Death Star, Soap Bubble Carriers and FB Ships

> Michael Brown wrote:

> I have two words that explain the hows and whys of the disparity of

The best reason is we can produce mediochre equipment NOW, in abundance, or we
can produce nothing until we have something really good (assuming our allies
have are still fighting). The sherman is proof of Stalin's maxim "Quantity has
a quality all of its own". The US army was faced with mass producing something
that they already had the tooling for, or waiting until they had a proper
tank. Being in a hurry, they produced huge amounts of shermans, despite its
shortcomings.

The DeathStar was struck down by one of those things that gives engineers the
willies-- the unforeseen glitch.  The US long distance telephone system
was once laid low by a minor programming error. When faced with too many
calls, the switching center would reject all new calls and bounce them to
other switching centers. Unfortunately, they left out the little bit of code
that would tell the switching center to start accepting calls when it was no
longer overloaded. Needless to say, the problem snowballed until the whole
system crashed.

Some poor bastard involved in the DeathStar design team laid out the venting
to ensure the minimum backpressure on the system, without realizing that the
resultant gentle curves would act as a shot trap. The error was compounded
when no one entertained the possibility that one of the reactors might suffer
the gross insult of a weapon strike, or they would have quickly realised that
the loss of a local reactor could destroy the whole station. The rebels, to
their great good fortune, looked at the armor scheme of the DeathStar, looked
at the

[quoted original message omitted]

On Tue, 14 May 2002 17:51:03 -0700, Michael Brown <mwbrown@sonic.net>
wrote:

> What other rational explanation is there for less than optimal designs

Plot point.