Anyone else feels like academic engineering takes a lot of fun out of making stuff

I'm not an engineer, I just like to make stuff. Naturally, lots of the content I watch often happens to be made by engineers (or engineering students), and seeing them go about making things sometimes makes me wanna kms. You've got a team of 5 dudes making a rc car, each bro i would assume assigned with his own task, trying to calculate every single thing that could possibly be calculated around said rc car before they ever dare to assemble the real thing. Listen I get why the methodology exist and I'm grateful for it, I don't want our buildings or bridges or commercial airliners to be eye balled, but following this workflow whilst trying to create something new is grating to watch. What happened to trying shit out? That's what the OGs did in the early 1900s and it looks a lot more fun than how we're going about it today.

As an actual design engineer, I have to agree that just throwing shit together because it "feels right" is a lot more fun than digging out all the equations and tables and studies and spending a lot of time trying to do it "per the book", but ON THE OTHER HAND IT'S NICE WHEN IT FUCKING WORKS.

Good luck anon, but don't try to do anything more complex than a simple jump ramp.

>>2777276
>What happened to trying shit out?

That is what I still do. Get an idea, try it out. Sometimes you have to change something on the fly if you see a problem popping up you didn't plan on. Sometimes you have to make a whole new version 2 or 3 with what you learned from the previous versions. No way in hell I would ever sit down and draft something up in great detail other than a basic napkin sketch. That would be wasted time for me. Other folks obviously vary.

>>2777290
my ramp is gonna be cooler than urs. Also, sometimes there's ideas that just don't have equations and tables and studies. Or sometimes there actually IS useful calculation you could make but making prototypes and testing them is actually easier than wrapping your head around abstract mathematical concepts you don't even care about. There's a time and a place for both is all I'm saying.
>>2777298
dis what Im talking about. That leonardo davinci shit. Had davinci wasted time with the nitty gritty, he wouldntve been able to explore all the shit he wanted to explore. Excessive specialization is the antithesis of the renaissance man

I worked 20 years as a research engineer in an experimental lab. Our group was very data centric and we rarely started with equations. Things would get math heavy only in data analysis and then trying to model what we found. I'm sure I sent > $1M though machine shops with few design reviews. In many designs there are places where you have to do engineering analysis, but over analysis is easy to do when you are just trying to prove a concept. From my experience a 3 step process should be used. #1 make it work (this is the hard part), #2 make it work better, #3 see step 2.

>>2777276
>That's what the OGs did in the early 1900s and it looks a lot more fun

Many of the OGs in the olden days also spent their entire lives spitballing ideas and failing to make anything work because there were no existing examples to derive test data from.

Then when they did get some proof of concept working they often died young while attempting to gather that data, which is necessary to develop engineering standards.

not pissing your life away throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and maybe dying in the process all for (maybe) being a footnote in the history books or a staple of old tyme engineering fail videos doesnt sound like much fun at all.

>>2777333
>not pissing your life away throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks and maybe dying in the process all for (maybe) being a footnote in the history books
Academic engineers are the ones who end up in the footnotes for inventing a "7.3% more efficient!!1!" variation of the idea of a natural engineer.
>not pissing your life away throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks
Hence why I mentioned that it's about balance. Reinventing the wheel every time you've got an idea is a waste of time, no shit. But if you ONLY ever go by the book (which is how modern engineers are trained it seems), you'll never create anything new, only very minute variations of what has been done a million times before.

>>2777355
>it's about balance

nah, it's about brilliance. a Bob Widlar comes along once in a generation, and you can dream of being Bob, but you ain't Bob and you're never going to be Bob. All the loser engineers who create "minute variations" are doing the best they can with what they have. Go ahead and invent a better laser diode with your "natural engineering", and get fucking rich.

(Widlar, who was described as "more artist than engineer", at one point in time [Widlar and Talbert] were responsible – one designed them and one made them – for more than eighty percent of the linear circuits made and sold in the world)

>>2777276
I went through a pretentious music phase, and a pretentious movie phase.
When you learn the elements of music or you learn movie tropes and really analyze and break them down, they completely lose their magic.
Being "art" there is some intangible magic which can speak to you, but if you are breaking it down to the building blocks and figure out what its trying to do, its a lot harder to enjoy.

When designing something, its the exact opposite. There is no magic, there is no aura trying to make you feel a certain way.
Its a tool that has a job, and it does its job with little fanfare.
Breaking things down to their building blocks and calculating everything is fucking awesome.
You are trying to make something tangible in the real world. Putting serious thought and effort into every single part makes great end products.

I fucking LOATHE eyeballing stuff in my projects and avoid it if I can.

>>2777355
I'd say it's a bit of both. Serious engineering often allows for developing ideas and concepts that would otherwise get laughed out. The Wankel engine for instance, people would say it's terribly inefficient, it will never achieve proper compression, the shapes are too complex for cost-effective machining and all. Well, with the proper math, you can show people that they are wrong and come up with an actual grounds-breaking concept. In practice, the Wankel did prove too expensive and not as efficient, but it's far from the pipe dream that its detractors claimed it was.

>>2777276
>>What happened to trying shit out
we still do, but stuff's so complicated now it can get expensive to try stuff out and find out you fucked up. You want to try stuff out? Get into doing simulations, it's a lot like playing a videogame. Computers make doing all those calculations much easier. Generally, the more math you do the more interesting the engineering gets. Take mechanism design, you know actually designing mechanical stuff. Designing fundamentally new mechanisms is a lot easier the more math you know. You can literally fucking mathematically prove mechanisms into existence.
>>2777355
>"7.3% more efficient!!1!"
that's pretty fucking huge. If you make a heat engine or electrical power supply more efficient by 7.3% you're gonna get RICH!

>>2777290
How do I become a design engineer? I wanna be an inventor so bad man

Western exceptionalism is built around the fraternity of scolasticism and empiricism. Empiricism, though, comes first (See Faraday and Maxwell). These days, the balance is off.

>>2777384
>I fucking LOATHE eyeballing stuff in my projects and avoid it if I can.

Nobody said you have to eyeball anything, you can still build with precise measurements without it being engineered or drawn up in CAD.

>>2777454
>you can still build with precise measurements without it being engineered or drawn up in CAD.
I mean everyone does this with small and basic projects. The problem is when you want to start doing bigger better projects, its all in the planning. And planning quickly becomes messy and complicated.

The reality for everyday /diy/ers is, any halfway decent or mildly complicated project can be greatly improved just by using CAD.
People get scared of the though of CAD, but its piss easy to learn and its cheap/free nowadays.

When OP says "what happened to trying things out", thats the exact opposite of what you want.
Everyone has done projects where they forget some key component, something is wrong or doesnt fit.
You have to rework what you just did because of shitty planning, and the project suffers for it.

You would have caught that if you would have modeled it in CAD
It really helps you take the next step in your projects, especially with the built in testing tools. It literally does stress test and engineering for you.

>>2777276
As somebody who is studying engineering (Aerospace Engineering, specifically). I agree, CAD is the bane of my existence, calculations can be greatly simplified to just rules of thumb.

I have built my own radio controlled aircraft before, using only rules of thumb (and they worked), but really, I do see the importance of calculations, just not shit like CAD. If anything, it slows down design and puts everything into a box.

That said, I think there is a difference in my mentality and the mentality of my classmates. I have an upcoming project to design a glider as a team and I already have a design in mind (based on Lippisch and Horten research into Nurflugel). The design would be really quite simple with only a half elliptical wing and a boom with a vertical stabilizer (no rudder, which can be controlled by drag rudders, which double as spoilers).

To me, this looks right, almost like a Seagull in flight. I would call this glider Mowe (German for Seagull), if I could. I need to convince my team, which has terminal Boeing mentality, to go along with it.

P.S: The airfoil is a Gottingen Goe 445.

>>2777290
is it still more satisfying to throw shit together when throwing shit together usually involves lots of swearing and more wasted materials?

>>2777276
Getting an engineering degree was really not what I was expecting. All the promo material showed students in electronics lab doing cool looking projects. IRL there was one project course per year and the rest of it was cramming calculus textbooks.

I find project work really fun and it motivates me to learn all the theory needed to make my project perfect and then some. Doing nothing but solving equations on paper isn't very interesting and it's often not clear how the theories relate to the real world. I got through my degree but it was a miserable struggle.

What's worse is after graduating I had some programming interviews. I taught myself programming in highschool and could have answered the questions back then, but I'd spent the last four years doing almost nothing but fucking calculus homework. Nobody ever expects you to solve a partial differential equation on an interview or on the job.

Now there's a lot of new grads who can't do anything hands on like soldering and breadboarding. They're not even aware that real life op-amps aren't always perfectly rail to rail like the ones in textbook problems.

>>2777517
> Now there's a lot of new grads who can't do anything hands on like soldering and breadboarding. They're not even aware that real life op-amps aren't always perfectly rail to rail like the ones in textbook problems.
>>2777472 again. This is what I mean by terminal Boeing mentality: Kids who dream of working for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheo, Northrop Grumman, or any one of the "industry leaders" in their field or fields of engineering, while having no practical knowledge or experience.

Boeing is the most common company that I see the classmates in my field dreaming of as a job. (Probably why Boeing has made so many boo-boos in the past 15 years).

