I don’t think that’s true. Individual fabrication is unlikely to be cheaper than a production line. Production lines may use fancy futuristic technology, but it’s always going to be cheaper to make a generic part than a custom one, if only from a time, retooling perspective. A tool that can create anything is going to be slower than a tool that is optimized to create one thing.
What other aspects? Aside from design, manufacture and assembly what else goes into spacecraft?
No, but they’re really good at getting things close enough and dealing with the unexpected. Now personally I think robots will be doing it in 200 years. But the Star Trek universe has pretty shitty robots.
As I said before a tool that can create anything will be slower and costlier to operate than a tool that is optimized for one thing. A factory that turns out I beams will still be cheaper 200 years from now for bulk I beams. Now if you need one after your ship crash lands or a single one to replace some structural damage fabricating one on the spot is a better bet.
Time is a cost. It will be faster and cheaper to run a factory than to use nano machines or laser hardening resin to build I beams.
And doing the work that the primitive robots in the Star Trek universe can’t do. Running wires through walls, installing shelving and bringing in 85 ton panels of tritanium in a steady 5km southerly wind and intermittent light rain.
Hyundai’s ships are designed around being able to be massed produced I’d bet. They likely aren’t designed around combat efficiency.
Powerful computers aren’t necessarily intelligent computers. Factoring warp core geometries in real time isn’t the same thing as figuring out why the 85 ton panel of tritanium isn’t seating into it’s socket.
That has often been ignored in canon. The Tech Manual is a good attempt at writing the laws of ST, but they ignore it all the time. Why do they switch to manual sticking when precision flying is necessary?
Cluster computing is awesome, but it has limits. And as I said earlier, computing power isn’t intelligence.
Yeah and everyone knows the Captain Nemo franchise of movies is second only to Star Wars in profitability, right?
Because you need a Gama Phased stick of crystilyzed trans-lithium to weld tritanium.
I won’t dignify that with a response, other than this one.
They are scifi, they’re standing on a starship.
The first Romulan war was about a patent dispute over the fuse.
We don’t know what for. Could be theft, could be speeding, could be illegal use of a ground transportation device, or trespass. Assuming that is a cop. We hear the audio in the clip of a siren, but that doesn’t mean that its there in the final cut of the film. Its not too unusual to put things in trailers to throw people off as to what’s really going on in the scene. Or to put scenes in the trailer which don’t make it to the final cut of the film.
That’s the thing about fabbbers, they turn every part into a “generic” part.
Manufacturing is the largest part. Presently, its final assembly that’s done by humans, but the design work is being done on and by computers.
Yes, that’s why they’ll handle final inspection and not much else.
But we haven’t really seen any robots in the Trekverse. There’s been Data, Lore, Data’s daughter, Data’s mother, B4, and I think that one of the Soong’s we saw was really a robot and not him. We’ve not seen anything like an industrial operation in the Trekverse, nor do we know much about the day-to-day life of people.
Wrong. First of all, with fabbing you don’t have the issues that Detroit’s facing right now: Namely that they’re setup to build something their customers no longer want. With fabbing you don’t have that issue. Presently, the CAD/CAM programs we have now are so sophisticated that if you change one element of the design, the software is smart enough to go through and correct anything which might be affected by that change automatically. Fabbing allows you to extend that process to the plant floor as well. So, a starship out in the field can find a flaw in a design, notify Starfleet, and at the touch of a button, they can fix that flaw, not only in the design, but in the ships which are presently under construction! No need to train personnel in the new proceedures, no worries that you’ve got to find 20 meter I-beams, when all you’ve got in stock are 19.9 meter I-beams. All of that just goes away.
You’re wrong there too. A fabbing operation can run 24/7, with no breaks for meals, rest, shift changes, or holidays. I’ve worked with CNC mills and lathes (which are basically primitive fabbers). The ones built 5 years ago can barely operate half as fast as the ones being built today. The technology and cost to do things things is matching that of PC performance and pricing. Apple is now machining the cases for their MacBooks out of aluminum blocks. (Video here. Dramatically slowed down shots of the process in a prototype setting show up at about 1 minute in.) They spend a good portion of the video talking about how doing things this way enables them to do it with greater quality and fewer parts than they’ve ever done it before. Fabbing amplifies the ability to do this to a tremendous degree. You can, for all intents and purposes have the entire hull of the ship be a single piece of material. That’s a huge incentive to find ways to speed the process up.
Given that we have robots now which can operate in conditions which humans can’t (Mars, for example) and crawling through places where humans can’t (collapsed buildings), I’m not seeing the need for humans doing those jobs.
Why should a fleet of starships be any different? Enterprise is not primarily a warship, she’s a research vessel, with weapons.
Given that a computer is now so fast that it can run through all the necessary calculations to study every move on a chess board and beat the best human players on the planet, having a computer run through all possible reasons why a panel isn’t going where its supposed to isn’t going to be that difficult in 200 years. The newest CNC machines can detect how sharp a tool is and automatically replace it if need be. Just a few years ago, you needed a human to do that. If the machine stumbles across something that it can’t figure out, it sends an email to the person assigned to check it when something goes wrong.
Problems with the plotonium crystals, of course.
