It’s a compromise, like anything else. There is no shortage of companies hiring highly qualified, hard to replace workers.

It is possible, and at least to me, likely, that the companies with better manufacturing facilities are busy making other parts (presumably with more difficult requirements and higher profits). If this is correct, than than the two types of manufacturers (high/low productivity) aren’t actually competing at this time.…

I agree that demand is a huge factor in this decision. The trouble with modern, productive manufacturing methods is that they are expensive, and you have to keep them busy.

In my experience, the risk typically isn’t (directly) in the payback for a modern factory being too far in the future. It’s in not being able to get all/most of the theoretical productivity gains from the new factory due to lack of skill/supply bottle necks/ internal politics etc. It’s usually a story of “If we could…

If this firm bought a modern production line, it could afford to produce at a lower cost. As long as it could get enough orders to utilize its line, it could easily afford to pay its workers better (and provide them with proper safety gear), since it would need far fewer of them. In fact, it would have a vested…

Because their employer is using very old production techniques. They offset the low productivity with a very large workforce, thus the low pay.

I understand, hope you don’t mind me asking. My run in with local motors is limited to a conference on additive manufacturers they (along with a few others) were holding during the last IMTS. I walked in being very excited to hear about how the envelope is being pushed in that field. And walked out very dissapointed,…

In order to be a business, you have to have sufficiend revenue to cover your expenses, or at least have some realistic plan of accomplishing that. Rally fighters aren’t priced like veyrons.

Interesting. 55 in how many years? Did they sell other products? If so, what were the biggest money makers?

3 reasons

The rally fighter is certainly a much better vehicle than all the printed nonsense. But tell me, how many have they made? How many have been sold to private buyers? Is that number over a dozen?

Damn it, not those guys again. They are not a car company, they are a grant sucking hype machine.

They need a racing league for these things.

I trust our defense procurement system to make the proposed smaller carriers come out with a much higher cost than the current super carriers. There wont be a single good reason for that, but there will be lots of bad ones.

Things that are strangely neglected here are:

Needs more front shocks. 3 are not enough.

That’s just the first stage, and you are ignoring the weight of the oxidizer. If you add total fuel for both stages you get 488ton.

Not much footing, that’s pretty automatic, but yes, very simple tasks.

The dragon V2 isn’t getting anywhere without another million pounds worth of falcon rocket underneath it. So lets use the falcon rocket as an example, because spaceX is very cool.

I thought it was 7 tasks.