensive and each colony only has a few, then a) you'll hit
production bottlenecks, and b) sabotage becomes a serious threat.

In the Alarishi view, having cheap autofacs is a good thing, because
if you have an insurgency, then you probably deserve it.  But you
might expect some governments to be stressed by that sort of thing.