Atlas City Project

Considering the number of electric motors the city will use, we should set up a production line to make three or four standard motors for use in the city.

This is one of the things we discussed in our last Oversight meeting as well. It's not a bad idea for us, plus we can use it and set up an auto conversion garage to convert gas blocks to electric motor vehicles. This helps everyone.

on the topic of a steel foundry however, that is alot of machinery. I dont know if manufacturing per se would be ideal.

a steel mill is a massive undertaking.

Anybody thought about the productivity of that line?

How many hours / month will it sit idle? I think unless its going to be in constant use, we don't need it. We could of course have a general maintenance/shop area with tools to repair, maintain, or even build new motors as necessary. But to commit money to some part of the city that will be idle most of its life is a waste.

I imagined a large city requiring many thousands of motors, but a small community might be better off buying motors, however a small flexible manufacturing cell could make many different things, including a few hundred motors.

If we are going into electric motor building, are there designs which are relatively cheap and also environmentally friendly and more easily recycable in their design ?


Though, Iwould hope one might design a city with the least amount of moving parts to save on maintance and running costs

Eg. try to design passive systems that don't need electrical power to operate, such as ramps instead of lifts for example to get between floors.

I agree. The less maintenance the better. It's not quite clear where we will be able to draw the line between ease of use/maintenance and up-to-date tech.

A low tech city demands that people do more work, what is the thinking on the amount of human labour required in the atlas city?

You can go to any commune right now and be required to work 40+ hours a week trying to be self sufficient, I was hoping atlas city would be as automated as we can afford.

Routine maintenance and damage repair should be automated, I would hope that these robots would also build the city in the first place.

> Routine maintenance and damage repair should be automated

Sadly most work will require humans to get their hands grubby, as such design with plenty of arm and head room for access!


> You can go to any commune right now and be required to work 40+ hours a week
> trying to be self sufficient

Indeed.

I have noticed that as well, having studied them a little, it does puzzle me why no one really bothers to improve it beyond that. From what I can gather, people are happy enough with that amount of work, because to reduce it would require work in the first place to build solutions!

Its rather ironic that people are too lazy to make less work for themselves tomorrow by doing something today


> I was hoping atlas city would be as automated as we can afford.

Agreed.

Though sometimes a well designed system can be cheaper and as effective as an automated solution.

For example, instead of a conveyor belt, you might have a gravity drop with simple rollers, so you might consider building your community on a hillside so that you can make use of gravity.


Maintence I have noticed is a very overlooked aspect, and something people skimp on when resources are tight, not to mention such poor design for ease of access either! (As such I'm a fan of surface mounted or very large access ports for everything, eg. don't bury things in walls!)

electric motors are relatively easy to build especially when you have the correct equiptment
ideally most of the components can be made from blocks of aluminium on a CNC milling machine

a bigger concern is Bearings as making these is really the key to electric motors lasting a long time,
personally i can see is going back to bronze bearings simply because they are easier to make and at worst require a drop of oil every now and then,

It makes sense to instead of long lasting, design for less life, but ease of repair and replacement parts.

Do you have examples of this? It seems, no matter the planning, it is always more difficult for upkeep then just to have a long lasting product.