@danielravennest that's cool. I was wondering if anyone did something like that. The wiki doesn't have a very good search function in it. Did you get anywhere with the associated spreadsheet? Do you think it's even possible to project what the entire village would need or do we just have to wait and see?
I think what's going to end up happening is the village will decide to specialize in one or two "cash crops" so they can buy all the things they can't make. Kind of like a nu-Amish economy. However, there will be a lot of baseline stuff that that can be projected. Like calories and BTUs.
One of the things I've been trying to push is making the "machines" more modular. Several of them would be more economical as systems rather than a single machine design.
@Metz damn, good point. It looks like a "bargain" 60Kpsi pump starts at more than $60K. Even assuming an open source one to be cheaper (1/5) you're still looking at $12K like you said. Assuming a GVCS-based shop isn't going to be doing high-volume production, it might be possible to get up to a useful amount of fluid at 60Kpsi if one was willing to wait around for the system to pressurize. A 60Kpsi pressure vessel is do able, especially if the internal volume is limited (and the engineering is done professionally). A pump could be rigged up to take advantage of leverage. It would take a while to pressurize, but it would get there with low-cost components.
At any rate, the whole idea of the torch table becomes questionable when I start to work backwards to where the metal will come from. I can totally see OSE building a mini-mill to produce steel bar and angle, probably even tube. However, big flat sheets are an entirely different world. Doing sheets of bioplastic is one thing, sheets of metal is an order of magnitude more of a thing.
Seems like it would make more sense to focus on building things out of bar stock and simply avoiding complex metal sheet shapes.
It's an interesting challenge.
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