colonial weapons

Ryan said:

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?

[Tomb] Seems to me NAC Royal Marines and Merc Figures have Laser Rifles.
These aren't special forces. The ubiquity of lasers in the figure ranges
offers some insight that they aren't that much of a holy grail.

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] So? 

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] While we're NOT going to start that, IF I believed that were
true, I'd blame that on two things: 1) People's perception of the
industry struggling because no one can (surprise) make much money on
free stuff and a lot of companies launched frivolous open source
projects in attempts to get labour for free (which was a bad plan before
it was done) and 2) it costs money to run hosts for Open Source. But
neither of these points, nor the legal struggles of open source, is
anything other than a Red Herring to the discussion at hand - I cited
Open Source as a way of pointing out a certain type of human spirit -
that which is not perhaps solely motivated by money and that which wants
to build things. The Law crushing the later part and the basic need to
eat having some impact on the former hardly refute the idea that you
will be able to find a number of trained personel willing to trade in a
$60KUS per year job in a big UberCity for a 100-acre farm, a job paying
$30KUS per year, and the chance to be a big-wheel in a small pond and to
build a new world. The desire to get away from UberCorps and UrbanHell
are already well represented by the phenomena of "Downshifting" and the
colonies would offer an ideal outlet. I'm not saying people will be in a
rush to move to some awful mining hellworld, but that isn't most
colonies - most colonies will be established on reasonably earth-like
worlds in order to keep colonization costs and problems manageable and
in order to offer us a chance of seeing them self-sufficient sometime.
And under those circumstances, the colonies can afford to trade land and
future prospects for skilled labour. And people will go. Or did you
forget how the American West was colonized? 

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.

[Tomb] And a few years before that, they thought we'd only need 5
computers in the world. And a famous man thought we'd only need 640K
ever. Guess what? Some predictions are wrong, but generally, the world
has evolved into something that would not have been predicatable, and
generally (IMO) it has done so in the "better-than-predicted-capability"
direction. 

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.

[Tomb] Again you work into what I think of as apples and oranges. This
was the case because it could be the case. These chip fabs could make
lots of chips and there was no good reason (that anyone thought about)
to change that. I think you'll find the US Gov't has made conscious
efforts to reduce dependence on Japanese and other Asian silicon...
because it is now aware of the risks. But that is besides the point...
the point is that this situation arose because of cheap available
transport and no real need not to have it be the case. Is the colony
analogous? Do they have cheap, abundant shipping? If so, then this
situation may arise. If not, then it won't. 

[Tomb] As a further aside, the memory price bump was hardly crippling.
It was an inconvenience. A colony could withstand this just as easily,
if that mattered. It was remedied reasonably quickly. And if it hadn't
been, other alternatives were available (with some expense). 

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.

[Tomb] Don't ever confuse current day market practices in an industry
that has a HUGE interest in selling you a car every 5 years, service
throughout the lifespan, and preventing you from working on the device
yourself with what our technology is capable of if we need it to be! 

 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] I can probably repair some surface mount boards (not easy, I will
admit). And I definitely can repair boards using DIPPS or other more
easily accessible interconnection technologies. And the colonies don't
necessarily require the utmost in small packaging to do the job. They
just need robust. A bunch of chips soldered into DIPP sockets and using
non SMT resistors, capacitors, etc. will be a bit bigger and less
wieldy, but it will work for most purposes. Heck, there is a reason most
embedded systems use computers out of date in the "computer world of
consumers". One reason is reliability is proven. The other is that you
can do a heck of a lot with an old 386 and it is very low power! So what
if our colonies in 2180 use computers from 2150? They're still 150 years
from now, and in 20 years we've taken a desktop PC that weighed 30
pounds, multiplied power and capability many times over, and crammed a
more capable unit into a watch! Where will we be 150 years from now? So
what if the colony can't support the cutting edge tech. It'll support
sufficient technology to make your idea of colonization seem like living
with primitives in caves. IMO.

>[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.

[Tomb] I'm not suggesting they have the top line laser rifle with: 
- multi power source capability
- fancy multi-mode synthetic vision sights (IR/TI/Doppler/etc)
- Range good to (est) 1500-200m
- Armour penetration
- Accuracy in the well-sub-MOA range
- Ability to fit in plenty of other peripherals of military use
- Ability to act as communicator, designator, etc. 
- Selective fire (ss, ab, fa)

[Tomb] Instead, imagine that they have:
- single power source
- basic optical sights
- range good to 400m
- limited penetration vs. modern armour (but fine vs no armour)
- no optional modes nor capacities for foreign add ons
- Single shot only

[Tomb] So instead of a fancy, expensive, hard to maintain system, they
focus on a reliable, robust, simple system. Minimal variety in parts,
maximum reliability and lifespan. Sufficient for the task. 

