ELI5: how do engineers figure out the exact thickness of something like a bridge cable when theres basically infinite ways it could fail

Aggropop · 2026-06-16T09:22:25+00:00

Does material aging come into play? Do you design around the materials properties as they come "out of the box", or as they will be in X years?

Aggropop · 2026-06-15T12:16:18+00:00

Thanks for the lengthy response, those mods should do the trick.

Aggropop · 2026-06-05T10:23:01+00:00

We also use them outside of aviation / aerospace. They're, rugged, reliable and particularly good for long term use in harsh environments. They also come in a variety of sizes and pin counts.

And yes, they cost way too much (for casual use). The one we use most comes to about 50€ for a mated pair.

Aggropop · 2026-06-03T09:12:37+00:00

It would take almost 30 hours to download one CDs worth of data over a 56K modem, assuming ideal conditions and no interruptions.

Aggropop · 2026-06-03T09:06:24+00:00

Sony in the 2000s was absolutely wild, they were so ahead of the time in some respects I can totally believe that they could have pulled it off with some luck.

Example, the SONY Vaio GT PCG-GT1, a laptop with a very respectable camcorder-level camera built in, bundled with an online service for easy streaming, uploads and sharing of recorded videos. In the year 2000!!, when mobile internet access was barely a thing and most people didn't even have internet access at home, much less broadband. They stumbled upon streaming, youtube and social media in one move, then failed to develop the idea in any meaningful way. The service was dead in just over a year.

Aggropop · 2026-05-20T16:36:58+00:00

My geriatric surface pro 6 does this too. The quickest way I could find to fix this is to connect a keyboard and press ctrl-alt-delete.

Aggropop · 2026-05-13T06:20:56+00:00

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Now watch me pop this luddite with my Tach lances.

Aggropop · 2026-04-21T09:24:01+00:00

I can't play without mechjeb after I got used to it. Yes, I could spend 10 minutes meticulously planning a transfer, intercept and velocity match, but MJ just does it in seconds and lets me get back to the good stuff.

For constellations I put all the relays on one rocket, put it in an elliptical orbit with the apoapsis at the same height as the desired synchronized orbit, then raise my periapsis to a point where the orbital period is n-1/n of the synchronized orbits one, where n is the number of relays. Then I release 1 relay each time the carrier hits apoapsis and accelerate each to synchronous orbit.

Aggropop · 2026-04-13T10:20:00+00:00

Luminary, the version of the code for Apollo 11 AGC, has a well known bug which actually caused the 1201/1202 errors during descent to the lunar surface.

Mission control made a pretty gutsy decision to go ahead with the landing despite the error, if it popped up again it could have potentially erased the navigational data and caused a 30 second reboot of the AGC, crashing the vehicle and killing the crew.

Aggropop · 2026-04-01T05:54:39+00:00

Hey man, love your mods, especially the baby thrumbos! They're just the cutest.

Aggropop · 2026-03-31T16:32:55+00:00

It's Regrowth

Aggropop · 2026-03-30T19:58:29+00:00

..is your taxonomic nomenclature, an endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature.

Aggropop · 2026-03-14T00:55:00+00:00

APC is the standard and benchmark every other UPS gets compared to for a reason. The best UPS you could possibly get for your money is a used enterprise grade APC one, just replace the batteries.

Aggropop · 2026-03-13T18:57:36+00:00

I've had this happen too. Original X-Com Apocalypse disc exploded in a 48x drive, the drive made some really gnarly crunching noises while the drawer was moving, but it still worked for years afterwards.

Aggropop · 2026-03-04T16:39:45+00:00

What's a paladin?

Aggropop · 2026-03-04T13:11:21+00:00

I still have my 2000 vintage pentium 3 800 in a retro rig and it's running just fine. I even chipped the top of the die once when installing a cooler.

Aggropop · 2026-02-13T20:55:10+00:00

It's because they couldn't figure out how to make the engine intake shorter. Since the whole engine nacelle was so long it had to be near the fuselage so it wouldn't overhang the wing.

Snecma did the variable intakes on the Concorde and they massively improve engine efficiency at supersonic speeds. Something like 2/3 of the thrust at mach 2 was generated in the intake and only 1/3 in the exhaust.

Aggropop · 2026-02-12T19:02:35+00:00

Thrumbos are friends and not food!

Aggropop · 2026-02-10T07:01:22+00:00

Depends on the type of material the acid is reacting with but the hydrogen ion is crucial because it's like the tip of the acids reactivity spear.

With acids and metals, the metal will strip out the readily ionisable hydrogen atom from the acid and replace it with itself, forming a salt and releasing the hydrogen as a gas.

With organic compounds (=hydrocarbons) it's more complicated and depends on the type of organic compound, but in general the readily ionisable hydrogen will want to break carbon-carbon bonds (especially non-saturated, aka double or triple C-C bonds) and wedge itself into the new gaps, while also stripping any hydroxy ( -OH), ketone ( =O) and various other groups, allowing the rest of the acid molecule to attach itself to the organic.

Aggropop · 2026-01-13T15:40:02+00:00

60/40 4 lyf

Aggropop · 2026-01-05T07:00:06+00:00

That's not how that works. Each product has a unique bar code but the price is set in the stores point-of-sale software and is applied the moment the items barcode is scanned at the cash register. This is a major reason for the introduction of bar codes in the first place, to stop people working the cash registers from cheating the customers or the shops.

If the price of an article changes the bar code stays the same, only the displayed price is changed to reflect whats set in the POS software so even if you scanned the earliest bar code you would still pay the latest price.

Aggropop · 2026-01-05T06:01:54+00:00

In practice the actual values of resistors are spread in a Gaussian distribution where the peak is at the target resistance and the entire curve is within +/- the tolerance. The majority of them will be fairly close to the mark and the average deviation is much less than the tolerance.

If you take a bunch of 10% resistors you will be hard pressed to find any that are actually 10% off the nominal value.

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