Electronics techs in the honor verse.

How can one justify the need for electronics techs in the honor verse. I can see electricians or equivalent but not electronics techs. How in the world would one repair molecular circuitry?
Would it not be the equivalent of board swapping? Would not the whole system be in one chip? One would just replace the whole black box especially in combat. I can see where running cable or optical fiber would be useful but wouldn't you just replace the FRU at the end of the run. Control panels would simply be a flat panel touch screen and interchangeable. The electronics at the other end are going to be built into the object it is controlling. Think replacing a pocket calculator instead of repairing it.

Part of what electronics techs do is simply board swapping. And that is part of what they are trained to do (would you really want someone who doesn't have electronics tech training to be swapping the boards on your five million credit, exawatt-scale graser?) But while all the data processing happens inside molycircs, you have forgotten all the interfaces between the people and the molycircs, and between the molycircs and the physical components they control. There are manual and voice control interfaces to build, repair, and maintain. There are screen displays and holographic projectors. There are video sensors, communications gear, and interfaces between electronic controls and mechanical devices. There are thousands of miles of wiring. Electronics techs have to work on every control interface on the ship, every display panel, every space suit, every remote drone device. They install electronics, they maintain them, they test them, they repair them, they build them when they have to. They deal with a lot more than just molycircs.

The system smitpa's describing sounds rather like the way the PN used to work to me. Their techs in the field were mainly conscripts with only basic training and weren't up to much, so their systems were designed to be modular - rather than fixing a problem, they'd pull the module and send it back to base for repairs, then slot a new module into place. It's a simple system, but the modular nature of the hardware added extra bulk, and Havenite gear was bulkier that Manticoran to begin with.

The RMN's techs, with superior training building from a superior educational foundation, could identify exact components that needed replacing, make the fix AND build new components in the ship's machine shops, something that was far beyond most PN techs.

Dafmeister wrote:The system smitpa's describing sounds rather like the way the PN used to work to me. Their techs in the field were mainly conscripts with only basic training and weren't up to much, so their systems were designed to be modular - rather than fixing a problem, they'd pull the module and send it back to base for repairs, then slot a new module into place. It's a simple system, but the modular nature of the hardware added extra bulk, and Havenite gear was bulkier that Manticoran to begin with.

The RMN's techs, with superior training building from a superior educational foundation, could identify exact components that needed replacing, make the fix AND build new components in the ship's machine shops, something that was far beyond most PN techs.

Actually I suspect a lot of the time, at least for the most critical systems the RN does have a spare handy and can just pop out the defective part, and replace it with the spare. The difference is their electronics techs can then use the onboard electronics shops to repair or rebuild the failed molecular circuitry - turning the failed component into another spare.

But for critical systems there often wouldn't be time to let the techs repair/rebuild and reinstall the original part. The system would be running on backups or be offline for too long.


But because you expect to be able to repair/rebuild before it breaks again you don't need as many spares, and you don't need to make the components as discretely plug and play to minimize the amount of working circuitry you're pulling when a board fails.

Now how the manticoran techs perform repair rebuild work on that scale is an interesting question. But it's canon that they do. (And while modern CPUs aren't quite down on that level there's still some repair / modification work that happens to them - its just that for economic reasons it's only done during the prototype stages. Otherwise a new chip, fresh off the line, is cheaper than the machine and technician time it would take uncap the chips and diagnose the problem, much less use ion beams or an electron microscope to actually repair in. (Whey waste many thousands of dollars trying to diagnose and repair a chip that wholesales for a couple hundred?)

You could posit that molycircs are a distant successor to todays' FPGAs (An FPGA is basically a bunch of general-purpose logic gates that can be arranged into any desired configuration), meaning that repairing them is a matter of reprogramming the remaining circuits.

The E wrote:You could posit that molycircs are a distant successor to todays' FPGAs (An FPGA is basically a bunch of general-purpose logic gates that can be arranged into any desired configuration), meaning that repairing them is a matter of reprogramming the remaining circuits.

