5 ms·

"DIGITAL TWIN!!" would be a lot less of a punchline if I understood the prototype on my desk well enough to predict its behavior. And I can look straight at tha

"DIGITAL TWIN!!" would be a lot less of a punchline if I understood the prototype on my desk well enough to predict its behavior. And I can look straight at that one. The idea that we can understand real hardware in unusual conditions well enough to make a simulation/Digital Twin the One True Reference is simply hilarious. Though as you point out, it sure does generate a lot of high margin work and great ad copy.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago
I'll concede that when you write off maintainability down to the nuts-and-bolts-level, that does make things a whole lot easier. But I don't think that's digital twin; that's just tighter tolerance, and aaalllll the things that ride along with that. But doing something like scheduled maintenance just from the Twin?! Ehhhhhh sheesh, I dunno. I'm not one of the smart guys, but you would need to combine the solid-model FM sort of simulation with the more fluxy CFD models, and then have them interact. I realize computers are super powerful these days, but that is a HELL of a lot to ask from a simulation running on commodity equipment with commodity software. I've seen single-assembly CFD choke when it had to extend to just a single fuel system's materials data - and that was nothing compared to doing that for an entire airframe. Or even a reasonable chunk of an airframe. I'm at peace leaving this stuff to the guys who know what they're doing, but I don't see a lot of those people actually doing the decision making. It's finbros all the way down. I'm afraid what I'll be ending up with, at the end of the day, is the Reification Fallacy made flesh: a box of parts that's supposedly a flyable airframe. "Just write a preflight checklist for it!" they might say. "Copy and paste something or whatever." Why knows, they're RIFing more or less everyone with technical knowledge this week, so it probably won't be my problem for long.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

I'll concede that when you write off maintainability down to the nuts-and-bolts-level, that does make things a whole lot easier. But I don't think that's digital twin; that's just tighter tolerance, and aaalllll the things that ride along with that. But doing something like scheduled maintenance just from the Twin?! Ehhhhhh sheesh, I dunno. I'm not one of the smart guys, but you would need to combine the solid-model FM sort of simulation with the more fluxy CFD models, and then have them interact. I realize computers are super powerful these days, but that is a HELL of a lot to ask from a simulation running on commodity equipment with commodity software. I've seen single-assembly CFD choke when it had to extend to just a single fuel system's materials data - and that was nothing compared to doing that for an entire airframe. Or even a reasonable chunk of an airframe. I'm at peace leaving this stuff to the guys who know what they're doing, but I don't see a lot of those people actually doing the decision making. It's finbros all the way down. I'm afraid what I'll be ending up with, at the end of the day, is the Reification Fallacy made flesh: a box of parts that's supposedly a flyable airframe. "Just write a preflight checklist for it!" they might say. "Copy and paste something or whatever." Why knows, they're RIFing more or less everyone with technical knowledge this week, so it probably won't be my problem for long.