Re: Death Star, Soap Bubble Carriers and FB Ships

Michael Brown wrote:

> I have two words that explain the hows and whys of the disparity of
forces in
> all these scenarios:
>
> Government Contract
>
> What other rational explanation is there for less than optimal designs
> (especially the Death Star) ?
>
> Michael Brown

The best reason is we can produce mediochre equipment NOW, in abundance,
or we
can produce nothing until we have something really good (assuming our
allies have
are still fighting).  The sherman is proof of Stalin's maxim "Quantity
has a
quality all of its own".  The US army was faced with mass producing
something
that they already had the tooling for, or waiting until they had a
proper tank.
Being in a hurry, they produced huge amounts of shermans, despite its
shortcomings.

The DeathStar was struck down by one of those things that gives
engineers the
willies-- the unforeseen glitch.  The US long distance telephone system
was once
laid low by a minor programming error.	When faced with too many calls,
the
switching center would reject all new calls and bounce them to other
switching
centers.  Unfortunately, they left out the little bit of code that would
tell the
switching center to start accepting calls when it was no longer
overloaded.
Needless to say, the problem snowballed until the whole system crashed.

Some poor bastard involved in the DeathStar design team laid out the
venting to
ensure the minimum backpressure on the system, without realizing that
the
resultant gentle curves would act as a shot trap.  The error was
compounded when
no one entertained the possibility that one of the reactors might suffer
the
gross insult of a weapon strike, or they would have quickly realised
that the
loss of a local reactor could destroy the whole station.  The rebels, to
their
great good fortune, looked at the armor scheme of the DeathStar, looked
at the
weapons that they had available, and desperately examined all of the
piercings to
find vulnerability.