Grrl Power #1027 – 1:1 Scale
Yeah, dams and giant shipping container boats don’t really mix. It’s not like you have to get the boats into the middle of a country for them to be useful, but the closer you can get to where you want them before you have to start relying on trains and mac trucks, the faster and cheaper it’s going to be. I don’t think anyone’s ever created a boat lock that can handle one of those mega shipping container boats, but then our world doesn’t have super powers either.
While it’s initially tempting to want to print out an entire jet fighter in one go, there are actually a lot of reasons not to. You still need separate parts and lots of hatches and panels for maintenance. If it’s all one piece, or if the frame is all one piece or something, if it takes significant damage to one wing, then you kind of have to scrap the whole thing. I think there’s a considerable leap between a matter replicator and a handheld “wave it at a broken part and fix it” repair module. The repairer would need to be able to de-replicate broken bits and edges (without causing a fission explosion) and then seamlessly integrate new matter into existing structure. So you still build larger things in parts and assemble them. And honestly, if printing out a jet fighter wing only takes 90 seconds, then it’s probably not too hard to have a stack of spares laying around. Assuming you have a few hundred kilowatt hours to spare.
The answer to “How many replicators could a replicator replicate if a replicator could replicate replicators.” will always either be zero or infinity. Although it the question itself qualifies “if a replicator could replicate replicators,” then the answer is always going to be infinity. Yes, assuming there’s not some dick move software preventing the unit from duplicating itself, but honestly, once you reach a tech level where you have matter replicators, all it takes is one open source project and then all the companies trying to monopolize the technology are donezo. And of course the answer isn’t actually infinity, partially because infinity is not actually a number, but also just general wear and tear means you’ll only get so many out of each unit, even with maintenance, before you’re better off replacing the thing. So I guess the answer is… 42.
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Well obviously a replicator can replicate a power source, but making it will take more energy then you get out
You’d get a short-term loss if you fab a fusion stellarator or something, but you’d earn than back after running it for a little while.
There’s no reason a replicated power source can’t produce more power than it took to create it.
The fuel, on the other hand…
That’s why solar, fusion and similar sources are the best choice. You aren’t replicating the fuel only the device that converts the fuel into power.
Three Gorges Dam has a shipping lock, so you CAN use a river for both
So does the Niagara river, which is part of one of North America’s major shipping routes (IE: through the great lakes). Of course, they also need locks there due to several kilometers of river that shipping boats can’t navigate, like the whirlpool, the rapids, and also that part where the river falls off a very high rock into a 51 meter hole.
Then there is the place a few kilometres to the west of the main river where most of the water that leaves Lake Erie actually goes, into the hydroelectric facility, with the same 51 meter drop to power the turbines. Several more kilometres to the west you will find the lock system to allow the boats to move between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario; not that much water flows this way, compared to the other paths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal_locks
Of course, locks are a well known and used solution. The main problem is the size of those containerships. Not only the draft but also width and length are part of the equation. Look up the Evergreen getting stuck in the Suez channel, or how such a ship fits tightly in the Panama canal.
Many rivers, while quite wide, are relatively shallow and specialised ships like (for example) a rhine barge (rijnaak) are used.
So, depending on the size, type, number and location of your river(s) sooner or later you have to use trains and trucks. And, as in this case, probably build tracks and roads.
Watch next time when Deus goes shopping for a teleportersystem.
“simple”, bring your deep draft ships as far up river to the offloading port, and offload there onto “river trains” to move them up stream to the dam. Dam has lift systems to the next train system, or the trains are just designed to ride up an escalator style conveyance up the side of the dam. You have one going the other way on the other side of the dam. You don’t HAVE to keep them all together on the big boat meant for crossing oceans.
I’m amazed nobody poked this with the Falkirk Wheel yet.
Theoretically the limit for replicators replicating would be the mass/energy limit of the universe (if any). It’s a variation of the grey goo/berserker scenario. There’s a mineral lifeform in Vexxarr that’s not much different and one of the gags was showing that by giving one of the ‘mother’ creatures mobility they’d consumed and replaced all life in the universe.
Let’s just hope the replicators (or the grey goo) use IPv4 so they run out after 2^32 units.
Well, he’s right, they have these things called “locks”.
Syddles is still thinking “monolithic dams” as in old-school power generation, but what if you tried making many smaller dams with less catastrophe footprint… All you need is sufficient depth to float a boat down a spillway without any tail-drag. There could be design problems with the lock, but I think nothing insurmountable. Once the boat is in the lower level, the dam goes back to hydro generation.
The thing is, Deus doesn’t have to do a lot infrastructure-wise. Mozambique already sells most of it’s hydro power to South Africa. With Deus being the new military and economic czar, he can divert that energy to Galtyn, run his fabbers, sell finished goods at “ridiculous” profit then pump that money back into HIS territorial infrastructure.
If South Africa complains about rolling blackouts though, he can just point at DeBeers and say: “Like how this company has been exploiting your nation’s resources for over a century? Please. Join my Coalition and we can hash out matters like civilized people for the good of all, and not just profit-mongering Imperialists.”
