[Scenario] We have 4 years.

[Rakaydos]

Interesting you mention that. I am totally aware of the moon's amazing size, however we are not considered a binary system because the Earth-Moon barycenter rests within the Earth itself. Pluto and Charon, meanwhile, are definitely a binary dwarf planet system. Charon needs to be taught in schools just as much as Pluto. Charon and Pluto have a much closer mass ratio than that of the Earth and Moon.

The "Binary planet" argument I remember hearing is that at the moon's surface, the sun has more of a gravitational influence than the earth- The moon isnt so much orbiting the earth as it is co-orbiting the sun close enough to gravitationally interact with the earth.

[EzinX]

We would'nt even get the spacecraft prototype constructed in four years, let alone testing it. Sure, engineering projects can be rushed, but there is a limit as to how much you can rush a engineering project. Yes, you can put in unlimited money, yes, you can pour in all the manpower and resources, but engineering requires intelligence and experience, and you can't find that in unlimited quantities to asign to all the programs and side projects.

Check your history, friend. First of all, WW2 had numerous examples of this kind of rushing, took place over a similar time period, and most of the projects ultimately worked. In order to solve some of the bottlenecks associated with an engineering project on the scale of Orion spaceships, there's a lot of mitigating methods you could try that enormously increase the cost but that's irrelevant. One of the methods is that whenever you come to a crossroads, where there's debate on the engineering staff as to which of several approaches will solve the problem, you simple spend the resources and implement all of the solutions. The Manhattan project did this : there was debate over which method of enrichment, and which fissionable material to use. They ended up using them both.

You would build the propulsion bombs by ripping the guts out of the world's nuclear arsenal and using strategic reserves of weapons grade plutonium that both the USA and Russia have. You'd probably try several orion designs and build them in parallel by the hundreds, possibly thousands (I suspect the problem might still be a lack of nukes and not ship hulls). Taxes towards this project would be essentially 100%. Seats on the ships would be competitively awarded to those individuals who made the most useful contributions.

It doesn't really matter if several of the orion designs turn out to be failures and blow up on liftoff. You would simply launch the hulls that do work.

If you have to rip the titanium needed out of existing jets or wherever else the metal is used, you do it. If you have to start open pit strip mines, you do it. If you have to demolish the buildings in major cities to get the copper you need, you do it. If you have to shoot anyone who protests or refuses to work, you do it.

[EzinX]

I suspect the way these spacecraft would be designed is that they'd have an orion pusher plate stage used to get from the ground on earth, and you'd probably eject the pusher plate once you complete the deorbiting burn for a lunar touchdown. You'd use some kind of cheaply built rocket engine for the actual lunar lander stage.

You could shield your "chosen people" (presumably most of the seats would go to young people distributed among your critical skillsets) from the fallout from all the Orion launches by keeping them in training camps a continent away from the Orion launch sites until it's time to go, and you'd bring them to the launch sites in hermetically sealed vehicles, since you don't want any fallout exposure to future mothers, etc.

The failure rate for these Orion vehicles could easily be 10-50% and that would be acceptable losses. You wouldn't hold endless hearings and recriminations if one blew up, you'd try to make quick and dirty rapid repairs to future vehicles to stop whatever mishap took out the last ones.

I suspect with 100% of industry put into building the Orion vehicles, which would be these overbuilt monstrosities of steel probably, sort of a higher tech version of a Liberty ship, the limiting factor would probably be bombs. There's 20-30k or so warheads that could be scrounged from the global arsenal, and the propulsion warheads are smaller than the strategic ones, so when you rebuild each warhead for propulsion you would use less weapons grade plutonium. You could rapidly build crude and cheap nuclear reactors based on the design used at Chernobyl to make more plutonium, but you obviously are limited in how much more could be produced in the remaining time. How many devices would be needed for liftoff to lunar insertion? 100 per ship?

