kzt wrote:
The issue of building well known and well understood products on new equipment by new personnel is probably best encapsulated by the story of FOGBANK. You've probably heard it, but I'll recap anyhow for anyone not familiar.
From 1975 to 1989 Oak Ridge made a substance code named FOGBANK that is used in critical parts of US W76 fusion weapons. "The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified." It is generally considered to be an aerogel that becomes part of the plasma that helps trigger the second (fusion stage) of a fusion bomb.
By 1993 Oak Ridge had demolished the production plant and left just the pilot plant, and virtually all the employees involved had retired by the early 2000s. Which is when the NNSA decided they needed more FOGBANK to refurbish weapons. So they built a new facility to make more, using the equipment in the pilot plant as a model, planed for completion in 2005, to turn out FOGBANK in to deliver refurbished weapons in 2007. Since they had a pilot plant and the production process documentation this wouldn't be very hard, even without the mast majority of the production personnel, right?
The plant was late in completion And the process to manufacture FOGBANK didn't work. It turned out that documentation of the manufacturing process were not complete, and despite having a pilot production plant they couldn't produce useful quantities. Two years, in 2007, and a lot of additional R&D later they finally were able to manufactured FOGBANK. Unfortunately it didn't work in the weapon. So after another year and $69 million, they eventually determined how to make it work.
It turned out that a feedstock material that was being used in the new plant was the issue. A "minor impurity" that was in the original feedstock was in fact absolutely essential to produce working FOGBANK but due to improved purification process that were developed since 1975 it was being removed from the feedstock.
So yeah, making old stuff on new equipment by new employees can be a very non-trivial problem.
Then we have the Saturn V problem.
We have all the blueprints, design documentation and production documentation all nicely stored away. But it is impossible to pull them out of the NASA archives and build one because the entire supply chain doesn't exist. The carefully selected parts that are specified are not made an more and the companies that made them often doesn't exist. So you can't even build the sub-assemblies to build the components. You'd need to redesign a very large portion of the entire vehicle using parts that are currently available.
And now that you've done that now you have re-qualify the all the parts of the entire vehicle, starting from individual components and sub-assemblys and running up to full scale test flights.
In the case of Beowulf and Mantiocore, I really doubt that the entire RMN production chain was based on Beowulf manufacturers. So, for example, everywhere the plan for a fusion reactor specifies a particular Manticoran made pump you have to replace that with a different part. Or you have to obtain the design documentation for the pump and build it from scratch. Which might be a bit of problem if that documentation no longer exists due to being blown up, along with the designers. So instead you have to find one built on Beowulf that fits the space available, or build one from scratch, and then either way you have to re-qualify the whole reactor and the vehicle or system it goes into.
And it isn't just physical parts like that. Someone has to port all the computer code designed to work on what I would assume are proprietary computer hardware (since most civilian systems are probably not designed to work when being exposed to the radiation from hundreds of nuclear detonations per second) to whatever the closest Beowulf equivalent is. And then you would probably want to find all the subtle weird problems introduced by these changes before you deploy a system controlling thousands of missiles moving at close to the speed of light in a system you are very fond of.
Now if you and just pour sand in one end and get Mk23 missiles out the other that isn't a huge issue. Of course that means when someone obtains the plans for a RMN system they can just pour sand in one end and get Mk23s out the other end too.
With Mycroft you also have a lot of new code being written for equipment that doesn't even exist in prototype form. Just the change between having your computer node maybe a thousand KM away from the control node to having them up to light minutes away will produce interesting effects that forces changes to a huge amount of the codebase.
You’re talking apples and I’m talking oranges.
(1) The labor force putting these systems into production in Beowulf is about 25% Manticoran, including people who were doing exactly the same jobs in Manticore pre-Oyster Bay and who are now teaching other highly skilled technicians how to do them in Beowulf.
(2) There is no — I repeat,
no — new, untested technology in
any component of Mycroft. For all intents and purposes, you could think of this as stripping Keyhole-Two platforms off of existing Manticoran ships (although that’s not necessary; Beowulf is fully capable of building new Keyholes if it needed them) and mounting them on Beowulf-built stationkeeping platforms using Beowulf-built power generation systems. Same parts, same sensors, same FTL components, same computer codes, same
everything at the pointy end of the stick. It's like taking a US 16" coast defense gun and its fire control designed for the Panama Canal zone and mounting it to defend the Straits of Dover. You're using British cement and British workmen to build the mounting, but the gun and its fire control are a well tested, thoroughly proven piece of technology. In some ways, the situation isn't
exactly parallel because the "guns" are going to be manufactured in England (Beowulf), but unlike the 16" gun which was built in a completely different foundry using completely different techniques, the Manties have brought the foundry
along with them to build any more they need.
(3) As was pointed out at one point in the books, there was a limited production line building the new missiles at Trevor’s Star before Oyster Bay. If necessary, that entire line could have been loaded aboard Manticoran or Beowulfan freighters and transported to Beowulf to be cloned. That was not necessary, however, for some of the reasons I mention below
(4) Honorverse technology is not
quite up to pouring sand into one end of the machine and getting Mark 23s out to the other. It does, however, in some ways come close. A huge proportion of Honorverse manufacturing is done with nanotech which “grows” the necessary parts and molecular-level printers which can be programmed to produce just about anything you want to any tolerances you want once the
template for whatever is being manufactured is known. The Manticoran advantages in construction times had a lot more to do with streamlining materials handling, scheduling, and simplifying/improving component subassemblies than it did with better blast furnaces, smarter blacksmiths, or heavier drop hammers.
(5) The Royal Manticoran Navy was able to provide Beowulf not simply with working models, not simply with a labor force which had been savagely winnowed by Oyster Bay
but still existed, not simply with service manuals, and not simply with blueprints, but with
the total documented background for every single step of every single stage of the R&D and testing which went into creating the hardware in the first place. in other words, just to make this perfectly clear, there are
no gaps
anywhere in the documentation, plans, or other paperwork. Zip. Nada. Rien. Zilch.
(6) Honorverse computers are based on effectively infinitely reconfigurable molecular circuitry blocks. There have been many references to this in the books. In essence, all Manticore needs to do is to take a Beowulfan mollycirc “blank” and “print” it with the Manty computers needed to control any component of Apollo and hence of Mycroft.
(7) Despite all of the above, it takes damned close to six months for Beowulf to have Mycroft up and running, officially online and fire test certified, protecting the Beowulf System.
Given all of this, I genuinely don’t understand why you are comparing the process or the situation confronting the Grand Alliance to the re-creation of a production line that was completely shut down or recertifying the pumps in a Saturn V booster in 2017. From where I sit, there is absolutely no parallelism between the two.
Of course, as they say, your mileage may vary.