We already have rolling blackouts with him. And it’s the present ANC government that’s the issue. We used to have some of the cheapest electricity in the world, now it’s getting really pricy.
That really doesn’t work as well. The height of the drop of the dam is the primary factor in its operating efficiency; the size of reservoir is linked to the stability of supply when rain is very seasonal.
Dams use locks to ring a ship up from lower elevations
And the panama canal has a series of locks at each end as the bulk of it isn’t actually at sea level.
*bring*, not *ring* [durp]
Regarding replicators replicating replicators, one of the big fallacies in a lot of development is exponential growth which does to infinity. It usually is an indication of one of two things: an unstable system or a system where a massive advancement happened and production and development has yet to catch up.
Examples of the former system are fairly common in control systems. Such as if your car’s cruise control has positive and negative flipped when determining the acceleration it needs to apply. So if you are going faster then the car wishes to accelerate and something will eventually break.
An example of the latter system is Moore’s Law, which is the growth of transistors in an dense IC doubles every other year. It will eventually stop because either the development costs get to high, or the size of transistors reach their theoretical minimum size.
Presuming, in the latter case, that no replacement for the silicon transistor technology exists.
https://www.energy.gov/articles/smallest-transistor-ever-0
I’ll admit that I’m not sure you can guide electrons in a path smaller than that. Time to switch to photons when that gives out!
There is a highly criticized book I can’t remember the author or name, but it was written by a big name in tech (though I’m not sure is he is a big name because he is known outside of tech like Hawking was as opposed to inside it) where he thought we would achieve singularity by 2050 based having technology to take advantage of our understanding of physics.
It is based on replacing the silicon transistor with something else (it was a while ago so I don’t remember the exact form he suggested we use).
My understanding is that it would (assuming it works) be better than silicon transistors, but it assumes we can use it.
Regarding modern transistors, one of the main problems with a lot of newer technologies is they take a very long time to work out the kinks which do not exist in a laboratory environment.
I could go on a fair bit about this, but you get the jist.
Since the Panama Canal uses gates, it is pretty obvious they have created those.
There are boats that are bigger than Panamax, but that is only due to the fact that we made bigger ones for Suez, and that said gates were built a hundred years ago.
There has been some refit done in the last 2 decades so some even bigger ships can now pass through, and making it even bigger is also just a matter of work vs benefit and interruption of service (and money, of course).
With the aids of fabbers, and supers, “normal modern human” construction tech and alien high-tech machinery, the tasks of setting up hydrodams and gates (redirecting rivers, excavation, construction) in an existing river, should be trivial compared with the Panama canal works, which were dug by hand. Given they took about 10 years to dig the main channel and then another 10-20 for doing all the bells and whistles, each installation in a suitable place to build (not as many as you would think on a river, even if you just set up a flow-type dam, instead of a full retention, ther need to be some base criteria so you do not end up flooding everything and still have the water moving) should be finished in very short time, each..
There are ships bigger than Suezmax as well. Basically, ships that have no need to go through either canal, like if they’re shipping between China and the western US.
“I don’t think anyone’s made locks for the giant container ships” I’m pretty sure the ones in the Panama Canal can hold several. Even then, river shipping would be much more efficient than other forms, you just use the proper sized ships and have more of them. Eventually, Rail becomes superior when the water narrows too much and will be in use anyways. Trucking fills in the gaps that rail can’t reach or when it’s more direct cuz you haven’t kept up on your rail development.
Thing is the Panama Canal is ONLY for short-cutting ship travel between the two oceans they aren’t left where the two oceans try and equalize their levels as would be necessary to also run a dam like Deus is doing. You’d need the dam and a parallel bypass for ships traveling down and up the river to be properly raised and lowered to get around it.
There is hydro on the Panama Canal at Gatun Lake. I expect it is there to one, generate power for the canal systems and two to regulate the lake level and water flow in the canal
Yep, there is a design of container ship called “PanaMax” for, you guessed it, the maximum that the Panama Canal can handle in its locks. For the moment; they’re working on bigger locks and bigger ships.
No, they haven’t, but then again they don’t use ships of that size in Europe, where many rivers are used to transport cargo. The rivers are just not wide and deep enough for ships of that size, not to mention the tight twists and turns of those rivers.
Which is why I question the size of the cargo ship in the mindscape here.
Honestly, if you had drones or aircraft that can lift the container ship, the more efficient use would not be to lift the ship but the containers themselves, and take them to their final destination. Taking the ship to a port is just adding several steps and is partly the reason why we’re in the supply chain crisis we’re in right now.
Water transport is far and away the cheapest and most energy efficient, and larger ships typically cost less per ton-mile. Rail is the cheapest over-land, followed by trucking. Air transport is energy intensive, and therefor expensive. That’s why air freight is usually reserved for high value, low bulk goods that need to arrive as quickly as possible, and low value bulk goods travel by water and rail as much as possible.
As for our current supply chain disruptions, the reasons for that are multi-layered and can’t be blamed on just one cause. Part of the problem is that American ports are among the least efficient in the developed world. But even once you get the ships unloaded, the shortage of truck drivers means containers are still backing up. And warehouses and distribution centers are also suffering from labor shortages, so there are further delays even once you get the containers there. The whole system is currently facing one bottle neck after another.
