How big and how to minimize RFC latest devious suggestion

jmseeley wrote:
From the text, they're starting to replicate the Delthak works at other locations. A bigger factor may be losing some key people.

jms

And from where would they took the machinery and equipment? The only place on the planet, capable of building machinery and powered tools for the Delthak-scale industry, is Delthak.

P.S. Some naval consideration. If the Dethak would be seriously damaged, the KH's would became useless; without the Delthak-scale industry, it would be impossible to keep them in service.

Dilandu wrote:Add earthquakes, tornadoes, cyclons and other completely natural disasters, that could, theoretically, not left stone on stone in Delthak.

Cyclons? Better hope someone has a Battlestar handy, but that's an entirely different story.

AirTech wrote:Cyclons? Better hope someone has a Battlestar handy, but that's an entirely different story.

Well, must admit, it was a funny mistake.

Dilandu wrote:
And from where would they took the machinery and equipment? The only place on the planet, capable of building machinery and powered tools for the Delthak-scale industry, is Delthak.

I don't think that's true. It has been made clear that Howsmyn has competition, but that he is the big fish in this pond...

Anyhow, foundries are, at that tech level, probably pretty easy to bootstrap if you know what you're doing. a small forge is an easy thing to make, and that lets you build bigger ones and other machinery. A single lathe can be used to make other lathes, both larger ones and more accurate ones. Howsmyn is also already trying to create a second large foundry in Chisholm, from textev. In his shoes, as soon as I had a site, I'd be shipping the harder to manufacture parts from Delthak, maybe sooner than that so that it *lands* when the site is ready. If Delthak were incapable of creating the needed spares, he could reasonably outsource production to a competitor. Outsourcing to a Chisholmian foundry would be quite in-line with the long-term goals too. These subcontrators would get an inside look at how Delthak works, probably prompting them to emulate aspects, increasing their capability and capacity.

Dilandu wrote:P.S. Some naval consideration. If the Dethak would be seriously damaged, the KH's would became useless; without the Delthak-scale industry, it would be impossible to keep them in service.

Again, impossible is a strong word. It would certainly be difficult. Locomotives in the steam era were practically hand-made, so having access to the original templates made producing a replacement part that much easier. Even assuming the charisian steam engines were better standardised than that, I doubt there are accurate templates offsite at another foundry. The question becomes: did the navy stockpile spares for failure-prone parts in sufficient quantities to keep it together until Delthak can be rebuilt, repaired or replaced.

MTO wrote:Again, impossible is a strong word. It would certainly be difficult. Locomotives in the steam era were practically hand-made, so having access to the original templates made producing a replacement part that much easier. Even assuming the charisian steam engines were better standardised than that, I doubt there are accurate templates offsite at another foundry.

Ok, almost impossible. Any large-scale damage would mean that the ship must be decomissioned.

The question becomes: did the navy stockpile spares for failure-prone parts in sufficient quantities to keep it together until Delthak can be rebuilt, repaired or replaced.

I doubt that; they already pushed their industry over its limits by building a large, steel-hulled fast battleships. The Charisian industry didn't even exist a few years before; they should have a extremly limited supply of heavy powered tools, large steam hammers and other heavy equipment. And this extremly limited supply is currently worked over the KH's program and coastal ironclads.

and that lets you build bigger ones and other machinery.

Could any small fore build something like this?

http://cache.wists.com/thumbnails/3/9e/ ... 51250-orig

And this isn't a biggest steam hammer; actually, it's a pretty small 7-tonnes one.

The problem is, that to build heavy equipment you need a lot of smaller equipment, and all this equipment should also be factory-made.

The main thing that i found especially hard to believe in Charisian industrialisation, is that they just "skipped" all this stages; only a few years ago they still used water wheels and have no metric system or arabi numbers, and after only a few years, they suddenly have a industry, that Earth nations took years to build!

Simply speaking - they could not do this so quickly. Even with all specs provided, they could not just decide "oh, let's build a large steam hammer for steel battleships construction!" They need to build an industry chain, that was capable to provide materials, tools and equipment to build this steam hammer. And this chain also need sub-chains to work.

Dilandu wrote:

AirTech wrote:Cyclons? Better hope someone has a Battlestar handy, but that's an entirely different story.

Well, must admit, it was a funny mistake.

I also read it as "cylons" and thought wow, the Gbaba and cylons?? These guys can't catch a break!

Dilandu wrote:

MTO wrote:Again, impossible is a strong word. It would certainly be difficult. Locomotives in the steam era were practically hand-made, so having access to the original templates made producing a replacement part that much easier. Even assuming the charisian steam engines were better standardised than that, I doubt there are accurate templates offsite at another foundry.

