HFQ Official Snippet #9

JRM wrote:

PeterZ wrote:In that passage, James, Zwaigair mentioned that the products from the same shop might or might not be interchangeable. That shop would use the same templates to make their jigs yet still not be interchangeable. Now toss in the brass rounds. The drawing machines for the brass have to produce nearly identical tubes. Sure they know how to make brass and copper pipe in quantity. For plumbing, tubes that don't fit exactly can be fitted together and soldered. Different enough drawing machines that produce tubes with big enough variances in their dimensions can produce cartridges that can fit in the chamber of the rifle but are different enough to jam or misfire. The more use the rifle gets the more likely these issues will come up.

Yes, these issues can be avoided with sufficient diligence and care. That takes time and money. To truly replicate the automated system of Howsmyn with the labor intensive system of the mainland, requires so much time and training that it would be a like one master gunsmith making every single piece from a common design. Even then it would take weeks or months per gun.

I agree with you that an argument might be made that the less than knowledgeable aristos of the mainland might just try to replicate the bolt action rifles. That would be such a resource suck that charis would be more helped than hindered.

Hi Peter,

The reason that the Tiger economies of the Pacific rim grew so quickly is that they didn't have to develop their technology, they bought it. They bought the most current technology, and their productivity gains were fantastic, because they skipped intermediate steps. Siddarmark's manufacturing is going to grow at a rapid rate for the same reason. What makes you and Don think that the Church can't steal and apply the technology that Charis is transferring to Siddarmark?

Does RFC have to transfer Shannon Foraker to Dolar?

James

Hi James,

The church can steal all they like. But under its present regime, they'll never catch up. Every time they encounter an unpleasant surprise and come up with counter, there is another unpleasant surprise waiting in the wings. That is because they are adamantly opposed to innovation. There are some bright people on the church's side, but being smart in means keeping your head down to avoid having the inquisition cut it off. Thirsk and Maigwair both have to protect their pet wizzards.

No, the church shops are not really capable of precision, at least not in the same sense as the Delthak works. Precision means having same measurements across the board and being able to come up with same results every time. In the church shops, they get "close" and then customize the parts to fit together. They lack the tools to make the tools that would make precision possible.

As an example, In my shop, I have a caliper that enables me to make precise measurements, let's say down to a thousandth of an inch, or its eqivalant in metric. This intrument permits me to lathe or grind down a piece of metal to the point where it would fit exactly into the perfectly round hole that the same instrument permitted me to drill or bore out.

There are no calipers in church shops.

As for the pacific rim countries with their tiger economies, they weren't handicapped by the proscriptions or the doctrine the church imposes. Neither, I might add, was Shannon Foracker. The inquisition would have sent her to the punishment as a servant of Shan-wei for sure!

Don

n7axw wrote:Hi James,

As an example, In my shop, I have a caliper that enables me to make precise measurements, let's say down to a thousandth of an inch, or its eqivalant in metric. This intrument permits me to lathe or grind down a piece of metal to the point where it would fit exactly into the perfectly round hole that the same instrument permitted me to drill or bore out.

There are no calipers in church shops.

Don

Hi Don,

LAMA August 896 Ch Ix Page 144 Paragraph 4

The parts in all of these rifles— all of them, My Lord— are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant.

So how could "small variations" have been measured without calipers?

James

JRM wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi James,

As an example, In my shop, I have a caliper that enables me to make precise measurements, let's say down to a thousandth of an inch, or its eqivalant in metric. This intrument permits me to lathe or grind down a piece of metal to the point where it would fit exactly into the perfectly round hole that the same instrument permitted me to drill or bore out.

There are no calipers in church shops.

Don

Hi Don,

LAMA August 896 Ch Ix Page 144 Paragraph 4

The parts in all of these rifles— all of them, My Lord— are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant.

So how could "small variations" have been measured without calipers?

James

By putting things together... and then going "Nuts! They don't fit!"

Equip ships with seacocks. However, this has the disadvantage that you now have a new point of catastrophic failure.

isaac_newton wrote:

Henry Brown wrote:Something that has been nagging at me for the last day or two since I read this: Why would a Charisan merchant ship allow themself to be boarded?

In a regular conflict, sure. The merchant ship is taken as a prize and the crew is held till either exchanged or until the war ends. But this war is not a regular conflict where the rules of war are being observed. This is a holy war in which all Charisans have been declared as heretics. Right now, the best outcome for Charisan seamen in the event of being captured is a quick execution (which is what the snippet says happened to the crews of the captured ships). The other possible fate is being put to the question and dying slowly and with great pain.

So, if your possible outcomes are either 1. A summary execution or 2. Slow death by torture, then why surrender at all? If your merchant ship is armed, then fight to the death. If unarmed, why not scuttle your ship to prevent capture?
*edited once

yup - that had occurred to me too - in fact I suggested same thing in the thread on snippet 8! - great minds and all that
http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6316&start=70

The key point is that the church don't have, and can't have, a standard inch due to the writ.
Charis has one. In our world the original mere-etalon is still stored in the Pavillon of Sevres even if it was replaced by a wavelength measure, and even the US inch is nowadays defined in relation to it.

So each factory has slightly different measures, whatever precision the machines and calipers can achieve. And there is really no way to reconcile the variations. Jigs even to a good precisions is not enough

More, their machinery, due to the lack of standard, are built with lesser precision geometry, and one of the hard rules of manufacturing is that you need at least a 5x factor increase regarding the precision of the main guiding parts of any machine. btw geometry is key here not dimensional.

This is true for any measure.