So do I see him portraying a country that can potentially grow a military power better than USA to a USA agent? Is he not afraid from a preventive strike?
I think at this point, given his forces, he’s probably not even worried about nuclear ICBMs.
That may be a large part of the reason for showing it now, at the start of that growth. “I have this capability. Look how I’m being open about it, rather than trying to hide it; you can assume I’m being similarly open with the other Great Powers. Do you want in?”
The who’s who is showing the wrong Maxima and has been for multiple pages.
Whoops, fixed!
There was, once upon a time, in a land very close to US, a move to implement a restriction in all video/camera chips. This restriction would look for an embedded pattern in anything the chip “saw”, and shut the chip down whenever it saw the pattern, thus preserving copyright/IP forever.
The issue of course was that “bad” people would simply remove the restriction from the chips they produced, thus causing the video/camera chips with the restriction to have no sales. (A very similar thing happened to Keurig, if you’d care to look it up.)
This should be introduced into any discussion of replicator technology. There is no relationship between legal and physical limitations. But I will guarantee you that legal restrictions will be attempted.
And defeated, fortunately. Even when they try layering technological and legal restrictions on top of each other, ultimately, people won’t stand for them.
In Quentin Quire, Space Ranger the Mary Sue character released into the internet of an alien world replicator technology and energy source technology, while pontificating on how it would ‘break the hold’ that business and government had on things and bragging about the great thing he did. People promptly broke the tech restrictions to create weapons and the entire world descended into war with massive acts of genocide going on. When readers called him on it he did a quick ‘I feel guilty’ arc for the MC while having him declare that ‘but it’s a good thing all the simulations prove I was right and things would have been worse if I hadn’t.’
I’d have laughed and told the MC – “Dude, if current society can’t handle tech, then we either evolve a society that CAN handle tech or we kill ourselves to either pre tech or extinction. In no case are the flaws in society that predate me by thousands of years my fault nor can they be blamed on me or on the tech.”
the panama canal has locks that let you send ships both ways by lowering and raising water levels in gated chambers the size of ships. current technology has is very wasteful of fresh water from lakes and rivers in area supplying excess water. with deus access to supers (including teleporters), demons/magic, and alien technology, water might be able to be recycled a lot easier, not to mention energy output of hydroelectric dams might be pretty high compared to real world, maybe by using superconductors. also, instead of using locks, he might use some form of levitation, like magnetic or antigravity.
as for the fabbers maybe they use some type of total conversion, but would still need an outside energy source to convert matter to energy then back to matter in a different form.
Hey look, Deus just gave NATO, the UN, Russia, and China an excuse to take away everything he has.
It would probably be done through the UN, Deus would be prosecuted for war crimes, making deals with foreign powers for use against the earth, and a dozen other things.
And unless those powers are willing to go to war (which they might not win even if they resort to nuclear weapons, because supers, aliens and demons) they’ll be sitting in committee twiddling their thumbs and trying to spin the optics to make them look in the right.
Galtyn’s fabbers make them more than self-sufficient. You know the saying “China only needs China?” The rest of the world can put all the sanctions it wants on Deus, and all that will do is slow him down a little as he pumps potential export resources into building up his own stuff. Like orbital architechture, asteroid mining and extrasolar colonization.
He’s won the game before the rest of the world even finishes setting up the board.
You don’t think they’d rather buy that military superiority to use against other countries? Sure, maybe they’d like to crush Galytn and take it for themselves, though if they can, then it’s not all that useful to them. But they’d be attacking a country that fields supers, aliens, and demons in defense, in addition to that military technology, and they presumably couldn’t use supers themselves if they wanted to remain in good standing with any country that signed the accords against using supers in war.
I couldnt have put it better myself.
Additionally, I think that Deus is smart enough that he isn’t showing all of his cards. It’s always good to have something in reserve. “I know something you don’t know. I am not left handed”
“Hey look, Deus just gave NATO, the UN, Russia, and China an excuse to take away everything he has.”
1) There are a lot of groups, like you, who confuse progress with tumult. or think hampering Deus’s COMPLETELY LEGAL PLANS will benefit them and does not come with a staggering mortality rate.
2) Since Deus is making the weapons and planes to SELL TO THE USA, I think the USA would prefer to spend $300 billion on them with no bloodshed whatsoever, and not be seen as an aggressive military power trying to pick on a new nation finally bringing themselves out of abject poverty, rather than spend potentially a LOT more on a war which will not be easy to win, nor popular, assuming they can get Congress to vote for a declaration of war in the first place. Which they probably cannot. The US probably also cannot give good reason to move US military into an offensive posture near Galytn, given Galytn’s progress is benefitting the US already.
If the US has not gone in and crushed North Korea after all this time, you think they’re doing to do it to Galytn, who has not made any aggressive posturing to ANY US interests, and in fact has been only interested in very beneficial trade deals with the US, where the US winds up getting extremely advanced weaponry?
The US has problems with tiny countries selling well-beyond-US-advanced weapons tech to them, and even more problems with the idea such tiny countries might sell it to anyone but the US. I suspect that would heavily colour their geopolitics.
