***
Plus what makes you think FT ships are constructed with a big workforce? Even
now robots almost completely construct some cars and computers, maybe the
shipyards are highly automated. So managing a big workforce may not be a
problem.
***
Understood, but you have to watch the FM factor youve introduced here.
Replacing humans with robots DOES reduce costs, especially in space, but once
you've got robots in all construction, it starts looking more and more like
the human structure. Sure, you can build, mothball the robots, then trot them
out again. However, given tech obscelence, and the cost of completely
rebuilding an infrastructure compared to incremental improvements, might well
make it indistinguishable at the
FT-granularity.
Ditto, I'm guessing, with control structure.
Though, the rebuild CAN work very well. Much of the strong German and Japanese
economies can be traced to the war devastation leading to wholesale
modernization. Parts of recent US economic upturns are also examples.
However, this is still mostly guesswork, and YMMV is still highly operative.
I'd have to say the current thread on corruption in ship construction is VERY
speculative, unless I missed ANYONE declaring their expertise in the area.
I declare NO EXPERTISE, even the comments above, so I'll try to let them
stand.
> However, this is still mostly guesswork, and YMMV is still highly
Since I started it I'll comment... <g>
I was mainly viewing it as less "corruption" and more "pork" to tell the
truth, I think that that point is valid more so than as "corruption". However,
there is also a fine line between the two <g>
Once again, there is a less fine line between "maximizing profitability" and
"charging the market price" to "sticking to the government because we can"
(remember those $900 toilet seats, and $500 wrenches back in the 70's or
80's?) I would guess that it happens more than we know but less often than we
are afraid of...
Hope the point is clarified. <g>
> --- David Rodemaker <dar@horusinc.com> wrote:
...
> Once again, there is a less fine line between
Ok, as a government contractor I feel compelled to point out that these sorts
of examples are highly deceptive. The government imposes massive requirements
for documentation and testing (especially the military) and it often costs a
heck of a lot more to produce an item for a military contract than it does to
put it in wall mart. That wrench may have had to survive 4000 degree
temperatures, drops from 50 feet, nearby explosions, etc. In other words, the
requirements for the item and the cost to document those requirements and the
whole process to make it and the oversight to make sure you did it the
government way makes that wrench VERY expensive.
Plus how do you know that some of those big ticket items were just fronts for
the money that went into building planes like the F117 and the SR71? That
money had to come from somewhere, right?
> > Once again, there is a less fine line between
Notice I said "back in the 70's or 80's".
<snippage>
Sorry if I hit a sore spot there. I think that it is a very well documented
fact that there is a certain amount of graft, corruption, pork, or simple
inefficiency that occurs for large scale projects of the sort represented by
ship construction (or bridge-building for that matter). It also happens
in the commercial marketplace also. No intent was being made to give offense.
<sheesh>
> --- David Rodemaker <dar@horusinc.com> wrote:
...
> Sorry if I hit a sore spot there. I think that it is
I don't deny that, and it is something of a sore point because the press is
fond of bringing up stuff like that without exploring the reasons why military
equipment (even pedestrian stuff like flashlights) is more expensive than off
the shelf stuff. Didn't mean to jump on you.
> On 29-Jun-01 at 11:14, David Rodemaker (dar@horusinc.com) wrote:
Well, my example was programming, back in the early 90s I had a solo business
doing custom programming for private companies. I was doing fairly well
writing databases with easy user interfaces and nice printouts. I bid on, and
won, a job with the state of Florida that I expected to take me 160 hours or
so. My bid was an order of magnitude lower than the next bidder!!! It turns
out dealing with the government is a whole different beast than dealing with
individuals or private companies. A year of later I finally finished and was
paid. It worked out to about 20 cents an hour. Dealing with government is a
whole different animal than private companies.
> --- Roger Books <books@mail.state.fl.us> wrote:
...