Edited December 10, 2014 by EzinX

[Starman4308]

Check your history, friend. First of all, WW2 had numerous examples of this kind of rushing, took place over a similar time period, and most of the projects ultimately worked.

And how many of them remotely approached the novelty and scale of an Orion-drive spacecraft? The only thing which came close is the Manhattan Project, and that took three years for a singular goal: making enough weapons-grade uranium and plutonium for functional nuclear weapons. Everything else for the Manhattan project was either in-place (heavy bomber delivery systems) or simple (making the actual bomb).

Orion goes far past that. Not only must the spacecraft be designed, you have to design everything for a self-sustaining lunar colony: the machinery, the radiation shielding, the agricultural equipment, almost ad infinitum. There are a huge number of things which have never been tested, this goes far beyond the scope of any prior space project, and it's almost certain to fail. It is also of much greater scope than you imagine: a self-sustaining lunar colony would basically need millions of tons of heavy industrial equipment sent, because they have to make their own everything, and a little 3-D printer isn't going to cut it.

This has far more in common with the Apollo program than the Manhattan Project. There are a huge number of untested subsystems, and even with all our resources devoted to it, there's something which will go wrong, and without Earth to send you a size-6 defloppulator when yours breaks down with no replacement, the entire lunar colony is screwed.

Edited December 10, 2014 by Starman4308

[NASAFanboy]

Check your history, friend. First of all, WW2 had numerous examples of this kind of rushing, took place over a similar time period, and most of the projects ultimately worked. In order to solve some of the bottlenecks associated with an engineering project on the scale of Orion spaceships, there's a lot of mitigating methods you could try that enormously increase the cost but that's irrelevant. One of the methods is that whenever you come to a crossroads, where there's debate on the engineering staff as to which of several approaches will solve the problem, you simple spend the resources and implement all of the solutions. The Manhattan project did this : there was debate over which method of enrichment, and which fissionable material to use. They ended up using them both.

You would build the propulsion bombs by ripping the guts out of the world's nuclear arsenal and using strategic reserves of weapons grade plutonium that both the USA and Russia have. You'd probably try several orion designs and build them in parallel by the hundreds, possibly thousands (I suspect the problem might still be a lack of nukes and not ship hulls). Taxes towards this project would be essentially 100%. Seats on the ships would be competitively awarded to those individuals who made the most useful contributions.

It doesn't really matter if several of the orion designs turn out to be failures and blow up on liftoff. You would simply launch the hulls that do work.

If you have to rip the titanium needed out of existing jets or wherever else the metal is used, you do it. If you have to start open pit strip mines, you do it. If you have to demolish the buildings in major cities to get the copper you need, you do it. If you have to shoot anyone who protests or refuses to work, you do it.

Check your history. I don't think that throwing out Liberty Ships based off a design that the shipyards had been using for decades and can really match up as to what we are doing. WW2 industrial capacity used pre-existing technology that had been worked on for a decade already (B-17 flew in the 1930's, B-29 was proposed in 1938 as a serious project for the USAF, not just some atomic researchers far-out fantasy); we only have four years. Orion hasn't been completed; the most we have are some theoretical blueprints and some data from a tests of a half-finished prototype that wasn't even fully funded. And the Manhattan project was just that. A bomb, that would run off an atomic reaction. Now Orion on the other hand, is going to need a completely new life support system that by itself,will take four years to design and test. It's going to need farms, it's going to need new advances in almost everything. Like Starman said, almost every required component of the Manhattan Project was in place except for the bomb itself, and we don't have that luxury with the proposed Orion.

We don't have a regularly used space-to-orbit transit system that has been well tested (Although I wish we did). Heck, we can't even keep people alive in a oversized tin can outside of our atmosphere without sending in supplies every half-year or so. To expect us to develop a completely self-sufficent life support system and send it to space all in the manner of four years would be like trying to go to space by strapping yourself to a bunch of leftover Fourth of July fireworks and expect to live. It doesn't work like that.

