An 8,000 Ton Giant Made the Jet Age Possible 307
Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Heffernan writes that when 'The Fifty,' as it's known in company circles, broke down three years ago, there was talk of retiring it for good. Instead, Alcoa decided to overhaul their 50,000-ton, 6-story high forging press, now scheduled to resume service early this year. 'What sets the Fifty apart is its extraordinary scale,' writes Heffernan. 'Its 14 major structural components, cast in ductile iron, weigh as much as 250 tons each; those yard-thick steel bolts are also 78 feet long; all told, the machine weighs 16 million pounds, and when activated its eight main hydraulic cylinders deliver up to 50,000 tons of compressive force.' The Fifty could bench-press the battleship Iowa, with 860 tons to spare, but it's the Fifty's amazing precision — its tolerances are measured in thousandths of an inch—that gives it such far-reaching utility. Every manned US military aircraft now flying uses parts forged by the Fifty, as does every commercial aircraft made by Airbus and Boeing making the Jet Age possible. 'On a plane, a pound of weight saved is a pound of thrust gained—or a pound of lift, or a pound of cargo,' writes Heffernan. 'Without the ultra-strong, ultra-light components that only forging can produce, they'd all be pushing much smaller envelopes.' The now-forgotten Heavy Press Program (PDF), inaugurated in 1950 and completed in 1957, resulted in four presses (including the Fifty) and six extruders — giant toothpaste tubes squeezing out long, complex metal structures such as wing ribs and missile bodies. 'Today, America lacks the ability to make anything like the Heavy Press Program machines,' concludes Heffernan, adding that 'The Fifty' will be supplying bulkheads through 2034 for the Joint Strike Fighter. 'Big machines are the product of big visions, and they make big visions real. How about a Heavy Fusion Program?'"
now technology (Score:5, Interesting)
We see various technologies come and go, one hit wonders, ephemeral vapourware and promises of the next big thing.
When I read this, it made the engineer in me happy to think some things last longer.
Re:now technology (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always loved the older technologies for their ability to just keep going. In fact, just a few days ago, I finished cleaning up an old 1950's Remington typewriter. It hasn't been touched in decades in my parents' damp, cold basement, was covered with more dust and grime than I thought was physically possible, but a lot of hours of cleaning later, and every key still works absolutely perfectly. Found a place online that still sells ribbons, so I've got it typing again. And odds are, unless it's dropped from something high up (and it even has a good chance of surviving that, since it's over 30 pounds of stainless steel), it'll probably last well until after I'm gone.
The new technology may be awesome for what it can do, but the old technology is awesome for what it can survive and keep going through.
Captcha: "keyboard". I don't think I've ever seen a more fitting captcha.
Re:now technology (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the old technology is like that because it's overdesigned to be like that. It survives because all the parts are stronger than they need to be (material science being what it was then, and quality variance between batches was probably a lot higher) because they had to - unlike modern manufacturing processes where we can get remarkably consistent raw materials due to smeltters carefully controlling the alloys. When your inputs are of varying quality, you compensate by overdesigning. And yes, it happens today in the semiconductor industry - it's remarkably hard to produce a consistent product so transistors and such are overdesigned to compensate (we can spec chips to run slower, we avoid use of passive components (it's difficult to get resistors/capacitors to come out with less than a 20% tolerance in silicon - there are many "equivalent" circuits done using transistors which are easier to match), etc.
Plus, we also have survivor bias - the "old stuff" survives because we threw out the crap that failed long ago. Heck, your typewriter may be a victim of that - it's just you got one of the few good ones. When things were cranked out by the thousands, it happens.
Re:now technology (Score:5, Insightful)
It IS the blender.
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"Archimedes once said 'Give me a lever and I shall move the Earth'. Well, I say give me a 50,000 ton press, and I can squash anything!"
Sometimes (Score:2, Redundant)
Bigger is better
giant machines, all the way up (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Actually not every... (Score:5, Informative)
There are Airbus and Boeing planes built using parts made by the lower capacity presses used while this one was unserviceable or down for maintenance...
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Ahh the FA extends the comment made out to all presses in the Heavy Press Program - the summary is wrong.
