Quote:
Originally Posted by 41Sqn_Stormcrow
No, CAD is just another tool. The genious is not with tools but to find the sweet point between all the contradicting requirements that offers the best performance and a good dose of luck - says the engineer.
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Bah. I do trade studies all the time. That's just maths. It's big and scary if you don't understand it, but if you do then it's just big maths, and tbh at PhD level you actually find is that 99% of what you do is actually computer-assisted* GCSE maths with scary references.
Drawing the blasted thing is a
nightmare. I mean, it's a long time since I actually did design drawings by hand, but heck, even just drawing quite simple parts was
massively time consuming. Engines have thousands of parts. They all have to fit together, both at the temperature that the beast is assembled at, and at the considerably higher temperature at which it is expected to run. They must not interfere, even under the worst-case combination of temperatures and accelerations.
And of course it has to actually be possible to build the thing. So there has to be a way of assembling it, and there must also be the necessary jigs and tools.
And without CAD, you've got to work all of this stuff out in your head before you even put pencil to paper.
I'm sorry, but
Damn.
*Both in the sense that Wolfram Alpha does the mathematics for you, and also in the sense that you tend to use a huge amount of computing power to perform massive number of quite simple but tedious operations for you at high speed. And then, when you discover that you can get a computer to do a week's worth of maths in about a minute, you naturally write enough code to tie the blasted thing up for two weeks, and then swear at it incessantly when it inevitably crashes after 13 days.