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

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