Re:Actually not every... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe... remember that Boeing only delievers between 300-500 craft per year with order lead times of several years. I suspect that Airbus is similiar. With that much lead time and low numbers, its possible they forged those specific parts ahead and Boeing/Airbus held them in inventory. In fact, that would make sense given the tooling and setup on a machine like this, because it would be cheaper to do a large production run of a certain quantity than to forge each item 'just in time' and have to re-tool for each peice or seperate run. So, its very possible, and I would think likely, that every one really does use parts produced on this machine.
Re:Airbus? (Score:5, Informative)
Then you know nothing about aviation manufacturers - a modern Airbus aircraft can be over 50% American by weight if chosen with GE or P&W engines, and 40% with RR engines. Airbus has major US suppliers.
Re:Airbus? (Score:5, Insightful)
"It makes me sad that now there are some things that the US can no longer make."
We can make anything we used to make, and many never before made.
It's just that we are led by weenies ( politically and economically ).
And that is what there is to be sad about.
The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
Modern planes, and other transport/engineering structures, are moving to composites. Which are layered, printed, sometimes pressure baked and squeezed into form. But no longer forged on this scale.
While these machines are awesome, I've wandered along a car body stamping line and watched plates go from a flat sheet to a car door in 100meters, they are becoming less necessary to us. They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces, with nostalgia for a bygone age of megaengineering, rather than a source of future industrial dominance.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
We are seeing this today with the rare earth mining industry, where all of the US mines shut down because China was exporting government subsidized minerals for peanuts. Then, when they got a monopoly on the rare earth market, they suddenly shot the prices up and started raking in the cash. Now the US company is reopening their plant because the economic conditions are favorable and because worldwide demand is growing enough that it will be difficult for China to flood the market again. People were biting their nails over the US "losing the ability to make a strategic resource", but the ability wasn't lost, just on hold while they waited for the economics to turn around.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
The knowledge isn't lost (we hope)
There is TONS of knowledge in industrial processes that only people who work on it every day really know. I've done some work in software for Steel manufacturing, and I tell you first hand, that many of the "Recipes" are over 50 years old and scribbled in the notebooks of the people who run the mills. These "Recipes" vary for each press/line and if the specifications are not followed exactly, it's the difference between good steel and shit. The "theory" is well documented in texts on metallurgy etc, but, the actual practice, where the rubber meets the road, not so much. When these types of plants shutdown and the people who have been doing it for years retire without passing on that knowledge and experience, it is LOST. In order to get it going again will take many years for people who have learned the theory to actually work out all the kinks in practice.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Interesting)
While in many applications it may be possible to replace metal with composites, there are always going to be corner cases. It wouldn't be too big a deal to lose one of these 50-kt machines, but losing the capability worldwide is another matter.
I'm reminded of a story a while back [slashdot.org] about there being only one company worldwide that can cast nuclear reactor vessels.
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I just hope those locations are disaster proof.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:4, Insightful)
Our civilization is actually very fragile and becoming more so. Lots of specialization and interdependence.
I hope more people (including our leaders) realize this and don't do anything stupid.
It's like the human body, you blow away both kidneys or a liver it ain't gonna work that well anymore.
Whereas you could hack a branch off a tree and it usually doesn't matter that much to the tree's survival, you could even stick the branch in the ground and there's a chance it might become another tree (the chance increases if you do it right).
And when you go to fungi or bacteria, it matters even less.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
Composites aren't going to replace everything. Landing gear and landing gear mounts, engine mounts, critical bulkheads, etc. will still be made of forged metal for a long, long time. Even with additive manufacturing techniques, forging will still be necessary because the forging process itself is what puts the strength in the parts.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what I've been wondering about with 3D printing... From what I've seen, current additive 3D printing has been with plastic, though I'll admit that my knowledge is sketchy.
Seems to me that it would be a simple matter to use 3D printing to build a model for traditional metal casting methods. But as mentioned, none of that gives you the strength of forged metal. So is there a way to combine 3D printing with casting and some sort of "generic" forging process?
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Informative)
There are laser-sintering machines that can "print" parts out of powdered metals. Titanium, Aluminum, Bronze can all be used in these machines. While most 3d printers use low temp plastics, like ABS, there is one sintering machine in the Midwest that uses PEEK plastic.
Laser-Sintering machines start at about $500k now. Significantly cheaper than they were 10 years ago
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Researchers are investigating the use of metal printing presses to produce stronger and lighter parts that are currently being forged. Metal printing techniques allow hollow parts to be made much easier than other techniques. Therefore, the nerds want to make strong metal parts that are lighter and stronger due to tight control of the metal particles and hollow. I hope they succeed.
