Timeline for How did no other engineer see the design flaw of the Death Star?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 3, 2017 at 8:13 | comment | added | Applefanboy | Quote: "Power supplies are the part you can most safely assign to the least experienced designer" That explains why my washer PS failed, set on fire, totalled my garage and almost took the house at 7.30 am one Sunday morning. True story and why you should never leave any PS or high current unit plugged in and switched on at the wall (even if the device itself is off). Assume an unqualified, unsupervised, junior design engineer who had no idea what he was doing and no budget for parts put it together in a sweatshop somewhere. Ask the fire brigade for No 1 cause of domestic fires. Frightening. | |
| May 1, 2017 at 20:41 | history | edited | fectin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
updated surface area ratio. Assumed Death star is the size of Luna, and the exhaust is a 2m radius.
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| May 1, 2017 at 20:39 | comment | added | fectin | @Neal Good catch; mea culpa. I asked google and grabbed the first result as an input. Should have double-checked, even here. | |
| May 1, 2017 at 15:14 | comment | added | Neal | As a nitpick, 1 in 4 million is way too high. It's more like 1 in 10 billion. | |
| May 1, 2017 at 13:36 | comment | added | Draco18s no longer trusts SE | To put things another way: the plot had a problem to be solved so the writer wrote in something that worked and seemed on the surface to be a vulnerability that got overlooked. The writer isn't an engineer and couldn't make engineering decisions, but he could write "here are some engineers, they're the best in the Empire, and they didn't see a problem" along with some badgering and cover up work. Voila. Convenient plot device for the story that was being told. | |
| May 1, 2017 at 3:51 | comment | added | Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні | @PhasmaFelis - I have seen the future, and it looks a lot like WALL-E... | |
| Apr 29, 2017 at 2:08 | comment | added | Wildcard | @PhasmaFelis, your comment takes my thought in an entirely new direction you probably weren't intending at all: a way in which such anthropomorphic AI could be more realistic/achievable/explainable than the alternative. If you consider living beings with meat bodies to be literal "ghosts in machines," then having droids likewise inhabited by such ghosts (spirits?) would neatly explain their emotional ability while yet leaving advanced integrated automation out of reach. Not in the Star Wars universe, though. :) | |
| Apr 29, 2017 at 0:10 | comment | added | fectin | I would be happy to discuss why some problems are hard to automate, but comments are probably not the best forum. | |
| Apr 29, 2017 at 0:06 | comment | added | Phasma Felis | @NateDiamond Also, in a world where spaceships maneuver like WW2 fighters, real-world physics don't necessarily apply. :) I like to think that the Star Wars universe has a completely different paradigm for what technology is capable of; barring scale and a few specific technologies like antigrav flight, hyperdrive, and droids, a lot of stuff seems to be pretty solidly mid-20th-century in terms of actual effect--e.g. blasters look snazzy but aren't notably more effective than firearms--and tech doesn't really change much over decades or centuries. | |
| Apr 29, 2017 at 0:06 | comment | added | Nate Diamond | @PhasmaFelis Except for their targeting computers doing complex navigation over a huge state space, human-level intelligence, etc. Like, I understand that they're absolutely not consistent with their application of AI, but they're solving problems that are very analogous to this. The Death Star is too complex to be done even by a fleet of engineers; they need automated engineering. The top answer claims that they had it, but ignored it. Especially given the cost to build, I think that's much more powerful than "it was too expensive or in error". | |
| Apr 28, 2017 at 23:55 | comment | added | Phasma Felis | @NateDiamond Star Wars, like a lot of space opera, has a very anthropomorphic notion of what AI is capable of: emotion, judgment, natural language, and so forth are so easy they happen by accident, but large-scale automation is hard (or involves using a zillion inexplicably-humanoid robots as factory workers, rather than any sort of integrated system). This is because few people were thinking about the real potential of ubiquitous computing pre-PC/internet, and partly because it's a lot easier to make a compelling film out of desperate fighter pilots on a suicide run than a pack of drones. | |
| Apr 28, 2017 at 23:49 | comment | added | Nate Diamond | The engineering doesn't necessarily need to be "automated", in that most processes for doing this will still need the objectives of the design, along with balancing for things which may not be taken into account or are difficult to quantify. We're using "automated" design techniques nowadays, for instance genetic algorithms to design functional equipment, from turbines to automobile chassis. In these cases, the engineer still takes the output of the system and then tweaks it, doing passes with more directed attention (like security). This problem seems like it would have been caught early. | |
| Apr 28, 2017 at 23:34 | comment | added | fectin | @NateDiamond I don't think so, but it's hard to say. Star Wars computers are never really explored. Setting this sort of problem up is very hard, solving it is trivial (and tends to be automated now; basically it's just a funny spreadsheet). Ultimately, if this were automatable, I would expect all engineering to be automated, which doesn't seem to be the case. | |
| Apr 28, 2017 at 23:14 | comment | added | Nate Diamond | I think a lot of this engineering for a type 2 civilization would be mostly automated, no? Like, this makes sense if this was all done by hand, but why wouldn't some complex simulation system consider it? A computer in this civilization should be able to map out "routes to high priority subsystems" and highlight this as a threat. | |
| Apr 28, 2017 at 22:30 | history | edited | fectin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Typos. They haunt me.
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| Apr 28, 2017 at 22:12 | history | answered | fectin | CC BY-SA 3.0 |