81–90 of 209 posts
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“I want all my music to fit in the palm of my hand.” Steve Jobs created the iPod in just one day
Meh, the Archos Jukebox was doing that well before Steve Jobs. Steve's genius concept was "I want all my music to fit in the palm of my hand, but with a way better UI than Archos Jukebox" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series
Guess I’ll never read the story.
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Came here to say something similar. My comment being "The word 'designed' is being used very generously here. I would suggest 'conceptualized' as a better word"
Conceptualized, but also pondered upon, and considered worthy of further effort. A conceptualization can be done as fast as a single second, but it can take ages to weigh it against alternatives.
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In a post appocalyptic world great-great-grandsons of B-52 pilots will inherit those planes, the same airframes their ancestors flew in the 50s. Impressive service life time, especially that since then nobody came up with something better then the B-52.
Necessity is the mother of invention and the US Military hasn’t had the necessity for anything newer.
On the delivery large bomb payloads into dominated airspace the B-52 is unbeatable so far.
The first prototype of the B-52 may have been designed in a weekend. The B-52 of today was iteratively designed over decades and the current H models are entirely different planes than earlier models (although structurally very close to the G model). Another HN commenter mentioned GPS being designed over a holiday. But we spent years and years in the military debugging GPS and making it functional. Claiming that some…
It's honestly a fantastic case for incremental improvements over time. There's practically no single part on a modern B-52 that's original to the 1960s since everything has been overhauled and modernized decade by decade. Every attempt to replace it has been (or will be) retired before its EOL.
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It's honestly a fantastic case for incremental improvements over time. There's practically no single part on a modern B-52 that's original to the 1960s since everything has been overhauled and modernized decade by decade. Every attempt to replace it has been (or will be) retired before its EOL.
Platonic question: is it still a B-52 then? cf. the Ship of Theseus
There is a thing called "type rating", that is qualification pilots need to have in order to fly a specific type of plane. For example, pilots need a type rating for the Boeing 737 in order to fly a Boeing 737.
Manufacturers try to do everything they can not to require another type rating when they make changes to an existing aircraft, because type ratings require expensive and time-consuming training that pilots and their companies would rather avoid, and it influences purchase decisions. One of the root causes of the B737-MAX crashes is that Boeing tweaked some settings in order to make the B737-MAX behave like the original B737 when it was, in fact, a different plane, and they did it wrong.
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Buran was made to look like Shuttle (despite opposition of engineers on the project), but was completely local design.
I’ve not read too much on the Soviet space program, but whenever I read about Buran (a wonderful accomplishment per se) my thought process goes something like this: “The Soviets must have seen the Americans working on the shuttle thing -> the Soviets must have thought that that shuttle thing was great mostly on account of the Americans working on it -> the Soviets built a shuttle system for themselves -> the Soviets…
Among various tracks that combined together, there was
1. Super Heavy Launcher - a long term dream since the failure of N1, realised in Energia
2. Reusable crewed orbiter - Buran orbiter
3. Mir-2, the successor to Mir space station - was supposed to use (1) for construction and (2) for crew
4. Fully reusable launch vehicle - was proposed continuation of Energia project
5. various missions requiring super heavy launchers (either Energia, or prospective Vulkan which added extra energia core stage on top) - including mars missions that were on slow boil since end of moon program
6. Soviet Space Forces - anti-SDI systems, orbital warfare unmanned cruisers (Polyot) etc. - dependant on (1).
7. Reduction of space construction and launch costs - nuclear-powered orbital tug launched by Energia which would be responsible for moving objects from low LEO to target orbit, including GEO
1,2,4, and 7 were all included directly in the scope of Buran, with Polyot (6) being in progress as well (the other Energia launch was launch of Polyot test unit).
Note that Buran orbiter, the one part that resembled Shuttle, is independent of other tasks though considered beneficial for the space station goals - if the orbiter project failed, it would still provide data for Reusable Energia variant, and Energia would still mean a working 100t-to-LEO system they could use for whatever - unlike Shuttle which was one specific vehicle. This also meant that Buran's orbiter had much lower cargo capacity - because it didn't need to have higher one as space station modules and the like could just use Energia.
surely its more efficient and lower maintenance?
is it that it would alter the centre of drag/gravity/thrust too much and would require too much engineering?
That's… not what the second F stands for.
Great article, despite the painful spelling of "bona fide" as "bonified". I guess they don't have a copy editor.
Language isn't static, it never has been, yet as soon as the notion of spell checking came about, written forms of words started to be frozen in time. If "tomorrow" is a valid rendering of "(on) t(he) morrow", I don't see why bonified is an issue.