Re: Euphoria's identity/philosophy -- Where is the focus?
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Nov 18, 2014
- 2576 views
OK then... I didn't mention anything new.
Just wanted to add:
Derek already addressed this better than I could. However, I'd like to point out one thing:
In the army, and specially the air force, and in a lot of electrical and mechanical equipment - designers finally realized that maintaining-time is more crucial then development-time.
I know someone who served in the US Air Force, and another individual who worked for a manufactor of jet aircraft.
It means that instead of 35 different kinds of screws they use only 3.
Not so. I couldn't get an exact number, but a US jet requires more than 3 types of screws.
And of course, this doesn't include the variety of aircraft bolts and other fasteners used to assemble an aircraft - I couldn't confirm this, but I strongly suspect the number of bolts used outweighs the number of screws, since bolts are used in the high stress areas of an aircraft, which are many.
And it means that instead of 100 different tools - jet engine can be replaced with few tools.
Perhaps, but replacing a jet engine remains an involved and grueling process.
Engineers realized that as many options as you have to deal with - to learn, to remember, and to use - as less efficient and reliable is maintainability.
The air force had to learn this fact in the hard way: many people died because of the complexity of the mechanical design. Jets could not be ready on time. But now they removed any unnecessary option and complexity, so it's possible to fix big problems in a very short time.
Right, but at the same time, they avoided oversimplification. Jet aircraft design remains complicated. Like you said, the air force has strong motivation to make this as simple as possible, if they haven't done that yet, it's because it's not feasible.
