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.