>>2777276
>Anyone else feels like academic engineering takes a lot of fun out of making stuff

Yeah, because academic engineering isn't just about having an idea and trying it out, which is the fun part of engineering. It's about the final design being good at what it does.

The reality is, any fuckwit can make a toy RC plane, often with minimal or no education on the subject. But they're going to fuck critical things up, or, at the very least, end up with a working but inefficient design. That's fine, it's just a toy. It didn't cost much and posed minimal risk of damage or injury. That isn't the case when you're designing a 300-passenger jet for Boeing (okay maybe Boeing thinks it is but still). Or a 70-storey building. You don't get the luxury of just cobbling together something that looks cool and then ironing out the kinks later. Major design oversights on "real" projects can easily end up costing 7+ figures, a lawsuit, or both.

The more math-heavy side of engineering exists because efficiency is a desirable goal. Think of the earliest internal combustion engines. A lot of those were just made based on winging it, seeing how well it worked, and making improvements to the next version. And they were dogshit compared to even the worst of modern engines. One could easily weigh over a hundred pounds just to make single-digit horsepower. The basic design of a simple, carbureted engine has barely changed between then and now. However, between thew slew of small optimizations and materials improvements, the modern engine can be any combination you want of more powerful, smaller, lighter, more efficient, and cheaper.

That's the point of it. Optimization. You don't HAVE to do it (usually), but, reality is, you're kind of half-assing it if you aren't.

>>2777503
Halt! Papiere bitte! This german aerospace enthusiast wants to see your Möwe.

>>2777541
Your arguments are all correct, but I think the problem these guys and myself have is that optimization is cringe and gay. I think this can be avoided by is actually coming up with something new and original, in which case youre "allowed" to make it non-optimized. However, I also think you can NEVER throw theory out the window. Take, for example, the Wright Brothers. They went through the classical iterative design process, tried things out and improved after every failure. They were, however, also well versed in theory and supplemented their knowledge with experiments. Thats the reason the aeroplane was invented by them and not the hundreds of shmucks who had tried to do so before them.

>>2777276
academia is a joke
even in egghead shit like software engineering academic types are seen as impractical retards not being able to produce results that matter

>>2777503
A vertical stabilizer but no rudder? Sounds like bullshit to me anon. Maybe you mean a horizontal stabilizer/Elevator?

>>2777503
Relax retard, noone cares about drag at those Res. You better get that weight down first.

>>2777541
For diy just doing it and trying stuff out just plain werks better. Even large complicated inventions with many parts can be broken down into simple sub assemblies that can then be linked together.

Now if you come up with a great idea and want to get it mass produced then that is where the engineering really comes into play to make it lighter, cheaper, and easier to mass produce.

As a diy'er I usually don't give a shit about lightness unless it is something I physically have to carry around, so I overbuild the absolute shit out of the things I make for super longevity in the hopes I will never have to touch it again in my lifetime.

>>2777670

NTA....but old hat, Foolio-

>"No rudders were used, and the vertical surfaces were simple fixed fins with no flight controls. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor<wbr>throp_XP-79

Just dicking around and spitballing ideas gets old quick when stuff doesn't pan out and you need to show results.<br>I used to work in an engineering lab and was dealing with working on projects where you couldn't just use equations or computer models for a design since we were working in a highly non linear environment and they just weren't reliable. Scale model testing was used to evaluate and optimise the design and it was tedious work, changing a distance here, tweaking a dimension there just to fill out the parameter space. A lot of time and energy wasted going down dead ends or chasing shadows in the data. Null results may still be results but when there is a deadline approaching and you need actual results then you start to sweat and would give your right arm for a bit of guidance from the boring math stuff

>>2777276
fun doesn't matter at work
fun is for hobbies
work is to earn enough to retire young then
pursue hobbies

robowaifutechnician

>>2778067
work won't matter for much longer
Everyone is focusing on the wrong thing.
The gold standard, race, anything but what actually matters.
The world's rate of profit, automation, productivity.
The ghost of communism will come back to haunt the world with a vengeance within a matter of years. What will good will the money you earn to subsist do you when they pull the rug? All that's left is high risk high reward. Its either that or it might as well be nothing at all.
I could be wrong but that's what i think. That's what they're saying. At the world economic forum...

Anonymous

>>2777276
I sympathize a lot with what you're feeling. A lot of anons in this thread are taking the words right out of my mouth.

>>2778067
>>2778074
Except (You). Both of you are profoundly retarded.

robowaifutechnician

>>2778112
You know while we're on the subject. I've been itching to make a video speaking my mind a little bit on an unrelated subject but not come across as schizo or anything. Anyways here is what i perceive would be the most useful skills to survive a hypothetical robot apocalypse. I'm not implying i've mastered any of those skills or anything.

Anonymous

>>2777815
>For diy just doing it and trying stuff out just plain werks better.

Except, even then, that's not always true. Even just from personal example, I built a lifting gantry to move some heavy machinery. I COULD have just winged it, but the consequences of that are either having 2000lb of machine tool come crashing to the ground, or spending an extra few hundred dollars on extra steel that wasn't needed. Maybe I get lucky and manage to eyeball it correctly, but why would I do that when learning some very basic statics and engineering the main span properly took less than an hour? Never even mind the confidence of knowing I have a mathematically-validated safety factor of 5.0+. Standing anywhere near a suspended load that weighs as much as a small car is already nerve-wracking enough, fuck the potential added stress of "gee I really hope this holds".

As another example, I've also got a 3D printer design on the backburner. Using basic physics to see how fast it should be able to move with a given motor helps greatly with figuring out how much I want/need to spend on the servo motors.

As yet another, I'm working on an angle grinder attachment that involves some wheels at as much as 18,000RPM. A bit of research and math showed the bearings I had selected weren't going to last very long. Again, very little effort spent checking, probably saved me quite a bit more in re-doing parts of the assembly after the thing failed.

I won't lie, the vast majority of my design work is just based on best guesses and experience. I would guess a lot of industrial design work still is. Those do still count for a lot when fleshing out the overall design. But knowing where to and actually putting in the extra effort in critical areas is incredibly useful, no matter how you slice it.

>>2778158
>But knowing where to and actually putting in the extra effort in critical areas is incredibly useful, no matter how you slice it.

Well no fucking duh. Yeah if you're building something like a gantry you probably want to at least research your beam size a bit not just get the flimsiest one you can up there. But that's still a bit different then sitting down at a computer and making a fully functional cad model of everything. Hell they have charts showing you how to size a beam properly, what kind of loads it can handle, etc.

And yes if you have things spinning at high speed with any kind of substantial weight you probably don't want to just slap some of the cheapest 608 bearings in there. Did you fully draft up the entire contraption in CAD and have it do a full analysis of the strain on every joint, and your material selection in order to get the engineer's stamp of approval?

robowaifutechnician

>>2778150
Well my dad just left. He came to visit. He and my mother law subscribed to my yt. My mom is subscribed as well. She commented on the deleted video. Regardless to say i'm going to have to tone it down a bit so they won't get worried. Really i owe it them since they have been helping me out financially and such... Like i said in my next video i will make it doomer theme talking about a hypothetical robot doomsday scenario I think. Now I happen to be a jack of many trades but my knowledge is stretched thin and im getting a little rusty really ive been trying to keep my mind sharp constantly learning but this year im going to be 35... And yes I do happen to have a wife with a kid. But let me explain. She's thai. That's my explanation. lol. Again im lucky to have my parents as a safety net and i haven't felt much need so really my doomerism as far as im concerned is a bit exaggerated. But going back to me being a jack of all trades. I don't happen to have deep knowledge regarding hacking, but I know somebody who does, but he charges a modest fee $50 for 3 months worth of stuff... for "ethical hacking" ;)
tell him peteblank gave you the referral and he'll add in a month and i'll get a small fee. I appreciate the views but i'd also appreciate a little extra. I help you you help me kind of thing and got to show something to my goldigger wife. I am not responsible what you do with the stuff on the telegram. He'll give you good stuff but you have to put in a little effort you know, get acquainted with privilege escalation on linux, python, cross side scripting. He also offers tutoring for a fee. Again what you do between him and you is not my responsibility. I'm on the fence on whether to advertise it on the youtube channel. Yes you'd be risking $50 but you can report and take down my channel if you don't get the things you seek.
Get on telegram and look up @V3T4L1
We're at a good spot for this kind of advertising because the channel is not like huge or anything.

Anonymous

>>2777446
Get a degree in mechanical engineering and then get a job in design engineering.

>>2777276
if you want to make a plane that will kill only you seconds from taking off thats one thing...and still fucking retarded because you could easily kill somebody else. real things are made for money, and work usually isnt fun. stop being a fag

>>2777503
a flying wing with an airfoil without reflex?
lol. lmao even.

>>2777276
>I'm not an engineer
yes that one is obvious. as for your example, i really wouldn't eyeball an rc car either, especially the batteries and motors
the engine fried itself before moving at all but hey at least you saved an hour of boring pen and paper work
also, context? if it was competitive in nature then "it just werks" is always doomed to fail

>>2778170
nta but this reads like a strawman
>Hell they have charts showing you how to size a beam properly, what kind of loads it can handle, etc
indeed you can just look up a formula and plug in the numbers but i'd rather have it done by someone who understands the theory and limitations of the formula and tables than someone who doesn't
for example these don't take into account force concentrations or the anisotropic behavior of certain materials, fatigue, or just that drilling a small hole is enough to triple the local stress concentration

>>2777517
What do you make of the train wreck competitions where engineering student groups trying and failing spectacularly? Are all of our engineers just fucking retarded now?

