Development levels rather than tech levels (segué into soft-tech robofac factories)

How do Beasts reproduce? Do they use the same reproductive tract for cuts of meat and for juvenile Beasts? Do they have two different reproductive tracts? Or do they depend on cloning to reproduce, like plants that have been bred to produce infertile fruits? Those have different implications for metabolic cost and for sustainability in a low-DL economy, I think.

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I don’t think they do. Probably Matrices produce Beasts.

A Matrix would be something somewhere between a bioech exowomb and a bioengineered broad-spectrum host-mother-animal. Thinking of it one way you imagine it as sessile, with its food brought to it. The other way it might be a large browser like a rhinoceros. Both types are probably supplied to different economic niches. The Swiss-Army-knife version probably includes an array of gonads that produce the zygotes of different Beasts, but in commercial models you probably produce the zygotes separately and implant them. Matrices produced commercially are probably difficult to reproduce, but open-source and socialist Matrices probably have a built-in self-reproduction function.

Matrices probably work just fine with human, and certainly with at least some parahuman, embryos. So a colony on which the Matrices survived would have been able to continue with artificial reproduction through the Age of Isolation, even if their development level fell well below the level needed to produce and operate hard-tech exowombs. Which gives me an idea for a colony, maybe Simanta.

Pearl bodies show that plants are capable of producing a food as nutritious as milk. Beasts probably don’t suckle, but are born sufficiently advanced to thrive on plant foods.

You make me think of something I wondered about in connection with Transhuman Space: Are things moving toward the point where people don’t bear children genetically related to them, but buy fertilized ova from a supplier, perhaps with traits that don’t breed true, like hybrid seed (if I understand it correctly)?

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It varies from society to society. A lot especially of the rich ones are moving, but not necessarily to that point.

  • In the Empire (IDJ, that is) people have a collection of their gametes taken when they are inducted into the Imperial Service; the gametes are stored cryogenically with each Imperial Servant having deposits in at least three repositories in different star-systems. Then the Imperial servants are semi-permanently sterilised.

    When an Imperial servant wishes to have a child (which, customarily, they do in pairs and small groups) they obtain an ovum and some spermatozoa. They may withdraw their own from a repository (which can take a few weeks). They can use someone else’s that the owner gives or sells them, or that they inherit ownership of. They can get a genome (commercial, legacy, open-source, or bespoke) and have the chromosomes synthesised, then have those implanted into a (natural or synthetic) ovum. With these gametes they can have an ovum made, which they can either get implanted into the uterus of a woman or gestated in an exowomb.

    The cultural assumption is that couples are combining their own archival gametes if they are a heterosexual couple, using chromosome-implantation if neither of them can supply an spermatozoon, and using a synthetic ovum, chromosome implantation, and mitochondrion transplantation if they can’t supply an ovum. But some people are doing other things — that’s between them and their reproductive technicians: confidential, but they often talk about it and nobody much cares. Some women like to gestate at least once: opinions are divided about whether it is a good thing, but soft-TL10 obstetrics blunts the disincentives and it’s a more common choice than you might think.

    It’s not usual, but nevertheless common to have two children at once in separate exowombs, or one gestating naturally and the other in an exowomb, then chain the parental leave allowances of the two together so as to give a longer period of child-raising to both children. Triplets are much rarer. Quadruplets are considered a bad idea even with child-raising and house-keeping robots.

    Most Imperial servants assume that since there has been nothing wrong with their ancestors’ genes for the past five generations there will be nothing wrong now. Others choose to have parahuman children. A few have their DNA sequenced and an ideal combination of genes from each parent selected, then have a set of chromosomes synthesised that they could have produced naturally if every helpful crossing-over had occurred and the right chromosome ended up in the gamete at meiosis. The result is sometimes a sibship that is technically a clone, even though the children are years apart in age. And sometimes brothers and sisters who are genetically identical except as regards one sex chromosome. PCs have often encountered NPCs with identical twins who are much younger or older, and once with two pigeon pairs of twins, each having an identical twin in the other pair.