> Well, my example was programming, back in the early
I'm a programmer too, though I have always worked for government contractors
(well almost) after getting out of the military. Doing software for the
government is even worse than building them
a hammer or toilet seat ;-) because when someone
is buying custom software they want it exactly how
they want it -- and that seems to change week to
week. The added complexity you get by a continual series of new government
faces, none of which really know what they want, continually demanding changes
and modifications can be a nightmare if it's not carefully controlled.
Also with government jobs, you often have political considerations (like you
work for the Koreans and they demand a Korean company be involved so you get a
whole bunch of people to work with you didn't hire and can't control and who
question your every move). Boy don't get me started, but the point is that
often the road to the end of the project is not one you'd choose if you were
looking for the most efficient, cheapest route.
So like you say it's expensive working for the government, even indirectly,
but it seems much the same whether I'm working on a training system for a
destroyer or a combat system for a defense network. The biggest ship we ever
worked on while I worked at
Litton was the LHD-1. We did the CSTS (combat
simulation test system).
> I was mainly viewing it as less "corruption" and more "pork" to tell
and
> "charging the market price" to "sticking to the government because we
Sometimes it's simply because the spec is old and it costs less to buy a piece
(which used to be standard but is now obscure) than to change the specs and
republish them. Sometimes it's because of unfortunate quantity break points.
When I sold plastics, a Marine air base used to buy one part from us every few
months, about $100.50 a shot including a set up charge of $100. We explained
to them that they should buy a bunch at once rather than pay the set up charge
each time, but they weren't authorized, so they bought, say, 5 individually at
$505 rather than in a group at $102.50. That was the Marine Corps; the
> Very true, not easy to keep secrets in a representative
> David Rodemaker wrote:
> > However, this is still mostly guesswork, and YMMV is still highly
Construction of starships in tuffleyverse will probably be different from
shipbuilding right now because the great powers are faced with the same
problems as the British Empire in the nineteenth century. The only way to have
a presence in a backwater is to actually be present. This is especially true
if the only FTL communication is by courier ship. The four major powers need a
large number of hulls in space just to keep the mail flowing.
The timeframe of tuffleyverse is after the amortization of a lot of the
components would have been paid for. The beam-4's of the Komarov are
not
inferior (in game terms) to any other beam-4, so the ships are designed
for the weapons, not the other way around. An old ship like the Komarov
implies that combat systems are mature systems. The life support systems for
these vessels are no more complex than for a nuclear powered submarine of the
same size, and only the Jeanne d'Arc carrier pushes this limit for a submarine
(28,000 tonnes, crew of 300).
If you doubt that the prices of the high-tech systems will go down, just
look at the cost of photocopiers before and after the Xerox patent expired.
The complexity of the combat management systems will hit a plateau, as the
system designers will actually reduce the feature set of the hardware and
software, so that the system falls within that subset of all programs for
which the halting problem can be solved. [Bug free computer systems have been
designed and implemented, and I know of one example that even does something
useful.]
[Off-topic tangent]
Ontario Power Generation, then Ontario Hydro, decided to go with an
ultra-modern
computer controlled reactor safety system. However, the major snag was that
they not only had to prove that the software design was correct, but also that
the implementation was correct. It took months just to come up with a way to
describe the software in terms that could be verified, but after a year and a
half, they were able to prove to the satisfaction of the Atomic Energy Control
Board that a license could be issued for the untried technology. Previously,
the safety systems were electro-mechanical in nature, with hard wired
relay
From: "David Griffin" <carbon_dragon@yahoo.com>
> Ok, as a government contractor I feel compelled
Been there, done that.
We wanted to sell some computer software to the US Military in the 80s. Could
have sold maybe 100 units at a few thousand each.
We gave up when we got the first batch of documentation, and examined the top
form, requesting details of our affirmative action plan for employing a quota
of Aleut Eskimos (with wording that made it quite clear that if we didn't have
one, we'd not be eligible as a supplier)..
Aleut Eskimos are pretty hard to come by in Australia.....
That's why the US taxpayer has to pay far more for some gear