There was a big competition for hyperloop and like 9/10 groups didn't make it 5 feet

>>2779531
its a bit of a humiliation ritual. how much can you possibly expect to get done by a group of peak dunning krueger kids in 1 semester? half these kids will end up at vaporware companies anyway and not even be aware of it lmao.

I'm a structural engineer and I get the best of both worlds. Stuff I design gets built within 6 months after issuing the drawings. And it has to be economical and practical or you're out of a job. So you have a continuous process of refining your skillset while beholden to codes standards and calculations.

The idea of being in development hell for 4 years and its not built because marketing department doesnt like it would drive me fucking insane

>>2779531
because it's a dumb idea in the first place
elon musk has also managed to uninvent the subway and move traffic jams underground in death traps
>for your next engineering challenge you have to design an electric car that can drive 1000 miles in 10 hours without recharging
>wtf everyone failed are they dumb or something?

>>2779559
Hyper loop being dumb as hell aside, The two best teams, one used an off the shelf rc car, and the other strapped a nitrogen bottle to wheel and let it rip

https://www.youtube.com/@project-ai<wbr>r/videos
this is a good channel about messing with rc cars and planes without really understanding what is going on. his "designs" often crash on their first flight and these sometimes involve expensive miniature jets
>don't need no slip-rol or pitch stability
>downforce, never heard of it
>i'm going things more aerodynamic by decreasing the wing's AR and reinforce the tail with wooden sticks
>i made this part more aerodynamic by adding a nose (when the back surface is completely flat)
jesus if you're going to make youtube videos about airplanes for a living at least read aerodynamics for dummies or something

When you're building something even slightly complex you either need to calculate tolerances and everything or keep prototyping through trial and error. The latter gets old reaaaal quick

>>2777517
how much of the math is actually needed, im thinking of picking up a book for math & physics for inventors or something like that(im not even at high school level of math)

>>2777276
one of the best lessons in design engineering (t. BSE Inventive Design) was a random company making RC helicopters before the drone explosion. The students asked how did you do the calculations for the rotational force s.t. the blade didn't grenade when spun up. Calculations they said? We attach one end to the rafter then have our fattest guy hang from the other end and figure that's stronk enough.

The thing they DIDN'T teach us in any engineering class was *where* to get anything to actually make stuff. The difference between a channel like mark rober and me (20 years his senior) is a workshop full of motors, servos, controllers, equipment, screws, printers etc. Design engineering should be more about compliant mechanisms and when to use M5 screws vs. interference fit. I guess that would be DET (design engieering tech, a la EET vs EE)

In short it's sort of like "you can make this from free pallet wood if you a huge shop and $10k of tools"

robowaifutechnician

I hate to get preachy again but listen.
Not all problems require same degree of creativity.
The invention of the microwave didn't require a lot of creativity, it was about calculating the right frequency to heat food. It has to be very precise.
The invention of the airplane however did require a lot of creativity.
Robots are more like the invention of the airplane than the microwave and so is AI despite it being heavy on math I think. If I could get a partner and you told me to pick between and architect or an engineer i'd pick an architect.

Anonymous

>>2777290
in work designing toaster rack
why is the spacing 70mm
i liked that number. when i did the maths after the safety factor was 4.5x. but i like 70mm for holding 800kg 9000x700x15 plates, it feels right.

>>2777355
>if you ONLY ever go by the book (which is how modern engineers are trained it seems), you'll never create anything new, only very minute variations of what has been done a million times before
The thing that many fail to realize is that just not going by the book is not enough, you also have to know *the* book ways very well to have a chance at creating something truly new, otherwise there's a great chance you'll be wasting time both reinventing the wheel and going against the book without realizing it.
There are also fundamentals (like basic laws of physics) that you either do by the book or you are 100% bound to fail.

>>2779913
>The invention of the airplane however did require a lot of creativity.
bad example. it wasn't "invented" it was a series of innovations that eventually made it possible. and birds exist you know
the most difficult part besides the power to weight ratio was achieving a stable and controlled flight but that was already achieved with gliders in the 19th century

>>2777276
>tfw good at math & physics
>Hate inventing, tinkering and taking stuff apart
>Hate that engineering collegues are boring uggos
I should've been an artist. I take all these inventions for granted and care very little for how they work.

>>2777276
They are being confusing on purpose, to hide their mistakes, and make others dependent on them to explain it.

Jewish knowledge obfuscation is a bigger problem than anything else in academia and is a legitimate threat to civilization.

>>2777517
This. Engineering nowadays is more a maths degree than anything practical.

>>2780070
not really. they teach you lots of maths in your first year because it's a tool to solve problems, in your later years most stuff can be derived with highschool algebra, like the theoretical limit of power you can extract from wind, or the optimal bypass ratio in turbofans
and if you encounter a DE you just put some forward euler script in matlab or python and call it a day. a bad habit i know but it gets shit done

>>2779736
in my first year it was calculus followed by even more calculus but i have a presumption it was there to weed out the brainlets
didn't really need it for later courses but i took the brainlet mechanical engineer route. the first year was everyone together so i can only speak for myself
at least i'm not a civil retard. they even have to interact with the "architects" and these are considered especially retarded even by civil engineering standards, and that just took a very short conversation with a friend of a friend
i know how to calculate a beam but they have courses about concrete with a digit behind it

>>2778170
>Did you fully draft up the entire contraption in CAD

Most of it, yes. It's almost always way better to do at least a rough model beforehand to suss out any stupid issues like "oh, this part literally won't fit in the gap I left for it" and greatly cuts down on the inevitable "shit, now that I've got this together I can see it would have been way better to do [whatever]". The only time I don't bother is when the assembly is literally like 4 parts of minimal complexity.

>have it do a full analysis of the strain on every joint

I mean, I could...but I already know, based on experience, that strength isn't the limiting factor anywhere in the design. It rarely is for personal 1-offs.

I don't even know what your or the OP's point even is anymore. By now, it's little more than just whining about how, sometimes, some people want you to do math on some parts of some projects. You already know you don't have to do this for many designs. You technically never have to do it if it's just something you're putting together for yourself.

Nobody's stopping you from fucking around and finding out on a regular basis, other than the ones in charge of expensive corporate projects. You literally never have to bother with the parts you don't like if you don't want to outside of that scope. WTF is there even to complain about?

>>2780495
Some people are just too lazy and ignorant to do things properly even when they really should so they start inventing excuses why their fucking around is just as great, if not even better way to achieve results.

>>2777384
also, the disadvantage of knowing the mechanics of story telling (hero's journey and stuff like that) and all of the arts of film-making and editing, you can only go on to make Nerdwriter style videos on it, or write pseud articles for a magazine that no one will read. Being a critic sucks.

>>2777276
a lot of the time when they 'eyeballed shit' they ended up dead

this video right here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTp<wbr>a0WVHspA
i generally like his videos because like OP has said just eyeballing things and see what works can be entertaining to watch (because i don't have to) but here he made a 20 minute video about boat propellors and he's going to find out by which one is the best by 3D printing and testing every single one of them
the first thing i asked myself was "bro what about your motor speed and torque efficiency" he didn't mention that at all
if i was him i would have read a book abour boat props, then made a parametric prop and slapped a vortex panel CFD software on it and let it run to get some data and designs without the need to print them out and test them in the field, but i suppose that would make a boring video
the one good thing about the comment section in his videos is that the usual brown nosing isn't that significant relatively speaking and he usually gets called out by people even more autistic than me
people being overly reliable on their 3D printers is something that i notice more and more

tl;dr, he could achieve the same with a lot less time and effort if he thinks before he does

>>2777639
I forgot I made this post, I will bring you some bread in the next hour, but I think I will make some slight changes.
>>2777671
The construction material of a full size would be Sitka Spruce, maybe not the best material, but comfy, soulful and even fit for purpose as a hobbyist aircraft. A model would be constructed from balsa.
>>2779472
I am a newbie, but would washout not serve the same purpose? I might revise my idea to have this. Reflex could be a simpler solution, but it would not work with drag rudders, unless there is an uneven split, which would make matters harder to solve.
Also, I am thinking of dabbling in lighter than air stuff, specifically for RC. I will probably buy a ready-made envelope from Windreiter and then figure out thrust lines and counter weights, since this will be of a design like that of the Goodyear-type designs. Does anyone know why Goodyear switched to pusher configurations after WWII? Was it because they were louder (so it would draw more attention to the advertising?

>>2777639
Bread has been served.

Yes, I know it is a rough design proposal and I did not include a third view, but this should give most of what you need to know. More of a napkin sketch than anything else. The ranges and such are educated guesses given visual references. Calculations can be done later.

I might as well make mention, there is such a thing as "too light" for a glider. This is where the craft is unable to penetrate the wind.

Interestingly enough, a similar design has been attempted and is now commercially available.

Sauce: https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/sho<wbr>wthread.php?4123391-Dlg-bow-110

I will now revise the sketch and add washout. Wish me luck, anons!

>>2783481
Also, I am wondering if a thicker wing is better? Maybe a wing with progressively changing airfoils?

