Re: COLONIAL WEAPONS

Ryan Gill wrote:

> At 11:41 PM -0500 1/28/02, Richard and Emily Bell wrote:
>
> >The industry required to build a car can fit in a modest garage.  The
500
> >factories are needed to produce cars at a rate of one per minute. 
The
> >garage with sheet metal, bar stock, plates, forge, and machine tools
will
> >allow you to produce a car fast enough if you only have twenty, and
they
> >each last twenty years.
>
> Yeah, a Lotus or something. But are you machining those parts from
> raw materials or using pre assembled sub components?

The parts are machined from bar stock, sheet metal, and plates.  An
intermediate step between raw materials and unmachined blanks.	I should
include piping, as it is easier to assemble the chassis from pipe
sections.

>
>
> What about armored vehicles? Where exactly are you getting your armor
> plate? Track links? Tires?
>
> There were locally produced armored cars that were made by smaller
> commonwealth nations during WWII. They used lots of locally available
> components and still had issues with their vehicles. Austrailia and
> or South Africa had what sort of
> Industrial base at that point?

If they need armored vehicles to face the native fauna, the initial size
of
the colony will be much more than twenty families of homesteaders (or
the
minimum needed to prevent inbreeding), it will be an instant settlement
of
several thousand, to allow for genetic diversity after many have been
eaten
and to have a large enough economy to support more than cottage
industry.

>
>
> >
> >The colony will probably start with steam powered machinery, as the
first
> >(admittedly really inefficient) steam engines managed to produce
useful
> >work despite fact that threaded fasteners were still cut by hand. 
Steam
> >engines have the advantage that they are easy to build and maintain.
> >While reciprocating steam engines require some artistry to run, being
> >able to operate one gives wonderful insight into what is wrong when
it
> >breaks done.  They can also use locally grown fuel, like charcoal.
>
> I'd expect that Fuel Cells and Solar/Wind power would be the quickest
> way of getting power that is portable. Electrolize water with solar
> or wind power, and you have a way of running a fuel cell easily.

Depending on whether small heavy things are cheaper to move than very
large,
bulky, but light things, and where they costs cross over (eventually
volume is
always more expensive than mass), the electrolysis will probably be done
with
nuclear power.	Solar-hydrogen is great from a pollution perspective
(assuming
that PV production is non-polluting, which is doubtful), it is truly
horrid
from resource utilization.  Anything-hydrogen is very resource intensive
and
you may be better off with a carbon neutral harvest of trees for
charcoal.
Converting light to electricity, then electricity to hydrogen, and
finally
hydrogen back to electricity has an embarrassing end-to-end efficiency. 
I
prefer aluminum batteries to hydrogen fuel cells, as you eliminate
problems of
storing the hydrogen.  While aluminum batteries are not rechargeable,
they are