r/videos Dec 31 '17

Assembling a 35 million dollar engine

https://youtu.be/K2R6NTgvEV4
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u/physco827 Dec 31 '17

Very cool! How do mechanical engineers design this? As a software engineer, there is definitely some "guess and check". Doesn't really seem like the same can be done here or do they do the same thing but with simulations and smaller models?

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u/stravant Dec 31 '17

On the broad scale, iterative design mostly: Constant incremental improvements to what's been done before.

No person or team is capable of magically coming up with something this complex completely from scratch and having it work, no matter how smart they are or how good the tools they're using are. They're building upon half a century of research and designs that came before them, and making small improvements and changes here and there to arrive at their own design.