For instance, the center is Goe 8K, then Goe 7K, Goe 6k and finally Goe 5K at the wingtips.

Any advice?

>>2783465
yes it does, but you need a significant amount of sweep and that reduces the efficiency unless you're countering transsonic effects, it also affects the lift distribution
i've worked on one for a bit, can't say i'm an expert and reflexed airfoils generally have a lower lift over drag ratio so this is kind of a trade off
it's up to you to make it work but for a first time project it seems like asking for more on your plate than you should
btw i'm genuinely interested so if you give more info about the limitations that would be helpful. i did a similar project, even the match checked out, who knew
forgot to mention adding vertical stabilisers sort of defeats the purpose of trying to get rid of parasitic drag

>>2783483
depends on what you're trying to achieve. more info would be great

>>2783501
Just a functional glider for a final project grade in a class. I am thinking outside the box, since it should be of simpler construction than a full fuselage glider. It also should provide an easy work around for using high aspect ration wings.

The airfoils would provide a slight degree of washout, thanks to some differing camber and leading edge positions.

>>2783498
>forgot to mention adding vertical stabilisers sort of defeats the purpose of trying to get rid of parasitic drag
Another oversight on my part, I got wrapped up in spin prevention by having such a fin in place.

These are very good points. Do you think that a slight sweep (five degrees, for example) would be an improvement?

I think that adding dihedral to the wing might also make the need of a vertical stabilizer to be pointless. Does this sound like a reasonable conclusion, or is this a genuinely retarded thought?

>>2783506
you're absolutely right, sweep and dihedral have roughly a similar effect on slip-roll stability but dihedral is far more effective
you slip in one direction and that sideslip causes a rolling moment that causes a movement in the other direction to counter the slip
however there is a ton more to it and also dynamic stability is not my strong point so perhaps i should stop talking

>I am thinking outside the box, since it should be of simpler construction than a full fuselage glider.
the main point of flying wings and blended bodies is to actually eliminate the parasitic drag of the fuselage and tail section. it might simplify construction and be even more efficient but you're basically opening pandora's box containing airplane stability

there is an entire general on this board dedicated to rc planes, maybe these anons can also help out. designing is one thing but actually building it also comes with shit like the shrinking foil warping the wing
and when i did this it was with a vanilla layout if we had to work with a reflex airfoil balsa and shrinking foil might not have been an option

>>2783506
oh fugg or were you talking about simple yaw control
i'm fucking off now, se you tomorrow whan my mind is a bit more clear
yeah i suck at stability, always neglected it besides the pitch that doesn't make you nosedive. i'm not that smart or talented, i just know certain things

>>2783516
I interact with the model airplane guys sometimes. I might share my latest project with them later (kit built Fokker Dr.I). I think that they would be a great deal of help for this project too.

Reflex could be done by making fixed control surfaces. The disadvantage is more tip drag, since there are more corners i n the wing for vortices to develop. I would sooner use tissue paper and banana oil than foil, since this saves weight, Mylar would also be a good option.

>>2783520
The modern train of thought is stability = gyro. Gliders and GA are safe from this trend at the moment. There are advantages to instability, though I am sure you are aware of what they are.

Also, I am far from an expert (my grades explain that, I have a 69 in Calc III). The most important bits of calculus for Aerospace Engineering are series and integrals to find area and volume, which I can do.

>>2783679
Could mess with spoilers on the wing
 Generally rc scale flying wings are fine with just elevons.eleven.

Computer/gyroscope stability is a closes feedback control loop thing and can be applied to anything

>>2779913
you are the last person who should offer an opinion, as per usual you are absolutely wrong on both examples. shit son, seriously how do you even function in the real world being this retarded?

>>2783506
maximum lift minimal drag. both are simple to calculate, that should dictate the profile shape and size of your wing because ultimately it has to also be strong enough to support itself. it's been done with paper airplanes and of course every design since lift was a thing. hobbyists do this all the time in the RC airplane sector. you are treading absolutely zero new ground, stop acting like you'll invent something new by throwing poop at the walls.

>>2783481
Ah, Dankeschön!
Cool design, I like the 30s/40s look. I presume the straight trailing edge is for straight control surfaces? In combination with the low AR, your wing has some inbuilt sweep already, though nonlinear (and therefore has non-sinusoidal damping). It's interesting to think what that would do for stabilization. In general, thinner wings are less draggy, but I don't know how much beatings/lift force it needs to endure. I need to know more about this project, also. What are it's goals and limitations?

>>2783769
The goal is to fly, or at least be conceptually sound. No limitations are provided, aside from it needing to be structurally sound and/or feasible, hence the aspect ratio.

P.S: I almost considered applying to TUM or TUB, so I could join a division of Akaflieg among other things, but I thought that it would be too much money for college, so I stayed local, since there is still a good college nearby. The AIAA is too expensive, though, plus the guys at college would probably want me to renew my AMA ($85/year after being free up to 18 years of age).

>>2783747
It is nothing novel, I am just trying to apply what I have learned (from my professors). I came up with this design more for the ease of construction, drag rudders would help eliminate the need for additional stab area for a rudder. A model is to be constructed, but the design must be transferred to a computer.

>>2783747
What is the stability of the best glide? Compared with the optimal Cl/Cd shape, is it possible that a slightly deeper section is better for real flights, because reduced weight reduces the energy wasted by control surfaces?

>>2783679
yeah or wire cutting foam. it's quick, cheap, easy, durable, easy to repair
however it takes some skill and it restricts your design options. a half eliptical wing anon is suggesting isn't happening but at least it saves you the autism of having to cut all the airfoil profiles out of balsa. 3D printing wasn't much of a thing yet so maybe things have changed
>The most important bits of calculus for Aerospace Engineering are series and integrals to find area and volume, which I can do.
in my case i usually got by with highschool algebra. the most math heavy stuff i saw in this field were joukowski transformations and the lifting line theory derivation
the results are absolutely beautiful though. you can actually prove the moment of a wing around the aerodynamic center is irrelevant of the AoA or roughly calculate a wing's performance with only a few equations
also, the like the lazy arse that i am but more often than not you don't have a choice
>solving a DE?
>forward euler says hi, haha
almost supid how effective such a simple method is, but i usually use central differentiation. it's a second order method that uses the same amount of computations and takes no time to write or understand
just a coding suggestion if anon is going to simulate the flight

>>2783841
you do realise that this is a very vague question, right?

robowaifutechnician

>>2783744
I'm going to double down and say yes I'd prefer an architect as a partner than an engineer. The inside can be imperfect, the code can be spaghetti but the outside must be good and I'd be willing to go as far as bruteforcing the motor values and whatever else. Now the wright brothers weren't engineers, they weren't scientists. They were bicycle repairmen.

Anonymous

>>2784147
You are the architect in your pairing. You are the useful idiot with the big ideas. You need an engineer to tell you how to design a mold properly and how big booba need to be to provide maximal stability while pounding top down bottom up.

No sane person would be doing this. You need to pay an engineer a lot of money to even think about helping you

robotwaifutechnician

>>2784158
I made the mold. He's only helped me with choosing the motors for the back and legs and the gear ratio. He also suggested I use nickel strips for the batteries. Either way I got a thick skin and I'm not going to get upset over everyone's comments. He probably won't help me with the booba cause again he's a Christian. I don't think he'll be helping me a whole lot moving forward but that's okay because I can take it from here.

Anonymous

>>2783977
Sometimes a glider will periodically stall. I could find a book about limit cycles or other nonlinear DE topics in the design of gliders, where the goal is to create or limit such stalling, but maybe it would be academic without any practical effect on design. In other words, since the aerofoil is straightforward to solve, what do you add next?

>>2784175
If you're an engineer making a 70mn flying wing. You can do a lot of math to figure out weight distribution and lift and how unstable you want it to be and how your should lay out the fuel cells to maintain the balance.

If you're making an rc scale drone its probably easiest to just balance the wing with the battery and see if you want it to be tail or nose heavy by moving some weights around in another comparment.

>>2777276
>just try stff out dude
https://youtu.be/FBN3xfGrx_U

>>2784147
i've talked to some civil engineering students when still in school, and they had some projects were they had to work together with architects
they said that they were idiots that came up with the most impossible designs for their eyesores and would always complain if you dared to suggest you need a couple of pillars left and right to not make it collapse
if you're too cheap to hire boring engineers you're going to get yourself killed
>Now the wright brothers weren't engineers, they weren't scientists. They were bicycle repairmen
ok you're a halfwit but i already knew that

robotwaifutechnician

>>2785045
Oh threatening me are you. I don't know if an architect is the right person. I want someone to make the exterior look nice is what I meant. You can try to kill me but that won't change the fact that capitalism is over and we're living on borrowed time.
What was the profession of the wright brothers btw?

Anonymous

>>2777276
I'm a biomed. engineer, so maybe a bit of a different perspective from what you'd want to hear.

>What happened to trying shit out?
We still do, but engineering isn't just trying shit out, its working with what you already know to pin down things you don't within acceptable parameters (i.e 'good enough'). This necessitates having an intuitive grasp of some concepts and sound rules to reason out what cannot be grasped on its own.

>That's what the OGs did in the early 1900s and it looks a lot more fun than how we're going about it today.
They had no choice. It was 'do it + write it down for later' or it won't get done until someone else does.
We *still* 'make do' with what we've got, it's just that we've got so much more.

