Electronics techs

peterjack 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.

Echoes of Honor Ch 18 wrote:Smith supposed it was inevitable—human beings, being human beings—that the new concept would have its critics, and some of the criticisms were no doubt valid. He did tend to get just a bit pissed off with the ones who caterwauled about what a heavy reliance the new design placed on the ship's computers, though. Of course it put a heavy demand on them . . . and anyone but an idiot knew that had always been the case. Human beings could do many of the things their electronic minions normally took care of for them, but they could do very few of those things as well—or in anything like the same amount of time—as their computers could. And there were any number of things people couldn't do without computers. Like navigate a starship. Or run a fusion plant. Or any one of a zillion other absolutely essential, extremely complex, time-critical jobs that always needed doing aboard a warship. It probably made sense to minimize total dependency on the computers and AI loops as much as possible, but it simply couldn't be entirely eliminated. And as long as he had an intact electronics shop, with one machine shop to support it, and power, and life support, Scooter Smith could damned well build any replacement computer his ship might need.

Echoes of Honor Ch 22 wrote:Peep installations tended to be bigger than Manticoran ones, largely because they used more plug-in/pull-out components. Peep techs weren't up to the sort of in-place maintenance Manticoran technicians routinely performed, so the practice, wherever possible, was to simply yank a malfunctioning component and send it to some central servicing depot where properly trained people could deal with it. Unhappily for the People's Navy, that assumed one had a replacement unit handy to plug into its place when you pulled it, and that had been a major reason for the soaring Peep unserviceability rates of the first two or three years of the war. The PN had been structured around short, intensive campaigns with plenty of time to refit between gobbling up each successive bite of someone else's real estate. Their logistics pipeline had been designed to meet those needs, and it simply hadn't been up to hauling the requisite number of replacement components back and forth between the front-line systems and the rear area service and maintenance depots over an extended period of active operations.

Jonathan_S wrote:

peterjack 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.

There was this passage from EoH

Echoes of Honor Ch 18 wrote:Smith supposed it was inevitable—human beings, being human beings—that the new concept would have its critics, and some of the criticisms were no doubt valid. He did tend to get just a bit pissed off with the ones who caterwauled about what a heavy reliance the new design placed on the ship's computers, though. Of course it put a heavy demand on them . . . and anyone but an idiot knew that had always been the case. Human beings could do many of the things their electronic minions normally took care of for them, but they could do very few of those things as well—or in anything like the same amount of time—as their computers could. And there were any number of things people couldn't do without computers. Like navigate a starship. Or run a fusion plant. Or any one of a zillion other absolutely essential, extremely complex, time-critical jobs that always needed doing aboard a warship. It probably made sense to minimize total dependency on the computers and AI loops as much as possible, but it simply couldn't be entirely eliminated. And as long as he had an intact electronics shop, with one machine shop to support it, and power, and life support, Scooter Smith could damned well build any replacement computer his ship might need.

And and in that book

Echoes of Honor Ch 22 wrote:Peep installations tended to be bigger than Manticoran ones, largely because they used more plug-in/pull-out components. Peep techs weren't up to the sort of in-place maintenance Manticoran technicians routinely performed, so the practice, wherever possible, was to simply yank a malfunctioning component and send it to some central servicing depot where properly trained people could deal with it. Unhappily for the People's Navy, that assumed one had a replacement unit handy to plug into its place when you pulled it, and that had been a major reason for the soaring Peep unserviceability rates of the first two or three years of the war. The PN had been structured around short, intensive campaigns with plenty of time to refit between gobbling up each successive bite of someone else's real estate. Their logistics pipeline had been designed to meet those needs, and it simply hadn't been up to hauling the requisite number of replacement components back and forth between the front-line systems and the rear area service and maintenance depots over an extended period of active operations.

So the Peeps went for bulkier replaceable modules, but it seems the Manticoran warships carried electronics shops capable of doing repairs / rebuilds even to molecular circuitry.

kzt wrote:David mentioned that the molecular electronics modules were pretty much both arbitrarily configurable and highly standardized.

Fireflair wrote:Clarification:
Wanderman didn't re-wire, so much as do a software re-routing. The communication for the gravitic array ran through the same junction as the software that communicated with a radar array. He convinced the two systems to talk to each other by re-writing the software and connecting the programs to each other.

Another tech didn't see how it could have worked at the time but it clearly did. Honor had them clean up Wanderman's program and put it in the saved files for future use.

However, it's a point which is worth noting, molycirc is supposed to be a standard chunk of hardware that isn't typically repairable because it's so compact and the way it's designed. But you might convince systems to work together by providing software or hardware bridges. I figure electricians and electronics techs are still doing their jobs in the Honorverse as they are today. Electricians work on the wiring and motors end of things, like the motors that move the bay doors. Electronics techs are handling the fiddly bits like gravitic arrays and communications protocols.

Fireflair wrote:Clarification:
Wanderman didn't re-wire, so much as do a software re-routing. The communication for the gravitic array ran through the same junction as the software that communicated with a radar array. He convinced the two systems to talk to each other by re-writing the software and connecting the programs to each other.

Another tech didn't see how it could have worked at the time but it clearly did. Honor had them clean up Wanderman's program and put it in the saved files for future use.

However, it's a point which is worth noting, molycirc is supposed to be a standard chunk of hardware that isn't typically repairable because it's so compact and the way it's designed. But you might convince systems to work together by providing software or hardware bridges. I figure electricians and electronics techs are still doing their jobs in the Honorverse as they are today. Electricians work on the wiring and motors end of things, like the motors that move the bay doors. Electronics techs are handling the fiddly bits like gravitic arrays and communications protocols.