[TML] jump weapons

[Grimmund]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nope.  Any engineer will tell you, you don't aim for absolute minimum.
> *Always* build in a safety margin.

Normally, a manufacterer build things to for a customer's order builds
them to customer specification.

You may engineer yourself a little margin on *meeting* that
specification.  If the customer specs something to 2g, you might build
it to 2.02g, maybe 2.05g.  You certainly wouldn't overbuild it by much
more than that; it wouldn't be cost effective for *you*.

If the customer wanted a redundant jump grid, they'd have spec'd it in
the contract, the architect would have put it in the plan, and the
cost would have gone up accordingly.

If the customer doesn't expect to *need* it, they aren't going to want
to *pay* for it.

(And of course, a lot of designs tend to be incremental changes to
existing designs, rather than a full, built-it-from-scratch, new
design.  It's almost always cheaper to reuse existing components that
meet the specs, than to find new items.)


(If the customer specs a 300 mile range, and the initial design fuel
tank provides a significantly longer range, we yank it and put in a
smaller, and thus cheaper, fuel tank, if we (or our fuel tank
suppliers) have a smaller, cheaper tank in the system that will
provide the contract-required minimum range.  For one end item, the
savings may not be much, but if you shave 10cr of the cost of 10,000
vehicles, you just made yourself an extra 100kcr.


Now, if you're building a commercial product, like a car, and selling
it over the counter, the economics are a LITTLE different, in that the
final customer doesn't really get the opportunity to spec the product.
 But in that scenario, the customer has their own specs, and picks
among the market options to find the product that most closely meets
their cost/performance specs.   Once again, price is likely to be a
driver, other things being equal.



Dan


--
If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have
to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
-George Carlin