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[darkrider2]

Wow that's amazing.

I'm really compelled to build one...

[Truean]

Interesting new twist on this stuff. It places some capital in hands, but I wonder about certain things. Naturally with me, this is from a legal perspective as applied to the US, but all the same.... Ideally, you'd have all the various subsystems of housing included in construction such as water, sewer, sanitary sewer, electricity, and even internet/phone.

I see there is a rod and wire mill. I suppose that would take care of wires assuming you knew how to deal with them safely. I wonder about pipes, preferably PVC or something similar. Metal pipes have definite drawbacks, but are workable. The ability to make the physical components is, regardless, impressive.

Concerning the safety and skill required for operating the machines, I must express some concern. I'd be somewhat scared to operate a lot of that stuff, personally. Wow, I mean they actually have an induction furnace. I have a fair deal of experience in factories and even construction/remodeling, but the metalsmithing here is essentially a micro scale economic endeavor.

All the same, DF was clearly the place for this link.

[PTTG??]

Well, the current designs require some input from the outside world. Ultimately that would change. We might start with a small conventional structure and work our way up from there.

Since this would probably be quite a ways out from town, we'd need to put in a septic and a well and everything. Getting off-grid electricity would be kind of a big deal... so with everything else off the grid, we'd probably have to resort to satellite internet. If we got a few hundred permanent people (we're talking long-term planning here...), then yeah maybe we could get a fiber or T1 connection since we are dealing with geeks.

Hmm... I wonder if we could find a property with running water and put in some miniature hydro. Of course, supplemented with solar, wind, and biofuels. And backed up in a shed full of nickel-iron batteries.

Edit: I don't see any light sources... Incandescents would be kind of tough, but Edison did it so we aught to be able to. Florescents would be really tough what with the mercury vapor. LEDs Would be insane. Just getting the materials would be hard.

Carbon lamps should be pretty easy, though. And maybe gaslights. Nothing like a nice, dry, piny house full of gas lamps. We could even use Hydrogen, which a little electrosis would gather up for us.

EDIT: To get white LEDs we'd need a source of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indium_gallium_nitride and a way to manufacture near-micro-scale cleanroom components, plus the florescent materials.

[Aqizzar]

Well, the current designs require some input from the outside world. Ultimately that would change. We might start with a small conventional structure and work our way up from there.

I don't know, I have a serious doubt you'd ever be able to assemble a laser-cutting CNC machine without outside production, at least until your "village" is effectively a first-world nation in itself.  I appreciate how they throw up their hands and just tell you where to comparison shop for parts.

It's a very schizophrenic list of stuff to build, and a lot of them seem more about showing off the builder's imagination than any technical specifications, like the "Power Cube".

[MaximumZero]

I am now watching this thread.

[Carnes]

Reminds me of this: http://imgur.com/Tgk63

I don't know, Aqizzar, checkout the TED talk and you can see that this guy is actually getting somewhere with this. 
TED talk here: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Open_Source_Ecology
Power Cube here: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Powercube

I think the tractors look awesome.  Sort of Mad Max looking.

[PTTG??]

The big problem seems to be that some things are going to be, by necessity, unsafe. You can't make a nerf rototiller. You can't smelt iron at room temperature. So having people visit would at very least require a lot of paperwork. And as soon as one guy gets drunk and wants to see if the tractor can do donuts, he ends up suing you for the cost of a new pair of legs.

[Jake]

Real-life crafting Wiki FTW. Needs more weapons, though. Or *any* weapons. Otherwise their open-source, sustainable civilization is going to be plundered by the guy who remembered the Sharp Stick + Pointy Rock = I Drink Your Milkshake recipe.

Mikhail Kalashnikov already has that covered, I should think.

[Skyrunner]

Quite interesting.

[Max White]

It is interesting, but like others have said, I would like to see how they handle going from the ground up. Gotta make that first forge before you can make a brass axe to shop the wood to power the forge.

[Truean]

It is interesting, but like others have said, I would like to see how they handle going from the ground up. Gotta make that first forge before you can make a brass axe to shop the wood to power the forge.

Well, ok, but I don't think they need to reinvent the wheel. Just revolutionizing it seems awesome enough. I mean, you're talking about a massive reduction in capital equipment costs, which in and of itself is huge.... They said somewhere that they project cheaper equipment production by a factor of 8. Now, I don't know if they're factoring in labor or anything, but even if they aren't and you account for that, "even" equipment that's "only" half the cost and makes means of production available to lots of people is huge....

[Aqizzar]

No, they're not factoring in labor.  That's the thing, they're not "reducing" capital equipment costs, they're just providing the labor cost themselves by doing all the assembly.  Which depending on how you look at it, can be a reduction in ultimate cost, since you're chopping out the operating cost of a factory, the transit costs of shipping a completed product over all its individual parts, and the ultimate question of how much your own time is worth versus paying some engineer somewhere to do the work for you.  Theoretically yeah, you can build a bulldozer for significantly less even including labor cost, but only because of the reduction in the bulldozer's capital requirements and if you consider yourself a cheap worker.

[Truean]

I... honestly am not following you.

GVCS Wiki

See, from what I saw in the introduction movie, I thought they really were making the capital equipment themselves at x8 less the cost of purchasing it? Wasn't that the 40 or 50 machines thing? Aren't they aiming to make those machines themselves? I could be wrong but I could've sworn it was in the intro video in the first minute.

"The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that enables fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. "

[darkrider2]

Guys, the only logical next step is to build a new nation of geeks using this equipment.

[Truean]

Guys, the only logical next step is to build a new nation of geeks using this equipment.

Fabricating the internet is gonna be a bitch.... Although as said above, the've got plastics and wires so....