Re: COLONIAL WEAPONS

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?

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?

>
>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.

>[Bizarre aside: to build precision machines, you need a very accurate
>lead screw.  You only need one, because after the first one is made, it
>is trivially easy to copy it by the millions.	Fortunately, in the mid
>eighteenth century, someone discovered that if you press a hard metal
>knife edge into soft metal round stock, at the desired thread pitch,
>turning the round stock would advance it past the cutting tool at the
>correct rate.	The man who did this is unknown, but his invention made
>Jesse Ramsden a fortune.]

Granted,
But, do they spend 36 hours per rifle on that 
machined/stamped/welded/riveted assault rifle that uses gas operation 
and a 200 year old reciprocating bolt design or do they spend 150 
hours making that gauss rifle using electronic components they can 
barely make on site?

You can get an Enfield or a L1A1 brand new made in Pakistan in a 
village on the border with Afganistan. You can't get a Brand new Sony 
beta deck made there. Too many precise and small electronic parts 
that have to be sourced from elsewhere.

>The web is complex due to the economies of scale.  Colonial economies
>will start small and then grow.

Thus at that small point the amount, quantity and variety of items 
they can make will be very limited.

>I will stand by my speculation that unless supply ships are inexpensive
>to charter and arrive every few weeks, the colony will not rely on
>anything that they cannot manufacture.

Thats the whole point.

--
Ryan Gill	  |	   |	     rmgill@mindspring.com
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