This reminds me of the story of the US army moving from canvas to metal helmets. To their surprise, they found that the number of head injuries went up, and not down.
Why? Because the metal helmets converted fatalities to head injuries.
Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
11–20 of 79 posts
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#12> count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire. > > Obvious but wrong Please tell me I'm not the only one who instantly thought, obviously wrong. And thought the obvious solution is look at what got shot down (or similar such as the article listed) Really? Are most people this illogical?
Many, many of the stories you read about insight turn out to be quite exaggerated, with everybody at the time understanding something which after many retellings turns into an amazing breakthrough by one person. Hell, it happens all the time at work, with a bunch of people screaming, "We need to do X, we need to do X," for months on end before they give up and just grumble bitterly about it over beer, and then after a mysterious attitude shift in the leadership, the next guy who suggests X (usually someone who hasn't been around long enough to know better) is hailed as a genius.
I actually got to be that guy once. I was randomly venting in a meeting about a chronic problem and the ridiculously easy fix to it, and there happened to be a business guy there who did not want his project held up by the BS problem I was talking about, so he demanded that the fix be implemented. It happened. I was amazed. I didn't cash in on the genius part, though.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#13You can't just say (Bullet hole here) + (returned plane) = (don't need to as much armor there). You also need to understand the circumstances of how the plane returned. Was it crippled and just barely made it back with critical systems straining? Or was it mostly functional? If there was a common place where planes were shot that caused the airplane to fly home for an emergency landing, then that spot is a good place…
Not necessarily. I'm assuming adding armor incurs some form of debt so to speak on performance, cost, development time, etc. In some cases those debts might overshadow the cost of armor...
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#14> count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire. > > Obvious but wrong Please tell me I'm not the only one who instantly thought, obviously wrong. And thought the obvious solution is look at what got shot down (or similar such as the article listed) Really? Are most people this illogical?
It's not completely illogical to want to protect the places with holes, because the distribution of where bullets hit isn't random. Fighter pilots aimed at specific parts of planes they were attacking. And some surfaces would have been protected either by other surfaces or by having a nearly flat angle of incidence to probable incoming fire.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
The only black swan connection I see is Taleb's point about "the graveyard of silent evidence". Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We didn't see all the planes returning that had catastrophic failures in the known bullet-holed areas and never returned.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#16This reminds me of the story of the US army moving from canvas to metal helmets. To their surprise, they found that the number of head injuries went up, and not down. Why? Because the metal helmets converted fatalities to head injuries.
Same thing with bicycle helmets and seatbelts in cars.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#17> count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire. > > Obvious but wrong Please tell me I'm not the only one who instantly thought, obviously wrong. And thought the obvious solution is look at what got shot down (or similar such as the article listed) Really? Are most people this illogical?
Many, many of the stories you read about insight turn out to be quite exaggerated, with everybody at the time understanding something which after many retellings turns into an amazing breakthrough by one person. Hell, it happens all the time at work, with a bunch of people screaming, "We need to do X, we need to do X," for months on end before they give up and just grumble bitterly about it over beer, and then after…
The astronomer Freeman Dyson was doing similar work for the RAF (I had heard this story attributed to him)
Two of his calculations weren't acted on because of illogical users.
Very few bombers crashed because of airframe failures as opposed to enemy attacks. Logically it would make sense to make the aircraft weaker but lighter/cheaper/faster the loss of a few % crashing due to breakups would balance being able to escape enemies faster.
Gunners on bombers very rarely hit incoming fighters, it would make sense to remove some or all of the gunners and instead train them as pilots and build more aircraft. The RAF's main problem was losing skilled crews and gunners were just extra wasted human resource when a plane was shot down.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#18You can't just say (Bullet hole here) + (returned plane) = (don't need to as much armor there). You also need to understand the circumstances of how the plane returned. Was it crippled and just barely made it back with critical systems straining? Or was it mostly functional? If there was a common place where planes were shot that caused the airplane to fly home for an emergency landing, then that spot is a good place…
Not necessarily. I'm assuming adding armor incurs some form of debt so to speak on performance, cost, development time, etc. In some cases those debts might overshadow the cost of armor...
The related factors of weight, speed, and fuel consumption would be the obvious downsides to adding armor. Especially considering that a heavier, slower plane is an easier target, thicker skinned or not.
There's a fine balancing point between just enough and too much armor.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#19> count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire. > > Obvious but wrong Please tell me I'm not the only one who instantly thought, obviously wrong. And thought the obvious solution is look at what got shot down (or similar such as the article listed) Really? Are most people this illogical?
It's not completely illogical to want to protect the places with holes, because the distribution of where bullets hit isn't random. Fighter pilots aimed at specific parts of planes they were attacking. And some surfaces would have been protected either by other surfaces or by having a nearly flat angle of incidence to probable incoming fire.
I thought this too, but then realized the humans doing the shooting are also illogical. For instance, I could see how hitting the wings might feel effective and easy, but it's not a great strategy because the bullet holes don't really impact the flight capability.
Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes
#20For more similar stories check out the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research wikipedia page.
When google released some OR software recently that hit the HN front page [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1724580] I followed various links to this particular wikipedia page and then moved on to other things. When the "armor where there are no bullet holes" stories started popping up I assumed that this was the event that triggered the "hey this is cool" reaction from a few people who started the ball rolling...