[Aardwolf]

Statement: Living stuff grows too slowly.

Rebuttal: Bacteria can double every 20 minutes

Counter-rebuttal: Bacteria can't grow faster than they can absorb nourishment. The growth rate will decelerate rapidly

Counter-counter-rebuttal: Not if they are put into an environment rich in nourishment all around, specially prepared for the growing bacteria's use.

[Asuko]

CCC-Rebuttal: Building something large, like a ship, takes much much longer than a colony of bacteria.

CCCC-Rebuttal: Not exactly as bacteria can grow exponentially.

CCCCC-Rebuttal: Bacteria are only one type of cell. A ship would require specialization of the cells.

CCCCCC-Rebuttal: Much like how living organisms grow, the process of building a ship can be broken down into parts that are later fitted into a whole.

[Aardwolf]

Your Cx6 rebuttal is a poor answer to an even poorer question. Yes, a ship would require specialization of cells, and no, that is not something that would cause a problem. They could specialize after growing, and in theory it would be possible for them to despecialize (although I don't know that any earth-life is known to do so).

[Asuko]

I understand that but that was just me throwing ideas around.

[Woolie Wool]

Statement: Living stuff grows too slowly.

Rebuttal: Bacteria can double every 20 minutes

Counter-rebuttal: Bacteria can't grow faster than they can absorb nourishment. The growth rate will decelerate rapidly

Counter-counter-rebuttal: Not if they are put into an environment rich in nourishment all around, specially prepared for the growing bacteria's use.

Wouldn't a shipyard be more practical than growing ships in Sathanas-sized bags of nutrients?

[blowfish]

Statement: Living stuff grows too slowly.

Rebuttal: Bacteria can double every 20 minutes

Counter-rebuttal: Bacteria can't grow faster than they can absorb nourishment. The growth rate will decelerate rapidly

Counter-counter-rebuttal: Not if they are put into an environment rich in nourishment all around, specially prepared for the growing bacteria's use.

Wouldn't a shipyard be more practical than growing ships in Sathanas-sized bags of nutrients?

Maybe not if you could re-use that bag of nutrients several times.  Anyway if it constructed some sort of tubes within itself (like blood vessels) as it grew to transport stuff around fast, then it wouldn't have to be in a bag of nutrients.

[darkship]

i guess another possibility exists that the ships are grown in a nebula, instead of a vat of nutrients, i mean that way its easier than using a bag of nutrients over and over again.

[blowfish]

But nebulas are not very dense and probably don't contain the right compounds anyway.

[Aardwolf]

Well, they'd probably have developed to minimize the amount of nutrients that are neither reusable nor used in the construction of the ship...

[Flipside]

I knew it was a mistake to check in on this....

You don't need a bag of nutrients the size of a Sathanas, you establish a mining operation using the miners we already know the Shivans have, you then place the seed in a suitable location and begin to supply it with nutrients, the ship would then begin to construct it's own under-structure using the materials supplied, if there are no materials for the cells to use, then they simply won't do anything, a ship is not going to starve to death because it is not 'alive' in the standard use of the word. The power could be supplied using non biological means, which means a vast supply of readily convertible energy is on-hand for the genetic construction mechanisms.

The various materials would be fed into a chamber where enzymes would form them up into various required materials, unused material would be either ejected, or, more likely, recycled and stored. once processed, they could be fed to a capillary system that runs throughout the ship, much like the veins in a leaf, where the material would be secreted to a precise 'blueprint' defined by the genetic code, that can be done via either 'formers' which force the secretion to grow into a particular shape, or 'limiters' which re-absorb any material that does not correspond to the blueprint, both cell types have analogies in naturally occurring biology.

Once construction is complete, the secretion hardens, the veins close and most of the building 'engine' suffers from triggered cell death, or is stored in a 'holding area' much like the Spleen, ready to be released and duplicate itself when required to, for repair operations etc.