As to invading, the US has a track record of invading (directly or clandestinely), fucking things up, then sodding off, leaving a shambles behind. As recently again happened in Afghanistan, but Iraq (the first time), Korea and Vietnam are nice examples too. Whether the POTUS can get congress on board for an overt show of power or whether it’ll be another Bay of Pigs or Contras affair is a bit moot for this discussion.
“The US has problems with tiny countries selling well-beyond-US-advanced weapons tech to them,”
Except Deus has already been doing this with the US for a while now. He’s just now upping the profit he’s making beause of the Mass Fabs. The planes themselves are entirely designed by Machina Industries, an Earth-based technology. They’d still be buying it from him if he was making it the old fashioned way. But then it would cost them even more, plus it would take a lot longer for them to receive it.
“and even more problems with the idea such tiny countries might sell it to anyone but the US.”
All the more reason to sign a contract with Deus where the US would have exclusive rights to certain technology, for which they would pay him extraordinarily well compared to any other nation. Deus already has shown himself to not be particularly fond of China, which is why he’d rather deal with the US directly.
“As to invading, the US has a track record of invading (directly or clandestinely),”
Only when it was easier than just buying people off. Deus has already made it abundantly clear his primary goal was money. And his secondary goal was to not do anything to directly interfere with G-8 nations if he does not have to.
” As recently again happened in Afghanistan,”
There’s literally no good comparison between why the US invaded Afghanistan and what’s going on with Galytn.
“but Iraq (the first time), Korea and Vietnam are nice examples too.”
Again, in all of these other examples, they are not even remotely comparable with Galytn. Mostly because there was actual military threats to the US or US proxies (ie, cold warfare) in each of those cases. That does not exist with Galytn. The only threat with Galytn is an economic one, and if the US is in business WITH Galytn, then it’s less of a threat.
Think about it. The US is already laughably dependent on nations who hate us and want us destroyed for a variety of goods. Deus has not shown this same animosity towards the US, even when showing disapproval of certain political actions in the US (which is his right, as it’s the right of any American to be able to criticize their government). Somehow I think the US would rather have business dealings with Deus than with China, Russia, or middle eastern nations which are calling the US the Great Satan.
“Whether the POTUS can get congress on board for an overt show of power ”
Unlikely, since Deus probably has a lot of ties with a lot of people in Congress. He knows how the political game is played. He’s even mentioned it to Maxima on more than one occasion, including how $250 million would buy the ear of some of the cheaper senators to influence their political decisions. Not to mention that declaring war is rather unpopular in GENERAL. It’s going to be SUPER unpopular to say:
‘we must declare war on this tiny African nation, which has finally freed itself from a brutal dictator and pulled themselves out of abject poverty, trying to remake their nation in a way that first world nations like the US would be able to relate to, not to mention that this nation is trying to bring stability to a VERY unstable region of the world. So we better start invading them and make sure that they don’t succeed in creating stability.’
This would not be a popular stance. It would be political suicide instead.
It is actually a trade off between the cost of simple single piece manufacture and the cost of complexity and assembly of repairable manufacturing. If the cost of single piece manufacturing is less than multi-piece manufacture plus cost of repair then go the simple route. In the latter case, remember to include the cost and requirement for trained labor to assemble and certify new plus diagnose and repair damaged items. If the mass fabricator can use any mass then recycle damaged items rather than repair them.
Like wise, while Deus can produce one new fighter per week (growing to three per week), where is he getting the pilot and support personnel? Gatlyn is not a large first world country so Deus would be severely personnel constrained. Remember, support personnel are many multiple of the number of pilots required. Also, the required infrastructure takes time to build out: airports (runways, supply chains, more personnel), air traffic control, training, roads, transportation, drivers (more personnel!), etc, etc.
Even with unlimited funding and complete security it would take IRL time and trained personnel to pull this off. It has only been three-four in comic months since Fracture Station right? He sure is working fast !!!
There’s always skilled people willing to follow the money.
Plus, considering the demon army likes to NWO planets, they can probably do a lot of that.
Even for a trained fast-jet pilot, it often takes several months at least to train to fly a new aircraft type. To reach peak capability takes much longer, and isn’t guaranteed.
Galytn Aerospace may be able to shave a bit off the conversion time by exploiting the custom-build nature of the plane, and making several variants of the cockpit section mimicking the ergonomics of different ‘precursor’ types. If you’re used to Rafales you can have a Dassault-style cockpit, if you’re used to Gripens you can have a SAAB-style cockpit, etc.
Of course, that would simply create more problems further down the line. Not being able to automatically swap any pilot into any plane is an obvious one, as is the loss of spares and repairs commonality. But having too much control familiarity in a plane with potentially very different handling can itself present a hazard – one of the suggestions in the aftermath of the Shoreham Airshow crash was that the pilot had defaulted to the wrong familiarity, and tried to fly a front-line fighter aircraft (for its time) according to the capabilities of a primary trainer (of similar era) in which he also displayed.
