On the other hand, look at the change in _user_ instrumentation

We've gone from having a dashboard with meters for tach,water temp,
oil temp,  battery amps, voltage, oil pressure... to "Check Engine"

Many drivers of the 1970s had a real good idea of what was under the
hood, and had to because things broke and they had to fix them.
Now... Northstar doesn't even have tune-ups for the first 100k miles
you own the car.

In the 1970s, there was plenty of room under the hood to be able to
reach things to do the maintenance because you did _something_ every
5-10k miles.
Now, there's no room...and 1/5 to 1/10th the maintenance time.

I think that'll occur with starships... and I think on warships, the
trend will be to have multiple redundant systems, each "podded" into
an armor box that makes it harder to damage.

I waver on that with things like the type-A and Type-S.
On the "A", I'd think there would be much fewer redundants and they
would all be of a type for easy availability when you're in the back
of beyond.

On the "S", I'd think there'd be a mix, even though that would make
logistics a bit more of a pain.
The "S" I built in Second Life had four small fusion reactors instead
of one big one, for redundancy.
I'd never told the players that if I'd gotten more detailed on spares
that two of them were designed to use the latest Navy spares, with the
highest mean-time-between-failures. One of the others was a commercial
design, intended to let you get parts wherever they could work on an
"A". The last was a pure IISS design that was meant to allow easiest
rebuild of parts that failed.
The Navy one shouldn't break, but if it does, then you can swap the
whole pod with one from a cutter.
The "A" one might break, but if it does, you should be able to buy
parts anywhere there's a starport
The "IISS" one might break, but if it does, you can repair it with TL
5+ make-shift stuff and scavenged parts from the other 3.... so you
can get back into space long enough to get to civilization.

On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Dave <deltadave@usa.net> wrote:
> As always, as tech increases the size of individual components shrinks, but
> there are more of them.  Increasing complexity in monitoring and trying to
> wring the last few percent of performance from a given power source at
> higher tech levels would IMO lead to more interconnects, not less.  Think of
> the evolution of the internal combustion engine - in the late 19th century,
> there were only a few feet of wiring in any given vehicle. That has grown to
> the point now that many cars have miles of wire connecting the various
> systems - emissions control, engine monitoring & optimization, accessories
> controls - up to 8 or 9 different systems.
>
> I've never really bought into the Star Trek conception of engineering
> spaces, especially on a warship where battle damage is expected and planned
> for.
>
> Dave
> Your 'reality', sir, is lies and balderdash,
> and I'm delighted to say that I have no
> grasp of it whatsoever.
>                       - Baron Munchausen
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Jeffrey Schwartz
> <schwartz.jeffrey@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I think TL is going to have a _huge_ impact on that.
>> And I think there's going to be a big difference between military and
>> civvie.
>>
>> I can see a TL10-12, maybe 13 ship looking very "20th century
>> submarine-ish" inside... pipes color coded for maintenance, conduits
>> easy to get to, etc.
>>
>> TL13,14,15, you've got room temp superconductors. No longer need 3
>> gauge wire to carry the power load, you can use 22 gauge. No longer
>> need big conduit to run it in, either - you form the conduit into the
>> hull matrix to begin with, since it's only going to be about 12mm
>> around.
>> Plasma conduit from the fusion reactor(s) to the M-Drive is going to
>> be formed in as well.
>> For additional safety, you put a 2mm crystaliron wall panel over the
>> whole thing, with disconnects at the corners. That way you can still
>> get to things if you need to, but if battle occurs, you've got a nice
>> spall sheet to prevent debris from breaking things.  On lower TLs you
>> can't afford the weight/volume for adding that layer of armor, and the
>> maintenance hassle for finding the pipe/conduit/etc is a pain. At
>> TL13+, you put one of the little heads-up displays on, link it to your
>> hand-comp, and it'll do an Augmented Reality schematic of the stuff
>> behind the wall, including highlights of pipe temps, power feed
>> status, etc.
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