Also know as, Star Bores 12, the prequel.
DMJ’s fault, he said I should have called the X Hard thing this, but…..
See, the thing is, there are all sorts of things that you can actually more or less graph numerically.
Nota Bene, I said graph numerically, not model numerically.
Graphing is recording *only*, modelling is extrapolation, and curve filling and smoothing…
You can use X hard etc to graph your descent into a living hell, or your climb out of it, but the trouble then is you start to associate the numbers with the result, and think changing the numbers will help.
OMG my fucking penis is only 150 mm long, if only it was 175 mm long I’d no longer be so boring average and I’d get more girls…… goes and buys penis pump to try and change the numbers, hoping the numbers changing will change the real world result.
Yeah yea, laughs cynically, nobody actually believes that shit, you’re right, not even the hundreds of thousands of men worldwide who have actually bought penis pumps, they didn’t actually believe that shit any more than you do… but they still bought them…. hope springs eternal, or something…#trashtag
That’s the problem with maths, it’s a fucking ABSTRACT language, it’s not real world, at best it can be used to describe some real world stuff… how many thousand feet of 2×4 to build a house, then you need a cut off saw, morticer, nail gun or hammer, basic carpentry skills, etc etc etc etc etc, and still even excluding all that shit you’ll still come up with a different number of feet used than you calculated.
Vospers / Thornycroft fucked this one up, and they aren’t the only ones, a navy wanted to buy some patrol boats, the had to be this size and do this and carry this, and oh, they have to have this minimum top speed, so they built two demo boats, and top speed was about 5 knots under the requirement, which in boats that plane since hull dimensions and form was pretty much as per plans it means total weight or displacement was greater than expected.
I told this story to a trainee shipwright, who laughed, see, his apprentice / qualifying piece that we was working on at the time was a clinker 3 man rowing skull, when completed it looked fucking beautiful, as a row-boat it was crap, it weighed over a hundredweight too much, lots of things his plans didn’t account for, and he spent *hours* trying to work it out, was his wood thickness’s at the higher end of the tolerances and so on… in actual fact most of the discrepancy was down to two things, the volume of varnish that the wood soaked up before getting the layer of coating on the surface, which is the bit he used for varnish volume and therefore weight calculations, and the weight of copper fasteners vs steel ones, he used steel in his calculations, pretty close, but a bit lighter than copper per cubic inch, but stronger than copper, so copper fasteners individually weight more than steel ones.
Even having worked it out, the math itself didn’t allow him to correct the problem, (same as Vospers) too late, and while it eventually told him where the extra weight had come in, it doesn’t do the design changes you need to get the weight back down… all that math does teach you is that being a ABSTRACT language you need to build a fudge factor in to translate between that abstract language and the real world.
By the time you’ve been making that thing for 20 years, you will have cut that fudge factor back from 15% to 0.75%, not because the math got any better, but because your skills did, and I don’t mean your skills in making each individual component weight exactly what the math says either, you’ll never do that, I mean your skills in the overall bit light here, bit heavy here sense.
I’ve had this argument with displacement boat designers, it’s a fucking DISPLACEMENT boat, the issue isn’t the fucking weight, which is what you are trying to tell me, when you tell me you need X, Y and Z electrical systems to run 48 hours without a charge, and I tell you that needs a battery bank of this dimension and this weight, and then they tell me that weighs too fucking much, usually by a factor of 5.
The problem is the *proportion* of the weight you are prepared to assign to the battery bank… sure, lead acid batteries + brine = chlorine gas, not good, but in weight terms, lead acid batteries make good ballast, so why have lumps of inert metal in the keel, why not get two shots for one, ballast and battery capacity, then you only have an engineering problem to solve, separating the lead acid batteries from the marine environment… shouldn’t be much of a challenge.
One guy I know took that and ran with it, traction cells in the keel, sealed in and vented above decks, it was a fairly large job, similar to engine removal, to get them in and out, he went from a design that specified 500 kilos of concrete poured into the spaces in the steel box bilge keel, and 2 x 120 Ah 12 VDC batteries for domestic and 1 x 120 Ah for engine starting to one with 12 x 40 Kg each traction cells, each one 600 Ah @ 2 VDC, two banks of six in series, so two independent banks of 600 Ah each for domestic, and one 100 Ah starter, 120 Ah domestic to 1,200 Ah domestic, ten times the fucking capacity, of course being deep cycle traction cells to all practical purposes every Ah of real vs rated capacity was worth two from a single truck battery, he said later he basically no longer used the main engine to charge domestic batteries, they had enough capacity for a 10 day cruise, just shore power em back up, so he saved a fortune is diesel, and a lot of glazing wear and tear from not running a 40 BHP diesel to spin a 12 V alternator to charge a domestic battery up.
He defined a desired goal or solution, without also defining a whole slew of limitations and caveats that all had greater priority, and sure, he got his math problem sorted, but he also got unforeseen challenges while implementing it, and unforeseen benefits from implementing it… as he said, I’d do it again in a heartbeat, just not the same way…lol
That old engineering adage about “You have to build one in order to learn how to build one”
Which is where it all falls down, I don’t get to live this day, much less this life, so that I can learn how to do it better and then press the re-wind button and start all over again.
I dunno, Bill Murray, ground hog day, didn’t actually watch the film, but what was it about, him re-living the same day so he can get ONE piece of ass…. there’s a million things I could do, and that would come somewhere near the end of the list.
The mathematical curve of keeping a clean soul is a bit like the mathematical curve of me coming home from school each day as a small boy and keeping the grass stains off my clothes.
Not going to school wasn’t an option, going to school naked wasn’t an option, going to school and not playing wasn’t an option (and anyway, they all have consequences of their own) so all the maths could really do was tell you how you were doing, are you doing better this week than last, the maths doesn’t give you a practical way of doing better next week, but analysing what you did this week vs last week might.
And it all keeps coming back down to that old one of I don’t know what I should do, everything I do do turns out wrong.
Well, yeah, there are no right answers, there are no always winning plays or strategies, all there is are approaches and attitudes, you can’t get your car from here at point A to there at point B 10,000 miles away without wear and tear and fuel consumption and possibly damage, and you can’t know what lies ahead, but you *can* start out at mile 1 and drive in such a way as to minimise wear and tear and fuel consumption and damage, or you can drive it like you stole it, you just can’t get away from what did from mile 0 to mile x, where x is wherever you are now.
What you can’t do is get to mile 10,000 with no wear and tear, damage or fuel used.
The mathematical curve of keeping a clean soul, you fucking CANNOT, your soul is going to get stained, the maths helps, after the event, to identify what strategies caused what stains, and to use that to try to minimise future staining.
It’s like a Star Wars film, OK, now we’re stuck, so we have to make episode 1 into episode 4, now we can create some new shit, ok, now we’re stuck, now we have to do something else… nothing can undo Star Wars 1977, nor can anything capture again what it was, at that time, at that place, when the 4th film was the 1st, and the whole universe was new, as was the story and characters and ships and everything else.