161–170 of 176 posts
The public sees destructive flight testing as failures so if your program relies on public money, that's a problem.
The article suggests using a probabilistic failure model instead of a large a safety factor, and explains how a safety factor established in the 1930s affected the cost of the Space Shuttle. But spacecraft might be a special case, where any additional weight is so expensive, and you also expect the models to be especially accurate and manufacturing to be extremely precise. For more everyday civil engineering, I think…
I'll go out on a pretty small limb and say that the vast majority of Civil Engineering failings are not a matter of an incorrect safety factor, but are things that are explicitly not part of it. 1) Blunders. (Many places. You do the math wrong, or approve the wrong shop drawing, and no factor of safety is going to save you). (See the Hyatt Regency Walkway Failure) 2) Inadequate Geotech Info. (Basically every dam fail…
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> The idea is: this advanced civilization has such command over physical technology, that they can effortlessly engineer unnecessary strength without losing any of their designed performance. Are you sure the idea isn't just "we never thought about it"? Old cars are sturdy and robust while new cars are extremely fragile and will total themselves at the drop of a hat. That's not because the 50s possessed ancient techn…
Old cars were not sturdier or more robust than new cars. That’s a myth. You can Google “crash test old car vs new” or something like that to see examples.
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> For the record, Star Wars is not science fiction nor has it ever been portrayed as such. FWIW this is literally the first time I’ve encountered someone claiming that it isn’t science fiction. ( Soft SciFi, to be sure, but still: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScien... )
And Vulcan are space elves, Klingon are space orcs and Borg are space undead. All of this stuff has inspiration from classical fantasy. That doesn't change whether or not something is SciFi or not. There is an intersection of SciFi and Fantasy for sure, and the line gets blurred. Artificial human stories can be cyborgs, androids, clones, golems, or chimera, or even explicit fantasy races like minotaurs. If it's an an…
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Or more simply: planes that get hit with massive unexpected turbulence shouldn't just drop out of the sky and kill everyone on board. And to paraphrase the great philosopher Donald Rumsfeld, it is all about the unknown-unknowns.
Any plane that can land missing half a wing on one engine is over-engineered, from a certain point of view.
Any idea where I can learn some simple structural engineering? For example, I want to build a small building. I want to be able to calculate things like the snow load of the roof, make a suitable truss, take into consideration things like the safety factor, and build with the materials to meet those requirements. I can buy plans for similar constructions, but i don't see how they decide what size wood to use where, e…
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True but Lucas doesn't have final say on classifying his movies. People who make things have an incentive to claim that their work is somehow special. I'd just say Star Wars is science fiction with lots of fantasy elements, as well as lots of influence from different genres (Earth-based war films, adventure serials, etc.) I see the fact that humans in Star Wars seem to be the "same species" as Homo sapiens to be simi…
Why isn't Lord of the Rings "science fiction" but Star Wars is? They both have technology unknown to us.
That said, Lord of the Rings has a lot more traditional things like elves and fairies and wizards, and a lot more "pure" magic. They are also completely lacking much of technology from today or even the time it was created... no telephones or automobiles, for instance. (Star Wars has things that are more advanced versions of these)
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We use super-strength thousand year plastic for one time uses. It's a big problem.
It is only a problem for single planet species. Advanced multi planet or multi system civilizations may worry less about that than we do. Also if the bio diversity dropped, and people are used to living in closed ecosystems to limit damages from such harmful chemicals, over long enough period everyone will forget what was there before , further making bad things will not impact their quality of life anyway.
Already you can see great decreases in plastic lifetimes, and they're decreasing faster and faster. The lifetime advantage plastics provide won't last.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideonella_sakaiensis
Without microbes breaking it down (which can be achieved in a number of ways, and generally it is at least slowed down) wood can last a millenium.
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Then there's the factor that, in the times such a bridge was built, having it collapse would've been a larger catastrophy than today. Today, we can quickly fix things and build another. In the old times, that bridge might've been the only bridge making trade at all possible and it might've taken years to stack stones. An unnecessarily strong castle takes you more time and resources to build. A slightly too weak castl…
> An unnecessarily strong castle takes you more time and resources to build. > A slightly too weak castle means you die, your family dies, and you lose all wealth and power. You're really glossing over a lot of important concerns here. There are many, many ways to lose all your wealth and power, and lots of them might have been avoided if you'd had a few more spare resources.
Most spectacularly this is seen in Cathedrals, but castles, certainly some castles, definitely show this. I would argue pretty much everything the Romans built is more than a little overspecced, certainly at construction time (do you really need 3 story POOLS, meaning pool on -1, pool on ground floor, pool on first floor, pool on 2nd floor buildings ? Yes the higher ones were apparently rented out to very rich Romans, or more often provided as favors to them, so there was some function, but ... come on. They were constructed to mostly look very convincingly to be 3 story pools without actually being that. Despite that, none of the buildings survived for very long. But "over the top" can be said about many Roman structures, from the Pantheon to the Aya Sofia)
So having an unnecessarily big infrastructure project has it's own advantages that actually increase your odds of survival, and that didn't start with the space race.
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> An unnecessarily strong castle takes you more time and resources to build. > A slightly too weak castle means you die, your family dies, and you lose all wealth and power. You're really glossing over a lot of important concerns here. There are many, many ways to lose all your wealth and power, and lots of them might have been avoided if you'd had a few more spare resources.
Actually one of the reasons big infrastructure projects were undertaken in the middle ages was just the opposite: to provide a reason for an economy to exist. Something for the population to do. Most spectacularly this is seen in Cathedrals, but castles, certainly some castles, definitely show this. I would argue pretty much everything the Romans built is more than a little overspecced, certainly at construction time…
This isn't really compatible with anything I know about the middle ages. Can you show someone of the time writing or otherwise demonstrating that he doesn't want the cathedral, but he's afraid of what the population will get up to if they're left idle?