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I find there aren't enough incriminating pictures/infography in the article. This kind of technical detail only speaks to people with a mechanics background. F
by aragot 12y ago
I find there aren't enough incriminating pictures/infography in the article. This kind of technical detail only speaks to people with a mechanics background.
For example, a pole will be much weaker if there is an abrupt section change in the middle, even if it's a bigger section. This is counter-intuitive until you learn what the forces look like in metal.
Same goes for welding and cracks. Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack? It breaks while spinning and launches the weighted wing at a few dozen m/s. The French aircraft carrier is lucky the wing was sent to the bottom of the ocean [1].
Which leads me to the next topic: Will politicians state that welds are too complicated for them just like computer things?
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1325965/French-calamity-carrier-heads-for-sea-again.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1325...
- wazoox 12y ago> Do you know what happens when a 19-ton propeller has a crack? The story of these propellers is interesting. They were to be cast from a single piece of metal, and were precisely of the largest dimension fit for the largest metallurgy facility in France (because it's a top secret design, they had to be made in a domestic factory). However, the project was so delayed that the factory closed its doors several years before it to be able to build the propellers... So another company got to build them, but they were so large that they had to cast them in several parts and weld them together instead of a single cast, which is apparently NOT best practice and hadn't been ever done before.