Was re: RFACS but diverging into philosophic ramblings about future tech...

>i'm more on Tom B's side (why is it i always end up siding with
Barclay?
>maybe he slipped some sort of subliminal message into an email
somewhere
>...), but with some reservations.

Well, Tom does work for a software company in Ottawa who get involved in
some, uh, interesting contracts with the govt/police...  I'm sure he has
access to all kinds of interesting technology...

>who's to say that more advanced kit will require heavy infrastructure?
i
>see most of the key improvements being in the intelligence of the
>equipment; the sensors, software and automatic control of the gun. now,
>today this is high-tech, and there's not that much robotic kit in use
in
>general technology (cars, washing machines, etc), but i suspect that by
>2150, everyday things will have a lot of roboticism, making it easy to
>build a swish FC - processing power is Too Cheap To Meter (tm), you can
>pull an imager out of the digital camera you take holiday snaps with,
and
>take some actuators from the car, washing machine, etc. these bits of
tech
>aren't hard-to-come-by military-specific items, they're general-purpose
>consumer components cranked out in their millions by Panasonic,
Phillips,
>General Electric, etc.

[snip]

>why on earth would 2150-era people consider 2000-era kit to be 'tried
and
>true', something 'they know works'? why wouldn't they use 2100-era kit?
>you're suggesting that they would see *one-hundred and fifty*-year-old
kit
>as acceptable battlefield equipment! this strikes me as rather daft.

[snip the rest]

I guess that in the end, the whole point of what I was saying was to
question the assumption we (well, some of "we") have that technology is
on
a constantly developing/improving upward slope, and that by necessity
everything that exists a couple hundred years from now will be so
advanced
that it is nearly unrecognizable to us today.  That may be the case. 
Given
the rate of change of technology we're seeing now, and over the past 50
years, it is easy to see that as a realistic probability.

But to be honest, I think that if we extrapolate tech to the degree that
we
could under those assumptions, we could easily explain away nearly
everything in the Tuffleyverse as improbable (at least from the
Stargrunt/Dirtside sense).  If you have tech *THAT* advanced, why not
have
armies of AI controlled machines that self replicate fighting your
battles.
 Why bother with fallible PBIs, when it should be easy enough to
eliminate
them all together, or at least ALMOST all together.

It's kind of strange that we allow certain tech advances to be part of
the
acceptible suspension of disbelief (grav tech, FTL, etc), but don't go
the
whole way.  Why is this?  'Cause we're playing a game, and it is much
more
interesting and compelling and fun to have SOLDIERS fighting each other.
 A
veneer of sci-fi and future tech covers what is basically the same sort
of
fighting as we see today, and have seen for most of the post WWII
period.  

We *could* say "sure, all the tech is SO advanced that even out on the
far
flung colony worlds they have stuff that makes what we've got here and
now
look like we're rubbing sticks together to start a fire..."

And perhaps that makes sense, from a logical perspective.

But I don't find it nearly as interesting as the alternative, which is
to
self-limit the technological expansion and development in certain cases.
 I
was advocating a technological environment which is of a greater range
of
difference that what you and Tom B and others have suggested.  I was
doing
so not because it makes more sense for it to be that way (in the end,
how
could we possibly *know* anything at all... we're just making educated
guesses), but because it makes for a more compelling story.  I can't
possibly suggest that "my way is more likely than your way, and you are
wrong".  But I think that having the range of technology that I'm
suggesting is both more interesting from a story sense, and more likely
given the way the game was written in the first place.	Though there are
no
specific directives in the rules to this extent (and in fact St. Jon et
al
have gone to great lengths to NOT impose a very detailed universe on the
game system), I get the feeling from stuff in the rules and in the fuff
that it isn't a universe where super-high-tech is totally all-pervasive.

This is entirely a personal subjective view, but I think it makes for a
more interesting gaming environment.

>> Just some food for thought, on this cold, blustery and snowy Sunday
>> evening.  And curses to all you Ozzies who are sitting around in your
nice
>> warm summer.  I just scraped 5 or 6 cm of snow off my car... <g>
>
>it's getting close to spring here - a mild snap, plus i saw some
flowers
>poking their way out of the ground this morning. of course, UK spring
is
>still cold enough to liquefy carbon dioxide :-/.
>
>tom

OK, you suck :)

We had more snow since I wrote the original post, so now the total on
the
ground here is close to 20cm I think, and I've had to dig out my car a
couple more times, and there is more expected tonight...  And it's cold
(real cold, none of this UK pretend chilliness stuff... way below zero
C,
now that's more of a winter...)

Whine, snivel, moan, snivel. I'm sure I get pleanty of sympathy from the
list membership <g>

Adrian