Trying things out 'to see if it works' is less an engineer's task and more of a scientist's whole purpose (which is rare to see in the modern academic world, I agree, but that's a whole other thread)

Read up on how Osborne Reynolds popularized a handy way to approach the following question: How do you figure out if liquid flow in a tube will be turbulent/laminar?
Guy just built a machine + tested parameters in meticulous, absurd detail so no one would have to compute Navier-Stokes eq's for the fluid dynamics, which would be
a living nightmare for anyone trying to figure it out in the late 1800s (Stokes published them in 1851).

Reynold's number is just one example of how we reduce uncertainty by trying out a bunch of stuff, failing far more than anyone else just to AVOID more complex computation.
So yeah, you best bet that whenever an engineer plunges deep into math, it is out of necessity + training.
Small projects are good to nail workflow before moving into complex problems.

robotwaifutechnician

>>2785280
Well for example think of a robot kicking a ball. It has to stand in one leg, move one leg back, then move it forward and balance itself while doing it. This adds a whole another level of complexity. Then yeah you'd need more math and physics to know how gravity is playing out throughout it's body etc... does that mean you can't do it through trial and error? Not necessarily I think. Companies however do want to ensure their stuff is safe though. A car has to be engineered well and so does an airplane and specially construction. An inventor however does not have to be an engineer necessarily. It's an advantage. A prototype can be imperfect and then later given to engineers to be made perfect if its good. A robot kicking a ball can be done through trial and an error now it playing futbol well that's harder. Lastly there's the fact that you can offload some of the more complex math to the computer but you'd have to know where to look. For example I could simulate the stress on the robot spine and by doing that I can use less complex math. Unreal engine is not the right tool for the job but I am more comfortable with it. I think.

Anonymous

>>2785280
>How do you figure out if liquid flow in a tube will be turbulent/laminar?
Why can't I find the canonical equation/chart for flow in a thin linear elastic tube? Surely it's just one more dimensionless parameter.

>>2785287
yeah or you could just take a course in linear algebra and mechatronics to learn how transformation matrices are useful to translate servo positions and velocities into wanted leg motions instead of just "trying to see what werks" and end up with something that in the best case barely moves in 10 times the amount of time
at least with your dumb robot you're not killing anyone and only wasting your own time and effort because math is for nerds xD

robotwaifutechnician

>>2785606
You might not be aware of the functionality of unreal engine but you'd be surprised. You can give the models body's bones weights differently by section. It has inverse kinematics. It even has springs and joints etc... I can also simulate the motor for the back and give it torque.

Anonymous

>>2785074
...there is a reason nothing is named after them.
i always get triggered when they are lauded as some geniuses that invented the airplane from scratch when in reality their only significant contributions were reinventing control surfaces and making a better propellor, while other people also made working airplanes at literally the same time
by the way if you sum up all their contributions including their patent wars that severly handicapped the american aviation industry for years it's actually negative
only ignorant clowns who got their education from watching history channel bring them up, they're on the same level as edison who also did significant damage out of greed and spite

>>2785610
sure man if clowning around with a program without knowing what you're doing is how you pass your time then i won't stop you
has boston dynamics called yet?

robotwaifutechnician

>>2786019
I do have a good idea of what unreal engine can do and simulating a robot physics happens to be one of those things. Again is not the right tool for the job the fact that it happens to be good for this is coincidence.
https://m.youtube.com/@Lusiogenic

Anonymous

>>2786044
this is like installing CFD or other software thinking it replaces fluid dynamic books
saw it even on here, someone made a thread about how thick a beam should be, just a beam supported on two ends with the load in the middle. a clown with a program simulated the load for a bunch of different weights and sizes to get the deflection when this problem is so simple you can just plug the numbers in a formula and do it with pen and paper in 5 minutes
his mesh was atrocious too. a rectangular beam is the easiest shape there is to make a mesh for
as for CFD, the results you get are about as good as the user's skill
you're namefagging about robots yet just reading a bit about mechatronics is too much too ask, no you just download some software because don't need no theory. the credibility of the results it spews out... who knows lol

>>2786055
not trying to meme but they're more often than not legit homos
i see them as artists and not "people" who try to make things work

>>2777290
The best part is i can still look at what you built and whatbothers built and just throw something togheter and it will work. Ni Hao.

>>2785280
this transition is pretty important in aviation as well, especially at lower reynolds numbers
laminar separation, i was considering bringing up to glider anon but he's probably overthinking everything more than enough already

>>2786484
Glider anon, here, I thought about Reynold's numbers a little bit, I thought that using a fairly low Reynold's airfoil would compensate for the drag rudders. I know what Reynold's means to lift and drag, I just hope that I applied it correctly, the highest number I have is 100,000, so it is a fairly "clean" wing. I know hang gilders use a wing with a Reynold's number of 1,750,000, but this only makes sense for slow speeds. I know that load factors also affect things, though.

>>2786017
>there is a reason nothing is named after them.

Are you literally retarded?

>"Wright-Patterson AFB is "one of the largest, most diverse, and organizationally complex bases in the Air Force" with a long history of flight tests spanning from the Wright Brothers into the Space Age...."

>"NASA named the first Martian airfield for the Ingenuity helicopter "Wright Brothers Field". The miniature helicopter arrived on Mars on February 18, 2021, attached to the Perseverance rover. A small piece of wing fabric from the 1903 Wright Flyer was attached to a cable underneath Ingenuity's solar panel.

>In 1969, Neil Armstrong carried a similar Wright Flyer artifact to the Moon in the Lunar Module Eagle during Apollo 11.

>Ingenuity flew five times from Wright Brothers Field between April 19 and May 7, 2021, then departed for other areas, making a total of 72 flights"

>"Wright State University is a public research university in Fairborn, Ohio, United States. Originally opened in 1964 as a branch campus of Miami University and Ohio State University, it became an independent institution in 1967 and was named in honor of aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were residents of nearby Dayton..."

>>2787090
i meant in a scientific context in case that wasn't obvious
brainlet

>>2777355
About here is where it became clear you have no idea how modern engineering works.

>>2777276
This is a result of people having access to computers. You wouldn't be calculating everything if you only had a slide rule and some tables. Engineering is not science and too many people think that if you use complex mathematical models to describe your problems somehow your answer is an absolute truth because look how precise it is. Meanwhile in reality tolerances are usually in 10-20% range if you even get provided with them in the first place. Pic related was designed in year of our lord 1248. Immediately throwing complex math at a problem is usually not the right approach. A model should be complex enough, approximations and empirical findings are fine, we're doing engineering, not science.

>>2789190
>. Engineering is not science and too many people think that if you use complex mathematical models to describe your problems somehow your answer is an absolute truth because look how precise it is.

Of course not, but it's foolish to think that having a mathematical answer doesn't help justify many design choices made and doesn't make actual implementation easier. Control theory made the design of steam governors from a game of seeing if your design worked with no sound reasoning behind it other than tinkering to a precise enough science that could be replicated and redesigned to fit your own parameters for said problem. The same can be said for any field of mathematics made before the great crisis and reconciliation due to the nature of infinity in the 1800s: Reasonable, accurate and replicable mathematics was seen as the building blocks of any successful engineering design. There's a reason mathematics and engineering were inseparable until math started dealing with more abstract concepts.

>Immediately throwing complex math at a problem is usually not the right approach. A model should be complex enough, approximations and empirical findings are fine, we're doing engineering, not science.

It depends on your use case. If you want to build an RC car to fuck around with, of course. If you want to build electrical circuits, process digital signals or do any sort of engineering that isn't basic like robotics, power signals or fluid dynamics, you will have to understand complex mathematics in order to get the most meaningful results to base your model off of. The Internet runs of of the theory Claude Shannon laid out in the 40s and 50s and to engineer better tele-communication systems, you have to know that as a basis for whatever work you are doing. (cont.)

>>2789193
(cont.)

Same principle goes for any field and even the people that build that cathedral there knew it too since a lot of structural design can be reduced to geometry, which an architect of the 1200s knew as a prerequisite to being an architect. Engineers look down on mathematics too much and it's almost always to their detriment because there are certain axioms, empirical data and approximations that makes the model easy to solve with mathematics and also much easier to implement and check if the work done is correct (irl and on paper). This is almost entirely a modern attitude because every society that has delved deep into mathematics did it for some practical engineering purpose (e.g. the Greeks'/Egyptians' obsession with geometry and seafaring, the explosion of calculus after Leibniz/Newton and the growth of the field of physical science, thermodynamics and the Industrial Revolution, etc) , so there is no need to distinguish between complex math and non-complex math. Just math you need to solve the engineering problem you have and math you don't.

>>2789193
>If you want to build electrical circuits, process digital signals or do any sort of engineering that isn't basic like robotics, power signals or fluid dynamics, you will have to understand complex mathematics
You don't have to understand it, you just need to know how to use it. Mathematicians do the understanding part. I can use laplace transform to solve circuits, but I have no idea about intricate details of convergence, topological spaces or how to prove any of this. There just isn't enough time in one's lifetime to understand everything. Laplace transform in a mathematical sense is a complex operation, but from engineering point of view it gets rarely more complex than looking up a transform table.