The only way that spacecraft would come into this is throwing dozens of satellites into orbit loaded with genetical matieral and microbes inside tiny reentry capsules. Asteroid hits, these satellites sense it and deorbit, and life begins anew under the guidance of any surviving humans in underground shelters as the remmants of the nations of the world work together to get humanity back into it's former glory and back into space exploration.

Edited December 10, 2014 by NASAFanboy

[Whirligig Girl]

The "Binary planet" argument I remember hearing is that at the moon's surface, the sun has more of a gravitational influence than the earth- The moon isnt so much orbiting the earth as it is co-orbiting the sun close enough to gravitationally interact with the earth.

This is not even slightly true! Where did you hear that? The Earth's hill sphere (Akin to the KSP Sphere of Influence) extends faaaar away from the moon.

[EzinX]

Orion goes far past that. Not only must the spacecraft be designed, you have to design everything for a self-sustaining lunar colony: the machinery, the radiation shielding, the agricultural equipment, almost ad infinitum. There are a huge number of things which have never been tested, this goes far beyond the scope of any prior space project, and it's almost certain to fail. It is also of much greater scope than you imagine: a self-sustaining lunar colony would basically need millions of tons of heavy industrial equipment sent, because they have to make their own everything, and a little 3-D printer isn't going to cut it.

This is where you have redundancy. You have a dozen different ways to refine lunar ore. You have many many machine shops worth of basic equipment. You have hundreds of thousands of the best "problem solving" technicians and engineers you can choose from on Earth. Orion nukes can do that, can they not? The bigger versions of the craft use much larger yield bombs and can have thousands of passengers onboard. They are a more efficient use of your limited fissionable materials, which I suspect would be the ultimate limiting factor in this scenario.

You don't have to make everything right at first. Certain things are too many steps down the tech tree to make realistically on the Moon without many years of work to figure out a way. Computer chips, sensors, that kind of thing - you could probably fit millions of general purpose ICs (like the system on a chips used in cell phones/Rasberry Pis) into a few crates crammed onto some of the orion craft.

I don't think it's almost certain to fail. The key is you need enough parallel paths to do any critical step - expanding your infrastructure or just keeping the air recycled - many different ways so when things fail unexpectedly you have another way to do things. You also would need a population on the order of thousands to millions of people, depending on your technical limitations in transport.

You don't sit there in boardrooms and pontificate ways to design things. You do stuff like come up with the requirements for a system you need, and then announce it publicly that any team of people who solves your problem gets a seat on one of the launches.

Need a lunar bulldozer? Get hundreds of teams working on a design in parallel, and then have them compete with each other in a Darpa style competition to find out which designs work. Need designs for lightweight industrial equipment that is multi-purpose? Ditto.

And of course, anyone who publicly speaks out about the project or says it's "almost certain to fail" you summarily execute. You need positive thinkers only.

[EzinX]

Check your history. I don't think that throwing out Liberty Ships based off a design that the shipyards had been using for decades and can really match up as to what we are doing

My point is that an orion spacecraft is a massive piece of metal and some shock absorbers. I'm saying that if you had 4 years, you could get as many orion craft as you have bombs for built. To solve the issue that you don't know which designs will work, you might build 10 or so independent series of craft separate from each other and only commit the bombs to the craft that have the higher success rate. "designing a life support system". You know you need lots of coolant compressors, lots of fans, lots of grow lights, lots of plants, lots of solar panels, lots of wire - you just throw mountains of all that onboard and have a rough sketch of a working system that might work. You'd have your technicians on the Moon redesigning and rebuilding the life support system as the base is being built.

Human losses mean nothing in a scenario where everyone who doesn't make it to the Moon is dead anyways.

[Starman4308]

Ezin, that is rather hopelessly naive.