I’m guessing that he has a fair number of pilots in the Aldarii , with the numbers of human pilots coming up as they are trained, and that’s if he even let’s humans into the program, as I guessing the Aldarii are ‘blood bonded’ or something Honor coded to Deus. Less back stabbing that way, or flying off to the highest bidder.
And new airframe designs often have quirks that don’t reveal themselves until they’re flown in exactly the wrong way, like how the SR-71 engines sometimes extinguished themselves. Even after this issue was mostly solved with hardware and software measures, it still caused an incredibly catastrophic failure while being flown some very experienced pilots (one of whom didn’t make it).
Right now in RL there is no direct connection between the controls of the plane and the pilot inside the plane. The only reason the planes we have in the USofA work now is because they have ungodly thrust they are otherwise flying bricks. Any attack that can hack or fry the electronics on a drone can also turn a fighter plane from a flying brick into just an expensive brick. Two F-35s have dumped themselves overboard already jees.
Our military is as usual fighting the war fifty years ago.
This makes fighter planes a waste of manpower that just got trained by Galtyn at large expense to Deus, when he could just get a whole fleet of drone-operating fast-twitch videogamery teenagers.
Deus might be stupid.
Unless of course he’s going deeper into Supreme Commander than it seems and this fighter is actually completely automated based on now ancient thoroughly-tried-and-tested design and software from aliens.
So I just did a quick search for time to build a jet fighter. Many people trying to hedge there. With, “Weeelll it depends on what you mean by ‘start’.”
But one number sited was 4-6 a month in one factory. So one a week is actually about, normal? What does Deus gain over regular assembly methods?
no materials needed.
He still needs materials, but he can used them in their base form rather than as highly refined and machined metal alloys and microscopic metallic layouts etched onto chips of silicon.
Pretty sure he does not need materials. Its a replicator – its energy to matter conversion.
and he also says “negligible materials costs” which might just be for the factories and fabs themselves, or parts that might not be “replicable” (perhaps very heavy atoms, like in star trek)
He doesn’t make one a week, he makes one every 3 days. Assembly and shakedown after fabrication takes about a week, but that doesn’t stop the fabs from fabbing.
He makes the parts in three days. Parts arrive at regular factories for building. And do one to one and a half. At best with his teams one assembly line is barely faster than 4-6 a month by being in a 6-8 a month. Sure he will build more factories. So does Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.
And this requires how many different factories, producing how many different items, with how much logistics required to operate the whole thing?
You throw the raw materials into this thing and it pumps out a fighter jet in 3 days.
Excuse me. I meant to say it pumps out the parts for a fighter jet in 3 days. All in one place.
One per 3 days per facility, not 1 per week. The fabbers are the limiting factor, not the assembly/testing, and the fabbers make 1 per 3 days. 1 fabber per facility, plus 3 assembly/testing teams per fabber to keep up with the fabbers’ production.
2 Assembly. There are only 7 days to a week. So he makes parts for 2 in 6 days.
If a fab and a half make a fighter and a half in a week and a half, how many fighters will half a dozen fabs make in half a dozen weeks?
Number of fighters (N) = number of fabs x number of weeks x fighters per week per fab (R)
(1.5)(1.5)R = 1.5 R= 2/3 1.5 fabs, 1.5 weeks, 1.5 fighters
6 fabs, 6 weeks N = (6)(6)(2/3) N=24 fighters
Of course, it’s been a few decades since I last made these types of calculations. As my daughter once asked me: “Is everything a math problem to you?” Yes
I’m thinking Deus must have purchased an off world design. Something not too advanced to allow for it being plausibly of Earth manufacture. If you are selling aircraft you are also selling the technology to maintain and operate them. Even with the manufacturing tech of the fabricators, a lot of work in manufacturing modern aircraft is tied up in design and development. Historically there were a couple of WWII designs that had a design to prototype cycle of less than four months but that is a circumstance of wartime priorities. A modern military jet is an order of magnitude more complex. If you are selling to other countries, you want the tech in your product to be one generation ahead of the competition at most. That assures further sales when the competition copies your current product. One place where Deus really wins is in the flexibility of his manufacturing plant. A lot of aircraft manufacture is tied up in specialized jigs and assembly fixtures. That is another drain on time, manpower and material resources that Deus doesn’t have to rely upon. There is also money to be made off of the maintenance and training package.
Something the other replies didn’t mention is that the 4-6/mo figure you cite is from a very rigid assembly line, which took many months of tooling to design, spin up, and get operating properly to build a single design. And which would take months to reconfigure for any significant design change, or to produce a different model entirely. That single model is the only thing that facility can produce that year.
With Deus’s on-demand printing, there is no assembly line spin-up or reconfiguration time between designs. You can pop out a single finished Mk II prototype directly from the design model in 2-3 days, and instantly go back to making the Mk I (or drones, or tanks, or anything else) while that’s tested. Then when you commit to the finished Mk II design, you take the last one out of the printer and start the Mk II series five seconds later. That takes many months, if not years, off the R&D and production timelines for new products. And as a bonus, you no longer have to keep obsolete manufacturing equipment or a stockpile of spare parts around for repairs or another production run.
Now that is a good point.
