Christ, you never give up, do you? I grow tired of the repetition.
Nova Andromeda wrote:-How does this affect the reduction in manufacturing facilities I asked you about earlier?
Spare-parts stores require no manufacturing facilities at all. And you still have never justified your assumption that bio-manufacturing can work at all when speaking of starship components.
Wouldn't a non bio. ship still need to keep more parts on hand since those parts have to last the entire voyage and there are no bio. parts that can regenerate slow wear and tear?
It would need less parts, since there is very little wear and tear on spacecraft that is cruising through space in a straight line and doing nothing else. A bio-ship, on the other hand, must constantly expend energy in order to simply keep itself from dying, and will have far greater wear and tear than an inorganic spaceship.
Why is it you think I advocate having no emergency spare parts on a bio. ship? Am I mistaken and this isn't really a misunderstanding of my position considering your earlier attack upon me?
You claim that bio-manufacturing eliminates the need for keeping spare parts on hand. If you don't eliminate spare parts, there is no need for this ridiculous bio-manufacturing kludge/subject change of yours.
Why won't you answer my repeated request to spell out the type of ship and types of science and tech. you are willing to consider?
Any ship which travels in space. The word "spaceship" is fairly literal, is it not? Space is a hostile environment to organics. As for tech, arbitrary assumptions of godlike super-advancement are totally unreasonable in a thread about technical viability and you know it. If you cannot produce at least some sort of theoretical explanation of how it might be done, then you've got nothing.
At any rate, I would now like to discuss building an interstellar ship using forseeable tech. advances with the goal of colonizing another system. I will then think about what components that might be replaced with biological stuff and see if it is worth the trouble. My "expertise" is not in material sciences, engineering, or manufacturing (and I'm sure you will argue it is not in anything useful) so I will need to draw heavily on some resource to make up for it. Hopefully, someone will provide me with or point me to that resource.
Biological stuff would be useful for growing food and helping the colonists on their long journey. It would not be useful for the structure of the ship, its control systems, or its key technologies such as propulsion.
-My initial thoughts on the ship are thus. It will need 6 general systems which are a drive, a power source, a life support and repair system, a structural "system," navigation system, and communications system. For the power source I was thinking of a fission reactor (grossly inadiquate to attain a sig. fraction of c I think so it will be slow going).
Nuclear fusion is generally considered a "foreseeable" technology.
For the drive I was thinking of an initial booster rocket and a particle accelerator (i.e., ion drive) for the long haul which could throw spent uranium and/or other heavy metals. I was thinking one could make the structure out of carbon composites, but perhaps metal is required. I have no idea what the optimal navigation or communication systems are. Perhaps a laser for communication and radar for navigation?
All well and good, but so far, nothing organic is required or even remotely useful. This would not be a bio-ship.
This thread asks a simple question: is a bio-ship viable? Why do you expend so much effort trying to drag the thread away from that question, rather than simply admitting that the answer is "no", which both you and I know to be the only correct answer? A totally inorganic ship with a hydroponics lab onboard is obviously not a "bio-ship", and any attempt to shoe-horn some kind of minor bio-tech into an inorganic starship would not affect the basic question: are bio-ships viable?