Ok, almost impossible. Any large-scale damage would mean that the ship must be decomissioned.

The question becomes: did the navy stockpile spares for failure-prone parts in sufficient quantities to keep it together until Delthak can be rebuilt, repaired or replaced.

I doubt that; they already pushed their industry over its limits by building a large, steel-hulled fast battleships. The Charisian industry didn't even exist a few years before; they should have a extremly limited supply of heavy powered tools, large steam hammers and other heavy equipment. And this extremly limited supply is currently worked over the KH's program and coastal ironclads.

The issue with spare parts is not nearly as big an issue as you guys think because everything being built at Delthak and the other plants are all being built to a standardized template so they would be able to use any spare in any of their steam engines. Also if the people who are pushing the industry forward have access to the plans for the next better piece of machinery it is not that hard to build it the real issue is that they need to show some sort of development of the ideas which is the main thing slowing down the development of bigger and better tools.

The best parallel between Charis and the modern world for its industry is that they are in the middle of a massive continuous crash program in developing industry and the closest parallel would be the Manhattan project which in the space of only 5 years went from just ideas on a chalkboard to a nuclear weapon except in Charis's case they are trying to develop simpler technology and they already know how to make it so I personally have no real issue with the speed they have developed their industry.

Oh this issue seems to me to be something which us readers will not really be able to resolve on our own so if someone can point me to the proper place to contact RFC and see if we can get an official answer on the whole speed of Charis's development of its industry.

Dilandu wrote:The main thing that i found especially hard to believe in Charisian industrialisation, is that they just "skipped" all this stages; only a few years ago they still used water wheels and have no metric system or arabi numbers, and after only a few years, they suddenly have a industry, that Earth nations took years to build!

Simply speaking - they could not do this so quickly. Even with all specs provided, they could not just decide "oh, let's build a large steam hammer for steel battleships construction!" They need to build an industry chain, that was capable to provide materials, tools and equipment to build this steam hammer. And this chain also need sub-chains to work.

You forgot that the industry was guided by people who know what's going on, have access to Owl, and while they do let their inventors experiment and learn for a while, they are under heavy pressure (from COGA and from what might awake from under the Temple) to do it fast, so any time they really need it, they can get Owl to make them correct blueprints and thus skip a lot of intermediate phases.

In fact, they knew (starting from Merlin, then others as they were added to the inner circle) about the need for the entire chain of industry, and Howsmyn experimented with that even before he knew. Merlin was pushing and prodding to get them to accept new ideas, and thus compressed several centuries into several years.

The whole thing has a government on top that knows what it's doing and that government is at the same time efficient and benevolent. How many corrupted politicians are there in Charis government? None since the Duke of Tirian.

That, I think, is the greatest advantage they have, and the reason Merlin chose Charis (in addition to them being an island nation, so COGA could not start land war from day 0, which gave Charis time to prepare).

Even that was not accidental; there is a whole order of monks/priests who knew most of the story, who advised kings of Charis for generations and a number of those kings were introduced to the full story too (or as much as the order itself knew). No wonder that those kings kept their government clean.

Compare that to any government in the real world - US or any other country. You'll find it very hard to find even a single honest and competent politician. In fact, if there ever was one such, he would have found it very hard to get into any significant position.

So, we have a competent and honest government, that knows what it's doing, has access to Owl's database, with info equal to a major TF university, Owl is by now a real AI capable of independent scientific research, including researching a top-end PICA from scratch, without even reverse-engineering Merlin, so producing blueprints for 18th/19th century machines is a piece of cake for him/her/it.

Blueprints that can skip 100% of the problems humans found in the real world, and in practice, if they don't skip some of that, it's just to let Charisians get some practice.

And the government will provide all the money that's needed, and they all are under the pressure of a serious war.

Under such circumstances, yes, I believe you can do it all in several years.

captinjoehenry wrote:Oh this issue seems to me to be something which us readers will not really be able to resolve on our own so if someone can point me to the proper place to contact RFC and see if we can get an official answer on the whole speed of Charis's development of its industry.

You're already on the appropriate place. RFC reads this forum (RFC actually stands for his forum name, runsforcelery). However, he doesn't respond very often, especially on relatively small issues like this. If something comes up that really looks like it needs the author's input, the forum moderator contacts him. But it doesn't happen often. Most of the time, the moderator and author let us sling things back and forth among ourselves. And he almost never adds anything when he has already said "tum te tum tum"! That's his sign that he's not saying anything more until we see it in text.