Animals grow in a womb, but the only womb a plant needs is the seed, with correct biological programming, a constant supply of nutrients, and a power source that is far higher than that supplied by normal sugar-absorbtion techniques such as digestion and photosynthesis, coupled with the fact that the whole structure is capable of making it's own 'builder cells', so 1 cell makes 2, 2 cells make 4 etc, I'd guesstimate a Sathanas-type biomass could be created in under 2 years.

I once remember a lesson my lecturer taught about starlings, every female starling has an average of 4 chicks per year, of those 4 chicks, they are lucky if 1 survives. However, if every single chick survived for every single starling, within 30 years, Earth would be solid Starling to a depth of 3/4 mile. If you consider the starlings as the 'cells' of the Biomass, it gives a good feel to how quickly things can move, only the Biotech could replicate far faster and, with the right mechanisms, without mutation.

[Woolie Wool]

Statement: Living stuff grows too slowly.

Rebuttal: Bacteria can double every 20 minutes

Counter-rebuttal: Bacteria can't grow faster than they can absorb nourishment. The growth rate will decelerate rapidly

Counter-counter-rebuttal: Not if they are put into an environment rich in nourishment all around, specially prepared for the growing bacteria's use.

Wouldn't a shipyard be more practical than growing ships in Sathanas-sized bags of nutrients?

Maybe not if you could re-use that bag of nutrients several times.  Anyway if it constructed some sort of tubes within itself (like blood vessels) as it grew to transport stuff around fast, then it wouldn't have to be in a bag of nutrients.

Circulatory systems would greatly reduce the durability of a starship, which is not what you want. Even if structural strength is not compromised, a hit that barely scratches anything else would completely destroy the circulatory vessels, and they would have to reach pretty much every living cell in the entire ship. A circulatory system would be far, far more extensive, and thus vulnerable, than conduits or wiring in an abiotic vessel, and components of a conventional starship would not wither and die if their power was cut off.

Also, I still haven't seen evidence that biological processes can produce materials with sufficient strength in all aspects (not just tensile) for use in a starship. The only known organic materials that can compete with steel are created either through macroscale artificial processes (like carbon fiber) or nanotechnology. Althoiugh, at the nanotech level and below, the difference between "alive" and "not alive" starts to get rather fuzzy, as many proposed nano-machines would have the capacity to self-replicate. But even these nanites wouldn't be biological in terms of carbon-based proteins and water biology.

There is also the issue of radiation. Multicelled organisms like humans really don't like radiation, but bacteria are far more sensitive to any sort of radiation, even sunlight. Most bacteria that can survive being in the open protect themselves with cysts, but this prevents them from doing anything other than sitting there. The radiation shields needed to protect cells or even the aforementioned nanites would greatly increase the cost and complexity of construction, giving further advantages to macroscale non-biological construction.

[Flipside]

A circulatory system is nothing more than a series of tubes, which themselves could be repaired if needed, structural integrity would not be affected all that greatly especially if the armour was grown or attached seperately. Wiring and other material would be deep in the surface and would be no more vulnerable than equivalent circuitry and ducting on a manufactured vessel. Like all manufacturing techniques, there are trade offs, linear manufacturing has some advantages of biological, but that's not really the point.

Enzymes create the structures they are told to, and things such as carbon nanotubes can be emulated and produced with the correct material and genetic programming. Much like food is broken down into its constituent elements, releasing energy in a human body, materials can be reconnected and altered by Biotech. human technology at this moment in time can only create nanotubes under somewhat limited circumstances, but the whole aim of the research is to broaden that scope, with particular targetting at Space-use. Once again, the seed could easily contain the 'key' locations where such nanotubes would grow, all the needs to be put in place is an initiator that the carbon connects to after being stripped from gases like Methane by the enzymes.

Just as Calcium forms a fair percentage of bones and teeth, it's possible to make other metals behave in a similar fashion, also 'toughness' is as much as defined by the lattice structure of a substance as by the material it is made from, that is why things like suits of armour used to actually be a honeycomb of metal between to plated layers, it was every bit as strong as an inch of solid steel, but considerably lighter.

