Next Bolthole devellopment

Weird Harold wrote:

Maldorian wrote:What is with Herlander Simmons?

I think they could build the first new Hyperdrive with the Aligenment Tec!

First, the name is Simoes, not Simmons.

Second, Herlander is a theoretical hyper-physicist and it is explicitly stated in textev that he was only marginally similiar with the hardware side of things.

The GA will eventually develop a "Streak Drive" and very probably a smaller, more efficient version than the MAlign invented. It won't be the "next Bolthole development" or even the second or third development, though.

The next Bolthole developments are going to be really simple, straightforward, Havenite hulls for getting some Manticoran goodies inside. If they are marvels at all, it'll be in terms of production efficiency or taking advantage of different national skills, not breaking any barriers. Think Liberty Ships that way - the wonder is in getting them out and the utility of them, nothing whiz-bang.

Re the GA streak drive - You're almost certainly right there. But, given that it's apparently a brute-force kind of approach; given that the real breakthrough for it is in the hyperphysics Simoes knows very well and just the demonstration that the iota wall really can be broken at all, it's at least possible that the GA designers will be able to knock out their own streak drive very soon. It still wouldn't be in those first Bolthole Specials - which have to be streamlined for familiar design on the Havenite end and slapping in Manticoran parts on their end - but a prototype streak drive testbed may be possible in the near future.

At any rate, we don't know enough about the technical issues to rule that out with confidence. Training the engineers to build, maintain, and operate the thing - getting confidence the bugs are all worked out - and designing line units to use it: these all represent hurdles to leap after that.

pnakasone wrote:Even a ship as advanced in design as the RMN Invictus-class is made up mostly of standard off the shelf technologies. So I figure Haven could be a source of general spare parts.

Not really. Not without extenive redesign. Let's take something simpler, like an F35. It's a plane with a jet engine, right? So anyone who makes jets can provide an engine? But no. It uses a very particular engine that has to provide certain amounts of power using reasonable amounts of fuel while fitting in the engine compartment, not screwing up the center of balance, and interfacing into the enormously complex automated logistics system that controls whether the aircraft can fly and to the very complex on-board flight and engine control system.

So essentially, you can use any engine anyone makes as long as it is a Pratt and Whitney F135. Or you can spend years redesigning the aircraft and software and maybe get somewhere.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:Even a ship as advanced in design as the RMN Invictus-class is made up mostly of standard off the shelf technologies. So I figure Haven could be a source of general spare parts.

Not really. Not without extenive redesign. Let's take something simpler, like an F35. It's a plane with a jet engine, right? So anyone who makes jets can provide an engine? But no. It uses a very particular engine that has to provide certain amounts of power using reasonable amounts of fuel while fitting in the engine compartment, not screwing up the center of balance, and interfacing into the enormously complex automated logistics system that controls whether the aircraft can fly and to the very complex on-board flight and engine control system.

So essentially, you can use any engine anyone makes as long as it is a Pratt and Whitney F135. Or you can spend years redesigning the aircraft and software and maybe get somewhere.

As well as satisfying the weight requirements. A design requirement that was problematical to all of the designers, which led to composites and the like which caused problems until corrected.

Even caused probs post production.

cthia wrote:Even caused probs post production.

They promise that it won't catch fire while taxing again. At least not very often.

How much of a ship is made up of high end parts vs how much of it is common water pump type parts? Since it is war time they would want to be able to use a wide range of spare parts they would have inventory including the possibility of having to adapt enemy spare parts.

At worst Manticore could provide the specs and digital manufacturing templates to Republic manufactures for them to use.

One question is how much of a ship is mature technologies vs cutting edge technologies? We must remember that they treat interstellar travel the way we treat air travel or a vacation on a cruise ship.

pnakasone wrote:How much of a ship is made up of high end parts vs how much of it is common water pump type parts? Since it is war time they would want to be able to use a wide range of spare parts they would have inventory including the possibility of having to adapt enemy spare parts.

At worst Manticore could provide the specs and digital manufacturing templates to Republic manufactures for them to use.

One question is how much of a ship is mature technologies vs cutting edge technologies? We must remember that they treat interstellar travel the way we treat air travel or a vacation on a cruise ship.

There are no interchangeable parts except Cogswell Cogs, Spacely Sprockets and the fairly new Spacely Spanners. Spacely finally produced something that allows him to compete with Cogswell. Spacely was about to go under.

pnakasone wrote:How much of a ship is made up of high end parts vs how much of it is common water pump type parts? Since it is war time they would want to be able to use a wide range of spare parts they would have inventory including the possibility of having to adapt enemy spare parts.

The problem in reality is that "common water pumps" are really not all teh same and are certainly not interchangable. For example, we have complete design plans for the Saturn V rocket. We can't build it today because the plans assume you can go buy all the parts. In many cases the companies that made them no longer exist. The process that made them are in some cases no longer used. To name an obvious example, the computers. To build a S5 we'd pretty much need to recreate a good chunk of the mid 1960s aerospace industry. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1054183/posts

But you say, we can substitute something similar for these parts. Well sure, if you don't mind dying. The Challenger and Columbia disasters were the effects of parts that were not quite working right. Once you replace a qualified part with a different part you have to requalify everything stepwise (part, sub assembly, assembly, major component, system, stage vehicle). You need do do this for tens of thousands of parts scattered everywhere throughout the structure.

Essentially you are likely to have to pretty much design it from scratch.


