51–60 of 265 posts
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Unfortunately, your assessment is very correct. There will be no solution and only a slow decline as previous systems become obsolete and there no on to fix or upgrade to better systems. This country is producing more Tik Tok stars than engineers that can sustain civilization.
What a confident proclamation that is backed up by nothing, aside from your limited perspective.
> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots. 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 pipelin…
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…
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As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. 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 ne…
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete th…
Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
Somethign I haven't seen mentioned here is that the technology used to design this thing is waaaaaaaaaaaay old. I know for a fact it was designed on an IBM mainframe (dad ran the one that the YF-22 was designed on). I can't remember what CAD package they used there, but its definitely conceivable that the software doesn't even exist anymore. How would you go about building a new one if you can't read the CAD files, i…
Reverse engineering the files night be easier than reverse engineering the airplane.
What are the odds someone said the phrase "those parts? I could mock up copies in a weekend!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete th…
It's also possible it was "Hey! The foam injection machine isn't working, I've tried everything", "There's this string trick I used once, try that", "Great, that fixed it, we should document that", "Sure, once we get all parts made that have backed up" Or, maybe I'm reading bad practices in my industry to everywhere else.
As yes, plenty of fixes for things are not written down anywhere.
> ... Air Force’s Rapid Sustainment Office (RSO) was looking to industry for a “cutting-edge, automated 3D scanning system,” specifically intended to replicate aircraft parts that are no longer in production, including at maintenance depots. 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 pipelin…
Being unable to manufactures things we did in the past is extremely worrying
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As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. 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 ne…
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete th…
Many scientific studies cannot be replicated either due to errors or ambiguous steps.
You only have what you test. If you want working documentation, you have to do a blind test. That can be pretty dang expensive, and most people don't think that way. Running production is heavily motivated to just keep running, and not worry too much about all of the potential problems - there are just too many potential problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works with the government a fair bit, this kind of forward thinking is extremely unlikely to be the case. This is the kind of government competence that only exists in the most wild conspiracy theories. 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 ne…
My dad was talking to an engineer at one of the major airlines manufactures apparently some critical part was foam injection or some such. Anyway the process as such did not work as documented. You had to add strings to the inside of the mold to get it to set correctly. This was not written down anywhere. Part of it may have been job protection. The union was bad about that. New hires would not be able to complete th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's impossible to overstate how long these things have been in service. The oldest B-52 airframes still in active service were built longer ago than the first flight of the Wright brothers was when they were built.
And likely to be in service for another 30 years. A 100 year airframe