Metal Hydrite...yeah, that's the one. Some MIT knob got great kudos for that in the papers a few years back (or was it UCLA??? Gah! Who knows?).

The fun thing of it is, the average high school student can create hydrogen at home. I suspect with the right equipment (and not necessarily refridgerant type... I mean one way flow valves and proper storage) the hydrogen could be converted to liquid at home.

Dangerous? Eh. So is cooking when you think about it. Timidity is one thing that keeps us in the gutters technology wise. I want the mad scientists who occasionally blow up their labs back (Nobel, I'm looking at YOU!!!).

From what I understand, the whole rail launch technique has some severe technical hurdles to using it on earth. Moon-based ones would work, but the amount of energy required to launch things out of earths gravity well creates problems on the material side, particularly with resurfacing the rails on railgun-esque launchers.

Farmers are paid not to farm certain amounts of their land becuase if they went full bore, then crop prices would drop so much that many would lose their farms. This is partly due to improvements in farm production, but also largely due to transportation. If you look back at history, food prices were high in the US during Colonial times because transporation was poor. When the Erie Canal was opened, the price of grain in the Northeast (which previously had to come by road through the mountains from the Ohio regions) plummeted. Prices again fell dramatically when the railroads spread through the Great Plains, giving the farmers easier access to the big markets to the east. Prices dropped so much that it caused a crisis and many farmers went under.

After the two world wars, we saw the same thing again. Improved tranportation in the form of faster and stronger trains, as well as better farm machinery and fertilizers, caused price drops. The problem ws becoming that banks had all these farms from foreclosures and couldn't do anything with them. So, there was pressure from the bankers and the farmers to relieve the pressure. Thus came about the subsidies.

There were other issues too, of course, like piratical rates charged by the railroads for transport and storage or grain in the Plains, but the above were the big movers. Now, had the farmers gotten together and former Co-ops to spread the costs just like the big agrobusinesses do, they could have faired better.

Anyway, transportation costs small if you are talking about ship transport, it just takes a bit of time. Rail is next most cost effective. Trucks are a distant third and planes are well below that. So, shipping food around the world by ship certainly is doable.

Well, a little bit of research shows that the US is responsible for ~60% of food aid, worldwide, with the next closest contributor the EU, at ~20%. Could we do better? Probably. But we are definitely trying to help.

I was actually discussing something vaguely related on another forum. The US is significantly larger than the EU, and has a lot more unoccupied land. We (yes, I'm from the EU) simply have less resouirces to grow food for aid.

Still, more pertinent to this discussion: growing crops for biofuel wouldn't exactly solve greenhouse gas emission problems. Regardless of how much GHGs burning biofuels generates, a major factor in GHG production is, in fact, agriculture. Of course this isn't really my field, so I won't quote any figures.

Ultimately the fuels that predominate in your SR world is up to you, and will likely have fairly minimal effects on your players. Systems that are excessively dangerous or impractical (moreso than modern systems, say) would find little takeup from the general public, so it is entirely reasonable to just handwave the specific tech and treat it as though it had similar properties as the modern system. One thing that might be interesting is the different kinds of protests that might arise (such as the anti tidal power group complaining about the loss of breeding grounds for wild fish stocks, or the public safety group complaining about the possibility of orbital power collectors inadvertantly turning into orbital death rays etc.)

Yes, ornot, but actually giving people food is only 1/3 of food aid. The three types are giving another government money to buy food/ lower the costs of purchasing food themselves, sponsoring programs that teach natives how to produce their own food/finance local food production centers, and emergency relief, which is actually shipping food straight to the starving people. My understanding is that the emergency relief is the exception, not the rule.

*EDIT*

Sorry, this has gotten totally off topic and seems to consist of me defending the US policies current day, instead of talking about the game that we all enjoy. I'll try to keep my jingoism to myself a little better from here on out.

Why are there still combustion engines that use gasoline?

Whats so wierd is that there have been many alternatives to gas over the years. Heh heh, didn't WW2 Germany use synth and biofuels to power their war machine so they didn't have to become reliant on foreign oil. (Sheesh I know another country that should have been following that idea...)

*Well you come up with a cool idea to an alternate technology for cars and some guy from Shell pays you 100 million for the patent even a bleeding heart wouldn't turn that kind of money down. Maybe thats why..."

Actually, with patents you don't have to steal the plans at all. They become open knowledge, on file with the Patent Office, where any goober can go take a peak at 'em...

Would make certain shadowruns sooooo much easier. Nobody's shooting the Patent office...

The earliest cars ran on a wide variety of fuels, including electricity, gas and I think steam. Petroleum just proved to be the most efficient in terms of weight and portability.

As for patents, I can see the corporate court enforcing those. It's in the megas interest to restrict smaller companies. Makes them easier to control.

Even so, it seems likely that certain megas wouldn't want to file patents of some of their developments, if they were of a sensitive nature and wide availability was never planned.

The point is that prototypes exist prior to patenting.
Thus, stealing them is really evil.

Software patents, that is, patents on algorithms or desings, are widespread in the US.

while i have not checked the entire thread, mythbusters did a episode about fuel sources...

at one time they injected hydrogen gas into the engine. lets just say they had some typical mythbuster results

Hehe... That's kindof what I was getting at by suggesting that the megacorpss would encourage and protect patents. While the megas themselves wouldn't be able to challenge each other, (as then they'd get a patent infringement thrown right back at them) it would be a powerful tool in controlling smaller and emerging corps.

Hi,

Personally, I think the best answers to these [and many more] questions can be solved by reading old Traveller material.
For instance..
Q - why in the far distant future do people use guns as we understand them today ??
A - because firing a lump of very fast metal at a target is very difficult to stop, is cheap and is easy to maintain.


Interestingly, it looks like many people here think that Cyberpunk must be like Bladerunner, which is a shame and really misses out on what Cyberpunk is about.
Some people here should read some of the Cyberpunk stories and maybe they'd realise that it's about change, regardless of the mileau.

There's nothing to stop Cyberpunk being set in the far future, or the past - indeed Transhuman Space [GURPS] or Transmetropolitan or Difference Machine are quite Cyberpunk.


Just my thruppence,
Synner667