researchers fire the 1000th shot, how can they call themselves researchers then?

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release... & Energy News -- Weapons Technology)&safe=on

i know that engineering is more pragmatic than science, and many "dumb" shortcuts are taken instead of analyzing the situation completely and reducing it to precise math..

but the way those guys are working, they're just swapping materials and geometries and seeing which would turn out best, certainly that's not how 20th century engineering is?

 

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Do you even understand what you read and post about because it seems like you don't have a clue.

 

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Wernher von Braun said “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I always feel a little guilty when I bill a Client for “Research”.

 

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why's that?

:roflmao:
but that can't be taken seriously?
isn't every experimental step equivalent to added cost and time, things any project doesn't have much of?
isn't the whole point of studying engineering is to design everything on paper before moving to real life? to gain the knowledge for a "guess" educated enough to be almost right the first time, requiring feedback and tinkering after one or two prototypes, and not a 1000 shot?

unless, the field of electromagnetically launched projectiles is soo futuristic they're actually now laying the basic engineering references which will be taught later on, which is hard to believe imo.

if you deliver the promised results then ethically it doesn't matter how you got them

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You must have a very rudimentary understanding of engineering

 

i'm a senior mechanical engineering student, no wonder they format our brains first thing we join a company, makes me wonder why we bother study in the first place.

first time i doubted my choice of mechanical engineering sa a major was when we studied design of mechanical design elements, screws and bolts and welds and bearings and the lot, the evil amount of calculations we had to go through to find the exact dimensions, number, configuration and material for a screw for a simple application like some cantilever beam is unbelievable, we all thought "just put an extra pair of bolts and get on with it!" or "just weld the whole freaking perimeter of the damn thing and stop being too stingy!".. but no, you had to do the two pages worth of calculations...for a bolt.

and rail guns? baah.. just design parts at random and try every possible combination and the shot closest to the bullseye must be the best design.. i mean give me a break

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Ah, that explains it. The real world is often significantly different than the ideal world taught in engineering school - and it does indeed take some "reformatting" to understand the differences.

Most new engineers go through a learning process when they start working. They start out thinking everything is easy, like a problem set at school. That's the point you really worry about them, because they design these things that have no chance of working in the real world.

Then finally one day they say "wait a minute - snubber designs affect EMI? And we have to meet EMI requirements? But the converter STILL has to be efficient? And fit in six cubic inches? Wow, this is hard . . ." At that point I know they're going to be OK - because they finally understand the full scope of the problem.

They're not doing that.