This is going to be somewhat off-topic - apologies to all.

>Growing your ship (and possibly generating a new one) from material
>acquired during travel is probably more realistic than having a complete
>shipyard and an engineering department on board every ship.

I think it's really difficult to say what's realistic in this field. 
Nobody has built a spaceship capable of interstellar travel yet, and 
we have no idea what would work and what wouldn't. Possibly an organic
hull would be more demanding to maintain than an inorganic one - it'd
certainly require more fluids (he said, as if he knows what he's talking
about :-). Possibly growing the hull and then having the cells freeze, or
die to leave a solid hulk would be viable.


>as for the
>
>>  because if there's one thing you can be sure of
>> in space, it's the need for an unreasonable amount of firepower!
>>
>in the original posting, I could not disagree more. You realy have watched
>too much star wars/strar trek etc. movies. 

With my limited aptitude and time, I feel I can make more impressive space 
battles than Chris Foss-style cruising shots. They're easier to make look 
good, because more is going on. I think. I don't share the StarWars or 
Star Trek (or Babylon 5, etc) view of what those battles should look like,
though.

>Space is so huge that interstallar
>battle is too unlikely to be a realistic option, simply because you can not
>find your opponent within a reasonable life expectance of only a few
>thousand years. 

Depends on the assumptions we make. For instance,

A) Depends on the speed of interstellar travel.

B) Depends if life is going to concentrate around planetary systems (increased
   likelihood of an encounter between ships) or spread out evenly.

I make some equally undecideable assumptions:

A) Motivation for battle. If both sides have access to the resources of an
   entire planetary system, including asteroid mining and the energy from a 
   star, why fight over raw materials? What's the motivation for fighting?

B) There are enough encounters between ships to make weapons worthwhile.

I think maybe a ship that can reconfigure itself as the need arises would 
be the most "realistic" option. If it needs weapons, it can rapidly build
them, but otherwise the mass is used elsewhere.

>Besides I do not think a civilization that would combine
>aggression and space travel technology has any change of surviving for
>more than a few centuries, but that is a political issue.
>

It's really difficult to say.

>BTW did I say I liked your design.
>
>    Andrel
>

Thanks! :-)

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