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Seems to me that it would be a simple matter to use 3D printing to build a model for traditional metal casting methods. But as mentioned, none of that gives you the strength of forged metal. So is there a way to combine 3D printing with casting and some sort of "generic" forging process?
3D printing is compatible with both casting and forging. 3D printing is a good way to make the initial master model for a casting mold. It can also be used to create the model from which the forging dies will be created.
As far as 3D printing replacing forging, that's a different story. The forging process itself affects the material being forged, essentially aligning the "grains" of the metal along the contours of the piece. This is what gives forged parts increased strength. At this point I don't bel
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Don't forget engine components first and foremost.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Informative)
Composites aren't a magic product that replaces everything that came before it. If they were then why isn't anyone making engine blocks out of them? They have their uses but they have their limits as well.
I present to you the carbon fiber engine block.
http://www.thecarbonfiberjournal.com/?p=770 [thecarbonf...ournal.com]
Re: carbon fiber engine block (Score:5, Informative)
http://blog.caranddriver.com/is-this-the-engine-of-the-future-in-depth-with-matti-holtzberg-and-his-composite-engine-block/ [caranddriver.com]
This article goes into a little more depth. The block is actually a combination of aluminum and carbon. The parts that see the highest stress and highest temperature still have to be metal.
Also, this engine was announced a year ago, and I haven't been able to find any links to people actually driving one.
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Wouldn't it make more sense to put steel sleeves into this, and as you say, other metal parts into high-stress areas? Philosophical purity has little (but not no) place in the real world.
and he's not even green... (Score:2)
bonus chart [team.net]
Nodular cast iron is a composite (Score:5, Interesting)
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The US has the only mill in the world that can produce the propellers used in high speed silent running.
Didn't Toshiba get in trouble years ago over exporting high-quality CNC mills to the USSR for exactly this?
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm sorry, but I can't see any evidence that what these machines can do can be replicated by additive processes.
Yes, additive manufacture is great, but it isn't a universal construction technique. Don't forget please, that the last country that thought you could just dump heavy industry and replace it with small scale operations didn't do very well. [wikipedia.org]
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They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help,
Yeah, like TFS (seems to) suggest:
'Big machines are the product of big visions, and they make big visions real. How about a Heavy Fusion Program?'"
I just wonder if 50,000 tons would be enough, though.
(ducks)
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No, it's short about 1.4*10^26 tons.
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Informative)
Modern planes, and other transport/engineering structures, are moving to composites. Which are layered, printed, sometimes pressure baked and squeezed into form. But no longer forged on this scale.
While these machines are awesome, I've wandered along a car body stamping line and watched plates go from a flat sheet to a car door in 100meters, they are becoming less necessary to us. They will still be needed, of course, for some jobs where only such a monster can help, but I think the US should look on these as potential future museum pieces, with nostalgia for a bygone age of megaengineering, rather than a source of future industrial dominance.
Even a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry would help you understand how you're wrong. There are fundamental differences at the atomic level between things that are cast, forged, and "printed" in the manner that modern metal-based 3D printing works. The Venn diagram of things forged metal is good for and composites are good for has some overlap, but not a lot.
Thankfully, the engineers who are actually building things know the difference.
"At the atomic level" is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)
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Which kind of makes my point (Score:2)
Re:The future will be printed, not forged. (Score:5, Insightful)
.
According to Chemistry, a forged and a non-forged part are identical.
-- a chem. eng.
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Depends on the material. We won't be printing parts that could be made with this press forge anytime soon. Right now, you can fabricate some plastic and some light metal parts. The plastic might be reasonably sturdy, but the sintered metal parts aren't the same class as stuff that's made from this press. Until you actually have molecular assemblers...you're not having "printing" removing this stuff. To say it will right now is folly.
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Additive manufacturing? (Score:5, Interesting)
This thing is neat and maybe that's the best way to do things. But I thought Boeing was talking about additive manufacturing. I know they have ways of making titanium parts using additive manufacturing. I don't know if they're as strong as forged parts. But once that's cracked this forging process should become obsolete in aerospace. After all, why use solid pieces when you can have pieces articulated down to the level of bone. Fine latices of metal interwoven to build parts that have strength to weight ratios similar to what we see in nature. Sure, metal is stronger then bone. But bone is made out of relatively weak materials. If you build something with the same structure out of metal you could get something very strong and very light.
