5 ms·
I always wonder how they developed things like that in the 70s. Right now I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system l
by mstipetic 5y ago
I always wonder how they developed things like that in the 70s. Right now I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system like that. I feel like most of them would try and throw a neural net at the problem and call it a day.
- lfowles 5y agoIt wasn't necessarily single engineers designing these systems in the 70s either.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoYou may be exaggerating but there is some truth in it, and it applies to many areas of science. The growing specialization means your knowledge is deeper but lest vast. For many classes of problems you just use a pre-built solution as this is the easiest and most common way. But rest assured, the people who work on defense system know very well what they are doing.
- mstipetic 5y agoAre these engineers paid well compared to standard web stack engineers now?
- katmannthree 5y agoNo, they might make half of what a web developer does.
- ska 5y agoOn average it's not that much different, but the distributions (in both cases) are not normal.
- brightball 5y agoI talked to a guy a few weeks ago who worked for a company that developed a guidance system before GPS that used stars like a sextant to navigate. Pretty crazy to think about.
- jihadjihad 5y agoSomething in that vein that has always amazed me, even though its performance in the field left something to be desired, is the Norden bombsight [0]. "The Norden [used] an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects." 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norden_bombsight
- rwmurrayVT 5y agoIt is also common in shiprepair to use the stars for aligning equipment with a theodolite like device.
- IMSAI8080 5y agoSpacecraft often use stars to orient themselves. The Voyager spacecraft have star trackers to keep the antenna pointing at Earth. They look for the Canopus star.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoDon't they need more than 1 star to get an orientation? I mean other than brightness 1 star doesn't give you a lot of information?
- _moof 5y agoGPS and celnav (and other forms of navigation, radio or otherwise) are really not so different when you get down to fundamentals. At their core they are all about locating the intersection of multiple lines, circles, or spheres of position, depending on how many dimensions you're working with. The major differences are in how you come up with the LOPs. The odd man out, if you will, is inertial nav, which has more in common with dead reckoning.
- StillBored 5y agoI'm guessing most mechanical and/or ECE programs still teach "control systems", and that might be where one begins, along with some "signals and systems" and RF classes. I suspect that the engineers you know are more computer science "engineers" than people who went through a traditional engineering core.
- InitialLastName 5y agoThis exactly. The ABET mechanical and electrical engineering curricula combined would give you all the skills a team needed (perhaps with the aid of a physicist and chemist or two) to build this system. That we have dissolved the word "engineer" to mean "ad salesman at scale" doesn't mean the traditional engineers aren't out there.
- selimthegrim 5y agoI'm teaching in an ABET accredited program using MIT textbooks and I'm not impressed. If engineers want to avoid learning how to integrate by parts or use the chain rule it seems like a great idea. Arubis' comment above seems on point.
- InitialLastName 5y agoAre you saying that the current program lets them avoid learning those things, or that they should be allowed to avoid learning them? I'm not sure I've seen a calculus course that skipped those (granted, it's been more than a decade since I looked at calculus courses). They certainly seem to still be within the remit of the FE - ECE exam.
- selimthegrim 5y agoIt's more an issue of what the students are retaining from calculus.
- StillBored 5y ago
- _moof 5y agoI'm guessing all the engineers you know are web software pukes. There are loads of people who could build these today.
- PaulHoule 5y agoInstead people like me make "spatial computing" led hula hoops and other harmless stuff like that... And those EEG cat ears!
- _moof 5y agoThe world would be much better off with more LED hula hoops and fewer guided missiles.
- PaulHoule 5y agoIt's funny because we were brainstorming on the hoop the other night and it hit me that this was the killer app for a "cheap and cheerful" inertial navigation system. The Trident 2 submarine missile has a gyroscope in it that costs almost as much as the nuclear warhead because it is so resistant to drift that it can be spun up and locked on in port and maintain its position when the submarine is at sea. If you tried INS with a smart phone or wiimote the errors in velocity estimation will build up quickly and you'll get terrible drift. In the case of the spatial computing hoop though you know the hoop never gets far away from the user so you can damp the D.C. component of the velocity, work in coordinates relative the user's center of gravity and never notice any drift in the x or y coordinates. (I don't like damping the vertical so much but I think I can live with it.)
- vintermann 5y agoOh, I'm pretty sure the stuff we "web software pukes" have to work with would drive all those old-timer Real Engineers crazy in its own way. It's a bit like how a middle school teacher doesn't necessarily have an easier job than a prestigious professor.
- 5y ago
- WalterBright 5y agoHeat seeking missiles started development in 1940s. In the US, they began as an unfunded rogue project. The infrared guidance system was simple and very successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder
- mhh__ 5y agoOne thing a lot of people forget because war movies don't show them, is that by the end of the war allied and German aircraft were absolutely loaded with electronics. The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2S_(radar) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2S_(radar) (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known. Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors... https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8 https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8 is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made before the scientists were dead, so lots of gossip. Randall and Boot should be known by more people, but magnetrons are not as awesome as the nuclear bomb.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe proximity fuses were a marvel - tiny radars put into an antiaircraft shell. Such would never ever have occurred to me, as how could a radar system survive being fired out of a cannon? It doubled the effectiveness of flak.
- mstipetic 5y agoThank you for this documentary link, it’s amazing
- PaulHoule 5y agoSurface-to-air missiles were long a priority of the Soviets. They caused our fliers no end of trouble in Vietnam: this guy got shot down by a SAM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Prisoner_of_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Prisoner_of_war The Russian military is organized around a land defense of their homeland since they don't have the natural barriers the U.S. has (e.g. they last got invaded in 1941, we last got invaded in 1812.) You might think they'd invest in fixed SAM systems but mobile SAM systems are so more survivable in a war because the radar for a SAM is highly visible. You really want to hide those systems in terrain and ambush planes going by. Systems like that are most effective when they operate in a networked mode together with AWACS airplanes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-50 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beriev_A-50 which use a "look down" pulse doppler radar which can see cruise missiles, UAVs and other low-flying threats. This is a great complement to the radar on a Patriot missile battery which is optimized to ballistic missile threats. Russia's latest S-500 system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-500_missile_system has crazy long range, it competes with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_Defense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De... as an anti missile missile system but also it can (try to) take out a distant AWACS airplane with a direct shot. The Russians DO NOT want an enemy to have air superiority over them anywhere.
- UltraViolence 5y agoI'm puzzled why we haven't created something that can compete with S-300 / S-400 / S-500. At the very least the Patriot SAM should be redesigned to allow for vertical launching to allow shooting in all directions. If you point Patriot one way and you get ambushed from behind you're basically caught with your pants down. At the very least you'd need four Patriot missile launchers pointing in all directions to prevent this scenario.
- sofixa 5y agoThat's why it was funny that Turkey was ostracized for buying Russian/Chinese SAMs ( was it S-400 last or a Chinese version). What else could they possibly buy? The Patriot system isn't even close, and doesn't seem to be working too well for the UAE ( but then again we don't know how S-300/400/500 would deal against drones and light missiles)
- dogleash 5y ago>I don’t know a single engineer that could even know how to begin to develop a system like that It's called "controls engineering", and there are plenty of talented people in the field. But you are correct that people who sought a career in websites and cellphones have never heard of it. (edit: s/cellphones/cellphone apps/)