Because this would be a very big waste for basically what he could do with a regular assembly line otherwise.
Actually there’s three different engineering patents I know of where you can get hydro electric power out of canal lock systems. The problem is that currently dams in general are seen as environmental disasters almost as serious as Chernobyl in some quarters, due to a wide range of issues from silt accumulations, alterations in water temperature downstream from any given dam, interruptions in historical flood/silt transport, concentrations of sediments from industrial farm waist in sediment inside damns to the point where it’s occasionally been found to be toxic, and so on.
Dutchman here: it is possible to place a series of locks next to a dam. A series, so the doors will be of a manageble thickness. The difference in height would be too much for a single lock.
Largest lock in the world is 500 meters long and is located in IJmuiden, the Netherlands.
There’s the locks at Panama and Suez Canals. The IJmuiden locks in Holland aren’t too shabby either. The newest one can handle ships up to 500 meters x 70meters, and up to some 15 meters draft.
Mind.. all of those are meant to limit/eliminate tidal effects, not really bridge a significant geographical height difference.
But given the actual energy source for his space-station access, I’ve no doubt Deus could have some of the lift-type locks, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronqui%C3%A8res_inclined_plane built.
He’s the type to go for Pharaonic-level building projects, after all.
There are no locks in the Suez Canal.
There’s also some canal transfer options that take up far less space, like the Anderton Lift and the Falkirk Wheel. But it would be pretty hard to scale either one up to cargo ship size, even with space-tech unless you allow full anti-grav; that’s just an absurd amount of weight to move around while fighting gravity. But if Deus did build something like that, they’d be magnificent erections indeed.
I want to see Sydney and Deus just interact for a page or 2. I think their banter would be funny
Hmmmm. Not sure if that would provide the perspective you’d think it would.
I do not think the replicators can replicate replicator, because the producer of the replicator wants to sell replicators.
just use flight/hover mega freight. pretty sure there is an alien ship outside the base.
should have access to the tech somewhere somehow. just skip the whole roads/rivers/rail dependency.
The problem Africa has with shipping, especially container ship shipping, is a general lack of natural ports. The rivers tend to have many many shallows and rapids/waterfalls making inland shipping a real pain. I will take more than simple locks to get regular shipping functional. If Deus can do that, that alone will make Gatlyn super wealthy. Africa has an amazing wealth in resources, but almost no way to economically ship anything in or out. The small number of ports Africa does have mainly in Egypt & the Mediterainean and South Africa are generally smaller than those used in the rest of the world.
It’s almost as if Galytn needed a route to the ocean, which they fortunately now possess.
Rail lines would be really worthwhile too, they’re extremely efficient and much easier to double up on so you can run continuous one-way traffic.
Not relevant at the time of this comic, but China’s belt and road is making connections to that part of Africa nowadays.
Instead of flying ships over the dams, is it possible to build a dam into something like the Panama Canal? The walls have the “dams” and supply the power, while the gates let the ships up and down.
Power generating dams work based on water flow, while locks and canals work on volume, so as long as your canal has water flowing in, then you can use it for power generation as well without losing functionality. Just put some paddles in your overflow prevention system and attach the paddles to a generator and you’ve got power coming out based on recent rainfall upriver. If you want to control the amount of power generated (you really want to do that!), then you need some kind of water storage area next to your canal. Or just make your canal excessively deep so you can afford to lower and raise the water level as needed by the demand for power.
Actually, it’s amazing how well a lock system can raise ships past dams….
The Tennessee Valley Authority was building hydroelectric power dams with shipping locks in them a century ago. They didn’t build the locks big enough to take modern container ships because a) such ships didn’t exist a century ago, and b) no one in their right minds would take something that size, and especially with that kind of draft, onto the Tennessee River. Far better to unload at a deepwater port and send the containers to their destinations by rail and truck (and the occasional higher-tech method); it’s what the container system is designed for.
Also barges. Still have plenty of barges transiting the Tennessee River.
I can’t believe Dave didn’t write “EVER GIVEN” across the side of that vessel
Most of the world knows the name “EVER GIVEN” because they famously failed at something. Deus has no reason to pay tribute to failures.
Ummm, no. The “they” is Egypt. The Egyptian government charges like a wounded bull for the privilege of using the canal, but has put very little of that money back into maintenance and improvement. Worse, the Suez Canal Authority has failed utterly to mandate a maximum size for ships transiting the canal, thus encouraging ship-builders to construct ever larger vessels.
The Ever Given was caught by known behaviour of ships in narrow shallow waterways. The passage of the vessel creates drag proportional to the distance between the ship’s hull and the side of the canal. The Ever Given was required to travel at speed in order to maintain rudder authority, but was blasted to its starboard side by an easterly sandstorm. The pilot in trying to correct the side-slip lost control of the ship resulting in the stern being sucked onto the east bank and the bows ramming into the west bank. The ship is several meters longer than the canal is wide at that point.
As a result, the Egyptian Government is now faced with massive costs to widen AND deepen the canal over its entire length, AND it will almost certainly be required to place extensive windbreaks along the canal to stop the samr thing happening to other large ships.