Still, very neat machine. I wonder if the Chinese have such a thing and it sounded like the Germans might?
It would be interesting to know if these machines are critical to a heavy industry economy.
Re:Additive manufacturing? (Score:5, Informative)
The Chinese have started building an 80,000 ton forge press
http://aciers.free.fr/index.php/2012/02/02/china-has-started-the-building-of-an-80000-ton-press-forge-us/ [aciers.free.fr]
Re:Additive manufacturing? (Score:5, Funny)
How long until I can buy one at Harbor Freight?
Re:Additive manufacturing? (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
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A comment from the article mentioned this link [aciers.free.fr] about a new Chinese forge that is even bigger.
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Sintered powder metal parts are not only not as strong as forged parts but their failure mode is to snap suddenly instead of bending. In car-land we saw this happen to the 7.3 liter powerstroke in 2001, where Ford went from the forged rods used in the pre-powerstroke International-Navistar 7.3 IDI turbo motor to a new powder metal rod chosen for lower cost. Not only is it not forged (cheaper) but instead of machining caps they are simply cracked off and then they get a cleanup pass, maybe. Unfortunately, th
Re:Additive manufacturing? (Score:5, Informative)
The laser Ti benificiation is the strongest additive manufacturing process available at the moment, and even it is very brittle because of the thermal stresses formed when it is produced. These are because as the laser melts the particles they are much hotter than the parts it is bonded with, and as they cool they shrink causing lots of stresses all throughout the material. That said, being able to make a ball inside of a socket during the manufacturing process is quite useful sometimes... not to speak of woven Ti mesh for grafts and such.
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Boeing was talking about using it to make airframe parts.
They described a similar problem in that the metal is at different temperatures during the creation. They said they managed that by somehow controlling that temperature throughout to certain tolerances.
Maybe they exaggerated. But they seemed to imply they had it.
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My understanding was that sintered powder forged metal rods with cracked end-caps were stronger than their standard counterparts. Ford's been using them in gasoline applications since... 1993? Whenever they introduced the 4.6 modular engine in the Mark VIII. They used them because they could make an equal-strength, lighter, less-expensive part, which sounds like a win to me. Of course, I'm not an engineer, so maybe I've been sold a bill of goods.
The only good article I could find was this [findarticles.com], but I'm guess
It all depends (Score:5, Informative)
The author of this paper is obviously biased MPIF 2005 paper [mpif.org] but it shows how active research is in this field, with the forging companies and powder metal companies constantly overtaking one another. The paper referenced actually demonstrates the superior fatigue strength of the powder technology used.
Forging involves the distortion of the metal grains, and as such there are always treatment issues with locked-in strain and the effects of any inclusions in the metal. Powder metallurgy has different problems. Neither is a perfect process. But the people who up-moderated drinkypoos comment certainly weren't metallurgists.
I find it's (Score:2, Funny)
I find it's really depressing
Score 1 moe for the government. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is another score for the government and a blow to the idea that provate industry always does everything best.
Some things are simply too expensivre and farsighted for private industry to invest. That's why a decent sized government is needed, to invest massive sums of money in things like this giant press. It has paid back massively.
Re:Score 1 moe for the government. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, yes, this is something that government clearly does best. Big, chunky investments whose returns are nebulous and decades after the initial outlay.
I don't mind that much that private enterprise then builds on government work afterwards, but what pisses me right off is when private companies then decide they owe nothing to the society that hosts them, avoid taxes, and campaign for reductions in the ones they do pay.
This, of course, has the advantage for established private enterprise of kicking away the ladder of government R&D and infrastructure investment so no pesky competitors can get the same leg up.
Re:Score 1 moe for the government. (Score:4, Funny)
This is another score for the government and a blow to the idea that provate industry always does everything best.
There is an entire political party that disagrees with you.
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Well in this particular case it was the Nazi government that was farsighted. The allies found giant presses when they occupied Germany at the end of WW2. So Germans had such presses running during WW2, and USA started heavy press program in 1950.
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In fairness, the US government was also farsighted. It saw them and decided that they had so much potential that they funded construction of their own ones.
FTFA: More military spending (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Fifty will soon be supplying bulkheads for the Joint Strike Fighter"
I'm not a big fan of dumping more money into the military when our science budgets are so thin.
Sheffield Forgemasters (Score:5, Interesting)
The UK company is mentioned as being build up with cheap government loans, which is a half truth.
