You do indeed have to make your nuts and bolts. A closed loop as I have
said before is where the net inputs are naturally occuring raw
materials.

I think that the philosophical point is this. Once you have assembled a
flatpack you can assemble anything else, you can assemble a furnace, a
jig for making nuts bolts ans screws etc.

This is why I would argue VN machines are Science Fiction nonsense.
Technology is not a simple matter of CAD design and making things out of
thin air. It requires a certain size planet, with certain resources, and a
population of a certain size and it also required time, because every piece
of technology we have and the whole infrastructure we have in place is a
result of everything that has happened on this planet since the very
beginning of time, it is also incredibly fragile because without resources
and the people to make the machines in the first place it would die and
given a major cataclysmic planetary disaster we could be plunged back to the
stone age within a couple of generations.

You seem to be saying, in essense, that the seed has to be as big as
the Earth - Almost. My statement that assembly of a flatpack leads to a
VN machine is still a true one. The real question is the size of the
seed you need. If the machine can do a general CAD/CAM assembly we can
produce all the parts and sub assemblies that are defined in CAD. This
includes furnaces, crushers etc.

At present we produce crews in large complex machines. This is the most
efficient labor saving way possible. It may well be that to get a seed
small you have to go back in time. For example I saw a programme some
time ago on the production of pins in Tudor times. The head was made by
twisting wire round the top. You van make a screw by cutting out a
triangular piece of material and twisting it round. Quite clearly the
first task is a flatpack assembler. Once this has been realized the
next step would be to define the minimal closure route.

OTOH Life can replicate and evolve with practically no infrastructure, it
would seem to me some form of genetic engineering would be a more effective
way to create self replicating technologies, or beings which we could use as
slaves. Well slavery is the thing, without slaves or workers there would be
no industrial complex and no technology and it still relies on slavery in
some form or another and I dare say it always will.

NO! CAD/CAM is an understandable route. We do not yet know in enough
detail what the genome in fact does. We know that we can get there
using CAD/CAM. We know that a flatpack assembler will get us a good
part of the way. We then need to define the minimal closed system