hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2969.txt

Episode: 2969
Title: HPR2969: Crewing a spaceship in Haskell
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2969/hpr2969.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:01:02

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This is HPR Episode 2969, for Thursday the 19th of December 2019.
Today's show is entitled Crueing a Spaceship in Haskell.
It's part of the series Haskell and it's hosted by Tukutoruto.
It's about 23 minutes long and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, how to calculate the amount of crew needed for a spaceship.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, you are listening to the Hackens of the Cradle and this is Tukutoruto.
Today I am going to talk about how to crew a spaceship in Haskell.
This time I'm going to try something a little different,
instead of going through each and every function and explaining each and every detail there.
I'm going to give a broader overview of this thing and concentrate on how I arrived to this solution.
There are plenty of tutorials in Haskell how to do some little things,
but there isn't that much of about how to take a big problem,
subdivide it into the smaller problems,
solve those smaller problems and then combine them to a solution of the big problem.
So that's what I'm going to try out this time. Hopefully you will like it.
So we have written a designer for making spaceships or rather footprints for the spaceships
and that works that you first you pick up how and then you put on different kinds of components.
For example, sales, preach, sensors, sleeping quarters and so on.
And you are limited by the weight and slots that you can use.
There's a similar system for the ground vehicles in the future,
but now we are going to concentrate on spaces.
And no spaceships moves without a crew.
And the amount of crew needed depends on the components.
If you have a science ship with lots of sensors,
then you will need lots of sensor operators to operate those sensors.
And then you are going to need archivisers to maintain those sensors.
And if you have lots of people on part of your ship,
then you need somebody to coordinate the efforts.
So for example, when you have a five sensor operators,
they will be second-class crew members, every five sensor operators will require one first class
sensor operators. And then when you have five of them, you will need a
non-drawing plant. Then you are going to need a senior sensor operator.
So the second class, first class, and senior. On top of that, as soon as you have a crew,
as soon as you have 10 second-class members, you are going to need a chief who is
in case of sensor operators, he is a chief sensor operator.
There is always one of them. There won't be many of them.
And this person is in charge of overall coordination.
So you have a crew positions like sensor operators, and then you have ranks like second-class,
first-class senior, and chief. This difference from the military ranks, those I haven't
even told about. Here are the inside of a ship who does what and who coordinates who.
Okay, so, and of course, in a spaceship that is out there for years,
at the time, you're going to need some quarters. So you have to have a living quarters for all the crew
you are carrying, and you could have a passenger. Then you have to have a living quarters for them too,
and there's different times of living quarters. There's a spirit that is basically just
cramming as much people in the space, as much as possible, and then there's
regular ones, and then there's the luxury ones. Luxury ones are those big suites.
Okay, so how would I go about this? So usually I start about thinking. When I start to think about
these things, how do I solve some problem? I usually throw a lot on the paper,
with pen and paper to mind maps, do some sketching, think about what kind of things I need,
what kind of things are related. Sometimes I have a lot of things that I just cross over and think
that this would be really cool to model, but this would get too complicated. And from there,
you often come up with the types that tell what the things are. So in this case, data types are
shown in the show notes, but they're not that important on following the episodes. You can
probably follow without the show notes. But the data types that I'm having in this time is that
there's a chassis and a record components, plant components, and these are chassis,
the hull. Record components are the list of things that have to be installed. If you have a space,
if you have to have a star sail, otherwise you can't move. And those depends on the hulls.
Sometimes, you have to have more sail than other, then there's things like bridge and living
waters and so on. Then there's the planet components. This is a list of things that the designer
has actually planned. This is the list that they have put on the design. And the unit starts
is that that's the estimated performance of the design. And for this episode, it's very small.
We only have the minimum crew and nominal crew. These tell how much the crew is absolutely needed,
absolute minimum crew to operate the ship. And the nominal crew tells what crew is needed
to get the optimal performance of the ship. This is for the crew, type of crew requirement.
And then there's the total crew space telling how much space there's a port of the ship
for sleeping and leaning. And also, flag that tells if the crew space is required. For spaces,
it's always required, but for some small ships or land vehicles that isn't required.
And crew requirement is just that it tells you what position this can be a navigator,
sensor operator, gunner, doctor, captain, rank, that's the second first senior or chief,
and how many of them are needed. Okay, then how would I arrive one morning to total crew space?
That's the three numbers for telling a crew space that the ship has
or that's the stearage quarters, standard quarters, and luxury quarters. Because it's easy to
the most amount of people you can get on part of the ship is by using stearage quarters,
but they are very cramped and very uncomfortable and crew won't like it. Everybody would like to have
a luxury quarters, that those are huge and heavy, that you have to strike by land. And have some
amount of stearage quarters, some amount of standard quarters, and if you have a passenger,
they probably will want luxury quarters. Especially if you have some sort of a crew ship that
just goes from planet to planet and transports rich people on territorial holidays.
Okay, so how would I go about this? So that's the description what I wanted to build.
So I decided to drop it into pieces. First, I wanted to figure out how many people are needed
to operate, give and sit. Just, just operate. And from when I know that amount of people and
positions, then I can figure out how many people are needed to manage them, to coordinate them.
So when I know how much of sensor operators, then I can figure out how many people are required
to manage them, or coordinate them. And from that, that's basically what we need to do here.
And because in Haskell, if you often, if you have something that you have a list of something
and you want to do a operator, to each and every time, then it's enough that you know how to do
that operation, to single item, and then you just use a SMAT to run that operation to all of those
items on the list. So that was my idea here. So knowing how much crew are needed to
operate a single component, was the first that, and it's not always an index amount.