For drawing processes in particular, even slight variations of pressures will attain very different results which may the difference between a jam or not.

JRM wrote:

n7axw wrote:Hi James,

As an example, In my shop, I have a caliper that enables me to make precise measurements, let's say down to a thousandth of an inch, or its eqivalant in metric. This intrument permits me to lathe or grind down a piece of metal to the point where it would fit exactly into the perfectly round hole that the same instrument permitted me to drill or bore out.

There are no calipers in church shops.

Don

Hi Don,

LAMA August 896 Ch Ix Page 144 Paragraph 4

The parts in all of these rifles— all of them, My Lord— are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant.

So how could "small variations" have been measured without calipers?

James

The parts in all of these rifles— all of them, My Lord— are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant.

So how could "small variations" have been measured without calipers?

James[/quote]
at a guess especially if he used a really good magnifying glass he could see pretty small variations. I am going to guess on the order of 10-50 thousandths of an inch.

the real deal with precision tools like calipers, micrometers, etc. is they they both read faster, AND can be set to a predetermined setting so that you can check and recheck as you get close to the desired measurement.

now my suspicion based on everything I have read is that a lot of the things both sides are dealing with within ~1 1/100 of an inch is effectively identical, granted that might not be the case with the newer rifles, but I suspect that a certain amount of "slop" can be resolved by things like the brass etc.

JRM wrote:LAMA August 896 Ch Ix Page 144 Paragraph 4

The parts in all of these rifles— all of them, My Lord— are effectively identical. I’ve measured them very carefully and found some extremely small variations in size, but none of them are significant.

So how could "small variations" have been measured without calipers?

A guage. You see this a lot in traditional woodworking; you don't really care how large something is, you care that the parts fit. So you make the mortise, gauge it, and use the same gauge with the same settings to mark the tenon you're about to cut to fit into that mortise.

This will not get you parts standardization; you need a standard set of measurements for that, and moreover you need to be able to make the rulers and the mechanical verniers you need to check your measurements.

Everybody's used a vernier gunsight at some point, right? You have to be able to make something very much like that with the utmost consistency to get reliable thousandsths of an inch measurements with a mechanical device, and you can't really do that with gauges. It's a hard problem and the Charians have cheated massively, skipped several lengthy and painful iterative steps, due to Owl.

Could the Church do this? Sure. Can the Church do it without making it much, much easier to innovate? No. So it's going to be sincerely resisted.

n7axw wrote:

As an example, In my shop, I have a caliper that enables me to make precise measurements, let's say down to a thousandth of an inch, or its eqivalant in metric. This intrument permits me to lathe or grind down a piece of metal to the point where it would fit exactly into the perfectly round hole that the same instrument permitted me to drill or bore out.

There are no calipers in church shops.

Don

This is absolutely my last word on the subject.

LAMA August 896 Ch V Page 108 paragraph 2

Safeholdian timepieces had been precision instruments from the very beginning of the human presence on the planet, although each of them had been individually built by master craftsmen like Bruhstair, without a trace of standardization.

If we start with a clock gear that has a random size, every other gear and moving part in the clock must be proportional to that part. The teeth of a given gear must be very close to identical and symmetrically placed if the gears are to mesh smoothly. How can that be done without a caliper? Now if all they were building were clocks for the town square, this argument might not hold water, but Clyntahn in his rage destroys a grandfather's clock.

In summary, the church has shops that measure parts to thousandths of an inch, even if they can't agree what the units of those measurements are. The church shops have drop hammers, water powered machinery, and accumulators. The plans stolen from Siddarmark describe not only how to make high quality steel, but how to use a steam engine in that process.

James

There is a difference between being able to measure out a fine difference between two apparently identical parts and being able to manufacture a third part of similar difference or even less.

In the earlier books, some of the struggles Howsmyn went through to improve the quality of the machine work in his manufactories are mentioned at some length.

Don

JRM, There is a quite long section in LaMA (P107 ff in the Kindle edn) about Styvyn Bruhstair, Howsmyn's chief instrument maker and head of quality control and how absolutely indispensable he has been to the whole development of standardised processes. Even for Howsmyn's factories that had been very hard to carry through onto the shop floor. Bruhstair started out as a master clockmaker and the section enumerates a whole long list of necessary measuring instruments he has 'invented' as part of this process. In other words they were not standard and the master clockmakers on the mainland don't have them.

It's not that the CoGA absolutely can't produce the kind of quality that Charis can, it's that the church requires master craftsmen to do so and they can only do it slowly. They haven't a clue about how to set up a power tool production line and exercise quality control sufficient to produce the kind of things that Charis now can in quantity.

The Church's metallurgy is nowhere near as good as Charis', which is why we had the discussion about making the St Kylman rifle mostly out of iron not steel. The church have stolen plans for one kind of steel making furnace, it wasn't the most advanced type and they are only just getting round to bringing some of them into production in the LaMA timescale, while others are also being built. The Church's scale is a problem as we'll as an advantage, it takes them a long time to change production methods.

On steam engines, all they got was some theoretical background, not plans for working engines, and it is not at all clear that Clyntahn has let anyone outside the Inquisition see even that yet. Thirsk clearly hasn't a clue about how the steam warships work in the recent HFQ snippets, beyond the smart but decidedly empirical comment that all the smoke suggests it somehow involves burning quantities of fuel.

Your comments suggest that the CoGA has a unified industrial system that is oriented towards and eager to develop innovations. In fact nothing could be further from the truth and especially so in Desnair whose raiders have actually captured the stuff.