Re: colonial weapons (and other stuff)

At 9:28 PM -0500 1/29/02, Tomb wrote:

>
>[Tomb] It'll be too expensive to ship out lasers and fancy fabs, but
>shipping raw ore will work? What are they mining? Unobtainium?
>Fantasium?

They could be slowly building up stocks to be sent back on bulk 
freighters. One big ship on a long slow run to get ore is nice and 
efficient. Even if it takes some time. Figure that that ore freighter 
is containerized rather than big bulk holds. It could bring in new 
materials, parts and components for things not locally available.

As far as shipping lasers, again though, if you're shipping out 
lasers for every Colonial Militiaman that needs one why did St John 
make the rules the way he did? Isn't the NAC giving its best weapons 
to the SAS and other special forces types first? I'm pretty sure that 
what firms like Holland and Holland, McMillian Brothers and Remington 
are offering in 2183 will still be different from what the NAC is 
equipping it's ground forces.

>[Tomb] I suspect you'll find that there are lots of computer engineers
>who'd consider a move to a new fledgling colony on a nice new world if
>they were promised 100 prime acres and a job in the central city as
>network administrator - being a key player in something (even a small
>thing) appeals to an awful lot of geeks, as does the pioneer/build
>something spirit. Some people will want to stay near Uber University or
>Uber Corp, but there are enough that are willing to work for a
different
>kind of compensation. Crap, look to the Open Source and Free Software
>movements....

Yes but a few engineers doesn't an entire Industry make. You need 
more than just the basic raw materials and far more than just the 
know how.  Open source is struggling. Congress isn't helping right 
now either.

>[Tomb] These will fall into two categories: ones which nobody needs
>enough to spend the money on (and that are expensive) such as luxury
>goods, and ones which are UberNew. But UberNew for 2183 is not a
>self-repairing basic machine shop and dishwasher sized basic chip fab
>IMHO.
>15 years ago, your toaster didn't have microchips. 20 years ago,
watches
>didn't. Now your watch can be a computer that can blow away a lot of
old
>desktops in certain ways. 200 years from now, the world won't be much
>like we'd recognize, I fear.

And 20 years ago everyone thought we were to have established a base 
on mars. 40 years ago, they thought we'd all have robots running 
around in our houses cleaning things. That and we'd all have personal 
flying vehicles.

Again, certain industries supple things to other industries. To 
fabricate Printed Circuit boards (not the complete board, just the 
Part the chips and processors go on) you need resins, chemicals, and 
metals that are refined differently. To get those metals, you need 
more chemicals that are different to refine them from ores.

The thing is though, many of those chips are made at a single plant. 
Memory prices sky rocketed a few years ago because the one of the few 
plants that made them in South East Asia burned down. That small a 
manufacturing pool is very much due to the precise nature and 
intensive needs of such a product. You do far more than lay bits of 
sand out on a cookie sheet. Processors have some amazing amounts of 
precision metallurgy in them.

I'd be bloody surprised if you could get such processes easier as 
time goes on. Just look at the modern automobile. Its gotten more 
complex to make and requires more specialized parts than 30 years 
ago. Not less. I can rewind a stator for a motor with the same things 
my grandfather would have used. I cannot repair a one piece surface 
mount computer board from my Honda Insight. The parts come from a 
particular factory.

>
>[Tomb] Because it is cheaper to locate it somewhere else and the cost
of
>shipping is minimal and the supply is reasonably gauranteed.

Ahha! But could you start that factory up in North Dakota if shipping 
were expensive? You'd be better off locating that factory central to 
your finished materials and ship out an expensive to ship final 
product.

> I won't likely find many people that
>can even burn e-proms in their basement work shop either.
>
>[Tomb] If you include the cities in ND, I think you'd find more than a
>few. How many Ham Radio operators do you think there are? How many
>people that are jackleg mechanics? Lots. If the necessity exists for a
>thing, the skills to work it appear eventually. If it can't be imported
>cheaper, and the argument I believe indicated that mass transport of
>goods might be expensive to preclude this.

Yes, but the whole point is that these items aren't going to be 
getting made insitu. If they are being shipped in and they are 
already the cream of the crop in weaponry then I highly doubt the 
average militiaman is going to have a first rate weapon. Likely he'll 
have something cheap, reliable and effective.

Besides, most of those Ham Radio dudes couldn't even begin to think 
about how to make some of the more basic components in their radios.

>
>[Tomb] And when you plan a colony, you'd only take farmers eh? You'd
>never bother planning out your initial roster or immigration incentives
>to help counterbalance your shortcomings? There are a lot of fisherman
>in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, but there is a growing High Tech
>community because the governments are making it attractive. If ND made
>it attractive, business would locate there as would skilled labour.