It doesn’t need to be. If it can run through all possible permutations in a few seconds, or even a couple of minutes, its good enough.
Only because of a lack of trying.
You did 20 minutes ago, but research has just discovered that inverse gamma phased crystalized trans-lithium works much better. If you were running a fabber, you could just make the necessary program changes and be done with it, but since you’'ve got humans stick welding, you’re going to have to get everyone to stop what they’re doing and wait for the new rods to show up. Planet Flemthpos is presently the only source for those, and they’re back ordered for 16 weeks, so you’ll have to lay the crews off and wait for the rods to show up. Then, once they arrive, you’ll have to train the crews in the proper use of the new rods, as well as the new safety proceedures they require. Oh yeah, and since some of the welding crew members won’t be coming back for various reasons, you’ll have some entirely new people you’ll have to train as well. This pushes back the project deadline by another month or so, as it’ll take a while for them to get up to speed.
Yes, but where’s the flashing lights? The weird shapes? Even the ordinary stuff in sci-fi movies is supposed to look weird.
Who held the patent on circuit breakers and surge protectors? The Klingons?
Which proves he’s driving a hoverbike with “Police” on it, but not why he was chasing Kirk. (Maybe its a T-3000 from the future looking for John Connor! :p) Nor do we know if that scene’ll show up in the movie.
Dude, if you can’t understand that industrial manufacturing processes that are done on a tremendous scale are more efficient that running something customized out of a single machine there’s nothing for it.
Yes a fabricator is a good idea for one offs. No it is not a good idea when you need 200,000 of something. Because you’re going to be able to do it faster if you optimize the factory for what it’s creating.
Let me say it again. You have a magic fabrication box that can make anything you want. You dial up I beams and it takes a second to create and it falls onto the floor ready to go. Now lets say your box is tuned just for I beams and can’t make anything else. You turn it on and it produces 5000 I beams in a second. Assuming shipping is cheap enough it’s the clear choice.
Get it?
Because without AI it wouldn’t work?
Silly comment. It’s designed to be a warship when necessary. You can weld a meteorological testing station to a tank, doesn’t make it a civilian vessel.
Irrelevant. Chess has specific rules. “Every possible reason” is a lot of shit. How exactly does a non-ai figure out “every possible reason”?
Irrelevant. Yeah and my car tells me when my seat belt in unbuckled. Amazing computing power that. :rolleyes:
I’m sure that person will do a bang up job since he hasn’t even been on the job site all day.
No. Have you ever programmed a computer? How does a non-AI know what “all possible permutations” is?
Good luck with that.
It’s not faster and better if it takes longer.
That is an opinion.
Look, your thesis is that there is no way humans would be using stick welders to weld metal plates onto the Enterprise. That’s makes sense if automation can do it cheaper, faster and better and there is no cultural reason to rule against it.
I’ve already established that there are fine reasons for them to be using something that looks like a modern stick welder. The only real question is if something as complex and massive as a starship can be assembled by a giant robot gantry that runs them off an assembly line. The obvious answer is that in the current movie’s timeline it can’t.
Why do shuttles have pilots?
Why do transporters have operators?
Why does someone actually sit at communications?
Why does the Enterprise need 400-odd crewmembers and is helpless in a fight if it’s running on automation?
Because in the Star Trek reality automation isn’t very good. You want a realistic sci-fi? Okay, no aliens, no FTL, no shields, no artificial gravity, no abundant anti-matter, no tractor beams, no long range sensors, no anti-gravity ships, no transporters, no phasers, no space anomalies, no fucking audience.
Because no one is going to watch a movie about an unmanned probe that travels at .6 C to a neighboring star system and deploys a sensor pod into a gas giant.
Given that the USS Enterprise of any given era is shown to be one of the most powerful starships in a fight for its time period, I dunno how far I can take that idea seriously. It’d be like trying to pass off the Bismark as a summer fishing yacht which just happened to be able to serve as a super battleship when needed.
I think you folks arguing that given the current state of things like robotics, etc., they would have necessarily advanced well beyond by the time Kirk et al. are ready to go Trekkin’, are missing something: the massive wars around the mid-21st century as referenced in Star Trek: First Contact would have disrupted both the march of technology and the availability of skilled personnel who could wield that technology and build on it. Americans, at least, are shown as having descended into a Road Warrior-esque scavenger society, and the situation is presented as global. Who knows how much prior art was lost, and how long it might take to regain the previous level of technology?
They WOULDN’T be using blue collar journeymen and stick welders deep DEEEP in Earth’s gravity well!
Can we agree and move on to more important things, like why would a space elevator have all those sharp, spikey, heavy (and dramatic) blade things tacked on?
To off the red-shirt, but you didn’t hear that from me.
My theory is, without the American election to obsess over, the Dope needs something to overobsess about. Hence this thread, and this one, and more before and to come, no doubt.
This is probably for the best. There can only be so many Sarah Palin threads before Dopers start eating their own without any other prey to go after. It’s like polar bears, really.
I’m missing something. What has the lovely Ms. Staite To do with artificial gravity being sad in the Whedonverse? Surely you don’t want Kaylee to be INCONVENIENCED. Why, if there were no artificial gravity, she might never have left home. Be sane, man!
