"RST Engineering" wrote in message
...
Sonny, I spent my first ten years out of college working on military toys
that didn't have a chance in hell of working.

Such as? Expound on that if your would...and please, no annecdotes.

First of all, that is anecdotes. Is your spell checker not working these
days? And it is you, and not your.

Second of all, how can you relate an experience working on a project without
telling the story? Anecdotal memory is all we have unless you want a
transcript out of my engineering notebook.

Third, what I was working on in those days was TS, and I'm not about to
jeopardize my ever getting a TS clearance again by relating to you the guts
of what I was doing. I have absolutely no idea if the stuff has been
released into the public domain, but I highly doubt it.

One of the projects was an electrically steerable antenna array meant to
interfere with another signal. It was so goosey and unstable that the only
way we could keep it reasonably operational was to hold ambient temperature
within a couple of degrees and vibration to a tenth of a G. And this was an
aircraft application.

One of the projects was a powerline detector for rotary wing aircraft that
would certainly detect powerlines, but about two seconds AFTER the aircraft
impacted the lines at any reasonable forward velocity.

There are half a dozen more, equally as ridiculous.


You don't think I can make
the distinction?

When doing R&D, how do we know what will work and what won't?

When you are asked to do something that violates a basic law of known
physics. Sure, you can be Einstein and discover a whole new set of laws,
but don't bet the farm on it.

Jim