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Right before jet engines took over the military aviation market, you saw some very complex, high efficiency piston engines. Mechanical marvels they were, only
by opwieurposiu 6y ago
Right before jet engines took over the military aviation market, you saw some very complex, high efficiency piston engines. Mechanical marvels they were, only now are automotive engines catching up in performance. Ultimately they were all commercial failures, the jet engine had a lot more headroom for improvement and was mechanically much simpler.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Nomad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Nomad
- throwaway894345 6y agoI've noticed a very general principle here. Things which are 'before their time' obviously tend to fail, but the interesting bit IMO is that 'before their time' often means "the problem isn't yet constrained such that the efficiencies afforded by the design are economically significant". I think this explains why so much software (my branch of engineering) is miserably inefficient and bug-ridden despite the fact that we have technology to improve efficiency and quality by several orders of magnitude (at a relatively modest cost)--the economic context simply doesn't place a very high value on efficiency and quality, presumably because the market is comparing software against the many, many orders of magnitude worse performance afforded by humans. Perhaps all of this is obvious to many others; it's interesting and novel to me, anyway.