An Orion craft is a complicated system: you've got to have a system capable of dispensing atomic bombs at very regular intervals. The shock absorber has to absorb a titanic amount of force, and not break if one bomb is a dud. Nobody has tried any sort of system on this scale, and I'm not even much familiar with the challenges of Orion craft design. On top of this, you have to build a spacecraft larger than anything we've built to date: just the design for the spacecraft section is going to take months at an absolute minimum, and it'll be riddled with problems.

There are not very many companies which have the expertise to build such systems: it's not like building an M4 Sherman, it's like building a Gerald R. Ford supercarrier from dead-scratch. There simply isn't time to "try it ten ways", because the aerospace industry is going to be strained past its limit to try even one. There just aren't enough engineers with the expertise to do this!

You show a clear lack of understanding of how complicated such an endeavor would be. We might, if we abandoned safety protocols left and right, make a single Orion craft in four years. Enough to make a sustainable lunar colony would be outrageous, and there would probably be no time to design the lunar habitats: the Orion craft would stretch us to the limit.

Edited December 10, 2014 by Starman4308

[Jouni]

Taxes towards this project would be essentially 100%.

If you have to rip the titanium needed out of existing jets or wherever else the metal is used, you do it. If you have to start open pit strip mines, you do it. If you have to demolish the buildings in major cities to get the copper you need, you do it. If you have to shoot anyone who protests or refuses to work, you do it.

You're ignoring one important thing: the 99.999% of human race who are going to die. This 99.999% probably includes the guys whose job would be shooting the people who refuse to work. What if this majority (or at least a significant fraction of it) decided that if they're going to die anyway, it's better to have fun as long as it lasts? After all, it's not their friends, children, or loved ones who would have a chance to survive past the end of the world. The sacrifices would only benefit a small technocratic elite, while the rest of humanity would spend their last years as slaves.

[Starman4308]

And now that I'm looking at the human part of it: What you suggest would be a very quick road to riots everywhere. People would support a last-ditch save-the-species act. They wouldn't support a tyrannical regime bent solely on getting a few technocrats to survive.

Granted, it likely wouldn't be necessary, because there's only so much you could possibly pour into the aerospace industry (not every engineer needs his own personal petaflop supercomputer), but the support would dry up very quickly if went from being viewed as "salvation of the species" to "excuse to persecute everybody but the 0.000001%".

Also, back to what I said about the aerospace industry: the number of people who know what the challenges are for designing a lunar vehicle is very small. You might get a thousand designs for a lunar bulldozer, but only the three or four which came from aerospace companies would work, because only those few companies have engineers who know offhand that they have to account for low lunar gravity, the absence of atmosphere, the composition of the regolith, and how to make it lightweight. Half of them would do something silly like neglect to account for lower traction on the lunar surface, half of them would forget "oh, no atmosphere for our gasoline engines", half of them would use the materials they're used to, like steel, instead of lightweight alloys, etc, etc.

[EzinX]

You're ignoring one important thing: the 99.999% of human race who are going to die. This 99.999% probably includes the guys whose job would be shooting the people who refuse to work. What if this majority (or at least a significant fraction of it) decided that if they're going to die anyway, it's better to have fun as long as it lasts? After all, it's not their friends, children, or loved ones who would have a chance to survive past the end of the world. The sacrifices would only benefit a small technocratic elite, while the rest of humanity would spend their last years as slaves.

You give all the people who help a nonzero chance at a seat. You use a weighted lottery system, where youth, useful skills, positive attitudes, gender, genetics, fitness, and your productivity all change the "weight" that affects how likely you are to be selected, but everyone has a nonzero chance. You pick people up until the very last launch.

[Starman4308]

You give all the people who help a nonzero chance at a seat. You use a weighted lottery system, where youth, useful skills, positive attitudes, gender, genetics, fitness, and your productivity all change the "weight" that affects how likely you are to be selected, but everyone has a nonzero chance. You pick people up until the very last launch.

Okay, so we have a lottery for the three seats which aren't occupied by people with 100% essential skills.

