[GZG] RE: Aus/NZ arms manufacture

At 8:56 AM +1000 23/8/06, <Beth.Fulton@csiro.au> wrote:
>
>>  Neither NZ or Australia is likely to have the capability to
>>  manufacture arms in the next 50 years so they would need
>>  to buy them from somewhere. Historic links suggest their
>>  gear might will be Anglican.
>
>What kind of arms are you talking about? We're developing new 
>weapons all the time so I find that statement a bit odd.

The world seems to have entered a phase where some kinds
of high-tech weapons are cheap as chips.

There were stories all over the Internet, some of them
even well-documented, about the guy in New Zealand who
built his own cruise missile. The government decided to
take it away from him.

Students in the Engineering faculty next door to me at
university build UAVs. At the end of each year students
put up posters about the work they've been doing. One
group put cameras on the UAV, low-light ones IIRC, for
tracking wildlife. Another group had done a feasibility
study of launching air-to-ground missiles from it!

Battle tanks are a bit harder, sure. But if Israel and
Sweden can build their own, Australia could probably
manage.

The big-iron items, warships and high performance jets,
seem likely to remain restricted to major industrial
powers. Unlike everything else, they are becoming more
and more expensive and difficult to make.

And the do-it-yourself UAVs and cruise missiles rely
on high performance CPUs which have become incredibly
difficult to manufacture. There's only about four or
five foundries in the world that could build a Pentium
4 chip, and they cost billions of dollars to set up.
Yet just about anyone can obtain one if they have a
few hundred $US.

Extrapolating to GZG, I imagine ship hulls and engines
to be fabulously expensive and valuable, so never ever
get junked. Old NAC/ESU/FSE/NSL hulls end up being
sold to lesser powers, where they are extensively
refitted with new electronics and software. Most of
the budget in such navies probably goes to welding
the hulls back together when they start to leak too
much.

	cheers,
	Hugh
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