I was just sitting here thinking. I watched a video someone posted about p-47's the other day. It blew my mind. I guess I have taken technology for granted. I wonder if the planes we have today are really as great of a technological achievement as the ones we had 70 years ago. I mean think about this: today we have complicated computer simulations to model EVERYTHING about the design..before there is even a prototype! Back in the day they had freaking blue prints...paper...wind tunnels and little models. I mean I am no expert on this stuff, but I did think about this stuff. I hope you can get what I am saying. I guess I am just in awe of engineering and precision. How the hell did they pull this toejam off without computers? I guess the same could be said for the cotton gin or the Antikythera mechanism or other such things. Being an idiot at math...I am absolutely in awe of engineers. no edibles..just swag. <S> :rock
I agree completely. Being a math Neanderthal, I’ve always been amazed by the technology that these genius engineers have come up with, especially the WWII aircraft.
Always keep in mind that in this era of airplane design, much was achieved through experiment. As an example the Supermarine Spitfire, the brainchild of R.J. Mitchell was the result of a few redesigns and largely based upon his experience with the Schneider Trophy seaplanes.
The other factor was cost. There was a war approaching and there was plenty of Government money to build prototypes... if they worked, they sold... if they didn't, they were scrapped or modified.
I have the greatest respect for the engineers of today that can digitally design an airplane and know that it will fly properly when the first flying example is built.
I've long been fascinated with the Pilatus PC-9:
(https://i.imgur.com/CJUb0cGl.jpg)
It's a turboprop sold as a trainer but also as a light attack aircraft - it's the closest thing to a modern-day WW2 fighter. The performance figures are actually less impressive than late-war aircraft but I assume it's cheaper, lighter, more reliable, and probably a lot more capable in the air-to-ground role. My hunch is that WW2 designers almost reached the upper limit of what you could do with a propeller aircraft, and if jets had never been invented most innovations post-WW2 would have been incremental.
A while back I read Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and that gave me a renewed respect for what people could do in the first half of the century. Atomic physics essentially began with people shining radiation sources through pieces of gold foil with slits cut in them, and looking at tiny particles with microscopes. The early experiments were unbelievably primitive by modern standards.
The thing that really struck me was the construction of Fat Man. That was an implosion-type bomb. The idea of packing explosives around a central core and detonating them at exactly the same fraction of a second - so that the shockwave forms a perfectly spherical implosion wave that travels through the uranium core - sounds hard enough but was fiendishly difficult with 1940s technology. It required input from a pool of explosives experts, in addition to the pool of chemical experts that developed the uranium refinery, plus the atomic experts.
It really brought home how hopeless the German and Japanese bomb-making projects were. They would never have been able to refine uranium and it would have taken years before they could assemble a bomb because they simply didn't have the mass of experts required (and their enrichment plants would probably have been bombed into oblivion).
I understand that fusion weapons are designed so that the interior of the case focuses the explosive shockwave of the fission stage so that it implodes the fusion stage, which again is extraordinary for the 1950s. Imagine the theory that went into designing a case that could - for a tiny fraction of a second - reflect the force of an atomic explosion, and the manufacturing precision required to not only construct one of these devices, but thousands of them.
And make them robust enough that the radiation doesn't fry the circuits, and shockproof enough that the ground crew can handle them. Also shockproof enough that they can be blasted into space on an ICBM and then withstand re-entry. Hard science! It's fantastic.
Today you could not keep it secret here. Too many folks living here that hate Americans and our country.
You've been spewing a ton of ignorant crap here the last year or so, but this my be the most ignorant statement you've made yet.
Your ignorance is not mine. I stated a fact.
Looks like an ignorant opinion to me.
But I'm game. If it's fact, then please post some sources. I'll wait.
At this point I have to take it you are not from the US.Do you not know where Cape Cod is? :rofl
Do you not know where Cape Cod is? :roflHave no idea where he is from.... just figured from his lack of knowledge about current events here.
If you read the news you would know.
You should also know politics are not allowed here. This will lead to politics as it always does. At this point I have to take it you are not from the US.
Have no idea where he is from.... just figured from his lack of knowledge about current events here.
Seems to me that you were the one to bring political talk into this thread with your baseless rhetoric. All I did was call you out for making this behavior a frequent habit.You seem to act like you were outed.
Again, where do you get your "news" from? I'm willing to bet both you and your "news" share the same problem where opinion is mistaken for fact.
I was just sitting here thinking. I watched a video someone posted about p-47's the other day. It blew my mind. I guess I have taken technology for granted. I wonder if the planes we have today are really as great of a technological achievement as the ones we had 70 years ago. I mean think about this: today we have complicated computer simulations to model EVERYTHING about the design..before there is even a prototype! Back in the day they had freaking blue prints...paper...wind tunnels and little models. I mean I am no expert on this stuff, but I did think about this stuff. I hope you can get what I am saying. I guess I am just in awe of engineering and precision. How the hell did they pull this toejam off without computers? I guess the same could be said for the cotton gin or the Antikythera mechanism or other such things. Being an idiot at math...I am absolutely in awe of engineers. no edibles..just swag. <S> :rock