People aren't going to be impressed by a 3 in 7,000,000,000 chance.

[EzinX]

Okay, so we have a lottery for the three seats which aren't occupied by people with 100% essential skills.

People aren't going to be impressed by a 3 in 7,000,000,000 chance.

Well, how many people can we bring? If 100 nukes gets us 10,000 people, and we have 40,000 or so, that's 4 million people. That's 400 ships the size of a naval warship, and since you have 10x redundancy, you are building roughly 4000 total vehicles and only plan to launch 400. (the extras are for the less successful designs)

Honestly, the 100% essential people leave a lot of empty seats. As you yourself pointed out, there's only so many aerospace engineering grads who are also young and who also have practical experience, just like there's only so many life support and ecology experts who also meet the criteria.

Got any delta V tables? How many bombs does ground to orbit take, and does it take more bombs once in space since you don't get the benefit of the atmosphere to increase the mass of the shockwaves?

Look, please don't misunderstand. The problems here are immense. I'm not going to claim it would definitely work, or even that the chances are particularly good. With that said, I think it's mind numbing and stupid to just declare it to be impossible without even thinking about how you might solve the problem despite the issues involved.

Edited December 10, 2014 by EzinX

[Starman4308]

Look, please don't misunderstand. The problems here are immense. I'm not going to claim it would definitely work, or even that the chances are particularly good. With that said, I think it's mind numbing and stupid to just declare it to be impossible without even thinking about how you might solve the problem despite the issues involved.

I have thought about it. Under any configuration of the problem, there is simply not enough time for anything. We've got nothing to deflect Pallas, and the systems required for sustainable colonization would take far more than four years to develop. The only hope is deeply shielded bunkers.

You are proposing we build a huge fleet of Orion spacecraft, specially built propulsion charges (gotta make sure your spacecraft can dispense them), and radical equipment to support a colony, all in the space of four years. That timetable would barely be enough to build one Orion spacecraft, nevermind a fleet of them.

EDIT: Also, Wikipedia says 800 0.15kt charges to get a 4,000 ton Orion craft to orbit. Not many nukes go that small, and they have to be small, or you'll kill any human crew aboard with the sudden impulse.

[EzinX]

So, I'm off by a factor of 8 regarding the bombs. Well, the next question is, how many years is the bare minimum. 8 years? 16? The reason 4 years isn't enough time is because the critical path for the slowest step - probably designing and prototyping the spacecraft - exceeds the time available. That's why if you can build one Orion spacecraft, you can also build 4000 of them with just a small increase in the linear time taken.

You do realize that all steps can be done in parallel, even if you have to crash train the engineers to do those steps from people who are the closest match to the skills you actually need. (suppose that 10 parallel tasks need engineers from your same limited pool of engineering talent. You could put your engineering talent onto the longest tasks from those parallel tasks and crash train new people who have related skills to perform the rest)

Even if you're training MIT grade engineers, for someone who has the proper support structure and works 16 hours a day, you could probably finish the training in 18 months instead of 4 years. You could probably get through the state school aerospace engineering curriculum in about a year from scratch. If you started with people who already had experience in some of the skills needed - aerospace engineering technicians, math and physics majors, etc, you could train them in less time than it would take for the smartest people you could find right out of high school.

The next problem is experience, though. Book learning isn't sufficient to make a skilled engineer, they need to build actual systems and test them, then refine their abilities. That might take another couple years even going flat out.

I see what you mean, 4 years may just be too little time, especially since at the very beginning, a lot of that time would be wasted setting things up.

Edited December 10, 2014 by EzinX

[Starman4308]

So, I'm off by a factor of 8. Well, the next question is, how many years is the bare minimum. 8 years? 16? The reason 4 years isn't enough time is because the critical path for the slowest step - probably designing and prototyping the spacecraft - exceeds the time available. That's why if you can build one Orion spacecraft, you can also build 4000 of them with just a small increase in the linear time taken.

