Gigantism is a never-ending temptation | Hacker News Reader

Gigantism is a never-ending temptation

spectrum.ieee.org

61 pointsseventyhorses25 comments

Full title of the article - "Gigantism Is a Never-Ending Temptation for Engineers and Designers"

My reaction - Giantism is not that much of a temptation for actual engineers and designers. It is a huge temptation for the Sales Dept., PR Dept., management egos, customer egos, and kids. Admittedly, some folks with "Engineer" or "Designer" in their job titles are, mentally, more in those other places.

Somewhat related, but not actually giantism, is feature bloat. Instead of the biggest just-plain-knife in the world, you have the Swiss Army Knife with the most different blades & tools & accessories & crap. That's more often a temptation for engineers & designers.

A different beast, which can be mistaken for giantism, is economics-driven limit-pushing. Doesn't matter if it's large overall size (wind turbines), small feature size (IC's), high efficiency (commercial jet engines), high pressure (rocket engine combustion chambers), or what. The company which can reliably out-do its rivals in the metric is well-positioned to crush them, via better economic performance. (Perhaps making the company a financial giant...)

1940s era Battleships are probably unnecessary gigantism, but it should be noted that the 'massive' ironclads of the 1890s were completely obsolete by the much bigger, heavily armored Dreadnoughts. (The battleships of 1890s were too small and impractical, leading to the development of the 1900s era bigger ships)

The only reason Super-Battleships of the 1940s didn't work was because aircraft carriers were better. Whenever a bigger ship went up against smaller ones, the results were spectacular. See Bismark vs HMS Hood (Battle of Denmark Strait) for example.

Battleships basically shoot 1 ton per gun per shot, and have broadsides of 9 guns in a unified and coordinated Salvo. These are the biggest guns ever made.

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Big guns shoot further. Bigger ships can afford thicker steel for more armor. Smaller guns of the Destroyer and Cruiser classes simply cannot damage Battleships in combat, too little range and even if they had the range, not enough penetrating power to go through the armor.

So if you have a smaller ship, you gotta sail into range while giving your opponents battleship first strike (and all 1940s ships had computerized firing systems, mechanical computers but they worked). So they were quite accurate with these big guns too.

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Tanks went a similar evolution in Germany. Other countries (France / Russia) put effort into heavy tanks, but Germany first focused on light tanks...

Until the German shells were bouncing off of their foreign counterpart's armor. So the Germans later made King Tigers, as bigger is in fact better in some circumstances.

> See Bismark vs HMS Hood

Bismark was not meaningfully bigger than HMS Hood. According to wikipedia, Bismark had a full load displacement of 50300 tons vs 47430 tons for Hood. Both ships had eight 15 inch guns.

320mm armor for Bismark vs 305mm (thickest) to 160mm armor for the HMS Hood.

Bismark was nearly 20 years newer with a far more efficient design.

Even then, the extra 3000 tons of armor makes a difference.

Meh, sometimes when you’re optimizing things you realize new limits. This is how you figure out what works and what doesn’t, you try. Simplifying failures down to “it was too big” and acting like this should be a priori obvious is silly. A small amount of stuff is always going to exist a few standard deviations away from the mean. Sometimes it’ll move the mean, sometimes it will fail. Backpressure from being too much of something is pretty natural.

It would be far sadder if we never knew the limits because we didn't try.

The human desire to tinker bears tempering with much communication and moral thought.

We're on the cusp of some genetic triumphs...and horror stories.

Don't be the "meh" guy.

On the other hand, you have the man who built several of the biggest, which were also in many cases the first, successes in several different areas of engineering: Isambard Kingdom Brunel[0]. He built the largest ocean-going vessel of his time (the Great Western and the even bigger Great Eastern), the first tunnel under a navigable river (the Thames Tunnel), the longest bridge of its time (the Clifton Suspension Bridge), as well as little things like the Great Western Railway. He was a pretty inspiring person, and the biography his son wrote of him is excellent reading[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel

[1]: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/41210

The Great Eastern has a cool history and was critical in ushering in the modern age. It was the only ship that existed that could carry a single cable of telegraph line the length of the Atlantic. Not having splices in the cable was quite important for them to function and survive in the early days. The ship was mostly a financial failure until it started being used all over the world to put down long ocean-spanning telegraph cables.

I agree with most of it except wind turbines - their size is not driven by vanity, but efficiency.

