Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
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Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
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Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#2Floating cities like cruise lines are bad for inhabitants but good for a pandemic in that they are easy to isolate and enforce control measures onboard.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#3Floating cities like cruise lines are bad for inhabitants but good for a pandemic in that they are easy to isolate and enforce control measures onboard.
Also easy to spread the virus, as the first outbreaks happened on them.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#4I agree with most of it except wind turbines - their size is not driven by vanity, but efficiency.
I am also not sure about blaming engineers for it, it's more of an investor thing. Engineers are often incredulous, IMHO, as it usually means more trouble.
On the other hand, things like JWST are amazing. If you resist the temptation to just make it bigger, and think outside the box, some really cool engineering can happen.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#5Meh, sometimes when you’re optimizing things you realize new limits. This is how you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you try. Simplifying failures down to “it was too big” and acting like this should be a priori obvious is silly. A small amount of stuff is always going to exist a few standard deviations away from the mean. Sometimes it’ll move the mean, sometimes it will fail. Backpressure from being too much of something is pretty natural.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#6Floating cities like cruise lines are bad for inhabitants but good for a pandemic in that they are easy to isolate and enforce control measures onboard.
Also easy to spread the virus, as the first outbreaks happened on them.
That was partly because they didn't understand that the virus was airborne, so they took the wrong countermeasures.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#7I agree with most of it except wind turbines - their size is not driven by vanity, but efficiency. I am also not sure about blaming engineers for it, it's more of an investor thing. Engineers are often incredulous, IMHO, as it usually means more trouble. On the other hand, things like JWST are amazing. If you resist the temptation to just make it bigger, and think outside the box, some really cool engineering can hap…
I mean, the JWST is just bigger. There's two sources of unique solutions in the JWST, its size and the range of wavelengths it observes.
The Hubble Space Telescope had a ground-glass mirror which was absolutely massive, both in size and literally in mass. To scale that up, a beryllium-gold mirror was necessary to be able to launch it at all, considering the immense weight of a ground glass mirror. Similarly, to fit it in the fairing, it had to be segmented. Due to the size, it couldn't have an enclosed tube as that wouldn't fit any fairing, and the mirror would be segmented as well anyway, so it's just easier to go without a tube and hope really hard that you get no interference.
Speaking of, the JWST operates at such large wavelengths that incredibly cold objects are practically giant lightbulbs to it. Point it at the cold, dark moon and you might overwhelm the sensor. Therefore the entire thing has to be as cold as is theoretically possible, which is here done through just putting a giant sunshield and big radiators on it. Size, again, so it needed to be a very innovative folding sunshield.
Everything that it has isn't really "outside the box", it's just the only working solutions to practical challenges with scaling up something like the Hubble, and moving to the observation of ever colder, further away objects.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#8Meh, sometimes when you’re optimizing things you realize new limits. This is how you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you try. Simplifying failures down to “it was too big” and acting like this should be a priori obvious is silly. A small amount of stuff is always going to exist a few standard deviations away from the mean. Sometimes it’ll move the mean, sometimes it will fail. Backpressure from being too much…
It would be far sadder if we never knew the limits because we didn't try.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#9I agree with most of it except wind turbines - their size is not driven by vanity, but efficiency. I am also not sure about blaming engineers for it, it's more of an investor thing. Engineers are often incredulous, IMHO, as it usually means more trouble. On the other hand, things like JWST are amazing. If you resist the temptation to just make it bigger, and think outside the box, some really cool engineering can hap…
"bigger is better" is true in many cases, not just wind turbines. This can be because of economies of scale, for example a bus and a taxi need only one driver, so if you want to move many people, buses will be more efficient use of drivers.
But it can be just physics, usually some variation on the square cube law. For example a large container will generally be lighter per unit volume/mass. Similarly, if you want to prevent heat losses, the easiest way is to go big.
It is no wonder why engineers like it big, it is not just ego, it is efficiency. Of course, there is a limit, but progress is made by pushing these limits. The romans were right with their huge ships, as proof, today's ships are even bigger, it is just that they were at the limit of their technology.
Re: Gigantism is a never-ending temptation
#10I agree with most of it except wind turbines - their size is not driven by vanity, but efficiency. I am also not sure about blaming engineers for it, it's more of an investor thing. Engineers are often incredulous, IMHO, as it usually means more trouble. On the other hand, things like JWST are amazing. If you resist the temptation to just make it bigger, and think outside the box, some really cool engineering can hap…
"bigger is better" is true in many cases, not just wind turbines. This can be because of economies of scale, for example a bus and a taxi need only one driver, so if you want to move many people, buses will be more efficient use of drivers. But it can be just physics, usually some variation on the square cube law. For example a large container will generally be lighter per unit volume/mass. Similarly, if you want to…
This article, on the other hand, argues that precisely ships are severely constrained by existing physical limits:
* maximal depth of many important ports, * maximal width and depth of Panama and Suez channels.
It isn't as efficient to build an übergiant that must take longer routes around the globe and can only fit into a handful of ports.
In case of crude oil carriers, there is also the question of maximum environmental damage if they founder. I wouldn't like to see 5 million tons of crude spilt into the ocean. Even current sizes are pretty big.
Also, when you take a giant anything (ship, nuclear reactor) out of operation for repairs, which may be urgent and unplanned, you reduced your available fleet by a massive amount, thus disrupting normal operations.