Re: starship-design: HIGHLY OPTIMIZED TOLERANCE

[Ben Franchuk <bfranchuk@jetnet.ab.ca>]

KellySt@aol.com wrote:
>
> Totally wrong.  Folks like to think that its all been written down, but it
> ain't true.  A lot of it is "cultural knowledge" of the manufacturers as well
> as years of training.      You can't just pull out a book on how to build a
> IC  and start churning them out.  Past that it takes whole cites full of
> people and factories to build all the things a ship would need.  You can't
> carry all that gear with you.
> 

I disagree -- you have to carry a boot strap able system.

All that stuff could fit in a large space craft the catch is it is not
economic
to have small systems and you may have to reduce operating perimeters.

Take solid state logic... A portable chip processing plant could
be table top size, but may have to use 2 inch wafers, be limited to 64kb
x 1
dynamic ram,16 bit processors ,or smaller and only produce 256 chips a
day.

Remember too, that the environment has changed too, with say 1000 people
on a space craft, or planetary base, demands of the things needed will
be a lot different than back on earth. It is only within the last 50
years
that we really have lost the ability to be independent.

A robotic - mining factory with only 25 people for exotic material might
make
a stock-holders rich,but will not do much for colonizing a planet. 

Ben.
-- 
"We do not inherit our time on this planet from our parents...
 We borrow it from our children."
The Lagging edge of technology:
http://www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/woodelf/index.html