sleep tubes and batteries and mothballed ships

[Condottiere]

Moving parts require more maintenance, as well as equipment exposed to extreme temperature swings.

I'm pretty sure I could let my computer run indefinitely, if I could keep it dust free, not accounting for panicking kernels, and a burnt out cooler.

 

[Anonymous]

Moving parts require more maintenance, as well as equipment exposed to extreme temperature swings.

I'm pretty sure I could let my computer run indefinitely, if I could keep it dust free, not accounting for panicking kernels, and a burnt out cooler.

let's assume you have passive cooling

capacitors will probably fail first, likely with 10 years, if it's a cap in the power supply it will cause voltage to fluctuate and if it's on the main board, who knows

assuming you get around this, the electron flow will gradualy erode the pathways in the chips

software can be solved by rebooting, until something dumb happens like the clock overflows, sometime around 2038 when the unix timestamp overflows.

edit: If you have an SSD, they're only good for a limited number of writes before the memory cells burn out, and if you have mechanical hard drive, it's a spinning metal disc and will suffer mechanical wear.

 

[Condottiere]

What can be solid state, will be solid state, plus redundancy.

Presumably, each technological level becomes more reliable and power efficient, to the point that they can function on radio waves.

 

[Anonymous]

Current solid state SSDs have a write limit. I don't know what it is, maybe around 1 million writes - I can tell you it's "several years" for an enterprise SSD in a data center. You could find out pretty easily with google if you wanted a more exact figure.

 

[Condottiere]

Current limitations don't matter in the consumer space, since you'll upgrade way before that becomes an issue; I burnt my fingers on SCSI and SAS, and expect the same level of increased performance on future storage solutions.

On the enterprise level, it becomes a question of redundancy and cost, which is what I expect will happen in terms of spaceship equipment.

 

[Anonymous]

I am sorryl I thought we were talking abot your current computer, and running without maintenance. I agree you could keep one running for a long time with repair parts.

SAS is actually very good for RAID arrays. There's no realistic other way to attach large number of drives for consumer hardware. I have a disk shelf with 12 hard drives in, that's connected via SAS.

 

[Condottiere]

I had to junk my SAS array; to give it it's due, eight two and a half inchers zooming along was pretty fast, but can't compete with NVME gumsticks.

Cost of ownership is more than just capital layout, it's operating costs as well.

 

[Linwood]

To Moppy’s point, a lot of ECUs have design lives of 100K - 250K NVM wipes. So your computer memory may be good for decades, but the memory in your car’s infotainment module may not.

 

[Anonymous]

I had to junk my SAS array; to give it it's due, eight two and a half inchers zooming along was pretty fast, but can't compete with NVME gumsticks.

Cost of ownership is more than just capital layout, it's operating costs as well.

That is fair. If I did it again I'd use SATA SSDs with an LSI card, or I'd buy a large Synology.

 

[Condottiere]

Usually, that can get expensive, and I had to get extra LSI cards just in case one died, because RAID [Five] is based on them.

I looked at the motherboard and realized there are a lot of empty slots, so I ordered a whole bunch of PCIEx1 and PCIEx4 adapters for the spare gumsticks, anything faster than that I suspect intrudes into Optane territory and multi gumstick, which I'll look at probably next summer; it's not hot swappable, but you don't have take out everything in the way, and then un/rescrew them.

High capacity NAS drives leaves a lot of SATA slots unused, so I'm trying to source cheap SATA/NVME converters.

 

[AndrewW]

Usually, that can get expensive, and I had to get extra LSI cards just in case one died, because RAID [Five] is based on them.

Had a different problem myself, motherboard went out and the LSI card is fine but requires a PCI-X slot (not exactly common)...

 

[Anonymous]

LSI cards are no more than $30 on ebay. With 3.5" SATA disks it's by far the cheapest solution. The disks themselves are the majority cost of a large consumer raid.

I had SAS because I got a good deal at a bankruptcy auction.

I like the idea of using all NVME, but I wont notice the speed as we have only gigabit cabling and not enough wall sockets to multiplex. If i ever built a direct attached unit or when we get recabled, I would consider all NVME.

 

[Condottiere]

Motherboards still the most likely component to go tits up.

I looked at the price of a server board, and I think it was three times that of a consumer one; second hand didn't look promising either, so I compromised and stuck them into PCI slots, which had half the bandwidth, but I never felt that had much of an impact.

They transitioned to PCIEx8.

 

[phavoc]

I'm sure traveller can build a long life powerplant if they really want to, but there is no need for a regular ship.

