I said "fast microchips." Today's personal computers have at least a thousand times as much of everything as they did in 1990 and those were almost that much more advanced than the ones available in 1970. Complex ballistics calculations go from impossible to almost impossible (or at least seem like that) when you use the computers of the 1940s and 1950s, then become trivial when you use small semi-portable computers of the 1970s. By 1975 even a pocket calculator could solve those equations in no time, and we weren't particularly close to what we call having real computers then, certainly not affordable or particularly portable ones.
In a guild system, when there is enough to do a particular job, they will clamp down if they can. Take so many years to develop a system, use contracts and other things to force spacecraft makers to use their systems exclusively and not upgrade for years, then upgrade only incrementally. This does have the virtue that a twenty year old system can be repaired with guaranteed quality parts, unlike a nuclear plant or the space shuttle.
One thing they had in the 1940s was the abacus. If I look around at the histories, someone probably used it. A person who was well trained could do calculations quite quickly and accurately with one of those, but it's a mental discipline that is harder than a lot of modern math. You can't set one of those up so that a farm-boy can throw a few toggles and get an answer on the dials. That's years of training just to crunch a few numbers. However, the abacus is more than adequate for plotting courses. If, hypothetically, it took two hours to set up a table of numbers using the abacus, this would be trivial for a space journey. They could have been used to figure out where to point the radiotelescopes during the moon shots. A good operator could solve those equations for you in under five minutes.
There were also solid state computers, even used on aircraft, made entirely of discrete components, tin-can transistors and stuff like that. This is what went up on early rockets. You are right to say that the space race forced the development of the microchip computer, but the Russians used heavier boosters to accomplish the same goal. What if another civilization went with the heavier boosters? The bonus is that they could throw more tonnage up. Take ten percent of the resources that their population might have used on cars, use that to build space stations. If a society is mercifully free of war, it might have a lot of excess to do that with.
Even with us energy has been relatively cheap and manufactured components have been expensive. The price of a small car engine is about the same as the price of gasoline to travel 10,000 miles if the car gets 20 miles per gallon, the price of gas is $3, and the engine is $1500.
When you talk about bringing the components back versus bringing the knowledge of how to build them, do you think that one through? Do you have any idea what goes into a chip fabricator? What about the tools to make tools? What about the thousands of people who have to be trained to support the infrastructure to design the fabricator and the chips, to work the fabricator, then to assemble those chips into something useful? What about the manufacture of all the materials that go into a microchip? It takes a hell of a lot more than a set of blueprints, and if someone can transport a few hundred pounds of chips, it really can make more sense to simply purchase them from Mouser electronics. It took the involvement of literally millions of people and billions of human-hours to make the microchip the reality that it is today. Let's see the Centaurians replicate that!
In a guild system, when there is enough to do a particular job, they will clamp down if they can. Take so many years to develop a system, use contracts and other things to force spacecraft makers to use their systems exclusively and not upgrade for years, then upgrade only incrementally. This does have the virtue that a twenty year old system can be repaired with guaranteed quality parts, unlike a nuclear plant or the space shuttle.
One thing they had in the 1940s was the abacus. If I look around at the histories, someone probably used it. A person who was well trained could do calculations quite quickly and accurately with one of those, but it's a mental discipline that is harder than a lot of modern math. You can't set one of those up so that a farm-boy can throw a few toggles and get an answer on the dials. That's years of training just to crunch a few numbers. However, the abacus is more than adequate for plotting courses. If, hypothetically, it took two hours to set up a table of numbers using the abacus, this would be trivial for a space journey. They could have been used to figure out where to point the radiotelescopes during the moon shots. A good operator could solve those equations for you in under five minutes.
There were also solid state computers, even used on aircraft, made entirely of discrete components, tin-can transistors and stuff like that. This is what went up on early rockets. You are right to say that the space race forced the development of the microchip computer, but the Russians used heavier boosters to accomplish the same goal. What if another civilization went with the heavier boosters? The bonus is that they could throw more tonnage up. Take ten percent of the resources that their population might have used on cars, use that to build space stations. If a society is mercifully free of war, it might have a lot of excess to do that with.
Even with us energy has been relatively cheap and manufactured components have been expensive. The price of a small car engine is about the same as the price of gasoline to travel 10,000 miles if the car gets 20 miles per gallon, the price of gas is $3, and the engine is $1500.
When you talk about bringing the components back versus bringing the knowledge of how to build them, do you think that one through? Do you have any idea what goes into a chip fabricator? What about the tools to make tools? What about the thousands of people who have to be trained to support the infrastructure to design the fabricator and the chips, to work the fabricator, then to assemble those chips into something useful? What about the manufacture of all the materials that go into a microchip? It takes a hell of a lot more than a set of blueprints, and if someone can transport a few hundred pounds of chips, it really can make more sense to simply purchase them from Mouser electronics. It took the involvement of literally millions of people and billions of human-hours to make the microchip the reality that it is today. Let's see the Centaurians replicate that!
