Hadrianus wrote:I was refering to the actual technology of say the internet or the AK-47, when I said information I meant the information to manufacturere that technology, I asume that is obtained through research.

Hadrianus wrote: ...
develop a technology that is both cheap and clearly useful
...
technology should be dispersed throughout the LT universe regardless of the research done by the player or an NPC
...
...if either an NPC or the player, develops tech that is both clearly useful and cheap then that information should be dispersed among the LT universe regardless of the research done by the player or other NPCs. Not immediately of course but over the duration of a ten year in game period.
...

BFett wrote:

Hadrianus wrote: ...
develop a technology that is both cheap and clearly useful
...
technology should be dispersed throughout the LT universe regardless of the research done by the player or an NPC
...
...if either an NPC or the player, develops tech that is both clearly useful and cheap then that information should be dispersed among the LT universe regardless of the research done by the player or other NPCs. Not immediately of course but over the duration of a ten year in game period.
...

Questions and problems

How are players and NPCs going to market your item to the entire universe?
How are players and NPCs going to transport your item to nations that are agressive twords your faction?
How is the player or NPC going to create these special items?
If the player values the item but other NPCs do not, even if the item fullfills the clearly useful and cheap rule, what makes the NPCs agree with the rule?

Basically, if you invent an item it won't be clearly useful and cheap because nothing is cheap when it first gets made. Cell phones weren't cheap when they first came out in the 80's http://mashable.com/2014/03/13/first-cellphone-on-sale/

Hadrianus wrote: For this reason I said that they should be made available after about ten in game years. I am presuming that by then the price would be low enough.

By made available I mean that you no longer need a blue print to build that particular item since by then the means of making that item is presumed to be common knowledge. Well at least that is the idea. I don't know exactly how the manufacturing process works in the game. You might not even need blueprints.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

McDuff wrote:

Spoiler:      SHOW

BUMP

Since Josh is currently working on research, it seems like a good time to reopen some old wounds. Apologies if this sort of thing has been floated before - I haven't seen it if it has.

TL;DR Summary

• Objects can be considered to contain the embodiment of the research that went into their production, so reverse engineering them can move you down that research arm faster than you could do it yourself but not instantly.
• This provides a built in balance for RE because you can't skip a node, giving some proportionality to gains from RE based on your starting position, and while also providing a way of moving the total amount of research in the universe onwards on a level that is aggregate but still unevenly distributed.
• Penalties for RE (considered separately from inter-faction espionage) are unnecessary because it's not a magical short-cut to the end of a research arm and can never give you an edge over someone doing primary research.

Faffing around with ideas begins below

• All the NPCs are researching too. We can imply that all the stuff you can buy in game will have been first researched and then built by some NPC, even if it's happened at a high-abstraction level.

• There are three levels of knowledge within the structure of the game:
  • You have what YOU know, you being a player or an NPC.
  • You have what EVERYONE NEAR YOU knows, that being the faction you’re in or just the people in your immediate system.
  • You have what EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE knows, the sum accumulated total of all researched knowledge.

• The way technology advances in the real world is an interesting thing to look at. Broadly speaking, once someone has invented something, everyone invents it. The future is not uniformly distributed, but eventually all new technologies spread out and become ubiquitous. We don't re-invent the wheel every time someone designs a new automobile.

• From what we have seen Josh say so far, there is a 1:1 relationship between a node on a tech tree and a blueprint for constructing an object. If I have researched a node, I can generate a blueprint from it. So it makes sense for that relationship to work backwards.

Here's the high level concept that comes from all these observations, if you also have a classical economics approach to these things. A blueprint can be considered to be the embodiment of the time put into that research.

(Aside: We can further conceptualise any object as the embodiment of its inputs - the materials from which it is constructed (which includes the time taken to mine/refine them) and the time taken to research the blueprint. That's interesting (especially if locally available materials make a difference to how Heavy Fighter III is actually produced from different factories (and especially if the ideas in this post are still in play)), but I don't want to expand on that further here because TL;DR is already a problem)

If I purchase a Mk III Heavy Fighter of Doom, I have purchased an object which contains the results of a research tree pushed all the way down one arm and an industrial process which manifested that object in the world.

