Re: colonial weapons

--- Tomb <tomb@dreammechanics.com> wrote:

> [Tomb] Correct. Now assume we deploy our early laser
> rifles by 2015. 

While you're at it, let's assume flying pigs as well.

By 2015, we'll be doing pretty well to have a working
infantry weapon with a laser rangefinder on it.

It
> is now 2183. Your "new iBook" analogy fails because
> by this time the
> laser rifle IS the Lithgow Enfield (actually, not
> the original laser
> rifle, but a laser rifle refined for a further 120
> years!).

Which doesn't make it easier to repair.  I could walk
around with a "Computer" from the 1950s (actually, I'd
need a truck to haul it around) and I couldn't get it
repaired anywhere, not the US and not Afghanistan and
not anywhere inbetween.

Mechanical stuff is easy.  You can get good tolerances
with simple equipment.	Electronics are hard, and
always will be hard.  There will never be a backyard
microchip industry in the sense that there is backyard
smithing or machining.	The complexity of the Enfield
is not in it's components--any given spring or
simillar item is easy and was feasible centuries
before the Enfield was actually produced.  It's in
designing the system in the first place (and in the
ammunition, but that's a seperate subject).  

John

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