We note that Israel (I believe) is considering cutting a competing canal probably from the north end of the Gulf of Aqaba alongside the Egyptian border to Al Mawasi in Gaza. Personally I believe this will not happen, but…
How many Palistinian lives do you think that would cost?
Personally, I kinda hope that after the world deals with Russia, we can turn out collective eye towards the shitshow that is Israel.
Somebody’s gotta dig. Some of those somebodies will be palestinian. That gives them a stable income for a goodly while, enabling them to start a family. It’s not like Israel is Qatar, so working conditions will be reasonable. So I’d say a net negative number of deaths, if anything.
The shitshow in Israel is because the palestinians like their days of rage so much. If they’d stop that raging, they’d live longer. Proposing to bulldoze Israel into the sea then seeking anschluss with Jordan, as palestinian leaders have publicly stated as a goal, isn’t any less of a shitshow than whatever happens there now. But, the raging palestinians have become quite decent at propagandising themselves with the so-called progressive set. Who usually know beter than to advocate genocide outside their own little in-groups, though.
You’re making the same argument as the people saying “If only Ukraine surrendered then they wouldn’t all be dying right now”
Check your thought processes, if you have any.
It is not quite the same argument, no. Not remotely, in fact. But I’m not going to argue with a windbag so rather than offering “check your…” bullshit, I invite you to show how you think the two are equivalent.
You are literally blaming the Palistinians, who are the people who were invaded and had their land taken away, for Israel’s agression. Simply because they are fighting to reclaim stolen land.
You are literally asking them to surrender to their invaders *and* infantilizing them by calling their legitimate war of defence “days of rage”.
Fuck you.
“Literally” means that I actually use those words in that context to say that.
This is not the case.
“The shitshow in Israel is because the palestinians like their days of rage so much.”
By “days of rage” you are talking about people fighting back against invaders of their country.
You can play semantic games as much as you like, but like Putin, you aren’t fooling anyone.
Fuck off with your victim blaming.
I don’t think the palestinians are justified saintly victim freedom fighters, as apparently, you do. So concluding that I must therefore be blaming victims is really only on you. Same for the rest of your analysis, which to me shows mostly poor reading comprehension. Comparing me to Putin just because you failed to argue convincingly also does not convince. Namecalling, same thing. But hey, you do you.
Wow, so much strawman there.
At this point, the damned Azov battallion are justified defenders of their country.
Are you a Professor Flowers fan, by chance?
It’d be crazy expensive to run a canal up there, as that’s not a sea level route unless you dig a very long way down, and theres not the reliable rainfall in that region to support a high-level canal of that size. With the costs being extremely high, transit fees would also have to be huge and so the amount of traffic very low. Total white elephant, I think you’ll find that it was proposed by politicians without checking with any engineers for whether it is at all feasible.
It’s in an “Imagination” cloud bubble… but admittedly I can’t quite tell if it’s Deus’ imagination or Sydney’s
Now this is interesting: Panel 2: Deus: “… much of what we produce here is earmarked for internal defense. There are a lot of groups …”
Internal defense? Of what do we speak? Waiting until we are invaded by foreign forces? Or mayhap we have (armed) rebels within the borders? Uneasy lies the head and all that, yes? No? And how much is “much”? What purpose does the “not much” fulfil? Is the plot an ice-cold gazpacho? Or a rich and filling bouillabaisse?
I’d imagine Deus will keep some toys for himself, as many as needed to discourage invasion of whatever kind. But he’s also a big fan of “the best defense is a good offense”, so really he’s probably investing some of that materiel into expanding Galytn’s partnerships.
Sydney is asking the real questions here, as always.
:V
Pretty sure Sydney’s contemplation here is really just DaveB trolling all of us. Although it is a pretty obvious line of questioning, regardless of how much energy we’ve spent arguing about it.
I’m pretty sure China is nuking this factory the minute they find out it exists. I’m only being slightly hyperbolic.
China’s entire shtick, economically, is being able to produce things more cheaply than anyone else, and having a controlled and regulated economy based on scarcity. Any fabber, let alone an energy to matter fabber, is a massive threat to both of those principles – they produce anything at the cost of electricity, which is cheaper, and as our good author noted, given enough fabbers, there is no way to keep goods scarce. Even trying to cut power to them doesn’t do much good – you fabber a photo-cell and a battery and go off the grid. Further, China’s political situation is heavily centralized – which fabbers also screw with – and relies on being able to buy food to support their population, which gets shot when the economic engine breaks down.
Given “this tiny country just (potentially) staked your entire national” there is no way China wouldn’t move against it, I don’t care what Deus got them to agree to vis nonaggression.
Which might feed back into why Deus is putting effort so heavily into building up his military defenses. Because if they can’t crunch him economically, the fall back is military force.
China might be in danger.
Max: It seems you’re poised to develop quite a military power here.
Dues: Says the country that enjoys being quite the military power itself.
I noticed that the aircraft on the assembly line appears to have an offset cockpit for the pilot similar to the Millennium Falcon. This may be beneficial for a cargo ship navigating in out of of ports, but can really mess up the targeting for the pilot in a fighter plane.