Now obviously it’s neither realistic nor balanced to presume that someone entering the game with an effective stone age knowledge could be given a laptop computer and two days later immediately understand microprocessor design. However, it does make sense that if me and my buddy Sue are both making missiles, and Sue calls me up and says “hey I just made a missile with +15% splosions at a cost of only -5% speediness,” that effectively means I don’t have to make that breakthrough myself. The "work" I put in is in understanding the concept Sue already thought of. Or if Sue merely puts her missiles on the market and I buy them and poke them to see what makes them work, I likewise don’t have to put the same amount of work in. But nevertheless I still have to put some work in any case.

Thus a strategy of buying/stealing and reverse-engineering something doesn't give you instant access to all the knowledge contained within it. Instead it enables you to traverse the same branch of the research tree at an accelerated rate. Essentially you are releasing some of the time contained within the device.

As people use this mechanic, technology will therefore converge on the current local maxima across a given body of NPCs, but it will not be an instantaneous convergence.

Primary research will always provide an edge of at least one node over people who are merely copying you. It it takes time T to research a node and time T/2 to reverse engineer your way there, once they hit your limit you're almost at the next level of technological advancement and they have to begin the process of primary research to catch you. It's a Xeno's arrow problem and you'll never lose that one-node edge as long as it's a direct race along the same path. However once they are close, if you stop researching, or diverge along a different path, they can overtake you.

You cannot skip a node. If you buy a fancy dancy missile and you've never put any RP into missiles yourself, you still have to get down the 16 nodes required for the fancy blueprint. More quickly, sure, but it's far from instant. No sudden jumps from knowing nothing to knowing everything. You also only get the nodes embodied within that item, you don't get any branches.

(Aside: research nodes, like everything else, will be procedurally generated, so it's therefore likely that branches will have different intermediary nodes even if different researching agents have arrived at broadly similar conclusions. You'd therefore need to implement some kind of pattern match where you walk backwards down both research trees and find the closest candidate for "common ancestor" and branch off there. This could also lead to negative payoffs for industrial espionage if what you thought was a small modification of the designs you were already using was in fact the result of a significantly different research tree, although I imagine those cases would be fairly rare in practice.)

This is also a recipe for disruptive economic events on a macro level, and for those disruptive events to eventually settle into a new equilibrium. If someone stumbles across a system where mining technology is leaps ahead of their own local maximum, they can sit and research it themselves, or just import the brand new technology, at which point others will start to research it, and eventually you’ll have technological convergence across the two systems.

Final note: I do see this working in parallel to Josh's notion that Research Machines produce Resource Units at a constant rate (thus accelerating research in technologies that aren't new and valuable), and don't see that it obviously conflicts or breaks that model. However, if someone sees a conflict there, feel free to point it out.

Anyway. Enough waffle. Thoughts?

to make the distincion between "everyone races to copy it" to "everyone knows it" there could be put in some "timer" in which the "patent" that makes the item special runs out and some puts the construction speciality "online" where everyone can see, download and freely reproduce it
(Like the currently running out laser-sintering 3D printing patents)

This would maybe need some restrictions, like military secrets and such, but these would only delay the process, not halt it

This could be regionally bound knowledge, downloaded (maybe with a small access fee) from any significant station or planet

Edit: this would also provide some entry point for new players and npc, as there is some "common knowledge"

BFett wrote:Even though cell phones are common today it does not mean that I can easily make one. Also, there are many brands with different functions for these cell phones.

Hadrianus wrote: Also if you want to start a cell phone company you also have to pay in order to be able to use communications satellites since I assume at the beginning you can’t afford to launch one yourself.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Hadrianus wrote: Also if you want to start a cell phone company you also have to pay in order to be able to use communications satellites since I assume at the beginning you can’t afford to launch one yourself.

Which service provider uses satellites for regular service? Most of coverage is provided by using tower-based transmitters, only in very remote areas is satelite based service is used, such as on sea or unsettled desert areas.

Also: an OEM does not need to provide communications infrastructure, thats what providers do.

Hadrianus wrote:
As always you should try to inform yourself! What do the towers use?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Hadrianus wrote:
As always you should try to inform yourself! What do the towers use?

Glass fibre or copper cables laid through the ground


In newer towers glass fibre propability verges on 100%, older towers are may still connected via copper, but that is phased out, because glass fibre is more efficient