161–170 of 209 posts
I was in the Air Force in early 90s, and we chuckled at one guy in training who got assigned to B-52 maintenance. "Ha that old thing? How long will that job last?"
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…
> 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). The plane was only ever produced for a decade and the H model was last produced in 1963. Obviously it has been retrofitted with new engines, avionics, armaments, etc, but it's not a fundamentally different plane.
The B-52 design proposal was done in a hotel room over one weekend, the actual engineering took at least 3 years, including "670 days in the wind tunnel". That is not to say the weekend hotel proposal was not an impressive accomplishment in itself, it was. But there's a difference between laying out a software architecture and writing code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_B-52_Stratofortress#Des... > On Thursday…
Coincidentally, I was watching a YouTube video last night about the YB-60. This was a version of the B-36 with the same jet engines as the B-52. And the aircraft lost in a competition with the B-52 because the Boeing jet was just plain better than the Convair jet. Boeing did a very good job. I don't think there have been (or will be) another aircraft that lasted this long in service. There are prettier aircraft (in m…
And the C-130 is right around the same age, not to mention still (I believe) being manufactured.
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It seems likely that this one is true: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20131008-00/?p=30...
I don’t know. Seems like apocrypha layered on apocrypha go me >…I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake.” >(I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.) >This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enou…
This discussion reminds me of the USS Hornet aircraft carrier museum in Alameda (near Oakland). It took 54 weeks to design, build and deloy it. It's a museum now; highly recommended. They have some Apollo stuff too. Four years from concept to first flight for the B-52 is impressive. The "over one weekend" claim (which the body of the article refutes) is annoying.
> often referred to as the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fellow) That's… not what the second F stands for.
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You say "putting some bomb bay doors on a modern Boeing" as if that is something that you can just do without redesigning the entire aircraft. Some other the changes you would need: - Retraining the entire fleet of pilots for the new aircraft. - Recertifying the entire set of currently available weapons that the B52 can drop. - Integrating modern military radios/crypto/satcoms/datalinks/etc with the civilian Boeing s…
not to mention redesigning entire airframe to hold 70,000 lbs along a single rail within its belly.
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> despite opposition of engineers on the project Huh? Despite 'opposition'? Can you elaborate? (also make sure not to miss /s in my previous comment)
I didn't miss the /s, but I feared others might think different ;) From what I've read, the decisions to make Buran look externally like STS orbiter was a political one, and the engineers at MiG OKB weren't happy about it - they have been working on a bunch of space planes for some time, including the infamous suborbital fighter. However the similarity was found to have political benefits in the weird opposite of kre…
I just don't understand how it could look any way different (at least significantly), this is a classical case of the function dictating the form.
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I had seen/heard/read that the thrust asymmetry was a design feature to help with yaw, and that fewer engines would overpower the design limits of other parts of the airplane, to the extent that everything else would need to be redesigned to handle them (mounts, tail, rudder, etc.) edit: I believe this is the original video where I saw the above https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02_geGISTLg
You can use thrust asymmetry to help with yaw, yes. But here we're talking about unplanned sudden thrust asymmetry, causing a massive yaw force at a critical phase of flight, takeoff, where you're engines are likely to be near their full power and you're close to/on the ground. If you go from 8 engines to 4, loosing one engine goes from causing 25% thrust loss on the wing to 50%.
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Conceptualized is a perfect word. The claim that it was designed in a weekend is like those “overnight success” stories that ignore the decade of work that someone put in to get to that point.
This was genuinely an overnight success, though. They got approval on the strength of this design. And the broad strokes design of the aircraft seemingly stayed intact through the subsequent processes. This entire comment chain is bewildering, we're attacking strawmen. Did anyone read this article and leave assuming no further work was done after approval? Was this HN comment chain enlightening to anyone ? Who are we…
For example, let's look at the concept/design of a helicopter:
DL1 (idea phase): a flying machine that can go straight up and hover
DL2 (concept with basic working principle): a vehicle with a rotor which acts like wings moving in a circle to move air down and by reaction push the vehicle up
DL3 (concept with important details attached): as DL2 but with a tail rotor to allow for axial control and differential tilting of the airfoils to allow forward thrust
DL4 (concept with specifications that drive requirements for other specs): as DL3 with rotor lengths of 3.3 m and a NACA 0018 cross section made of 6061-T6 aluminum
DL5 (concept with full specs): as DL4 but also etc.
Is anyone aware of better nomenclature like this for the concept/design phase? It would help for more important things than this discussion alone. Like when discussing which is more important, idea or execution: so which level idea are we talking about? Also, the root cause of a lot of software problems is in the spec. It would be nice to be able to go back and say, "this spec is only spec level 3, can I please have a spec level 5"?
This discussion is happening because "they designed it over a weekend" is really vague. It would be nice to have a quick way to make it not-vague.