For example, in case of the long range sensors, I decided that you need, for every long range
sensor, you need one sensor operator to manage the station, then you need one crew member to help
help them, and then you need 0.1 artificers to maintain the sensor. So if you have
10 long range sensors, then you need 10 sensor operators, 10 crew members, and one artificer.
And of course, if you have only one sensor, you need one sensor operator, one crew member, 0.1 artificers,
but you cannot have 0.1 person upward of your ship, so you have to get one artificer. So it's
in this, in case it's a three people. So I made a function, that's just, it's got come to crew
wreck, that takes a component and gives you a list of how many people are prepared to operate this one.
And then when I have that function, and then I have the amount of plant components,
I can just run that function to those components that I have, I have the plant to be installed
on a ship, here dealing with the crew friends after all here. Then I will get a list of,
list of, so it's a list of list of people. So there's a list that contains list of people,
of different, different positions and amounts. These don't have ranks, these are assumed to be second class.
And then I just combine those, then I combine those lists to one big list, there's a
join function for that, and I get one big list of people that are needed to operate all the other
components, or a part of the ship. And this, of course, the same position, if you have
multiple sensors, you will, in that list, you will have multiple sensor operators.
So next step is to go through that list and combine them together.
If you have a one sensor operator, and next item is one sensor operator, you're going to
sum them together, and then you have two sensor operators. Okay, and that is done by the
function called acrylic, that just takes a component crew wreck, that is the
fractional amount of people, list of component crew wrecks, and makes a list of component crew wrecks.
And yeah, the basically, and now that I have combined those requirements,
together, now I have just a list of requirements, but each position shows up the only ones.
So then now I have a list of 10 sensor operators, one captain, and
five rb-fisers, and one not. So then the next step is to take that list, and figure out how many,
how many people are required to manage that list of, of, of, how many
first class senior and chief level people are required to coordinate operations of that crew.
And that's a, that's okay, now just a piece of, piece of mat, I'm just going through the list,
checking, checking that if I have at least five, sorry, if I have at least 10,
second class members of something, then I will add automatically, I will add a
chief of the same, same, same, uh, group position to the list.
And then I'm running a module of five to get amount of people needed to, uh, to get the amount of
first class people. So if I have zero to four, second class, I'm not getting any first class,
but as soon as I have five or more, then I'll start getting the first class crew members.
And then on that amount, I'm running a module of five again to get the senior members,
and those I'm all adding up on to the list.
And, uh, of course, uh, there's, there's a, uh, one thing that I forgot, forgot to say because
when I was making a list of people needed to operate sensors, those, those, those,
that least was done with fractions, so you could have a 0.1 archivizer, the, the sensor station.
But for, before, uh, before figuring out the coordinating crew, I have had to, uh,
I had to, uh, move from the, from the fractions to the interiors,
rounding up. So if I had a 0.1 archivizer or 0.7 archivizers,
then it got rounded up to one, and if I had two, two point three, it got rounded up to three.
So I, I could, then I get a whole crew, whole crew members, and from that number,
I figure out the amount of crew members needed to coordinate them.
And then I get a list of crew members.
Now I, now I have a list of crew members that, that, that tells me that this is a,
uh, this is the amount of second-class, first-class scene here, and three, chief level.
Crew members needed to operate this ship in a, in a full, fully, uh, sorry, in full,
full, uh, in full capacity, in best, in best of the ship's ability.
Then you have a, uh, then you can have a skeleton crew, that is the minimum amount of
people to get ship moving and doing something. And that is just, uh, the nominal crew that we
figure out previously, and then I arbitrarily decided that it's a one-third.
So I divide everything by three, rounding up, and that's what I, that's what is needed to
operate the minimum crew need to operate. The ship, that's a, that's just an, uh, arbitrary decision,
decision, well, lots of things are arbitrary decisions when you're building up a game,
but basically decision by done, done by you. So originally this, this looked with
hairy problem, like a lot of, a lot of moving, moving parts, but in the end it was just
figuring out pieces where to cut it into smaller problems, solving those smaller problems,
and then combining them to the bigger, bigger solution. And that's, that's something that is hard
to, uh, learn from the books, programming is really hard to learn from the books anyway.
In my opinion you cannot do that, you learn by doing it. So, theory is important, but
more important is that you actually apply that theory. You can, in my opinion you can
read tons and tons and tons of books, but if you never try out those things in practice,
you're not going to be a programmer. So one of my friends said that being a programmer,
if you want to be a good programmer, you have to be willing to be a really terrible programmer
for long enough time, so you're not anymore terrible. So it, it takes a lot of practice.
And sometimes that's very frustrating, like, it's recently, I've been doing programming for
20 years, for, for professionally, and I think 30 or something just for fun. And
recently at work I was trying to say something into the database and it just was not working.
Like, very, very basic problem, and I had to pull a colleague into help help help me out with that one.
But so, that's just, that's a source that programming can sometimes be difficult and if you fix it
to one way of solving things, you're, you might get stuck, so you, you, it will make
an idea to ask somebody else to help you or take a walk and come back later and with fresh
eyes try to look at problems from different, different direction, so you could easily, what,
what are you, what's your problem. But, that's about this episode. I don't know if this was
better, first, same as always, but I thought that I'll give it a try with a little bit different format.
Best way to reach me out is either by email or in the papers where to do it at master on
the social, if you have any questions, comments or feedback, I would be very glad to hear that.
I have been actually getting a bit more feedback recently about the episodes and that that
always makes my day when somebody writes or sends a, sends a message or says to me that hey,
I didn't do a recent to the recent episode and I think something about that. It doesn't have to
be a good, good feedback, it still makes my day. Okay, in the meantime, Ad Astra.
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