Summary of Technology
Star Trek and Star Wars are real inspirations to a practicing engineer. The technology required to put together the starship Enterprise inspires today's transportation builds. If human-kind is going to build a faster than light speed ship by the year 2030 we will need to catalog the requisite technologies. The technologies for a starship need a high degree of reliability and must have a design life that stretches centuries. A starship must be testable; that is to say it must be able to diagnose failures within itself and report these failures to the crew of the ship for corrective action. All of the functions of the ship must be known to be working. Critical functions must not only testable but the testing mechanism must be testable. RiAC equations show that two levels of testing push the instantaneous hazard rate to a suitably low level to ensure safe functioning. If humankind is to create a Star Trek or Star Wars worthy craft the following must be implemented and I'll l...