On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 5:15 PM, Bruce Johnson
<xxxxxx@pharmacy.arizona.edu> wrote:

> They have had *starships* for 10K years.

Well, yes.  Sort of.  The Vilani pretty much stuck with the same J1
and J2 designs for most of that time.

The deal with the the two different LCS designs is that they are *new*
designs, and we're building a bunch of them over a short time.

The Vilani would likely hand-build the individual system prototypes in
isolation, test them for 10 years, making design upgrades and
improvements, then hand-build the non-flying prototype, test it for 10
years, fixing problems and making design changes, then build the
flying prototype, test for ten years, and then build a second
prototype, and repeat the testing cycle for 10 years.

So, the design does not go into production until at least 50 years of
R&D on 4 generations of prototypes.

And for the Vilani, that's probably and aggressive schedule.

The problem with modern ship-building is the competing drives to do it
cheap and to do it fast.

Dan

--

"Any sufficiently advanced parody is indistinguishable from a genuine
kook." -Alan Morgan