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