3 ms·

Everything important seems to be handwaved away. You can't just say making a "truss building unit" would take a spider 10550 hours of labor, or that spiders op

by jjk166 4y ago

Everything important seems to be handwaved away. You can't just say making a "truss building unit" would take a spider 10550 hours of labor, or that spiders operating TBUs will produce truss 416 times faster - show me the design for this spring powered truss builder that takes precisely 3 hours and 3 minutes to produce a unit of truss; show me the spider that builds it, show me the steps along the process of the spider assembling the unit, show me where these numbers are coming from. It would be one thing if these were rough order of magnitude estimations, but the level of precision implies that not to be the case.

narrator 4y ago
What's more fun is imagine pointing this thing at earth instead of an asteroid. Soon the whole crust of the earth is turned into paperclips, or trusses or whatever. oops.
pmayrgundter 4y ago
I disagree with your assessment of importance. A work like this strikes me as being primarily important as a "concept of operation", with sketched numbers from (presumably) sub-studies. In other words, my primary concern would be Does the whole thing hang together? Hard to say for such a vast project, so you need to start somewhere with many estimates and placeholders. I wouldn't shoot down the value based on missing references for sub-projects. Especially for what appears to be a solo-author work. I do agree those would be helpful references. I've contacted the author asking for collateral materials and will post back if there's anything to share.
- jjk166 4y ago
  The validity of the concept of operation depends entirely on the validity of the assumptions that went into it. If, for example, the truss building unit can't actually make truss much faster than an appropriately designed spider working directly, or if the project would be done before the TBU could be completed, then suddenly the argument for spending a lot of resources building the TBU disappears. Yeah, you gotta start somewhere, but this isn't the place to start.
  - pmayrgundter 4y ago
    Yep, I get that.. it's like, don't start the Manhattan project if you can't create a runaway nuclear reaction in the lab. I suspect the author has given the truss system a fair amount of thought given the rest. But ok, your spider sense is ringing :)

by jjk166 4y ago

narrator 4y ago

What's more fun is imagine pointing this thing at earth instead of an asteroid. Soon the whole crust of the earth is turned into paperclips, or trusses or whatever. oops.

pmayrgundter 4y ago

I disagree with your assessment of importance. A work like this strikes me as being primarily important as a "concept of operation", with sketched numbers from (presumably) sub-studies. In other words, my primary concern would be Does the whole thing hang together? Hard to say for such a vast project, so you need to start somewhere with many estimates and placeholders. I wouldn't shoot down the value based on missing references for sub-projects. Especially for what appears to be a solo-author work. I do agree those would be helpful references. I've contacted the author asking for collateral materials and will post back if there's anything to share.

jjk166 4y ago
The validity of the concept of operation depends entirely on the validity of the assumptions that went into it. If, for example, the truss building unit can't actually make truss much faster than an appropriately designed spider working directly, or if the project would be done before the TBU could be completed, then suddenly the argument for spending a lot of resources building the TBU disappears. Yeah, you gotta start somewhere, but this isn't the place to start.
- pmayrgundter 4y ago
  Yep, I get that.. it's like, don't start the Manhattan project if you can't create a runaway nuclear reaction in the lab. I suspect the author has given the truss system a fair amount of thought given the rest. But ok, your spider sense is ringing :)