Unless they change the laws of physics they can't. The Voyager RTG's are pretty solid state, and the decline is due to the half-life changes in the plutonium. P-238 is the plutonium isotope chosen due to it's radioactive properties - the chief one being it's the easiest to shield against. Other radioactive isotopes are possible, but there is a trade-off between power density per gram, half-life and required shielding. Doesn't do any good to keep someone alive while you are also irradiating them at the same time (or the materials around them). Keep in mind that RTG's aren't terribly efficient today (less than 10%), and they haven't been able to change this. Maybe the future will come up with a better method/handwavium.

 

[Anonymous]

I'm sure traveller can build a long life powerplant if they really want to, but there is no need for a regular ship.

Unless they change the laws of physics they can't. The Voyager RTG's are pretty solid state, and the decline is due to the half-life changes in the plutonium.

Include maintenance system and a self-repair system with a factory. They have robots. Humans go 100 years if the fuel lasts. Nothing prevents a futuristic mechanical system from having similar repair ability and it should be possible st high stellar (tl 14+) if rather impractical.

 

[Reynard]

Like present day Earth, corporations don't make money on long duration, high quality, low maintenance and still cheap products. Just because you have an advanced civilization, perfect products are not guaranteed.

 

[Anonymous]

I'm always told "the economy" is one of hte founding principles of Traveller. Just like today, there are many things they can make with TL 15 but do not as it is not cost effective and therefore impractical.

 

[phavoc]

I'm sure traveller can build a long life powerplant if they really want to, but there is no need for a regular ship.

Unless they change the laws of physics they can't. The Voyager RTG's are pretty solid state, and the decline is due to the half-life changes in the plutonium.

Include maintenance system and a self-repair system with a factory. They have robots. Humans go 100 years if the fuel lasts. Nothing prevents a futuristic mechanical system from having similar repair ability and it should be possible st high stellar (tl 14+) if rather impractical.

Half life doesn't work that way. The materials start to degrade as soon as they are created. The spares would be in the exact same condition.

If you want to wave your hand and say they have magical batteries with tech to make that happen its OK, but having a plausible reason works better.

An actual better idea is using carbon nanotubes to be both the structure of the bod and also storing the necessary power for it to function. We've already made similar items in labs, but we've yet to master the art of creating objects.

Of course whatever the reason you then have to make sure that it doesn't break anything else in the game. Which is a concept that is ignored far too often by the various publishers.

 

[Anonymous]

Half life doesn't work that way. The materials start to degrade as soon as they are created. The spares would be in the exact same condition.

If you want to wave your hand and say they have magical batteries with tech to make that happen its OK, but having a plausible reason works better.

An actual better idea is using carbon nanotubes to be both the structure of the bod and also storing the necessary power for it to function. We've already made similar items in labs, but we've yet to master the art of creating objects.

Of course whatever the reason you then have to make sure that it doesn't break anything else in the game. Which is a concept that is ignored far too often by the various publishers.

There's no reason that a long term power supply needs to have an RTG in it.

Thinking purely in present day, if we were on a planet, no-one would question it. Its just tidal and geothermal power, right?

From orbit, earth and moon slow each other down (probably friction from ocean tides?), which means you certainly extract energy from a planet's momentum from something in orbit somehow. Maybe a spinning wheel of some kind? I'll leave this one for the people with a deeper understanding of physics.

In deep space, spin an iron asteroid under a magnet and you have an electric generator. It'll slowly spin down, so use a big asteroid.

How many of these are practical? It depends. They need a higher TL, but no new physics.

Back to magic, and Traveller has a damper of some kind that prevents radioactive decay, and could preserve RTGs. I don't rememeber the name of tech system.

edit: A quick trip though google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether. Two space craft spin around each other connected by a cable. It's like the asteroid generator, but just better designed.

 

[phavoc]

Decay is how an RTG works. It has no moving parts a d requires no servicing.

The damper field does indeed halt radioactive from decaying. However it takes power to operate, so it's not going to be usable for this scenario.

I forgot the name for the type of device that magically produces more power than it takes to start, but those have only existed in fantasy physics.

Deriving power from gravity is a novel idea, but like other power sources it's limitations make it an unlikely emergency power source that must work in any condition or location.

I'm OK with things that don't fit within existing science (like say a form of power that pulls energy from other dimensions) as long as it is well thought out and doesn't break with the setting or previously accepted standards. It's when something is tossed out and it breaks with previous standards that it becomes the most annoying. If it's applied on a moving forward basis that's fine, that's reality. But ret conning something is just stupid in my view.