    There are some dark mutterings (amongst players, not amongst characters) the Home Office Reproductive Services is clandestinely supplying Imperials not with their own gametes but with (a) genetically engineered ones, (b) those of corrupt officials, or © those of Imperial heroes, stolen from the private deposits in the repositories.

  • On Simanta they have matrices at the regional prolesariums that produce and gestate zygotes of the various parahuman types. These are raised and socialised by specialist workers. Simantans do not expect ever to reproduce, and under most circumstances they are not fertile; their sexual organs are for recreation and not for procreation. However, they are all taught about sexual reproduction, gestation, childbirth, and child-raising at school, and their gonads are dormant, not vestigial. If they were to stop receiving the oral contraceptive that is added to all food on Simanta (it is not a contraceptive but inert to primitive humans) then they would become fertile. This is a precaution against economic or technological collapse.

Once you can replace the incest taboo with an incompatible-genetics taboo, much of the incentive to determine someone’s genetic parentage (as distinct from their environmental parentage) goes away. “Would you rather have a child who looks like you, or one who thinks like you?”

I’m not sure you can replace a taboo founded in the fear of moral impurity with an ethical guideline founded in prudential concerns. At least, in the process of turning into a taboo, the prudential guideline seems likely to mutate into an irrational aversion with different content.

In general, I like Brett’s guide to DLs. I have some thoughts of dubious value to add:

A. If this is for a player’s guide, the traditional player concerns are about equipment. Obviously, equipment that can be made locally will be cheap, and imports dear, but this document seems more oriented towards economics than retail. Unfortunately, I can’t see a compact way to handle that. Perhaps a table of various important gear types grouped by what DL makes it a “local” manufacture?

B. DL is significantly different than TL, and the whole TL structure is seriously compromised by the fact that most FB colonies are effectively post-apocalyptic. TL isn’t even a good guideline to equipment access since many things are supplied by self-replicating high tech gear. Perhaps something for "high tech stuff almost everyone has: biotech/genefixing/medical theory etc. Even with that, the TL relationship seems very rough at best.

C. Presumably most FB colonies at least had a plan for continued development if supplies from Earth stopped. It seems like most of these failed. I’m not sure this section is the right place to explain why, but my curiosity is piqued.

Tech level systems in GP RPGs such as ForeSight and GURPS are usually oriented towards describing the availability of kit for PCs, but in interstellar SF settings such as the Traveller universe, ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia, and Flat Black they have traditionally also served as an important part of the description of individual worlds, implying things about their development, technical sophistication, and social culture. What I’m doing with DL is trying to break that nexus. So, while DL will have an key influence on the relative prices of different item on different worlds and the absolute availability of weapons¹, it is also an important part of the qualitative description of a planet. The text I posted above it from the “Colonies” chapter, and specialised for that purpose. It answers “Just how poor and backward is this particular muddy hellhole?”.

When time comes for the Big Flat Black Ezi-Buy Catalogue each item will be listed with a price in SVU and a characteristic DL of manufacture, called perhaps its SL or sophistication level. SL will be kind of like TL, except that things that are commonly grown in Flat Black will have the corresponding SL of about 2 or 3. When you are on a colony with a given DL you will be able to buy local products with SL up to DL for the listed price, or one SL at bespoke prices, to two higher at prototype prices; you will be able to buy imports (except for weapons and military supplies) at a price given by the list price, the real exchange rate (0.71^(SL-DL)), and the mass (shipping costs). Or maybe I’ll tabulate an import price in crowns as well as the DLs.

As for the economic catastrophes of the colonies (1) I don’t want to describe it in the players’ guide because it doesn’t matter enough to deserve the word count it would take and I’m trying to minimise the content of history (2) I’d like to discuss it in a different thread.


