RE: starship-design: Re: One way (again...)

["L. Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

On Wednesday, December 10, 1997 1:53 PM, Kelly St [SMTP:KellySt@aol.com] 
wrote:

> The deep space probes like Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager  had multi decade
> service lives.  Thou thie trivially simple compare to these ships.

Oh don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we can't design a small system to 
operate for 20 years without failure. Only that the bigger the system gets 
the less likely that we can engineer EVERY part to those tolerances and the 
more likely that cumulative failures of subsystems will eventually add up 
to major system failure. We have had quite a history of such failures 
already in the space program.

> Oo, excelent example.  I forgot about material decays in plastics.

Isaac still hasn't thought about it...

> Excelant point.  One possible siolution for a star ship would be solder
> joints
> on all seals.  If you want to rotate something, you heat the joints until
> they
> melt, rotate them, then cool and resolder the joint.
>
> Still would leak out all the air every few years thou.  Ox and CO2 isn't 
a
> big
> problem, we can store tha in chemical bounds, but how the hell do you
> store
> nitrogen?!  It doesn't bound well with anything,and cryo tanks would 
bleed
> off
> long before we were done.

Isaac hasn't got this one either. Lack of real world experience.

Lee