Bear in mind that, as Deus states in Panel 1 and DaveB expounds on in the Author’s Notes, this facility is not producing fighter jets. It’s producing pieces of fighter jets. Nothing you see in Panel 1 is guaranteed to be a cockpit.
Do you mean the bit on the right hand side as we look at it? The component being built looks like it’s just the right wing, so that bit would be where the leading edge joins the main body.
Of course, offset cockpits haven’t necessarily been a deal-breaker in the past. And since missiles have almost entirely superseded guns in modern air combat, targeting is even less affected. Having said which, engineering and ergonomics still favour keeping the pilot on the centreline to avoid complications of balance and rolling g-forces
The Mustang is a nice example but personally I like the Hawker Siddeley Sea Vixen
Haven’t ever come across one of these, but it’s a very intriguing mix of styles.
I was going for the extreme, rather than the practical. The Sea Vixen, and the Canberra PR.9, had side-by-side two-seater cockpits in which the navigator’s position was fully sunk into the fuselage to give more space for displays and instruments – the cockpit itself is still on the centreline, even if only one side of it is externally visible.
Lots of environmentalists consider traditional dams environmental disasters despite hydropower itself being clean. So a number of companies have developed dam tech that is less impactful on river flow. One pretty cool one I see a lot of diverts some of the river, funnels it down a turbine, and then spits it back out into the river fish and all. Pretty sure the ones i’ve seen are pretty small scale for Dues’ needs but I’m sure if he puts his mind, money, and advanced alien tech to the problem he’d figure something out
Hydroelectric: you could create a single large damn/reservoir up at the headwaters – well, above where you would need any major shipping – for a standard hydro plant and for regulating water flow; and a bazillion low-flow hydro plants (wikipedia “micro hydro” or “small hydro”) which would wouldn’t block river transportation (and much much less impact). And if you can mass-replicate the components, quick and easy.
Regardless of how fast a fabber can make something, it still needs raw materials fed into it to create the final product. If you tell it to make a one kilo brick of gold then you still need to feed it one kilogram of gold to do so. The benefit is in the rearrangement of the raw materials into something more valuable. A blue diamond is just carbon with a 1 ppm impurity of boron. Feed a fabber a bag a charcoal briquettes and a box of Borax cleaner and you get back a few thousand Hope diamonds.
Certain South African mining companies may frown on this use of the fabber. As would PC chip manufacturers in the same situation, whose product is basically sand with a few metallic impurities.
“Certain South African mining companies may frown on this use of the fabber.”
Yes. When Tanganyika was granted independence, the De Beers Diamond Co made it very clear that the Williamson Diamond Mine was not allowed to oversell its products, or De Beers would simply open its safes and flood the market.
Deus has a massive bargaining chip here. He could put every diamond mine out of business in a week, thereby killing the blood diamond curse stone motherless. He would be very popular in West Africa :>
You know that diamonds can be and are already being artificially produced? De Beers works more on a natural vs synthetic marketing angle nowadays, when the subject comes up at all.
Och aye, but Hope Diamonds at 10¢/carat? In 10Kg lots? Shipped *anywhere*?
With a bit of pink coloring and you could make an awesome pink panther dismond.
Ba dum, da dum, da dum da dum de do dum de duuuuum, da de da dooooo da.
And the customs Inspector wouldn’t have a clue,so why not?
They say diamonds are forever, but a pink diamond will eventually turn into a rose quartz.
Those massfab units will still need lots of raw materials.
if you try to m = e / c2 your way around that the proper description for your energy needs is not ‘holding us up’ but ‘armagedon’. You need to put the equivalent of a nuclear bomb in to create a few milligram of mass (as that bomb does the reverse)
Well, unless you’re also capable of elemental transmutation. Obviously there will be efficiency losses, but if you can transform 1 kilogram of impure silicon dioxide (ie, rock) into …say 99.999 grams of diamondoid-composite armor plate…
You still run into issues unless you can break conservation of energy somehow.
And I don’t think we’ve seen that yet, outside of Capes and Sydney’s orbs.
That specifically retains conservation of energy. 1 kilogram of mass transformed to energy and back, with just a bit of mass lost to inefficiencies and to maintain that conservation of energy. You have to feed more mass into the system than you get back, that’s the point.
Nuclear bombs barely lose mass. I just checked and the difference between each Uranium-235 atom and the resulting Krypton-92 and Barium-141 is only 2 neutrons (235-141-92). And even those two don’t get turned into energy, they are just pushed out and are what continues the reaction by hitting other Uranium-235 atoms.
It is only the binding energy that comes out in the BOOM. I imagine actually creating mass would take a whole lot more power than we can create with Nukes.
Not sure why everyone is assuming these fabbers are converting energy to matter. It would be far, far more efficient to shape forcefields to arranging/binding a stream of molecules carried by inert gases.
That is a much more feasible than energy conversion, he’d need about 6.45 zettawatts of power to build something with the same mass as a B2 (which this looks vaguely like). The world, as a whole, produces about a thousandth of that in a year. I’m pretty sure it’s still an order of magnitude or so above our total electricity production ever.
Careful Sydney, that line of thinking leads to gray goo.