Interesting. Sounds like the modern SSDs (solid state drives). Over their lifespan (10-15 years) they lose memory, but automatically reprogram to avoid the bad sectors.
In today's hi tech military gear you can plug and replace modules, but good technicians can work around problems and often raise platform availability without using up spares, and as others have mentioned often the problem is in the wiring or ancillaries.

The Manticore Navy seems to break thinks out a little differently than we do as well. Most of the techs we know about generally seem to be involved on the software side as well as hardware much more so than in our world.

Daryl wrote:

The E wrote:You could posit that molycircs are a distant successor to todays' FPGAs (An FPGA is basically a bunch of general-purpose logic gates that can be arranged into any desired configuration), meaning that repairing them is a matter of reprogramming the remaining circuits.

Interesting. Sounds like the modern SSDs (solid state drives). Over their lifespan (10-15 years) they lose memory, but automatically reprogram to avoid the bad sectors.
In today's hi tech military gear you can plug and replace modules, but good technicians can work around problems and often raise platform availability without using up spares, and as others have mentioned often the problem is in the wiring or ancillaries.

Even if you're just swapping components, you need to know which components to swap. Performing diagnosis a huge part of any electronics technician's job.

smitpa wrote:How can one justify the need for electronics techs in the honor verse. I can see electricians or equivalent but not electronics techs. How in the world would one repair molecular circuitry?
Would it not be the equivalent of board swapping? Would not the whole system be in one chip? One would just replace the whole black box especially in combat. I can see where running cable or optical fiber would be useful but wouldn't you just replace the FRU at the end of the run. Control panels would simply be a flat panel touch screen and interchangeable. The electronics at the other end are going to be built into the object it is controlling. Think replacing a pocket calculator instead of repairing it.

Donnachaidh wrote:Even if you're just swapping components, you need to know which components to swap. Performing diagnosis a huge part of any electronics technician's job.

smitpa wrote:How can one justify the need for electronics techs in the honor verse. I can see electricians or equivalent but not electronics techs. How in the world would one repair molecular circuitry?
Would it not be the equivalent of board swapping? Would not the whole system be in one chip? One would just replace the whole black box especially in combat. I can see where running cable or optical fiber would be useful but wouldn't you just replace the FRU at the end of the run. Control panels would simply be a flat panel touch screen and interchangeable. The electronics at the other end are going to be built into the object it is controlling. Think replacing a pocket calculator instead of repairing it.

This whole thread brings back memories of when I was in the navy. Swapping out circuit boards is not always that simple; especially since you do not always have the circuit board available. Our electronic techs could not keep our radar up and operating because of this. At the time I was not a tech but I did have a 4 year college degree in electonics... so what I did was trouble shoot and figure out what part of the circuit board was bad, remove the bad part. From another exact same type of board that was not working I took off the good part I needed and put in in the first board. I eventually had two working circuit boards and the ship was operational.... I was an radar intercept controller and not a tech, but I had good sense in thinking outside the box. The Tech Officer got upset because the circuit boards were not supposed to be tampered with and were to be sent back to the states, we were off of Viet Nam.

Just a thought...

Donnachaidh wrote:Even if you're just swapping components, you need to know which components to swap. Performing diagnosis a huge part of any electronics technician's job.

How much training does it take to find the spot marked "Push To Test" and read the fault code?

You only need to divulge the secret that there are wires connecting components to a select few "troubleshooters" who get called in when the fault code keeps telling you to change the same box over and over.

[/sarcasm]

Since the Electric Lawn Darts are still flying twenty-five years after I retired, I assume the US Air Force has taught a higher standard of troubleshooting than when they were first introduced. When first introduced F16 Electronics technicians were taught to rely on the self-test functions for troubleshooting and wiring diagrams were scarce to non-existent at the field repair level. I spent an inordinate amount of time teaching A-shop and B-shop technicians what to do when the Self-Test functions lied to them.