¹ And to some extent ammunition. Anything that requires HEDM propellants and explosives will be interdicted by the Empire’s refusal to transport weapons even on consignment for governments. But smokeless powder grows on shrubs everywhere that’s DL2 of better. Even if the best weapon you can manage is a handcrafted muzzle-loading smoothbore, you can load it with capsules of gun-gel that you gather from a shrub — or use the same capsules in reloading cartridge-cases.

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It seems as if that implies a “who made God” type of question: Do the Matrices reproduce, giving birth to other Matrices? If they do, why have the intermediate level of Beasts? It seems as if a Matrix could, on one hand, bear another Matrix, and on the other, give birth to food packages. Particularly if Matrices are large browsers.

Unless your goal is to harvest smaller or scarcer plants, which might call for a browser smaller than a rhinoceros. But then you might want comparatively small herbivores wandering around eating those plants, and giving birth to single hamburgers rather than roasts—or laying eggs, which are fairly conveniently packaged food sources.

Or are you envisioning the Beast as eating all the vegetation in an area, from herbs up to trees? That may call for a complex array of dentition and digestive apparatus.

It seems to me as if, at a DL where it’s hard to defend a large community, a Matrix, especially a sessile one, may be a single point of failure for a community, and also a single target for attack. That might make it prudent to favor nonsessile Matrices, though perhaps they ought to be sized more like ceratopsians than rhinos.

It helps to think of these things as robots rather than as animals.

Your crop plants are solar-powered organic-nanotech chemical engineering systems. Unless a malfunction has occurred they don’t grow past their design size and you don’t want them eaten. Instead they are made at or grow to design size and then stop growing. Instead of putting their production into stems and leaves and reproduction, they put it into producing specialised bodies containing drugs, perfumes, flavours, nutrients, household chemicals, adhesives, chemical feedstocks etc. at high purity and hygienically-packaged ready-to-eat or ready-to-microwave meals-for-one.

You don’t want your plants eaten. You want them harvested of their produce. You can do that either with a hard-tech machine like a combine harvester, or with a soft-tech robot that looks like a genetically-engineered beast of labour. So one of the things you want plants to produce is fuel/food for the farm machinery.

In most cases plants can produce the products you want directly, and for those you have harvesting biobots that are somewhere between a honeybee and a robotic combine harvester. Only in cases when you want something that won’t grow on a plant (perhaps because of high metabolic oxygen demand), or when production is diffuse, do you have Beasts that collect nutriment and use it to drive animal-like catabolism to grow your rib eyes or your wool.

Matrices are bioroid factories. You have Matrices because is is more efficient to use specialised capital. Beasts and other bioroids that don’t carry around a bunch of reproductive anatomy will be more efficient at their jobs. Bioroid factories that don’t harvest crops will be more efficient bioroid factories. I really prefer the sessile Matrix to the rhinoceros-like one.

Some Matrices are designed to be produced by a similar Matrix, in an incomplete state and then grow to full-size maturity, and they have a built-in self-reproduction function (gonad) and a buffet of built-in products. Others you buy fully-grown from the manufacturer.

Given the desired genre of planetary romance, the equipment used by the locals is probably at least as important as what the PCs can buy.

As far as I can recall FB does not use Biotech directly as weapons. The Empire probably suppresses WMD style bioweapons but killer “beasts” seem like they would be allowed but are absent. You don’t need to explain this in the base material but you might want to have an answer in your back pocket. You may already have one.

There’s a very handy box in GURPS Ultra-Tech for 4e (on page 148) showing, at each TL from 9 to 12, what the typical weapon choices are for personal sidearms, paramilitary forces, infantry, etc. If I were running a game in this setting, I’d find something equivalent most welcome.

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In principle it might make sense to describe a world by two axes: first, how developed they are and hence what they can produce for themselves, and second, how integrated they are into trade and so how easily they can obtain things from the outside world. Poor integration might be due to being distant, having no convenient method of travel, etc., or it might reflect a government that deliberately isolates itself from outside influences.

