Originally Posted by
carlos danger
they built atom bombs, sr71, moon rocket, moon lander all that with common sense and a simply slide ruler. they didn't need any "scanner" to get stuff done.
and i think this is whats missing today: just getting stuff done. by yourself, ringth now.
Hardly. More like stacks of complex formulas in very thick books. A good reference for just the formulas, not any theories or explanations, is Roark's Formula's for Stress and Strain, originally published 1938, still used today, latest edition 1072 pages.
And, lots of model simulations to determine or correlate with formulas ("towing tanks" for ship models, "wind tunnels" for aircraft models), and static load tests. Way back then, even the aircraft companies were lacking in all the knowledge and equipment to do dynamic fatigue and vibration studies and tests, and there were mishaps due to that, catastrophic failures, or vehicles getting out of control due to divergent oscillation. And things going supersonic was/is an entirely different realm, dealing with shock waves, compressible flow, etc. Lots of crashes until things got figured out. Chuck Yeager was lucky not to crash, the plane he used to go over Mach 1 was designed all wrong for it, it was later learned.