Yes, they are getting cheap loans, but only begrudgingly and only after the government had canceled a much larger loan, aimed at letting them produce "ultra large" forgings that few other places in the world can manage, mostly for the nuclear industry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheffield_Forgemasters#2010_expansion [wikipedia.org]
But of course, we have to spend billions turning London into a bland commercial fortress for the Olympics. This is not that surprising; money that is meant to be spend on a national level has a nasty habit of being spent within a few miles of London.
But hey, I'm sure the Coalition know what they are doing. I'm sure putting missile launchers of peoples roofs and forbidding British beer brewers from selling stuff in many of the capitals pubs is a far more sensible economic investment than developing world class forging capabilities.
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and forbidding British beer brewers from selling stuff in many of the capitals pubs...
Huh?!! Really?
(please provide a link; if credible, one less ticket to London's Olympiad, thanks)
Re:US Steel "Shield" (Score:5, Informative)
A bit of history provides some useful background. During WWII, the area near Pittsburgh PA produced more steel than the rest of the world combined. (But those mills were mostly built with 19th century technology. They were at the 'prime of life' and would have been obsolete soon even without the war.) Steel mills and other heavy industry throughout the rest of the world also were largely destroyed by bombing from one side or the other - mostly Allied bombing of German and Japanese steel mills. So after the war US industry, and particularly US steel, were the only ones still able to produce products. We then lent money to all parties (the Marshall Plan), with the proviso that they had to spend the money on US goods. The boom of the 1950s was the result of this and some other policies (the GI bill was another). This amounted to a postwar bubble.
One of the things that those other countries did was build new steel plants, using the latest technology. By the end of the 1950s these new plants were coming online, able to make steel for much lower prices. At that point the US steel industry, still based on late-19th century mill technology, became completely obsolete. The US steel companies, still competing with each other as well as the rest of the world, could not justify spending $zillions to essentially compete against themselves, while it was well worth while for other countries to develop their own industries, as they were starting from a zero base. This is a classic problem that results in constant turnover in many/most/all industries - it rarely seems like a good idea to build your own competition looking at the short term - all it does is spend money to reduce profits- but it's often a good idea to come in from outside and build the competition to the entrenched, inefficient market leader..
Since the 1970s there have been quite a few new, smaller mills built here using the latest (IIRC NUCOR was one of the first examples) but they still have to work hard to compete with the lower costs elsewhere - lower wages, lower land prices, etc. So it's an uphill battle, and that kind of dominance after WWII was a one-time deal.
One of the side-effects of the loss of those two-mile-long mills in the Pittsburgh area is that the side has become clean. When I lived there (early 1990s) the Carnegie Library and Museum was being scrubbed. The building had been black for 80 years or so. After scrubbing it turned out to be blond! I saw pictures from the 1950s where it was too dark and smoky to see across the street in downtown Pittsburgh. And those big mill areas along the rivers are now available to be turned into parks, housing, light industry, clean industry, whatever. But of course, there aren't many jobs. The population of Pittsburgh now is about 1/3 what it was in 1965. Houses are (or at least were) cheap.
Of COURSE we lack the ability to make a new one (Score:5, Funny)
Take that Ayn Rand lovers! (Score:2)
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Rands philosophy does not prohibit government service, spending or initiatives. Where she differed from conventional thinking is in how the government should be financed. She believed that contributions to the government should be voluntary.
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Right, because the rich are all about giving back to the society that enabled their success.
"I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." -the presumptive Republican nominee.
Hugh Pickens (Score:3)
Sounds Like a Strategic Target (Score:2)
TFA says:
What sort of defenses surround this Atlantean artifact?
And while we (Score:3)
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Metric System Thriving In Nation's Inner Cities [theonion.com]
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Where am I using the UK as the standard? They are just as ridiculous with their units as the US. I want a metric system to be used as the standard everywhere.
I see that I've been marked as a troll by all the american mods :D I for one could not envisage the scale of the machine thanks to the units used.
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No, a large rich arrogant country with a lot of infrastructure built around its standards that would cost a fortune to change.
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Actually, since so much of the major companies/manufacturers/infrastructure needs to deal with international standards, they're already dealing in Metric and the like, they'd probably be just as happy to get rid of US Imperial too.
