Originally Posted by
Landroger
It is getting clearer all the time, many thanks to you both, but I have to take the math as read.
I have my grandfather's grasp of the mechanical (electronics was before his time, but those too
),but not my late father's self taught grasp of mathematical concepts. They just give me a sensation very closely allied to vertigo.
Roger,
A lot of it is not maths as such, but "getting your head around a concept".
Like supersonic flow, shock waves and all that.
I was lucky, I suppose... I learned all that when I was still a teenager, from somebody doing a few very simple demonstrations in a flow of water over a slightly inclined glass plate lit from below.
The same with electronics... my grandfather was a radio amateur (1920's !!), my father was an electrical engineer. It rubbed off very early on.
....I could try and explain how MRI scanners work...
Again, it's not just being an engineer, but being able to
explain a concept in clear terms.
BTW, I know how MRI scanners work... after my early retirement I went into writing documentation for medical imaging software....
What I find so neat - I'm sure it is beautiful if the maths are included - is the way the design team 'conjured' the shock waves.
The edges, dump gates and ramps are
sort of obvious, almost simplistic in a sense, but the secret is all in the way these engineering 'magic wands' conjure a series of invisible, yet powerful 'force fields'. Force fields not directly connected to the doors and ramps necessarily, but the whole witches kitchen interacting to produce .... the thrust rabbit out of the intake hat.
Thanks, Roger.
It's usually only engineers that will recognise a particularly neat engineering solution as "beautiful".....
I know engineers are regarded as soul less nerds, but the things they create are truly beautiful. Very few in Britain would disagree that Concorde is a beautiful thing to look at, like the Spitfire and the fan blades on a Trent 900, but how many could understand how beautiful she is on the inside?
So true... sad, really that so few people can see the beauty in a truly well-done design, apart from rare exceptions such as Concorde or the Spitfire, where beauty of form join beauty of design.
There I go, waxing lyrical on a technical forum.
I'll get my hat.
Please put your hat back on the hat-rack.
Because whether technical or not.... we've all been waxing lyrical here, one way or the other.
With Concorde, we did something special.
Apollo took men to the moon.
Concorde took us to the other side of the Atlantic in three-and-a-half hours, and in the end did so for twenty-seven years.
No, it didn't all work out, sure.
Apollo was abandoned, Concorde saw only sixteen aircraft built.
But I think we're all proud of what we DID achieve.
And as to Concorde.... she was beautiful in every way.
CJ