I was under the impression Nano technology was so common place in Sirius your average citizen has regular access to it's applications. The solution to quick and efficient construction might be found in that.
I can't believe you just compared a spaceship to a car.
Calling NASA now.
Also, it takes more than 2 minutes for every car to come out of the factory. I believe it's more like every 10-15, which significantly changes the statistics.
12 years working in the auto assembly plant here in Lafayette. Typical line speed, we were building 220 cars per 8 hour shift. That's 7.5 hours of production time for breaks and line shut-downs during the day, with lunch not included. 7.5 x 60 minutes = 450 minutes / 220 cars per shift = one car off the end of the line every 2.05 minutes. And we had (while I was still working there) two production lines - one building SUV's as well. The truck line was putting one out every 2.5 minutes.
You do this by breaking things down into tasks. Team 1, for example, took the doors off the painted bodies, loaded them onto a secondary conveyor, so they could go to door line for things to be put together there. Team 2 started routing some of the internal wiring harnesses. You get that down to, say, Team 10, which has 6 people on it. You've one person putting seat belt harnesses in for each side. One person in on the back right side pulling harness through and connecting lights, while the person on the left side is putting the rear window wiper motor into the body. Up in the engine compartment one person has sub-assembled the air-conditioner radiator and installs that while another person is routing the brake cables through the firewall and hooking up the brake pedal. You do all of your assigned tasks for that vehicle in 2 minutes - which isn't that tough to do - and then repeat. Yeah, it's boring.
But anyway - how big are the fighters our characters fly? Oh, yeah - they're about the size of an SUV, aren't they? Why would we not apply the same techniques to building those?
I'm glad Chris brought up Liberty ships. We were using a lot of manpower to make them - but he's absolutely correct, we were cranking those out incredibly fast. BY HAND.
Guys - I'm going to say it again.
MECHANIZED and ROBOTIC construction. Fletcher - you're correct in the way you're talking about doing things - but again, think assembly lines in space.
That's where I think everyone is failing in their thinking. It may take you a year from the time you start building the chassis all the way up step 14, where the ship is commissioned. BUT ...
Why do you assume that you're building the ships one at a time?
Once you fill up the assembly line - which granted, may take a year - you should be able to crank a ship off the line once a week, if not faster. So yeah, from the time that Destroyer Hull 25 started on the construction line, it may have taken it a full year to get to being a completed ship - but it's only a week behind Destroyer Hull 24, and a week ahead of Destroyer Hull 26.
THAT'S why I'm comparing spaceships in Discovery to cars, Dab. They're a mass produced item, not the fancy hand-built prototypes that NASA cranks out. Same thing from our factories that made B-17's, just to compare something that had to fly. We cranked out over 11,000 B-17 bombers in 4 years - an average of 7.5 bombers per day. Once you have the assembly line full - it stays that way.
There was a thing on cruise ships not too long ago on TV, about constructing the biggest cruise ship in the world. Everything was sub-assembled ahead of time. All they had to do for hull construction was, literally, lift the assemblies up and put them together. And since most of the section ALSO had the wiring and plumbing done up ahead of time, it was mostly a matter of simply connecting pipe A to pipe B many, many times. (It's called modular construction.)
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
When it comes to building the actual modules for the ship, like weapons, sensors, armour plating I do strongly agree their manufactured in a mass basis. Not just for new ships, but for replacement parts and resale.
The primary bottleneck I can see is the installation and construction of the actual superstructure and armour modules. I can't see it being a speedy process, but applying them as modules instead of 'build-as-you-go' basis is a time efficient process.
While a zero gravity environment greatly enhances the movement of incredibly heavy components, the lack of superstructure robotic equipment such as cranes and massive 'welding' devices, at least just looking at the construction facilities would slow down the process.
Current construction methods are good, but its far from the best without sealed and dedicated hangers that can handle multiple capital ships, up to and including carrier class.
If we were to go by vanilla lore, it would take six month just to refit a battleship. It's in one of the rumors, it says Battleship Yukon will be moved to Norfolk for that.
I do think consumer-level, fighters and freighters would be similar to modern day in building in the Houses. I think the additional technology to build things better would be offset by how much more would have to go into ships, including safety checks and all that.
I think most transports should be compared with train building today. I don't know how long that takes, however.
I see battleships as similar to carriers today. Or at least those giant supertankers.
That is definitely for in the houses though. Smaller groups and isolated factions would never be able to get that sort of industrial production. Manhattan may have several billion people, but what is the population of the less crowded places? How long would it take for a modern day criminal organizations to build a car?
Remember that each of the houses economies went through their infant years in isolation of each other. This means no comparative advantage and few things in the way of economies of scale. Freelancer also doesn't make use of the self replicating machine as far as I know.
