Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?

Let's assume your projections are right and cannibalism is unavoidable like you say. You will never sell any of this technology. There is no need for it until there is a nuclear winter, so nobody will buy before it happens. After it happens nobody will buy anything. The only thing that could invest in something like this is government, but no government will commit political suicide by funding machine-assisted cannibalism.

Sounds like the same technology could be used to kill animals in a more ethical way. Perhaps you could market it as an ethical cow killing machine or something? Then you might even be able to continue secretly pursuing the cannibalism tech agenda, making sure the cow-killers can be easily repurposed into man-killers.

Anyways it sounds like you are an aspiring Bond villain, so I wish you good luck fighting spies and superheroes. When you inevitably trap one in one of these capsules don't turn around until they are 100% dead! Thats how they get you!

I’m not sure what’s superior in the old approach.

You’re able to perform much more robust and detailed calculations using computers compared to hand. You’re able to iterate more rapidly. The only thing I can think of is that the designer or engineer has more time to ruminate on their design. Or there is no artistry in a computer generated print.

It’s probably the bias in my training (mechanical engineering tech and not architecture or industrial design) and what I’m trying to accomplish through drafting, but I don’t get this romanticism for hand drafting.

My program, in the mid-2010s, had 13 weeks of hand drafting. The program still does that in the 2020s. My program emphasized sketching and drafting as a core component of the engineering design process. So hand drafting is still taught, and there may be sampling bias at play in the other comments. Or my hand drafting isn’t “real hand drafting.”

Sketching allows you to iterate through different designs early on. You then move into the detailed design which results in the manufacturing specs. For example, hole sizing and location, material thickness. We absolutely did all of these calculations by hand in our courses, so you need to be able to draw something out. You’d simplify and not worry about completely accurate proportions, though.

I guess before the rise of CAD systems, you’d hand over a bunch of rough design papers with the final dimensions for a drafter to prepare the final print.

However, with computers we now do the detailed design through computer aided engineering (CAE) software. This requires a 3D model of what you’re building. You run the simulation and find out that the thickness of the material isn’t suitable, so you change the thickness in the model and re-run the simulation.

This CAE process gives the engineer the 2D print for “free.” All the information needed to create the 2D print are embedded in the 3D model. You just pick which projections you want in 2D and you specify the dimensions and tolerance. Now that’s done and there is no need to draft it by hand.

Highway trucking as I-90, I-94, and I-80 converge is hellacious.