Economies and Diseconomies of Scale
Posted: 2003-01-26 03:16pm
I lack both the math skills and the raw data to calculate this, but when looking at another thread it struck me as something interesting to know....
Are SW weapons, especially turbolasers, subject to economies, or diseconomies, of scale? Or are they roughly smooth throughout?
It would seem to me that if we could somehow isolate, say, the firepower and mass of several given weapons, on different scales, we could get an idea of whether the weapons scale well, poorly, or smoothly... which would lend us greater abilities to predict, though in an admittedly imperfect manner, the yield of weapons whose throughput is not formally addressed.
I dont know enough to even know where to start, but I thought it an interesting idea and figured id throw it out here for the experts to chew on.
Analyzing a fictional universe is alot like science. Though you cant run experiments, you can take known facts, derive theories, and test their predictive power.
Are SW weapons, especially turbolasers, subject to economies, or diseconomies, of scale? Or are they roughly smooth throughout?
It would seem to me that if we could somehow isolate, say, the firepower and mass of several given weapons, on different scales, we could get an idea of whether the weapons scale well, poorly, or smoothly... which would lend us greater abilities to predict, though in an admittedly imperfect manner, the yield of weapons whose throughput is not formally addressed.
I dont know enough to even know where to start, but I thought it an interesting idea and figured id throw it out here for the experts to chew on.
Analyzing a fictional universe is alot like science. Though you cant run experiments, you can take known facts, derive theories, and test their predictive power.