11–20 of 265 posts
I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.
Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
Dupes / other identical submissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26321523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26322477 --- As an aside, does it still qualify as a dupe if there wasn't any significant discourse?
Generally no. Some submissions just don't take due to poor timing (not lining up with when an interested audience will catch, upvote, and discuss it).
Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…
The idea that it was made by some long defunct subcontractor and nobody knows what happened to their blueprints and production notes is far more likely. Also, even if you had the blueprints you still need to be able to make the tooling, which is at least half of this project.
That said, if some contractor does come through with this and does a good job (on time, on budget, parts work, etc...) they could likely find plenty of other programs with similar needs. In some cases the original contractor does still exist, but they're asking way too much money to reconstitute an old production line so a scrappy startup like this could prove themselves valuable.
I read once that if you tried to build WWII-era aircraft according to specs and mechanical drawings, they wouldn't fly. The real design was found in the dies and jigs that were adapted after many iterations and test flights.
That's an interesting though, like software documentation that hasn't been updated over years of patches. Do you remember where you read that? Sounds like an interesting bit of history.
Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…
US DOD and their industry partners definitely has this capability already. If they're putting this call out there then there's a real need, not a covert effort to promote the discipline of reverse engineering.
> You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?
The budgets they use for secret reverse engineering aren't booked as any kind of reverse engineering.
Reverse engineering seems like a good skillset for the DoD to nurture, anyway. Yes, the US is going to be at the cutting edge of weapons design at least through the medium term, but the leadership isn't arrogant enough to think that all engineering innovations will come domestically. If the US acquired a next-generation Chinese fighter, wouldn't it be handy if someone had the expertise to tell you exactly how its par…
You see the real issue? Even if they have the blueprints, it will be difficult to even manufacture the parts here.
There's so many more problems like this coming down the pipeline. We've effectively lost (or rather acquiesced) almost all manufacturing skill to other countries. This was a result of the largest corporations taking advantage of labor arbitrage and then flooding their home market out of business.
If we really want to reverse this, we need to do what it takes to bring manufacturing back to the United States. It's a painful reversal of the open-trade policies of the past. Honestly, Trump was right to fight so hard for this, even going so far as to remove us from NAFTA.
I don't have a good strategy for this, but probably some set of minimum manufacturing of everything should happen within our borders, say 10%, and accomplishing that target with a combination of sticks and carrots.
This happens even outside Defense in all specialized industry. I was once asked if I could reverse engineer a part for a 30 year newspaper stacking machine in a printing press. Very interesting stuff and a consequence of being niche.
- Limited production run. These aren't Ford Mustangs or Toyota Priuses with hundreds of thousands and millions being produced. There were 21 built over 13 years. This also leads to the consequence that each one should be considered a bespoke creation and not a "copy" of the others (even ignoring the 20+ years of individual maintenance work they've each had).
- Time. It's been 21 years since the last one was produced in 2000. Whatever facility produced this has long since lost that capability.
- Aging workforce. Whoever designed it is likely retired, and could even be dead at this point. Certainly the senior engineers who may have been 40+ when the project started in the 70s/80s. Even if they weren't retiring and dying, the people on the project have been doing other things for 20+ years.
The B-2 is ancient, doesn't seem very surprising.
I had to check, it's not as ancient as some other bombers with B-2 first flight occurring in 1989. I met a pilot who flew on the same B-52 as his father, and his grandfather had flown some of the first B-52s. This was in the 00s, about 15-18 years ago.