Re: (ReacTor) Five SF Novels About Rediscovering Ancient Tech

Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

In article <v20iaa$cm96$1@dont-email.me>,
William Hyde  <wthyde1953@gmail.com> wrote:

Christian Weisgerber wrote:

On 2024-05-14, Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> wrote:
>

So, like the car in /The World's End/, it is the same in one sense,
and yet not in another since almost everything has been replaced.

>
Aka "Ship of Theseus".  People have been philosophizing about this
for at least two millennia.
>

>
In  the 1660s, the UK parliament passed an act requiring the navy to
build a certain number of ships of the line.  These were duly built.
>
But the technology of wooden warships was advancing. These ships were
getting less viable in the line of battle, as French and Spanish ships
were getting significantly larger.
>
The natural thing to do would be  to scrap these elderly ships and build
new ones, but their existence was required by an act of parliament, and
their scrapping would be illegal.
>
So the ships were "rebuilt".  Disassembled to piles of wood, with as
much as possible of the same wood used to create a larger ship of the
same class (so a 60 gun ship from 1750 would be much larger than one
from 1670 despite having the same rating (though they stated to call them 64s about that time)).
>
Some ship were subject to several rebuilds, so there was only a
homeopathic amount of the original timber remaining.  But it was still
legally the same ship.
>
William Hyde

 It's too bad there were no new Acts of Parliament after the 1660s, though
I can see the attraction.

The parliament of those days was more difficult to deal with than the ones today, with regimented party discipline.  Getting anything done required political capital.
Who wants to be seen as voting for the weakening of the Navy?  As one's opponents would doubtless paint it.  Better to let the Navy handle it, even if the solution was not optimal.
Bubb Doddington, for example, was a man who controlled six seats in parliament.  An astonishing amount of time was spent trying to get his support in close votes circa 1750.  He wasn't malignant or greedy, mind you, just unreliable.  And there were many like him.
William Hyde