I would not say that starfliers are as complex as cars in the future. They would be as affordable, perhaps, but affordablility does not indicate complexity or lack of. This can be seen in the electronics market, which is ungodly complicated in terms of production processes and technological principles, but quite affordable for the lay man who thinks Norton is the best.
Remember how a battleship/carrier is built today. Think about how much larger their displacement would be once they don't have to float in anything anymore. How many resources is this? What about support systems like air and food storage/recycling? Energy systems, weapons, shields, whatever the space version of radar would be and so on. It's pretty complex to build a ship now...
I kind of like everything I am reading here, it's interesting.
Regarding how long it takes to construct a ship, I think of it is a matter of how efficiently the ship is being built. The biggest factor is material cost, not building time.
You have a large, modern shipyard, utilizing an obscene number of Robotic Components, and having those robots continuously fed all of the materials needed so that they can work nearly non-stop, then yes, I can imagine a ship being built literally before your eyes, and ready for operation faster than most would believe (if they did not know better already).
But the whole process, from the drawing board, to the beginning of the assembly line, and then finally to then end product, if you add that in, then that would make everything seem like it was taking much more time. Regarding parts, some components simply take a long time to manufacture.
But the shipyard workers, the assemblers, they do not need to worry about that. For them, the parts are ready to go and just need to be put into their proper places. Someone just needs to pay for it.
And this "prefabricated and modular" system is pretty well reflected in Discovery. Everyone has noticed that there is a limited variety of ships available, right? Now days, there are (I am making this number up, guessing) hundreds of thousands of different kinds of automobile designs, from cars, trucks, vans, to transport vehicles and job-specific vehicles. This seems to work fine on the ground, and I imagine the tradition carries on in Disco, on planets and even some stations.
But when you are dealing with space travel, you want tried, proven, and reliable. And that is the most time consuming factor of the ship building process in Disco, I believe. Ship Design.
Starting from scratch, Hah!, years upon years, at best. Even modifying a current design is risking catastrophic failure. The motto, "If something is not broken, don't fix it." strongly applies to space ships I feel.
If you already have that design, then you just knocked off years. Next is making the parts for the ship.
Two words: Mass Production. Sirius does it well, at least in regards to space ship parts. There is only one kind of Liberty Defender. They are all designed the same, constructed from the same components, and are built the same. All ships of the same "class" in Disco use the same modular weapon systems, with few exceptions. Chances are excellent that, for any ship available in Disco, parts are ready and available to begin construction the second you pay for the ship.
So, there are a limited number of ship designs out there. As a result, each design can have parts for it mass-produced and readily available (from somewhere), as opposed to a demand-driven production. And for enormous projects, like a Carrier, there would not be enough parts all ready and waiting in storage to build one hundred of them. But, the components that do take a long time to produce would be stockpiled in abundance, since the manufactures can safely bet the Liberty Carrier design will not be changing suddenly and make everything obsolete. Other parts that take less time to produce will be kept in much smaller stock.
It does not take a very long time to build a ship. Any ship. New designs do not come out each month, or each year, or even each decade, all of the designs that are out are all tested and perfected. Parts are readily available and constructed ahead of time, as long as the design proves to be in demand (and when you are talking about the space ship of a particular group, you can bet there will be demand for as long as that group exists.). Actual construction itself can be done fast or slowly, depending on various variables, such as type of workers, number of workers, access of the parts needed to those workers, etc.
Under ideal circumstance, I do not see a problem with a new cruiser coming into service after a matter of months, or even weeks. Sooner, if partial construction began before the request was even made (you have all these robots and parts waiting, you are a rich company, and you *know* the ship will sell, why not start now?). Smaller ships, hell, have it done in a few days.
This is all assuming that your ship is not super special and customized. In which case, prepare to wait several years.
Oh, and also,
' Wrote:Hey, maybe in the future we will have a ship-building mod...
That is a strangely arousing idea to me.
<span style="color:#999999">"There are many ways this could go wrong. Let's try them all."</span>
Quote:I still hold that say Battleships and Carriers at least take close to a year to build in Discovery, but smaller capital ships like Cruisers Destroyers and Gunboats are being mass produced and churned out several at a time every couple months.
I agree, if you look at the numbers in the lore (dont count Gallia because it is not lore...)
Liberty has 500-1000 cruisers?
Only a couple hundred battleships.
Obviously, Cruisers are far more mass produced, because they're smaller and cheaper than battleships.
Many Cruiser infocards reflect this, the Rhienland Cruiser says it is "The backbone of the Chancellors fleet" or some language similar, while the Battleship says its the Chancellor's "Checkmate move" which means there are less and they're used in a more strategic fashion.
Just my extrapolation.
As for how long it takes to design, designing takes far longer, if you look at more infocards, you'll see the Zoners -failed- with the Kingfisher...
It still flies though.
How many do you think fail and do not fly because they're unsafe?
Design takes much longer than building, I believe, in Freelancer...
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