[GZG] RE: Aus/NZ arms manufacture

> At 8:56 AM +1000 23/8/06, <Beth.Fulton@csiro.au> wrote:

The world seems to have entered a phase where some kinds
of high-tech weapons are cheap as chips.

There were stories all over the Internet, some of them
even well-documented, about the guy in New Zealand who
built his own cruise missile. The government decided to take it away from him.

Students in the Engineering faculty next door to me at university build UAVs.
At the end of each year students put up posters about the work they've been
doing. One
group put cameras on the UAV, low-light ones IIRC, for
tracking wildlife. Another group had done a feasibility
study of launching air-to-ground missiles from it!

Battle tanks are a bit harder, sure. But if Israel and Sweden can build their
own, Australia could probably manage.

The big-iron items, warships and high performance jets,
seem likely to remain restricted to major industrial powers. Unlike everything
else, they are becoming more and more expensive and difficult to make.

And the do-it-yourself UAVs and cruise missiles rely
on high performance CPUs which have become incredibly difficult to
manufacture. There's only about four or five foundries in the world that could
build a Pentium 4 chip, and they cost billions of dollars to set up. Yet just
about anyone can obtain one if they have a few hundred $US.

Extrapolating to GZG, I imagine ship hulls and engines to be fabulously
expensive and valuable, so never ever
get junked. Old NAC/ESU/FSE/NSL hulls end up being
sold to lesser powers, where they are extensively refitted with new
electronics and software. Most of the budget in such navies probably goes to
welding the hulls back together when they start to leak too much.

cheers,

HI guy's, us Australian's, did build own own tank, in ww2, called the
sentinel, mk's 1,2,and 3.The armaments we 2, 6 and 25 pounder, and a
flamethrower variant. The tank hull was one single cast, and the turrent was a
single cast that is, very hard for Australian manufacturer's to do back then,
for our small manufactureing industry was just starting to make our own
car's.so we really were not tooled for this type of vechicle. We only made 66
unit's of this tank, and was reported to have never seen

front line service in the Pacific threatre.

So I would say that retooling for a military vechicle wouldnt be any harder
than releaseing a new family sedan,. We do make our own light armoured troop
vechicle the Bushmaster and we do modify the Lav 25, to our condition's.

But N.A.C or N.S.L would seem to be where the OU would by there big tanks and
gear from.

But your gear is always supplied by the lowest bidder!

james m

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