A modern example of this is the classified substance called FOGBANK used in nuclear weapons. It was made from 1975 to 1989. They tore down the main plant in 1993 but the pilot plant for the project was left intact in case they needed more. And in 2000 they needed more. They had an existing small-scale plant and supposedly all the required documentation. And no, they could not make it.

After investing hundreds of millions of additional dollars and assigning huge resources to the project they eventually determined how to make it again in 2009, years behind schedule. Rumor had it that one of the key raw materials obtained for the restart was significantly more pure than the original raw material and the impurities played unexpected role in the process.

There is also the AMRAAM (and Sparrow) rocket motor problem. One day the motors made by ATK suddenly stopped passing the USAF "cold soak" test, where the cool them like they were on a jet in the upper atmosphere for hours and then fired. For two years the US miltary refused to accept any new AMRAAMs or Sparrows while ATK (and the missile manufacturer Raytheon) scrambled to fix their problem. It apparently turned out to be subtle formula changes in the fuel composition to comply with EPA regulations, which was fixed by buying rocket engines from someone who wasn't subject to the EPA.

These sorts of real-world issues is why I just laugh at David's tale of how Manticore will rapidly recover.

kzt wrote:

pnakasone wrote:How much of a ship is made up of high end parts vs how much of it is common water pump type parts? Since it is war time they would want to be able to use a wide range of spare parts they would have inventory including the possibility of having to adapt enemy spare parts.

The problem in reality is that "common water pumps" are really not all teh same and are certainly not interchangable. For example, we have complete design plans for the Saturn V rocket. We can't build it today because the plans assume you can go buy all the parts. In many cases the companies that made them no longer exist. The process that made them are in some cases no longer used. To name an obvious example, the computers. To build a S5 we'd pretty much need to recreate a good chunk of the mid 1960s aerospace industry. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1054183/posts

But you say, we can substitute something similar for these parts. Well sure, if you don't mind dying. The Challenger and Columbia disasters were the effects of parts that were not quite working right. Once you replace a qualified part with a different part you have to requalify everything stepwise (part, sub assembly, assembly, major component, system, stage vehicle). You need do do this for tens of thousands of parts scattered everywhere throughout the structure.

Essentially you are likely to have to pretty much design it from scratch.


A modern example of this is the classified substance called FOGBANK used in nuclear weapons. It was made from 1975 to 1989. They tore down the main plant in 1993 but the pilot plant for the project was left intact in case they needed more. And in 2000 they needed more. They had an existing small-scale plant and supposedly all the required documentation. And no, they could not make it.

After investing hundreds of millions of additional dollars and assigning huge resources to the project they eventually determined how to make it again in 2009, years behind schedule. Rumor had it that one of the key raw materials obtained for the restart was significantly more pure than the original raw material and the impurities played unexpected role in the process.

There is also the AMRAAM (and Sparrow) rocket motor problem. One day the motors made by ATK suddenly stopped passing the USAF "cold soak" test, where the cool them like they were on a jet in the upper atmosphere for hours and then fired. For two years the US miltary refused to accept any new AMRAAMs or Sparrows while ATK (and the missile manufacturer Raytheon) scrambled to fix their problem. It apparently turned out to be subtle formula changes in the fuel composition to comply with EPA regulations, which was fixed by buying rocket engines from someone who wasn't subject to the EPA.

These sorts of real-world issues is why I just laugh at David's tale of how Manticore will rapidly recover.

Parts from our current ICBM war deterrent, Minuteman III, are no longer available. It is 55 years old. Not only are the parts no longer available, but knowledgeable maintenance crews may be suspect. **A single Minuteman missile was damaged by a maintenance personnel doing close to $2M in damage. 450 Minuteman Missiles currently exist...

***The Air Force operates 450 Minuteman missiles - 150 at each of three missile fields in Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. A few times a year, one missile is pulled from its silo and trucked to Vandenberg, minus its nuclear warhead, for a test launch.

***The Minuteman 3, first deployed in 1970, has long exceeded its original 10-year lifespan. It is so old that vital parts are no longer in production.

*Incidentally, this is a cool site. It shows the 5 ton silo hatches of the later sites. That's two-and-a-half times the weight of the largest Mercedes. That ought to give you a better sense of scale when movies portray a silo hatch opening. Surely does it for me.

* http://w3.uwyo.edu/~jimkirk/minuteman.htmlv

** http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/air-forc ... d=36458565

http://www.voanews.com/content/poorly-t ... 59840.html


http://www.military.com/equipment/lgm-30-minuteman-iii

*** http://m.voanews.com/a/icbm-minuteman-t ... 09612.html

ICBMs are an interesting case of technology. The war trajectories are over the poles, but nobody has ever tested them over the poles. They are only tested EW or WE. And the first flight often reveals some anomalies in the guidance system and removing that makes them much more accurate on subsequent flights. So it's a pretty good bet that a Trident or Minuteman missile can hit a target on Kwajalein Atoll with a high degree of accuracy, it's not so certain that this is true of targets in the vicinity of Moscow. Hopefully we will never learn this.

kzt wrote:ICBMs are an interesting case of technology. The war trajectories are over the poles, but nobody has ever tested them over the poles. They are only tested EW or WE. And the first flight often reveals some anomalies in the guidance system and removing that makes them much more accurate on subsequent flights. So it's a pretty good bet that a Trident or Minuteman missile can hit a target on Kwajalein Atoll with a high degree of accuracy, it's not so certain that this is true of targets in the vicinity of Moscow. Hopefully we will never learn this.

Interesting bit of info. Thanks.