The low-low worlds are primitive backwaters that rarely see spaceships. The high-low worlds are reasonably wealthy but exotic, things can be very cheap or expensive there, and they have odd solutions to the Brave New World problem. The low-high worlds are living off aid from do-gooders in the high-high worlds. The high-high worlds are integrated into a single combined society that looks wonderful, but it has its own solution to the BNWP and everyone is so dependent on each other for their JIT chains that if anything goes badly wrong they might all fall in a heap and catch fire.

I think by assuming a generally constant degree of integration (IS travel slow but cheap) you lose the opportunity for some interesting variation. And variation is the heart of planetary romance.

Or that is interdicted by them, a staple of Traveller. Or that hasn’t been discovered or integrated yet, as you find when you run a Flat Black: Survey campaign set sixty years or so before the usual game date.

Hmm. I have to be careful of cardiomegaly — don’t want to end up with either congestive heart failure or sudden cardiac death.

It seems to me that the problem with *-low worlds is getting PCs to them without making everything too powerful and important. I’m not strongly averse to there being a coma of lost and hiding colonies in the Beyond, but the drive postulates that produce them tend to be fraught with unwanted side-effects. And there turns out to be little way of getting PCs to them other than in an Imperial warship, which drags towards space opera.

It doesn’t have to be a nightmare to get there - I think there probably should be some planets which it is horrible/impossible to get to, but it isn’t strictly needed. Just making the place a bit difficult/expensive/slow ought to weed out most of the tourists and trade. Of course the PCs need a reason they are visiting the Flat Black equivalent of the Central African Republic/Siberia/Robinson Crusoe Island/Amundsen-Scott/Deep Australian Outback/Heart of Darkness. But being government agents is hardly the only one.

Well, colonies with Type N spaceports probably have only a few services per year. That makes access pretty awkward.

The Earthly analogy that comes to mind is coastal vs. landlocked. Right now the drive postulates make all FB colonies coastal. Something as simple as “Dark-matter nebulas interfere with the drive in this volume - reduce FTL speed by 90%” allow for isolated but not cut off colonies.

However, you spoke of unwanted side effects, so perhaps I am missing something important.

Perhaps you will think it is unimportant, but I consider

  1. Exposition is costly. Flat Black is already a lot of reading, and complex enough to be a significant burden to the comprehension. I don’t want to add unnecessary exceptions to its framework.
  2. I have players — @davidbofinger is one of them — who know more physics than I do and who take me to task over nonsensoleum and even handwavium. Ditto with astronomy. Linguistics. Demography. Radiocommunication technology. Cryptography…. The result is that I am strongly inclined to avoid technobabble.

I guess I could do something or other with the density of the interstellar medium. I’d have to find a better (3D) map of the Local Bubble and work out where travel is actually likely to be slow. And then complicate the astrography and history to take the effects into account. That would make the player’s guide longer and the setting more complicated. Which would make Flat Black even less accessible to new players.

So, would it be worth it? David offers that if I did it I would get planets that were highly developed but even more exotic. Is it a problem with Flat Black that the highly-developed worlds are not exotic enough? Simanta, where the “people” are a couple of dozen clones of parahumans, androids made in a factory with no family life? Todos Santos, where people get their minds and personalities professionally altered and certified so as to be appealing to prospective employers and romantic interests? New Fujian, where people go through a series of medically-induced metamorphoses to adopt successive social roles, and where the conventional marriage is an age-graded bisexual ménage á trois? Sure, Tau Ceti isn’t very exotic, but it is the exception. It is there to be the place a PC can come from and the player not care about it. I’m not seeing the beige. I don’t taste the baked custard. Seems like trifle to me.

Is my calibration that far off?

Presumably the reason you don’t get cultural hegemony from rich worlds to poor worlds (here are Mickey Ferret cartoons and Dopa Cola, our ways are best) is that the Empire stops them from doing it?