>>2789204
>You don't have to understand it, you just need to know how to use it.
Then what happens when you have edge cases that aren't easy to generalize? Communications people have to think about this all the time because that's a massive point of failure and they have to ensure their systems work within very tight bounds.Same thing for power systems people too. Math is a tool just as much as the tools you use on-site.

> Mathematicians do the understanding part. I can use laplace transform to solve circuits, but I have no idea about intricate details of convergence, topological spaces or how to prove any of this. There just isn't enough time in one's lifetime to understand everything.

That is a terrible attitude to have. Just because you can't learn everything about a subject that is important for your project doesn't mean you can't learn enough to get a good physical intuition of what it means or at the very least understand what is going on so you can apply it to cases that you have never seen before and might not be readily available to look up on a transform table. Something is better than nothing. It's a matter of whether getting a PhD in Pure Mathematics with a specialty in Operator Calculus is necessary or just a firm understanding of what a Laplace Transform is and how to do them generally to any sort of diff eq. you may find in addition to getting a sense of what is doing is enough.

I've heard it been said that engineers are consumers that understand what they are buying when it comes to math and mathematicians are producers. The best engineers are the ones that consume, but do so in a highly informed and tactical way rather than just because that was what was in front of them. Sometimes they end up being producers themselves, but their projects are the most successful due to them using the mathematical tools laid out in front of them in a way that ensured its success

>>2789208
>Then what happens when you have edge cases that aren't easy to generalize?
Then you move one level deeper. There is no point in spending time pondering some advanced graph theory just to solve a basic problem. Deadline will come before you'll be able to understand even 1% of that advanced field. One can easily overdose on math and completely lose contact with reality. A great example of that would be modern physics (dark matter, cosmological constant problem, string theory). Or look at Artemis vs. Apollo program. To much knowledge of something will box you in certain thought patterns that can lead you in a completely wrong direction.

>>2789233
>Then you move one level deeper. There is no point in spending time pondering some advanced graph theory just to solve a basic problem.

You should only consume when you need to not only understand the problem but to generalize it and solve similar problems like it. That's hardly pondering advanced graph theory on a PhD level and more like a basic undergrad or maybe master's level introduction to the material. It's perfectly doable if you really know what you are looking for in your engineering design.

>One can easily overdose on math and completely lose contact with reality.
That's more of a problem of not picking out what's important and what's not. There are many tells that something is so abstract and/or so pathological, you will never see it in real life at all meanwhile things like the Wiener–Khinchin theorem have effectively been implemented irl in DSP systems due to their ability to analyze linear time invariant systems (or their reasonable approximations) that aren't able to have their power spectrum analyzed with conventional Fourier methods. I'm not saying you have to do a deep dive; you just can't plug-and-chug and expect to get a reasonably good system when there's no theoretical basis versus a reasonably slim but solid theoretical basis, just like every other field.

> A great example of that would be modern physics (dark matter, cosmological constant problem, string theory).
A lot of that is physicists making up theories that are mathematically sound but not testable. It's not the maths fault that physicists decided to not to be physicists. Again, it's the person wielding the tool's fault, not the tool.

>>2789259
>Or look at Artemis vs. Apollo program.
NASA's budget has been slashed drastically after the Cold War. A lot of the motivation for getting to the Moon is gone now that there is no ideological component to it. That in addition to the large amount of people who can calculate equations but not understand them now versus the people that had to understand why they were using this equation and where it came from in addition (a lot of the original people working for NASA were applied mathematicians and physicists) or else, we just killed the entire crew.

> To much knowledge of something will box you in certain thought patterns that can lead you in a completely wrong direction.
That makes no sense. You can easily pick out whats relevant and irrelevant for your problem at hand. You don't even need to get super deep into the proofs the way a mathematician would. What's important is that you understand the relevant theory, the major points regarding it and the intuition and connection to the problem you are doing. No one is asking you nor expecting you to retread old ground, but if you want to use said theory in your project, you should have a firm grasp on how and when to use it, just like any other tool. Going into navel gazing abstract nonsense for an engineering is pointless but doing the exact opposite and ignoring all of it just to use the theory without knowing how it works is just as foolish. And you can do this rather quickly as in a matter of hours or so. Just go to wikipedia and go over the theory of what you want to apply to your project. It's exactly the same as going over programming documentation before actually programming.

>>2789259
>Again, it's the person wielding the tool's fault, not the tool.
The problem here is that the tool is able to modify the fundamental properties of a person who uses it. Math changes your thought patterns, sometimes this can be beneficial other times not so much and can in worst cases work against you. You learn math and start to see world in a certain way. But what if learning a certain math concept prevented you from seeing the world in a different way that could better fit your application? Sometimes knowledge from other fields can help you even if you don't see the connection at first. I'm sure you've seen numerous examples where nature was used as an inspiration to solve certain problems.
>>2789264
>That in addition to the large amount of people who can calculate equations but not understand them now versus the people that had to understand
I don't think understanding is a problem here. People have much deeper understanding of math than in the past. I'm sure there are still top talent applied mathematicians working at NASA. Aside from budget issues the main problem with artemis is overcomplexity and insufficient grounding in reality mostly thanks to Musk and retards who listen to him. Apollo was $257B (adjusted to inflation), artemis $93B. Considering a lot of things were already worked out in the past reduced budget shouldn't really be an issue. Here it also shows why adding more complex math can't solve everything. While equations remained, other knowledge was lost. Kind of knowledge you can't just conjure with a bit of math and a piece of paper.
>You can easily pick out whats relevant and irrelevant for your problem at hand.
Can you really? It all comes down to if you think you have control over subconscious processes that have influence over your conscious thoughts. There will always be a bias towards certain things. If you use something that you used before you'll be more likely to keep using that thing even though there might exist a better way.

>>2789302

>Math changes your thought patterns, sometimes this can be beneficial other times not so much and can in worst cases work against you.

>But what if learning a certain math concept prevented you from seeing the world in a different way that could better fit your application?
What? I'm speaking from experience as a person who has gone pretty deep into mathematics and still is doing fine in my Electrical Engineering program. You have to determine what's important and what's not and it becomes very evident what matters to your current project and what doesn't almost immediately or if not immediately, in a short period of time. I've only seen math positively or neutrally affect a project's success. I'm not going to go dive deep into the realm of computational geometry or even differential geometry outside of R^3 even though that is the basis of the math I learned to accomplish what I want with my current project .

I don't know where that came from. The people that try to overdo it with the mathematical basis of their project/work tend to do it because they don't understand the core question they want to answer, the core pieces of theoretical information you need to solve it and making the connections yourself or are actively bragging about their mathematical acumen. You don't turn a simple geometry problem into one of higher dimensional topology unless you don't know what you're doing or are showing off. It's not a passive, subconcious process. It is very much active and in the forefront of your mind. The physicists that make string theory untestable do so because they don't understand what science is or want to get grant money and fame, not because math warped their brain or something.

I understand you are talking about how math changes your thought patterns, but it changes it in such a way that you pick up on things that make solving the problem at hand easier. I've never see a person learn math and have a problem become more difficult.

>>2789314
All that thinking you need can be summed up as: identifying the problem, simplifying the problem to make it more palatable/easier, solving that problem and applying that solution to the real physical model as much as it can be applied. The theory part only comes into play as a thesaurus of possible tools to make all these methods generalizable to multiple systems. I've even seen a book about the mathematics of robotic system kinematics and dynamics, so I'm not saying anything revolutionary here: a reasonable amount of mathematical theory (something an undergraduate or master's student can understand depending on what you're doing) is probably necessary to get work done, but it goes a long way and often is necessary for a lot of more complex real life problems.

>>2789314
>I've never see a person learn math and have a problem become more difficult.
I see this all the time. People messing about with complex models when it's clear that whole concept is fundamentally flawed. Result is lots of pretty CGI, FEM simulation results and pretty plots, but not a working product. Same thing happened with coof pandemic. Some "scientists" created an elaborate infection model, fed in garbage data into already flawed model, told us we will all die and as a result fucked up economy and countless lives. Instead of focusing on observations we trusted some questionable math because of course it's the absolute truth (that can be molded to whatever one wants), just look at those equations, it's like a word of god. How dare you criticize pandemic response if you don't even understand all the math? As with any tool you can build a nice house with a chainsaw, but it can also saw your whole leg off if you aren't careful. As convenient as math is, we still aren't sure that it represents our reality completely, it works remarkably well, but there are still holes and unknowns at fundamental level.

>>2789335
>Result is lots of pretty CGI, FEM simulation results and pretty plots, but not a working product.
You said it yourself. The entire concept was flawed from the beginning, so no amount of math will make that work.

>Result is lots of pretty CGI, FEM simulation results and pretty plots, but not a working product.
And? That's an implementation problem, not the problem of math itself.

> Same thing happened with coof pandemic.
All of what you listed is just people misusing a tool for personal/political/financial motives. If you use a hammer as a wrench and it doesn't work, it's not the hammer's fault: it's yours for not understanding how to use it. It's the same sort of shit you see with polling firms and how they cook the data to get the results they want. Again, not a problem with math. That's user error.

You are really highly opinionated for something you clearly do not understand. That is not really a sign of someone that has any sort of competence to do anything that's close to engineering.

>>2789338
>As convenient as math is, we still aren't sure that it represents our reality completely, it works remarkably well, but there are still holes and unknowns at fundamental level.

