3 ms·

Is there such a thing as submarine unit testing?

by mikekij 13y ago

lmm 13y ago
You can't exactly unit test the buoyancy - the hull is the only part that floats on its own[1], all the other crap you put in would sink. The two need to balance when you combine them, but there's no way to test that at the unit level. [1] Ok technically a few other parts like air tanks would float.
- omegant 13y ago
  But you don't have to unit test a radio throwing it to the water. Just sending messages.
irremediable 13y ago
As I* understand it the only "traditional" engineering field with anything close to unit testing is electronic engineering. Lots of chip or circuit design packages let you automatically test small parts of your design. For mechanical/civil projects, this approach is less common. I think that's partly because of the projects' nature (good luck unit testing a submarine!) and partly because of the engineers being more traditional, and further from the software industry. This said, I can envision some cool things you might do by taking a CAD package and associating some (automatically updating) equations with various parts' critical dimensions. This might act a bit like unit testing. A check of total mass would be another such useful check. * Engineering student with some work experience, but by no means a blooded engineer.
berkut 13y ago
Depends - as it's designed (using GRC's Paramarine - http://www.qinetiq.com/what/capabilities/maritime/Pages/naval-architecture-design-analysis.aspx http://www.qinetiq.com/what/capabilities/maritime/Pages/nava...) you can virtually unit test things like propulsion, stability and buoyancy. Once it's been assembled into one complete system, it's very difficult to do that - individual systems on-board from a systems perspective could be unit tested, but actual physical items - not so much - generally they only find out about mismatches when they try and assemble the warship/sub from different sections (sometimes built by different companies) and they discover their tolerances were off.

Is there such a thing as submarine unit testing?

by mikekij 13y ago

Is there such a thing as submarine unit testing?

lmm 13y ago

You can't exactly unit test the buoyancy - the hull is the only part that floats on its own[1], all the other crap you put in would sink. The two need to balance when you combine them, but there's no way to test that at the unit level. [1] Ok technically a few other parts like air tanks would float.

omegant 13y ago
But you don't have to unit test a radio throwing it to the water. Just sending messages.

irremediable 13y ago

As I* understand it the only "traditional" engineering field with anything close to unit testing is electronic engineering. Lots of chip or circuit design packages let you automatically test small parts of your design. For mechanical/civil projects, this approach is less common. I think that's partly because of the projects' nature (good luck unit testing a submarine!) and partly because of the engineers being more traditional, and further from the software industry. This said, I can envision some cool things you might do by taking a CAD package and associating some (automatically updating) equations with various parts' critical dimensions. This might act a bit like unit testing. A check of total mass would be another such useful check. * Engineering student with some work experience, but by no means a blooded engineer.

berkut 13y ago

Depends - as it's designed (using GRC's Paramarine - http://www.qinetiq.com/what/capabilities/maritime/Pages/naval-architecture-design-analysis.aspx http://www.qinetiq.com/what/capabilities/maritime/Pages/nava...) you can virtually unit test things like propulsion, stability and buoyancy. Once it's been assembled into one complete system, it's very difficult to do that - individual systems on-board from a systems perspective could be unit tested, but actual physical items - not so much - generally they only find out about mismatches when they try and assemble the warship/sub from different sections (sometimes built by different companies) and they discover their tolerances were off.