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] Don't know how you train your Hams.... but up here you learn to
build a radio from some pretty basic components. Yes, you might need a
PLL for FM. But I can build AM with much simpler components. And I have
built AM and FM radios myself. It isn't that hard... it does take some
finesse and patience though. But this is with tech from years gone by!
Hardly 150 years away! 

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

[Tomb] You must have stopped in mid sentence here.

I think you'd still have a hard time getting a computer maker to move to
ND.

[Tomb] If the government acted to make it a place the workers thought of
going to and that companies paid attention to, and went FAR out of their
way to get the first big anchor company, then other companies would
start to arrive with less of a pull. This is not an overnight process
but can be accomplished. Winnipeg is working on it, New Brunswick has
had a fair degree of success. Ottawa (although having some other pluses
to start) has made huge strides in this area. 
>
>[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.

[Tomb] Moore's Theorem. There is no way to prove this mathematically as
a truism that I'm aware of and just because a Theory has held for a
while does not make it a law, despite media blatherings. 

[Tomb] And the point about war was not that you were fighting a war, but
you were relying on historical precendent to project future events,
which is analogous to how some generals prepare to fight wars, with
generally unpleasant consequences. 

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] Actually, we probably have viable flying car designs around. The
main shortcoming here is it represents an entire transformation of our
transportation system, our urban environments, our driver education, and
our fuel distribution system. That's a lot to take on. It isn't a
technological shortcoming that held this up, it was the unwillingness or
failure to consider the societal ramifications. The same does not hold
true for what I'm suggesting in the colonies IMO. 

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).

[Tomb] So when you start to do something you've never done, you need
some outside advice. But if we've put out a hundred colonies, this is
old hat. It is no longer "new effort". 

 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).

[Tomb] Surprise. They tried to port a high tech design to the backwoods!
(Okay, not _real_ high-tech, but higher tech than the facilities could
support). 

 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?)

[Tomb] And they were doing it in a hurry during a war. Different
constraints than sending out a space colony. They weren't saying "we
have time to redesign the whole thing to use the skills/manufacturing at
hand". They just wanted a quick way to slap some vehicles into
production. AND they also wanted to produce lots of them. This might not
be quite a worthwhile analogy for those reasons. Though it does
highlight the point that you need to take into account what skills and
resources are avialable. 

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.

[Tomb] So what you are saying was it was effectively cheaper to have it
done elsewhere. If that's the case, then the colonies will do the same
thing and import. But if not, then the situation isn't analogous. And
another item: This comparison assumes they were trying to build (on the
frontier) something equivalent to main-line military technology. I'm not
suggesting that by any means. Or don't believe so.

This all shows that just because people know how to do it

[Tomb] But you pointed out they didn't.... so they needed outside help.

 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. 

[Tomb] Can't argue with that. 

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.

[Tomb] It always takes tech complexity to make the state of the art item
with state of the art efficiency and features. If you are willing to
settle for a lesser feature set and apply state of the art engineering
to building something robust and simple (rarely done in the real world
because people want features and there is no market), you CAN produce
something far more robust and simple. 

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.

[Tomb] Yep. And I can probably point to plenty of examples of how
industry in the 1920s did things a certain way and it led to big wastes.
OTOH, I can point to the same types of industries today and indicate how
they have stopped those wastes by new industrial processes. They've
managed greater reuse, recycling, etc. and found they need less material
and simpler processes to achieve the same degree of capability. That's
what happens over time. Hence why I suggest the colonies might be 20
years behind, but they'll have robust, cheap to make tech. Even if you
consider it UberTech from your poor 150 year old vantage point.... ;) 

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] This I somewhat agree with. If I get 3 guys working in an
advanced machine shop (in situ) and they make a robust and simple laser
rifle in two or three days, sure they aren't cranking out 200 a day like
UberArms smallest production unit, but they build theirs to last 20
years. They don't care that UberArms can outproduce them by an order of
600 if they can't get access to those 600 weapons due to shipping or
cost. Further economics may make it such that these machinists (who get
paid in local dollars which may well be less than the value of the
currency backing the manufacture of the 600 guns, not even accounting
for shipping) may take some of their pay in trade/barter. Something
tells me that will thrive on smaller colonies. 
The gaurantee of the ability to fix their own kit, the ability to afford
it, and the ability to do goods-for-services barter as well as the
ability to make very long lived kit (if not state of the art) may well
justify exactly what I'm suggesting. 

>[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.

[Tomb] All of them? Even if you only have one major power station (for
example)? I think you might underrate some of the issues that will
centralize early colonial populations. And besides, the spiritual taint
would be enough to make some people want to move.... ;)