I'm going to start this discussion due to a comment made in another thread.
I find it difficult to understand or comprehend that people don't quite understand modern (as in, what we have today in real life) factory and assembly line technology, and seem to be unwilling to extend that into our disco future, which is based effectively 1,000 T-years from now.
I use for a modern, real world example, a local auto assembly plant. Note that I call it an assembly plant, because the only component that is actually made on site is the steel body of the vehicle itself.
On an average day, 20 tractor trailers will bring in coils of steel. 6 stamping presses take those coils and convert them into fenders, hoods, doors, and assorted internal structural components. These components then go to the body shop, where they are welded together almost entirely by robots, with only minor human interactions - primarily in the quality control area. They then go into a paint shop, where they are painted, again mostly by robots. The painted bodies then go into the trim shop, where all of the parts are put onto and into the steel body which make it a car.
You'll typically have 100 tractor trailers per day bringing in trim parts, but a lot of those are the seats which are made in a factory about 20 miles away, so those are continually shuttling back and forth. The engines are assembled on site as well.
Now, from the time a painted body hits the trim shop, it's normally about 5 hours until it's a fully completed car. But they don't make one car at a time - that's why it's called an asembly line. What THAT means is that about every 2 minutes, a new car rolls off the end of the line. Running two shifts per day means that they're producing, on average, 450 cars per day.
That's one auto assembly plant, with 3,000 employees. Granted, there are about 15 OTHER factories running to support this one factory (not including the tire company), so that's another 7,000 or so workers. But those OTHER factories are also making parts for OTHER auto assembly plants as well. After all, a wire harness is a wire harness is a wire harness - the only difference is the ends and where they need to go. That's why you see a Subaru or Toyota with a Delphi wire harness in it. So those 7,000 other people may be making parts that supply 5 auto assembly plants. (And yes, that does happen. That's why we have here in Indiana alone 4 different vehicle assembly plants for four different car companies - yet some of their internal parts ARE the same.)
So we're talking about 2,000 cars per day - 10,000 per week - made here in Indiana, right now.
My point with this being - that's today, real world, 2012.
Why would we assume that in Discovery people are making spaceships over open forges with chunks of steel like you forge armor in Skyrim, pounding them out with a hammer?
That seems to be the rationale put forth by those people who argue that our organizations in Discovery can't build ships.
There are (according the planet info card) more than 4 billion people on Manhattan alone. That's nearly as many as we have on Earth today. We have in-space smelters to refine ores from asteroids so you don't have to dig up the planetary surface, in-space shipyards and factories to assemble things, and the level of robots - including effectively autonomous robots (all those bartenders, right?). Robots that don't need air - or gravity - to do their thing.
So what you'd have is an orbital factory that does nothing but make space-ship seats. There'd be transports hauling those seats to all the shipyards in space. Most hull components are going to be fairly standardized. Again, a wiring run and harness is a wiring run and harness is wiring run and harness. So you'd have a factory in Liberty supplying components for not only the ships that Liberty builds but also to those ships that are sub-contracted through some company for Liberty. It's entirely possible that you might find that same company supplying parts through a re-shipper to every ship in Bretonia, Kusari, and maybe even Rheinland.
So the Zoners want to build a series of ships. They're not going to build everything from scratch, over an open firepit. They'll bring in x amount of electronic components from a Liberty factory, y amount of components from a Bretonian factory, z amount of hull components from a Rheinland factory.
Think about it - first you have one robot, capable of making other robots, presuming you give him enough raw or other materials. Say it takes him one day to make another robot. Anyone ever seen the checkerboard geometric progression? Day two you have two robots that make two more so you have four robots. Day three you have four robots that make eight. Day four you have eight robots that sixteen. Day 5, 32. Day 6, 64. Day 7, 128. Day 8, 256. Day 9, 512. Day 10, 1024. Day 11, 2056. Day 12, 4112. Now you pull half of those robots out to start making space ships. You know have 2056 robots - each making another 2056 robots per day - and 2056 robots making spaceships the first day. 4112 the second day. 6078 the third day. How long do you think it's going to take 10,000 robots that don't need air to make a spaceship? Really?
I'd be amazed if it took them more than 2 weeks to knock out any battleship in the game. That's what you have when you get a shipyard - thousands of robots that simply need components to put together a ship or a series of ships. The actual limiting factor would be in the raw materials you can get. Do you make 300 Titans this week, or 1/2 an Ossie?
Now - again, with what we can make today, now, in 2012 - tens of thousands of autos and their equivalent per day - and that's IN ADDITION to all of the consumer goods we also make now - why would you consider in the least that we cannot assemble and make all of the spaceships that we role-play that we have made 1,000 years in the future? (Seriously - could something as basic as a StarFlea be any more complex than a semi tractor? One of those rolls off the Peterbilt assembly line about every 10 minutes - which doesn't include the Volvo, Mack, Freightliner, or OTHER assembly lines...)
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