I am also not sure about blaming engineers for it, it's more of an investor thing. Engineers are often incredulous, IMHO, as it usually means more trouble.

On the other hand, things like JWST are amazing. If you resist the temptation to just make it bigger, and think outside the box, some really cool engineering can happen.

I mean, the JWST is just bigger. There's two sources of unique solutions in the JWST, its size and the range of wavelengths it observes.

The Hubble Space Telescope had a ground-glass mirror which was absolutely massive, both in size and literally in mass. To scale that up, a beryllium-gold mirror was necessary to be able to launch it at all, considering the immense weight of a ground glass mirror. Similarly, to fit it in the fairing, it had to be segmented. Due to the size, it couldn't have an enclosed tube as that wouldn't fit any fairing, and the mirror would be segmented as well anyway, so it's just easier to go without a tube and hope really hard that you get no interference.

Speaking of, the JWST operates at such large wavelengths that incredibly cold objects are practically giant lightbulbs to it. Point it at the cold, dark moon and you might overwhelm the sensor. Therefore the entire thing has to be as cold as is theoretically possible, which is here done through just putting a giant sunshield and big radiators on it. Size, again, so it needed to be a very innovative folding sunshield.

Everything that it has isn't really "outside the box", it's just the only working solutions to practical challenges with scaling up something like the Hubble, and moving to the observation of ever colder, further away objects.

"bigger is better" is true in many cases, not just wind turbines. This can be because of economies of scale, for example a bus and a taxi need only one driver, so if you want to move many people, buses will be more efficient use of drivers.

But it can be just physics, usually some variation on the square cube law. For example a large container will generally be lighter per unit volume/mass. Similarly, if you want to prevent heat losses, the easiest way is to go big.

It is no wonder why engineers like it big, it is not just ego, it is efficiency. Of course, there is a limit, but progress is made by pushing these limits. The romans were right with their huge ships, as proof, today's ships are even bigger, it is just that they were at the limit of their technology.

This article, on the other hand, argues that precisely ships are severely constrained by existing physical limits:

* maximal depth of many important ports, * maximal width and depth of Panama and Suez channels.

It isn't as efficient to build an übergiant that must take longer routes around the globe and can only fit into a handful of ports.

In case of crude oil carriers, there is also the question of maximum environmental damage if they founder. I wouldn't like to see 5 million tons of crude spilt into the ocean. Even current sizes are pretty big.

Also, when you take a giant anything (ship, nuclear reactor) out of operation for repairs, which may be urgent and unplanned, you reduced your available fleet by a massive amount, thus disrupting normal operations.

Worldwide we have plenty of merchant ships. Taking a few out of operation has no significant impact.

They lost me when they said the Ford F-150 is not gigantism but actually the right size. It's certainly the right size for some things, as is an 18-wheel articulated truck. But it's not the right size for the vast majority of the time it's actually used. Gigantism seems to be a temptation for consumers just as much as engineers and designers. People are tempted by that unwieldy vehicle or large house and don't consider the practicality or running cost.

The biggest car we own is a Honda CR-V, but if I had to tow a boat 3+ times a year or carry sheet goods once a month, I’d buy a truck appropriate for that and drive it the other 350-ish days of the year. It’s not practical to rent a truck every month or for a week at a time just to save a little money every month. Are there trucks sold that never do a single truck thing in their life? Probably, but probably not as many as you’d expect.

When are we going to have a viable compact smartphone again? They have slowly became larger until they're so gigantic I cannot fit in one hand. Oh Sony Xperia Compact. I hope you don't ever die!

The iPhone SE is ~5.5" by ~2.5" which is pretty compact which isn't that much bigger than the Xperia Compact.

That's still pretty big. For me, the ideal size is that of the iPhone 4S or the BlackBerry Q10.

I think it might be better to say "extremes are a never-ending temptation", just as we try to make the biggest things, there's also plenty of effort put into making the smallest things. As another commenter mentioned, this is often less because of engineers' desires than because of product departments' needs for the next best product, which often just means the original product, but "more".

The Egyptians where the first to figure out if you want to build something permanently you have to make the components so heavy 4 persons can’t take it with them. Otherwise someone eventually will and it is just a matter of time someone actually does.

Floating cities like cruise lines are bad for inhabitants but good for a pandemic in that they are easy to isolate and enforce control measures onboard.

Also easy to spread the virus, as the first outbreaks happened on them.

That was partly because they didn't understand that the virus was airborne, so they took the wrong countermeasures.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...

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