Re: colonial tech

At 1:24 PM +0100 1/29/02, KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
>Well, Gottlieb Daimler was building cars well before Henry Ford. :-)
>Anyway, the purpose of the assembly line was not to be able to build
>cars at all, but to build them in large numbers, cheaply, and
>efficiently.
>If you have a small colony of a few 100.000 people, it is nonsense to
>build a factory that can turn out 10.000 cars a day.
>

You need more than parts to assemble a car. To get the engines built, 
you need steel, aluminum, chromium, copper, bronze and other alloys. 
You need to source those raw materials from each different kind of 
mine. Each of those alloys needs its own refinery process with its 
own associated chemical process for refining and thus its own source 
of chemical catalysts and reagents. Each of those chemicals needs to 
be made and their raw materials need to be mined/refined/synthesized. 
Then you've not gotten to the components for the electronics, 
plastics, fluids, rubber/sealants, assembly aids and such. Even 
something as simple as glass will need its own factory.

Henry Ford made cars out of parts he was able to make from refined 
and cast blocks of metal that had already been refined. He didn't 
take ore in one door and spit cars our the other.

--
Ryan Gill	  |	   |	     rmgill@mindspring.com
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