On 5 Sep 2014 at 9:20, Jeffrey Schwartz wrote:

> 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.

Not for anything that's ever expected to take damage.

You can replace section of conduit if there's a hole thru that
section of wall due to combat damage.

If the channel is part of the wall, then splice the cables and
replacing the "run" just got at least an order of magnitude harder.

> 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.

Now picture the fun when an engineer pops the panel only to find that
what the AR display is showing him doesn't match what's actually
there.

Could be because this is a Mark V mod F ship and they got the info
for a mod D. Or it could be an "upgrade" from that last yard visit
for anuual maintenance.

And even AR isn't going to help much if some pennypincher at the yard
did what I heard happened to one new USN vessel a decade or so back.

Because of automated wire laying gear (or some such) they "saved
money" by using all the same color wires in the wiring harnesses.

There were *loud* screams when the first ship went for a shakedown
and they opened something up for a "simple" repair only to find
neatly bundled wiring harnesses. With every single (unlabeled!) wire
the exact same shade of red.

The yard was told in no uncdertain terms that they were going to
replace all the wiring in the ship with new wiring that was properly
color-coded.

and whatever idiot came up with that "cost saving" measure probably
got promoted rather than take the blame. :-(
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com