Re: COLONIAL WEAPONS

At 12:50 PM -0600 1/29/02, Scott Clinton wrote:
>
>
>You could NOT have taken your Enfield Rifle to such a location in 
>1941 and had decent replacement parts made, just as you can not take 
>any cutting edge tech into the middle of nowhere and expect to have 
>replacements made for it.
>
>The point IS a LASER rifle will NOT be cutting edge tech in the 2150 
>universe.  Quite the opposite I would expect it LASERs to be quite 
>well established tech as they will have had well over 150 years (!) 
>of development behind them.  How many years of development does your 
>Enfield have behind it now?  About the same number of years that the 
>LASER will have 150 years from now (first rifles using cartridges).

I couldn't get a 50 year old Cathode Ray tube fixed there now. The 
thing to think about is the amount of technology behind the 
construction and repair of the weapon is the issue, not whether it is 
cutting edge or not. You need basically one type of complex tool to 
work on a weapon that is all steel and wood. A milling machine. For a 
laser, you would likely need far more compelx tools to manufacture 
new components. What do you think goes into a Laser of 2183? 
Electronics? Some kind of complex tube that requires multiple 
chemical and microsopic industrial processes to make? Would such an 
industrial process be able to be shoved into a container to be 
shipped 50 Light years away and not need anything else other than 
bulk refined material?

--
Ryan Gill	  |	   |	     rmgill@mindspring.com
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