You do realize that all steps can be done in parallel, even if you have to crash train the engineers to do those steps from people who are the closest match to the skills you actually need.

The only precedent we have is something like the Apollo program. Eleven years to go from a simple satellite to an exploratory landing on the Moon. A lunar/Martian colonization project would probably take a similar amount of time for systems development, several more years for scaleup, and several years on top of that to build up the colony. In all, I'd estimate 20-30 years. At the amount of stuff you would need (absolutely tremendous), it may actually be simpler just to deflect Pallas: in that case, all you need is to develop Orion propulsion (and possibly supplement with gigantic solar sails) and send up a giant fleet of identical craft to deflect Pallas: no need to develop the vast multitude of systems required for extended survival in a non-terrestrial environment.

They could also be simpler Orion craft, as there's no need to put people on them.

[EzinX]

The only precedent we have is something like the Apollo program. Eleven years to go from a simple satellite to an exploratory landing on the Moon.

Apollo wasn't done at all costs, and it wasn't an effort that involved 100% of available resources. NASA had institutional reasons to avoid losing astronauts, and it took the time to develop computerized flight control for the lander (from scratch, essentially) when a riskier landing without computers was probably possible. I think you need to look farther back in history at the scale of Von Braun's efforts and his planned missions for exploring Mars.

I think you're simply misunderstanding what a parallel effort means, and I think you need to read more ww2 history books. Your arguments have little merit except that the absolute bare minimum serial time may be a little over 4 years. Double the time in a scenario like this (8 years) doesn't mean double the progress, it means exponentially more progress. For instance, if we have 10,000 aerospace engineers today with the right skillset, you could get 10 million, easily, with a total mobilization effort and a full 8 years. You could build a large number of nuclear reactors, probably thousands, to create the plutonium you need for more bombs. And so on. The ww2 war fleets that were built certainly dwarfed the scale of this project in tonnage, although of course they were a much lower quality product than an Orion spacecraft, which must be carefully balanced and wired with complex control systems.

Edited December 10, 2014 by EzinX

[jwenting]

what will happen?

Every doomsday preacher of every religion will gather his followers and start spreading his conviction by the sword, causing bloody chaos around the world.

Every dictator will seize the opportunity, now that countries are in disarray all around them, to expand their power by invading neighbours, under the guise of "helping restore order".

Governments will, "to protect the public", impose martial law, rationing, conscription.

But nothing will be done to deflect the threat, even if scientists, militaries, and space agencies agreed that it could be done, how it could be done, and who'd best take the lead in it because it would require a world wide cooperative effort and nobody is willing to grant anyone else control over their strategic assets.

Welcome to the apocalypse.

[WestAir]

To be fair, during WWII the US was able to turn most of its private, service-based manufacturing plants into war infrastructure in shorter time. There's little reason why the World can't put every man, woman, and child to work on survival infrastructure with equal zeal. The economy would probably boom 2000 points just from the news alone of a "All hands on deck strategy."

[peadar1987]

To be fair, during WWII the US was able to turn most of its private, service-based manufacturing plants into war infrastructure in shorter time. There's little reason why the World can't put every man, woman, and child to work on survival infrastructure with equal zeal. The economy would probably boom 2000 points just from the news alone of a "All hands on deck strategy."

I don't know. Who is going to be investing when the world is going to end in 4 years?!

[cicatrix]

All investments will go on digging deep bunkers.

[NASAFanboy]

To be fair, during WWII the US was able to turn most of its private, service-based manufacturing plants into war infrastructure in shorter time. There's little reason why the World can't put every man, woman, and child to work on survival infrastructure with equal zeal. The economy would probably boom 2000 points just from the news alone of a "All hands on deck strategy."

Even so, you cannot simply "brute force" an extremely complicated spacecraft using technologies that we still haven't discovered after years of research in a mere four years.

Building bunkers deep under would save mouth more people and be cheaper and easier to produce, allowing to to save perhaps the entire human population in four years.