That is actually the most retarded I've heard today, especially considering the proven successes of the highly mathematical physical classical, thermodynamic, quantum and special/general relativity theories (and their more prominent sub-theories) . We live in an age where mathematics dictates large swathes of how we describe the physical world and have for at least 2000 years, with this model becoming better and better as time moves on. Literally, entire civilizations have been built and discovered due to geometry and calculus paved the way for us finding a way to model change in the world and hence make dynamical systems that are the basis of engineering for the past 300 years. We have mathematical models of nature that are so accurate, they can predict physical phenomena with an error of 1 part in about 1,000,000,000. That's an extremely accurate representation of reality. that's not to mention the highly accurate mathematical physical models that go into things like planes, network communications, integrated circuits and even physics that has an actual experimental basis. Just because some people misuse mathematics to do evil things with the pandemic doesn't mean math is bad and false. It just means you have to red between the lines and see if they are falsifying or misrepresenting data, which is always possible. But that's not the fault of math that people have a penchant for lying for their own benefit: it's the fault of the people lying.

If you aren't able to do math, don't do it. It really seems like you aren't able to think clearly enough to do it. But don't blame it for what amounts to user error and don't call it useless when the people who made the mathematical tools you use now used it specifically to solve physical problems. That is amazingly idiotic and ignorant.

robotwaifutechnician

>>2789340
Simulations may not be as fast and precise as math. But some day they will be.

Anonymous

>>2777276
>american engineering
Can't speak for every country, of course, ubt at least in Germany and Japan (the two countries I studied in), engineering labs are usually "Here's a bunch of materials, try not to kill yourselves. See you next week". For your RC car example, we'd have calculated the torque of the engine to get the maximum gearing that could still move the car (assuming a somewhat high weight), then eyeballed the rest.
This whole "calulate everything and do nothing" bs is pretty much exclusive to people from "good" american universities from what I've seen. Same people who usually failed their foreign semesters...

>>2789347
>Simulations may not be as fast and precise as math. But some day they will be.
They literally are mathematical operations on dynamical systems. There's a reason why the dynamics/kinematics of a system are called the equations of motion.

>>2789338
>The entire concept was flawed from the beginning
Yes, but why was it flawed? Could it be that too much math made people too arrogant to consider otherwise?
>And? That's an implementation problem, not the problem of math itself.
Problem wouldn't exist without math. You need finite element theory before you can run such simulations.
>All of what you listed is just people misusing a tool
That's what I'm trying to emphasize. It's not that people are using hammers as wrenches. It's people using n-dimensional hammers with infinite nails to hang pictures on walls. Math is incredibly easy to misuse.
>You are really highly opinionated for something you clearly do not understand. That is not really a sign of someone that has any sort of competence to do anything that's close to engineering.
Maybe I don't... But all great analog electronics engineers such as Jim Williams say
>He never confused description with understanding. When he would give seminars on how to design piezoelectric transformer lamp drivers, he pointed out that professors who fill the blackboard with math really don't know how a circuit works. Jim knew that the math can describe how a circuit works but understanding how it works was a much more fundamentally intuitive and poetic endeavor.
And if you've ever done something practical (in physical world, not in software) you would quickly come to the same conclusion. Engineering is more than just complex math. That doesn't mean that advanced math is useless, but more often than not a simple "back of the envelope" solution will be good enough.

>>2789340
>We have mathematical models of nature that are so accurate, they can predict physical phenomena with an error of 1 part in about 1,000,000,000. That's an extremely accurate representation of reality.
If you'd read the fine print this accuracy applies to a result of experiments under certain conditions. We only know that under those conditions model is accurate. Whatever happens when some other variable comes into a play nobody knows. I'm sure 10-20 years down the road there will be another crisis in physics because some different experiment will produce statistically significant discrepancy. Considering how evil and corrupt academia has been lately I would be careful about being too enthusiastic about the precision. Our knowledge of reality is still very primitive in the grand scheme of things and that 1 part in about 1,000,000,000 could be completely off and realty is doing something entirely different.
>If you aren't able to do math, don't do it.
What is this now? A math dick measuring contest? Yes, yes, I'm the idiot, you're the smartest guy in this thread.

>>2789190
19th century actually. and with these old buildings there is also a very strong survivor bias you need to be aware of, you only see the ones that are still standing

>>2789340
>We have mathematical models of nature that are so accurate, they can predict physical phenomena with an error of 1 part in about 1,000,000,000. That's an extremely accurate representation of reality.
turbulence says hi

>>2789364
>If you'd read the fine print this accuracy applies to a result of experiments under certain conditions. We only know that under those conditions model is accurate. Whatever happens when some other variable comes into a play nobody knows. I'm sure 10-20 years down the road there will be another crisis in physics because some different experiment will produce statistically significant discrepancy.

It's literally a result of Heisenberg's principle: there's no such thing as a perfect measurement. 1 part in 1,000,000,000 is basically perfect and 1 part in 1,000,000 is a very good approximation.There's nothing wrong with the theory, you physically can't get better results because the measurements get fuzzier after that point.

>Considering how evil and corrupt academia has been lately I would be careful about being too enthusiastic about the precision. Our knowledge of reality is still very primitive in the grand scheme of things and that 1 part in about 1,000,000,000 could be completely off and realty is doing something entirely different.
MUH EVIL ACADEMIA. You're just retarded.

>What is this now? A math dick measuring contest? Yes, yes, I'm the idiot, you're the smartest guy in this thread.
I'm saying you're an idiot that failed out of college or high school and is blaming academia/education for your own personal failures regarding retaining mathematical knowledge and not being able to apply it to the world at large, like an actual engineer should do. it has nothing with me being some sort of super genius and everything with you being an underachiever and general idiot. You're basically like the average 4chan user that makes this his life instead of a hobby to waste time

>>2789377
That's why you build wings that are resistant to turbulence, which can be done via simulations and test flights. Not really a problem.

I fucking wish I were as smart and motivated to build shit as you all. I got my degree in industrial and manufacturing engineering instead of MechE out of interest. I was the kid that liked How It's Made instead of all this car and plane design shit. Is there a way to be a cool engineer but not have to jerry rig shit together all the time?

>>2789379
>You're basically like the average 4chan user that makes this his life instead of a hobby to waste time
You're the one who started posting walls of text to impress people on the internet and own some retard that failed out of high school. Go solve some differential equations to calm down your autism.

>>2789386
I'm not trying to impress you. I don't know you, I don't care about you and you are rather contemptible for thinking a high school dropout knows jackshit about math or engineering. I just like shitting on stupid people that think they know it all like you because honestly they need to be reminded they're fucking idiots.

Eat shit you retard. You can't even pass high school. What makes you think you have any right to tell anyone what's maths place in engineering when you haven't even gone past high school math? Fucking arrogant prick. At least a normalfaggot would disengage and realize they're out of they're depth with shit they aren't able to learn. Imagine thinking you are more intelligent than people who put blood sweat and tears into an Engineering or Math PhD just because you can RC cars. Fucking delusional retard. Go back to your autism pen and play with your kiddie toys.

>>2789419
So much butthurt. Having a bad day? I don't know why you're so upset over some pointless argument over the internet?
>Eat shit you retard.
>Fucking arrogant prick.
>Fucking delusional retard.
This has to be funniest rageposting I've read in a while.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJD<wbr>NkVDGM_s

>>2777355
This post proves you think way too highly of yourself

We all want you to waste your life spitballing stuff so we can all forget you exist
"Natural engineers" don't exist
The people who actually solve real problems and create new things toil for years and years and years doing tests and math and gathering data until they make it

You're literally trying to "happily ever after" design and invention

This isn't a fairy tale, this is real life

>>2789436
>So much butthurt.
Why would I be butthurt by a person that doesn't even know what they are talking about? You're an idiot and the only catharsis and freedom from that fact is projecting your worthlessness onto me. Like why would anyone be upset by what an uneducated high school dropout has to say, especially one that can't even do engineering properly like even the most braindead engineer has to?

>>2789439
/thread.

>>2789379
the point was that mathematical models can only get you so far. turbulence for example is notoriously difficult to resolve
"test flights", sure, that will get you the vibrations the vortices cause over the pipes in a nuclear reactor. "Not really a problem" when you have a supercomputer and lots of time and even then the results can be open for interpretation

brainlets disparage one or the other, the true blue american jew uses both (where appropriate) to get shit done because results make money

>>2790308
That's fair. You can't model absolutely everything in a system using math because the real world has so many variables and it is constantly changing. There still is value in using mathematical models to get the fundamentals of your system in order though just like there is value in considering other sources of inspiration in your design.

Engineers aren't mathematicians, but we can use their results to improve our designs.

>>2777290
At home I fuck around and find out. At work I run the numbers and do it the boring way, mostly because I need to justify everything. Plus if something doesn't work right, I can look back and compare numbers. When it's a serious project at home I might do some math but not always.
>t mechanical engineer

>>2777503
>which has terminal Boeing mentality
you mean they're indian or they want to fill the glider with people and crash into the ground while pocketing the difference?

>>2790644
this. it's not black and white
when you get paid for minmaxing and have to explain your choices then yes you better do the math

>>2789365
That is true for the upper third of the towers and the main structure without the actual sacral half circle. The foundations were already in place when they finally got around to continue it after 500 years.