Nope, I'll probably have a few specialist. But I doubt any

>
>
>[Tomb] Everything has to locate somewhere and sometimes that is just a
>momentum thing. And ND probably isn't on the radar of people looking
for
>a high tech HQ. And if you are the first business into an area, it is
>hard for your HR to steal guys from the other company. But that's some
>of the profit based issues. A colonial administration has different
>issues and different tools and incentives to offer. If the gov't of ND
>offered programmers a huge ranch for moving there and advertised all
the
>great family reasons to live in ND, I think you'd see some movement
>(especially if they at the same time lured companies with tax breaks).
>It's all a matter of your offer relative to other places.... and if
>colonies want to make themselves attractive to educated and mobile
>workers, it can be done. Sometimes it is about lifestyle, sometimes
>opportunity, sometimes money. Always about optics (advertise!).

I think you'd still have a hard time getting a computer maker to move to
ND.
>
>
>[Tomb] You know, this discussion reminds me of a group of generals
>preparing to fight the next war by preparing to fight the _last_ war.
>What went on there in WW2 has some value as a case study, but does not
>necessarily acknowledge the changing capabilities of industry,
>especially on the micromanufacturing scale. Nor does it acknowledge the
>general increase in educational levels. Nor other factors. History is
>interesting, the trick is ferreting out the pertinent while realizing
>how the world does and will differ from what has gone before.

We're not talking war fighting here. Its economics and things like
Moore's Law.

Its more like the folks that (as I said above) stated we'd have 
flying cars by the year 2001. We're barely to the electric car stage.

>
>[Tomb] Unless you are suggesting all colonies will be created out of
100
>people and a shoestring budget, I don't see that as a valid comparison
>either. South Africa evolved a defense industry when it became apparent
>procuring foreign arms was going to be very tough. It offered to solve

And that happened over how long? 50 years from their early stage of 
making Marmom Herrington Armored cars for the North Africa campaign 
to making the Oliphant and the Rooikat. Still thought in WWII terms, 
South Africa was more than 100 people.

 Likewise Austrailia. They had thousands of people. Many of them knew 
how to fix a car. Far far fewer of them knew how to build a tank. In 
fact the person ( A Colonel Watson) that helped design the Sentinel 
was shipped (in 1940) from Great Britain via the US (he looked at the 
US M3 designs on the way out). The first design (The AC I) they 
settled on used the final drive design from the M3. When they got 
around to looking at the manufacturing side of this it was realized 
that this was going to be too sophisticated for Austrailian 
facilities at the time (April '41). It would take a year for the 
fabrication tooling to arrive from England. (What's the time from one 
planet to another in FT terms? Half a week? 3 Months?)

So, they decided to down size the weight and size of the vehicle so 
they could use locally made truck components for the engines and 
final drives, when they finally worked everything out, it was 
realized it would be limited to a 2 pounder gun and a 16-18 ton 
weight. By september they decided to abandon this design (AC II) and 
go back to the AC I. They simplified the final drive and changed to 
using horzontal volute bogies and had a working prototype by Jan of 
'42. And by August of '42 they had the first production vehicle off 
the assembly lines at the Chullona Shops build specifically to make 
these tanks. They built a total of 66 tanks by July of '43. By this 
time it was realized the US could supply the entire requirement of 
vehicles for the 1st Austrailian Armoured Division that had recently 
been formed. Thus the Sentinel never saw combat and was only used for 
training in Austrailia. You should know the hull and turret castings 
were considered an achievement for Austrailian manufacturing. The 
thing used 3 Cadillac V-8s in a clover leaf arrangement.

This all shows that just because people know how to do it and that 
you have the raw materials available it doesn't mean that you can do 
it fast, cheap and in even close to the same scale that a industry 
can that is much larger and more broad. It takes a multitude of 
supporting industries for making engines. Let alone more complex 
components. Just because you can make one kind of component, doesn't 
mean you can turn around and make another in a few days. You have to 
re-tool, redesign and re-arrange the factory for that particular item.

Outside of the Lockheed martin plant, there are a pile of assembly 
jigs and stands that were used to make the C141. All of those now 
rusty bits of metal were made to build the production C141s. They 
were made using the prototypes as an example to get the production 
floor arranged and configured for making the aircraft in multiples 
rather than in single units. Those jigs are now junk rusting in a 
field. It took at least a year just to make those jigs and get them 
all just right so they could turn out the first production aircraft.

If you get 15 guys to make a laser rifle in their work shop over 10 
weeks using parts shipped in or painstakingly made in-situ then 
great. Just because they do that, doesn't mean they can turn around 
and start turning them out by the dozens in the same amount of time. 
More back industry needs to be set up and running before hand.

>[Tomb] Very true. Mind you, some of the groups might be happier away
>from everybody else. And there may be a class of settler that is always
>moving to the next new settlement - once you get more than three
>neighbours, it is too crowded.

Planets are big places.

--
Ryan Gill	  |	   |	     rmgill@mindspring.com
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