[Starman4308]

Apollo wasn't done at all costs, and it wasn't an effort that involved 100% of available resources. NASA had institutional reasons to avoid losing astronauts, and it took the time to develop computerized flight control for the lander (from scratch, essentially) when a riskier landing without computers was probably possible. I think you need to look farther back in history at the scale of Von Braun's efforts and his planned missions for exploring Mars.

Apollo was pretty close to 100% utilization of the limiting resources, namely being aerospace engineers. There were quite a few people who got aerospace engineering degrees in the early 1960s, and found themselves without a job in the 1970s. Had we gone to something silly like 100% taxes, we still could not have done it much faster, because we were already going full-speed through the primary bottlenecks.

I think you're simply misunderstanding what a parallel effort means, and I think you need to read more ww2 history books. Your arguments have little merit except that the absolute bare minimum serial time may be a little over 4 years. Double the time in a scenario like this (8 years) doesn't mean double the progress, it means exponentially more progress. For instance, if we have 10,000 aerospace engineers today with the right skillset, you could get 10 million, easily, with a total mobilization effort and a full 8 years. You could build a large number of nuclear reactors, probably thousands, to create the plutonium you need for more bombs. And so on. The ww2 war fleets that were built certainly dwarfed the scale of this project in tonnage, although of course they were a much lower quality product than an Orion spacecraft, which must be carefully balanced and wired with complex control systems.

As I mention below: WWII is a terrible example. WWII was extremely unique, a situation where the state of the art was still, albeit just barely, in the realm of mass-manufacture by non-specialty personnel. There would be a huge number of bottlenecks for an Orion project, all of which require skilled personnel who you simply cannot train that fast. You can go from 10,000 riveters to 10 million in four years: in four years, you can go from 10,000 aerospace engineers to 40,000, because the training takes so long and is so hands-on.

To be fair, during WWII the US was able to turn most of its private, service-based manufacturing plants into war infrastructure in shorter time. There's little reason why the World can't put every man, woman, and child to work on survival infrastructure with equal zeal. The economy would probably boom 2000 points just from the news alone of a "All hands on deck strategy."

The M4 Sherman could mostly be built on technologies and principles familiar to automobile makers. Those companies could change over their tooling a bit, and 95% of the processes were familiar to them.

Try to do the same with an M1 Abrams, and it would take at least a decade. The M4 Sherman was made of steel and mostly mechanical parts: the M1 Abrams is made of advanced composite armor, uses very specific electronics for fire control, and is in general a vastly more complicated beast. If we had to mass-produce a tank in the next decade, it would probably look a whole lot more like the M48 or early M60 than the M1.

Same principle with an Orion spacecraft: this isn't something the Ford corporation can just retool to make in a few months, it's a massively complicated spaceship which only a few people have the expertise to build.

[Jouni]

Try to do the same with an M1 Abrams, and it would take at least a decade. The M4 Sherman was made of steel and mostly mechanical parts: the M1 Abrams is made of advanced composite armor, uses very specific electronics for fire control, and is in general a vastly more complicated beast. If we had to mass-produce a tank in the next decade, it would probably look a whole lot more like the M48 or early M60 than the M1.

I think I'm not buying the arguments of either of you. Creating something new is always harder and takes more time than you expect, even after you adjust your expectations for this. On the other hand, cost-effectiveness has been so deeply ingrained in our society for decades, that it's very hard for us to consider any other approaches seriously.

I remember some Soviet jokes about their dealings with the Chinese from my childhood. The Chinese were always building some huge project, and the Soviets were helping them. Soviet consultants told the Chinese that they would need heavy equipment and advanced techniques, and the construction would take four years. The Chinese answered that they would get the project done in four months, which the Soviets didn't believe. Next day, a million Chinese workers showed up.

The jokes were obviously exaggerations, but they were based on what Soviet engineers actually experienced in China.