The guy was simply experienced and knew what had worked in France on other churches. That being said it is not without flaws. The main columns along the pews are sagging slightly inward due to having to support the high vaulted ceilings and are actively being monitored. They are simply a bit too thin for their job.

Regarding the foundations he went quite overboard with them extending down a dozen meters onto even older churches and made from layered sandstone and granite piles. Which happen to be just flexible enough to make the church quite resistant to earthquakes.

All in all a mixture of experience, conservative rules of thumb and an anality to keeping walls straight over their whole height.

>>2777384
Form is about countless intangibles. That's why a painting someone spends 100 hours on is better than one with 20 hours. That's why a lifelong musician will have style elements amateurs won't. That's why songs you know are uncanny valley when a new player just attacks them after reading the tab.
I used to be about pure function in most things. idk why it too me so long to use the skills I had gained to shift my focus to form, but it's a big step in my overall standard of living. I would say this can be aesthetic, ergonomics, textures, or several things people favor but might not consciously process. Levels of refinement take a great deal more time and effort to execute. You can charge a fortune for the work. There is a bit of magic because you're often working without a clear final goal or are working against defined limitations.

>>2792698
kind of a miracle it mostly survived the allied bombings. the one in dresden collapsed because it got so hot inside the bricks started to crack
on topic there are plenty of churches and buildings that collapsed and we are only left with the paintings, or churches that according to structural engineers shouldn't be standing.
i would rather live in a house where someone did the math than where someone eyeballed everything because that's how his grandfather did it
>do i really need an engineering degree to do X
no, but it helps

>>2777276
A lot of things were invented by just trying shit out, problem now is that we have reached a point where optimization is interesting and not necessarily inventing.

See Gas turbines for example work at max 1400 degrees celsius. What are we doing now? We started to cool the turbine blades, so they don't melt. You can't just say "let's drill a couple of holes into that bad boy and put water as cooling fluid into it and see what happens.

What would happen? The engine would obviously blow, in addition with such a sheer force that the roof would probably fall apart (100MW engine).

I'm not saying you shouldn't have your fun in doing something new, but projects are costly, so a good planning is important. We are far ahead the stage of just sticking a couple of rags on wood and call it a plane. We know the ideal designs for such things, now only the calculations are left to do for a specific use case.

>t. chemical enginner

>>2792755
You make it sound like pilot plants aren't a thing.

I have so many ideas but as a small apartment living asshole I have no access to a proper machine shop or equipment. I think this is the biggest hurdle for people these days. With unlimited access to a proper shop I could make all sorts of things ive been imagining.

>>2792833
he was specifically talking about a turbine. the first stage is usually the limiting factor of how high the temperature and pressure can go (the higher the better, see carnot) so they actually managed to make mono crystalline turbine blades and air cooling is also a thing i guess but the course about turbines and gas turbines has been a while

>>2792833
oh and i actually have been behind a control pannel in a training centrum of a gas power plant
they had given us the simple task of shutting down the turbine but no one could. my idea was to just cut off the gas, it will turn off eventually even though it would be ugly but we would do what was asked. and even that was a challenge. yes i failed
fuck me yes i don't know how to operate a gas power plant in 5 minutes. i've seen a control room up close and there's at least a dozen of people there

>>2777446
>>2777676
>>2778182
>Get a degree in mechanical engineering and then get a job in design engineering.
Design engineering is something of a unicorn job, you're going to need more than just a basic ME background to snag the job. Also understand that a lot of the artsy and UI side of design is actually its own field, Industrial Design.
To have a shot at a design engineering job, you're going to need an extremely solid CAD background and ideally a portfolio of projects to show off. It's also going to help if you have a solid understanding of GD&T, so your part drawings are very clearly understandable by outside parties (especially details like what tolerances you're making different features on your parts to).

>>2793086
this is what one of the teachers told us, you're not going to reinvent the wheel, you're going to to maintenance work and looking at tables will be your bread and butter
at least he wasn't spreading delusions. the teacher that came before him actually sort of invented a welding technique that made him loaded but i'm not going to do that, i'm dumb
i don't know anything about welding and material science to me is a black hole. steel bends and twists in a certain way but that's it

>>2785362
>Why can't I find the canonical equation/chart for flow in a thin linear elastic tube?
there isn't one. i don't know the specifics of what you're trying to do but laminar flow in a pipe was already aids enough, this is something else entirely. seems like a subject worthy of a master dissertation

>>2793224
It's already been done, it's just that it hasn't been summarized in a way that retards like me can easily use.

>>2793247
i tell myself that i know quite a bit about fluid dynamics but blood flow in a human body, ehh
you're not retarded, i don't know the specifics but i'm already gagging just by thinking about it

>>2785362
how in the world deos somebody end up with that in their name

>>2789439
>"Natural engineers" don't exist
They do, though.

>>2789379
>wings that are resistant to turbulence
can you elaborate?

>>2793187
I strongly encourage investigating Industrial Design courses if you want to get into stuff like product design. Ideally a certificate in it could open some doors, but again if you show a flair for it in your personal projects that might be enough.

>>2793459
my ambitions have long gone lol. there was a job interview when i was still green where i expressed my interests in aviation but that was torpedoed immediately
i'm also a passive twat. initiative too spicey
and design, did you miss the part where i said i'm dumb? i even refused a phd partially because of this reason. the teacher said it was an oppurtinity and if i refused the position would be filled by yet another chick or a pajeet
LES, they can have it

>>2777446
>I wanna be an inventor so bad man
Can you reasonably come up with a new idea on how to make something more efficient/streamlined? Most "inventors" just have a eureka moment. If you are good at connecting the dots this should come naturally.

>>2784147
>Now the wright brothers weren't engineers, they weren't scientists. They were bicycle repairmen.
To be fair its not like they woke up one day and started building a 737, but they did get the initial idea 'off the ground'.

>>2777276
the chad rule of thumb vs the virgin "my calculations say..."

>>2795402
To be fair...

>The Wrights developed basic techniques still used by all modern aeronautical engineers, such as their pioneering use of the wind tunnel.

>Systematic flight testing was critical to the Wrights success. Their method of evaluating data gathered in these tests, then refining their design based on the results, remains an important tool in aerospace research and development.

>A key term in the lift and drag equations was Smeaton’s coefficient, which accounted for the density of air. A value for the coefficient of 0.005 had been widely used since the 1700s. Using measurements obtained from their glider tests at Kitty Hawk and the lift equation, the Wright brothers calculated a new average value of 0.0033 for Smeaton’s coefficient. Modern aerodynamicists have confirmed this figure to be very accurate.

>>2784147
Bicycle repair in their era was far from just parts replacement so they needed all the skills relevant to making and modding bicycles and components including making much of their own equipment.

That was an era where it was worth torch welding shattered castings (like auto engine blocks). They would have been well read and studied far more than a modern parts swapper. It was typical for any decent machine shop to have its own small foundry to make parts which are weldments today. The Wrights were officially bicycle repairmen and made money doing it but that job title should not define them.

>>2795408
so they used already existent technology like the wind tunnel and corrected a wrong constant that in reality isn't constant
this is why i hold theoretical contributions in higher regard
>Wright brothers calculated a new average value of 0.0033 for Smeaton’s coefficient. Modern aerodynamicists have confirmed this figure to be very accurate.
this is why you shouldn't take anything from wikpedia at face value because it's not accurate at all

>>2792912
If you want that kind of life, integrate your interests completely into your life.

For example I wanted space, freedom to work as I see fit, and low cost of living in a slow growth area so I could have acreage, isolation and easily affordable (thanks to DIY) comfort. I was willing to do anything and go anywhere to get what I wanted so I got it. If a choice was briefly inconvenient well tough shit, I did it anyway. All it takes is determination and planning.

>>2777374
high interest in the persona
thanks for the read anon

>>2777290
>ON THE OTHER HAND IT'S NICE WHEN IT FUCKING WORKS
Then why doesn't it in so many cases, like my fucking dishwasher, egghead?

>>2777276
Wait till you get to career engineering. It only gets worse.

>>2777290
That's how I feel, I look at my box of useless shit thinking "Oh, I can repurpose all this into something cool! It's not garbage!" Then I go to a project and realize that if I want to do it right I need to design and/or purchase materials and tools to do it right. Something I've learned is that you can do the job with shit tools, but they have to be the RIGHT tools. Same applies to the materials. Growing up I didn't really have access to that stuff and makerspaces weren't even thought of. I built one of those Proton Packs from Ghostbusters out of a shoe box when I was a little kid, I loved it of course, but it makes me appreciate the access I have to 3d printers, drills, and electrical wire (among other things) as an adult with money.

>>2777290
Disagree

It's more fun to have all the numbers and spreadsheets together and know something works inside and out, make a fake gay digital copy, show it to other people, let them steal it, realize you wasted years of your life only for lying faggots to cash in on your work while you regret not writing in some fatal flaw their goldfish minds can't comprehend.

That's much better than building something with your own to hands because THAT COSTS MONEY.

>>2777333
Personally I think there was an active effort to suppress and prevent Normies from learning that flight was possible.
It was one of the gay humiliation rituals/pipedream techs like fusion or quantum computers nowdays.

Then some fucking bike mechanics who must have flown under the radar were hosting airshows and everyone freaked out.

>>2784147
Wright brothers were fucking autistic which is why it worked out for them.

Trying to apply their own autism to the legal realm and meeting a man named Langley arguably fucked them.