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What is that ITU international dialling you refer to? The +country prefix that works on cellphones? This is available everywhere in the world, U.S. included. As for calling from landlines -- ah, it's some pipe dream. Travel around some and tell me what international dial prefixes have you seen, because I have 5 on my list, and I haven't even tried very hard. Even for pulse dialing there are two offsets worldwide -- one pulse can mean 0 or 1, depending on where you are, and U.S. is not to blame for that one
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Why the downmod? The guy is right: even though /. is us-centric, such a boondongle of units makes the whole text unclear.
One day, the US will switch to metric. And that will be a good day.
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If there were only two countries that drove on the left-hand side of the road, or only two countries that didn't speak English, then I'd imagine that there'd be some pretty heavy international pressure for them to get in line with everyone else. Even if the pressure was more subtle, such as imported vehicles costing more as it's a different model to the entire rest of the world...
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oh, dear. Nice straw man dude. In many ways, you have just clinched the matter for us due to the confusion between pound-mass and pound-force. All the more reason for this shit to just go away.
Oh, I don't mind using Newtons either.
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We know how to reach the moon. If for some reason it was necessary to land men on the moon, we could implement a program that would get us back there. Instead, we have rovers on Mars with another huge rover on the way there, a Saturn orbiter, a probe to Pluto, a Mercury orbiter, an asteroid orbiter, ....
I sure as hell wouldn't trade all of that for a couple of guys walking around on the moon again.
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Indeed.
Fix it. Throw enough billions at the project, and get a semi-sustainable base up there. It'll be handy for astronomy, national pride and construction of spacecraft for going further.
Aesop thinks you're a moron (Score:2)
the grapes are sour.
Learn to fable, idiot.
The fox claimed the grapes were probably sour because he couldn't reach them.
In contrast, we went there, ate the grapes, then decided it wasn't worth the effort to procure more of the same grapes.
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And what if the monarchs of the old world felt the same way about the new world?
To be fair, after Columbus' initial voyage to the new world, it wasn't any sense of exploration that was driving those expeditions, it was the promise of immense reward due to the reports of those "streets lined with gold". Even Columbus' first voyage wasn't bankrolled just for the sake of exploration, but to find that shorter route to the East.
I bet if Columbus had discovered the New World and found a lunar landscape, it would have been hundreds of years before anyone bothered to return.
Don't misunderstan
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You do realize that defense is about 16-18% of the budget. The rest is all those other things governments do. Cutting defense to $0 will still leave the U.S. with a $600-700 Billion budget gap. And the Me Generation is about to send the rest of the budget into outer space now that they are getting old enough to retire and somehow believe the rest of the country owes them some Golden Years after having to put up with their whining and kvetching for the last 50.
And even if they did reduce the defense budget b
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2010 US federal budget breakdown chart [wikimedia.org]
US Military budget (uses 2010 number) [wikipedia.org]
US Federal Budget (uses 2011 number) [wikipedia.org]
Maybe this impressive chart from the New York Times on the 2011 budget [nytimes.com]
Then there is the XKCD Money poster that also has a federal budget breakdown [xkcd.com] Simple fact is that we spend more money on social programs than we do on military (hell I'll even toss in the veterans affairs stuff too if that makes you feel better)
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US Federal Budfget, 2010...
Total spending: ~$3.55 trillion.
Total Social Security spending: $695 billion (19.6%)
Total Medicare spending: $453 billion (12.8%)
So, we're over 20% so far.
Total Medicaid spending: $290 billion (8.2%)
Unemployment/Welfare/"other mandatory spending: $571 billion. (16.1%) - note that not all this will be
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Relative to the weight of the plane, yes, it would be the same as adding two more pounds of thrust, though you'd gain a slight advantage in maneuverability due to less mass.
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Re: (Score:2)
Heck, I'd settle for putting a lump of coal into it, to get diamonds, just like Superman.
Re: (Score:2)
no the submitter is wrongly thinking that if you'd take over the europe now you would find working fusion reactor models to clone with government money....
Re:Summary contains entire article... plus some? (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is a summary of the article on BoingBoing, here:
http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/machines.html
which mentions all of those things. (Specifically, the company that built the press went bankrupt some decades ago and the machines used to cast the parts of that size have been sold for scrap). The link is to a similar article in The Atlantic, for whatever reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Allow me to demonstrate, Mr Bond. When I push this button, 50,000 tons of compressive force will ensure that your body is as neatly pressed as your Savile Row suit.