Well, in Apollo most of the computing was done on the ground, by those aforementioned buildings of computers (and people with slide rules.) A quick look shows the Apollo Guidance Computer weighed 32 kg, so you could save a substantial portion of that with more modern hardware. Probably not off-the-shelf, though, due to flight safety requirements. There would be some savings in radios, replacing flight instruments with flat panels, etc, but the need for redundancy and hardening probably means it won't be as dramatic as you'd think. Avionics are bulky and heavy compared to what you expect in consumer electronics.
]]>My observation is that some people are businessmen, and some people are writers, and relatively few are good at both. Indy writers that do well tend to be in that last category. The problem is when you're selling, you're not writing, and vice versa -- there's no division of labor.
The two traditionally-published writers jumped on the chance to stop being indy. They were terrible at self-promotion and were making less than they eventually made as a published writer, a LOT less. Even though there are now middle-men involved, those middle-men are very good at the things that those writers were very bad at.
The remaining indy writer is actually desperately hoping to find a way to be traditionally published, because the grind of selling and promoting means she has no time to actually write. She's also suffered many of the mistakes that indy writers inevitably fall into -- Kickstarters that result in weeks of tedious, unpaid box-stuffing; months of fighting with printers over printing errors and whose fault they are; spending thousands of dollars on boxes of books for a con at which she sold two books, then having to pay to ship them all back and store them in her living room.
Being an indy writer is hard. I respect anyone who can make money at it because it's basically doing three or four jobs at once, jobs with very different skill sets. It's a bit like how some people sell their own house and pocket the commission -- they sometimes make out like bandits, but most people seem to do better if they hire a realtor, you know?
Now, most people I know who have gone the indy route have done it for lack of alternatives. I can see how an established artist, with a well-known name, who already has lots of industry contacts, could probably make more money doing it themselves -- although at the cost of time and effort spent on running a business instead of writing. But for people starting out, it's a massive time sink with little reward. Most small-time indy writers I know are viewing it as the minor leagues, hoping to attract the attention of a publisher.
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