Richard has a point about colonies making use of simplistic tech. This could
include advanced steam engines (advanced in design, so as to retain simplicity
but acheive max efficiencies).
OTOH, one thing people are sort of glossing over is the 200 years of time
past. Lets just say that either biotech or nanotech or both are what they are
cracked up to be. This has profound impacts potentially for colonists.
Let's talk about the "Factory". This is a nanobot
builder/controller system. The part you need
from Earth is the main controller. And maybe an initial dose of bots. Add
appropriate trace minerals, and set it down on a big metal deposit. Wait some
time, get a small factory or machine shop capable of turning out the parts
for your tractor/car. The factory has the
advantage of being self repairing. It needs no input from the colonists,
except relocated every so often or a new program (not too expensive to ship
due to brutal info density and therefore low shipping costs) downloaded from
Earth.
And I agree with Richard in terms of the simplicity of construction of "a car"
(basic) and maintenance of same. Henry Ford was building internal combustion
vehicles long before assembly lines. Garages were about the order of the day.
And he didn't have 200 years on us. Henry's cars also gave good value because
if his engineers told him a crank shaft had to be 1", he ordered a 2" shaft.
They were overdesigned, but they lasted a long long long time even when poorly
treated in many cases.
Thomas Barclay schrieb:
> Richard has a point about colonies making use
Why steam engines? At whatever tech level you look at, a steam engine
isn't really simpler than an equivalent internal-combustion engine. The
reason motors supplanted steam engines was that, at the same tech lvel, they
were more efficient, easier to operate and more powerful than steam engines.
Occasionally, you see notes in tech magazines about reviving steam engines for
some purpose or other, but little usually comes of it. Simple motors can be
operated under appaling conditions, too.
Anyway, a high-tech product needn't always be more complex to operate,
prone to failure or hard to maintain than a primitive one. Compare, say, a
quartz watch with a mechanical one. Even manufacture need not be that
advanced, at least not always. Many
high-tech products are assembled or even manufactured in semi-Third
World countries. The massive investment is in research and development.
> Let's talk about the "Factory". This is a nanobot
Indeed ? No re-programming to suit local
conditions/fuel/maintenance/repair ?
... except relocated every
> so often or a new program (not too expensive
Well, Gottlieb Daimler was building cars well before Henry Ford. :-)
Anyway, the purpose of the assembly line was not to be able to build cars at
all, but to build them in large numbers, cheaply, and efficiently. If you have
a small colony of a few 100.000 people, it is nonsense to build a factory that
can turn out 10.000 cars a day.
> Henry's cars also gave good value because if
Were they indeed good value? If they were that overdesigned, the material to
build them was double that what was neccessary, hence the car had to be more
expensive than neccessary. It is not always clear that customers will prefer a
product that lasts double as long if they
> At 1:24 PM +0100 1/29/02, KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
You need more than parts to assemble a car. To get the engines built, you need
steel, aluminum, chromium, copper, bronze and other alloys. You need to source
those raw materials from each different kind of mine. Each of those alloys
needs its own refinery process with its own associated chemical process for
refining and thus its own source of chemical catalysts and reagents. Each of
those chemicals needs to
be made and their raw materials need to be mined/refined/synthesized.
Then you've not gotten to the components for the electronics,
plastics, fluids, rubber/sealants, assembly aids and such. Even
something as simple as glass will need its own factory.
Henry Ford made cars out of parts he was able to make from refined and cast
blocks of metal that had already been refined. He didn't take ore in one door
and spit cars our the other.
> KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de wrote:
> Thomas Barclay schrieb:
The
> reason motors supplanted steam engines was that, at the same tech
Internal combustion engines have only supplanted steam engines in electricity
production within the last fifteen years, but only because you can build them
faster and use the high grade waste heat from a gas turbine to power a steam
generator. Internal combustion engines only beat out steam engines for part
load applications and specific power density (a 300Mw gas turbine and
auxillaries is MUCH smaller than a 300Mw steam plant and turbine).
The steam engine has two main advantages over an internal combustion engine:
1) It is not limited to certain classes of fuel. The germans never did perfect
the coal fired diesel, there are severe issues with applying nuclear power to
the Otto (four stroke), Diesel, or Brayton (gas turbines) cycles. Steam
engines can run on anything that supplies heat; although, not necessarily all
at the same time. They are not limited to burning fluids.
2) Sacrificing some efficiency for robustness allows you to choose a two stage
curtiss wheel, which will have fewer then ten moving parts. Small tube boilers
with a large heating area per unit volume will reduce the starting times to
rival those of IC engines in subzero temperatures.
A third advantage is that a steam engine does not need to employ a
mechanical-electrical-mechanical or mechanical-hydraulic-mechanical
power conversion process to achieve the very useful feature of
max-torque-at-zero. The slower it is moving, the more torque you can
apply.
A fourth advantage is that you could deploy the steam enigine as a "prime
mover"
> Anyway, a high-tech product needn't always be more complex to operate,
The only thing third world about manufacture-for-export facilities in
the
third world is the worker pay/rights/benefits (except for low-input/high
markup goods like fashion clothes).
> The massive investment is in research and development.
The only problem that I have with selfreplicating nano-robots is the
(im)possibility of being able to prevent horrible disasters, with properly
designed software code. After the first glitch (hopefully not on a densely
populated world) self-replicating machines will only be reintroduced
after the software has been deterministically proven to be bug free (this may
not be possible).
> ... except relocated every
Henry Ford may have started out with over-building, but he eventually
got around to finding where he could cut costs by reducing the standards for
parts that had historically never worn out before the vehicle was junked. As
for the crankshaft, in 1996, according to learning coordinator at the
Westinghouse turbine plant, in Hamilton Ontario, machining costs $50 an
From: "Richard and Emily Bell" <rlbell@sympatico.ca>
> The only problem that I have with selfreplicating nano-robots is the
Due to SEUs (Single Event Upsets) from errant cosmic rays, this isn't a goer.
All you can do is write/grow the software so it will fail badly every 10
Universe lifetimes, on average. Or whatever your threshold of risk is for
having a planet eaten.
Just a thought about colonies and their 'tech level' - it might, no
*will* vary dramatically. Science colonies might not have heavy industry but
in put a problem to a team of good
engineers/biologists/linguists/chemists and you might get some great
'patches' to a problem or even a new way to do 'business' in some arena.
"Agricultural" colonies will almost have (even in low tech) some machine plant
capacity (I think that's the term I want) to keep the tractors, harvesters,
and other implements running. And industrial mining, chemical production
planets will have tech suitable to make the colony viable.As for 'population
colonies' (Penal, dissident, expanding the empire, military planets,
population overflow, whatever) will vary dramatically in what level of tech
the 'home government' deems suitable to make the colony "work" (survive)!
Gracias,