Earth bacteria doesn't like extreme conditions, and even then we have Extremophiles, indeed, there is strong evidence that there are forms of bacteria that can pretty much ignore incredibly intense radiation.

http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=1269

I also found out that Bacteria also has the advantage of growing even faster in low gravity environments.

http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/news/expandnews.cfm?id=1341

A lot of the new lightweight armour types are detailed as 'Biologically inspired', it's not such a massive leap to altering the biological system that created the inspirations and creating the armour that way, certainly beyond the bounds of human technology today, but so is most of the Terran technology of Freespace 2.

[Aardwolf]

In my model, as proposed earlier, there doesn't have to be a circulatory system; the biological components of the ship could be swapped out with metal alloys and carbon nanofibers as the growth of the ship progressed and neared completion. The finished product is not alive, just the means of construction.

I'd say it's like coral, but Woolie Wool already 'destroyed' that argument with his infallible logic that any comparison to something requires that all of the other aspects of that thing be present in the thing you're trying to explain through analogy.

[Admiral_Stones]

You seem to forget something. As we know Volition and their general appreciation of highly accurate uses of science, they propably don't have a clue that blood veins and such lower the ship's structural integrity. The discussion here seems to get really science-y, which simply don't applies to Volition.

[Aardwolf]

Volition makes no statement on the matter, and therefore this discussion is purely speculative.

In retrospect, however, I'm glad to see how far it has gotten considering the rather ridiculous content of the first post.

[Woolie Wool]

A circulatory system is nothing more than a series of tubes, which themselves could be repaired if needed, structural integrity would not be affected all that greatly especially if the armour was grown or attached seperately. Wiring and other material would be deep in the surface and would be no more vulnerable than equivalent circuitry and ducting on a manufactured vessel. Like all manufacturing techniques, there are trade offs, linear manufacturing has some advantages of biological, but that's not really the point.

The problem is that you need a lot more circulatory vessels in a bioship than wires in a normal ship. Vessels would have to reach every single living cell on the entire ship. The structural integrity may not be affected, but even a very minor hit could destroy the vessels themselves, and whatever part of the ship the vessels lead to will die.

The argument seems to be going from "biological ships" to "abiotic ships constructed by monocellular organisms whose extensive genetic engineering makes them border on bio-nanites".

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Woolie, you don't die from a scratch wound, do you? You have got a circulatory system as well, and even if you lose 15% of your blood, you'll manage to get to the hospital in time. So why wouldn't it be the same for ships?

[Flipside]

The thing is, veins don't take blood to most of the body, capillaries do, and that material is absorbed through the capillary walls by various cells and taken where it is needed. Apart from very specific points on a human (such as the jugular) most major veins (arteries) are deep inside the body out of harms way, I honestly don't see any kind of 'circulatory' system being used for anything other than construction anyway, possibly for repair, but it certainly could not be done in battle, you'd have to supply the ship with necessary materials and wait for the repairs to take place. Biotech is fast, but I doubt it could be so fast that it could be used as an in-battle repair system, though, I have doubts about nanotechnology in that department as well.

So that circulatory system would only really be used in non-combat situations and for construction in my opinion.

In many ways Biotech is exactly that, it's making cells behave like nanotech, not surprising since Nanotech was concieved because genetics was found to be a lot harder for us to understand than 'physical' technology. In 1991, the US Army Bio Division suggested Biotech proposals for techniques that, when developed, would allow soldiers to grow lost limbs, filter out nerve gas etc in their oesophagus and other things, these all relied on creating 'pre-programmed' cells to make them behave in a specific manner, not dissimilar to Nanites in a lot of respects.

[karajorma]

Why not just build a ship instead of trying to use inefficient, ridiculously slow biological processes?

Inefficient compared to what though? It took the terrans 20 years to build the Colossus. They had to hire, feed and pay workers for all that time in order to do the work. With a biologically grown ship you might simply set things up and come back 40 years later. That gives the Shivans themselves more time for flying around nuking stars.

[Asuko]

Or building more Sathanas.