It is, but it’s a common trap people fall into: overengineering.
The truth is, the purest expression of the engineer’s art comes not when there’s nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away. We are, in fact, sculptors, removing all of the elements of technology that don’t do what we need it to do.
When I was in the engineering corp, we made everything as simple as possible because infantry would inevitably get ahold of it.
We don’t use the term ‘idiot-proofing’ in the Imperium.
We use ‘Goon-proofing’.
Same thing.
If you’re on a minmatar ship, and it’s not vibrating: head for the escape pod.
I don’t fly rust buckets.
White finger syndrome. Hand-held power tools, the vibrations, over a period of time, damage the small blood vessels in the fingers, hands, and arms. This causes a loss of sensation, difficulty in picking up and manipulating small objects, and a lot of pain.
I am impressed that it was possible to derail this thread. Well done.
Whenever someone claims something is fool-proof I remind them never to underestimate the ingenuity of fools.
You’re missing out. They are great ships.
We could derail the ‘off-topic’ thread next if you want. The members of this forum have that kind of talent.
I believe perhaps a probable cause is that many of the Militia has deployed to the Cloud Ring region in order to protect Gallente assets in the area.
Uh … with great respect to Ms. Kim’s combat skills, I’m pretty sure one thing she does not actually do all that often is spend a lot of time with Technicians. (It’d leave less time for training.)
It is probably true that taking ships apart and reassembling them for fun doesn’t happen a lot, but it’s for another reason: Caldari tech tends to be kind of by-the-numbers. It’s not that it’s hard to take apart and reassemble, it’s that there’s not a lot of easy room for improvement. It sounds a little like Sebiestor techs like tinkering and trying to improve stuff. Caldari techs are mostly … well, techs. They keep stuff running in good order, clicking along like it’s supposed to.
Come to think of it, that might be partly a result of a difference in basic technological background: it’s pretty hard to do improvements on stuff like a gravimetric fusion plant or a Talocan shield emitter without a lot of very specialized knowledge, and you really, truly don’t want to be the tech who has to admit to having taken something important apart and almost put it back together correctly.
That might also explain why people talk about Achur Inventors like there’s something magical about them-- they’re playing with some kind of esoteric stuff. (Achura talk about a lot of stuff like that, though, even when we know perfectly well there’s no magic involved.)
Goon-proofing is not a destination to be achieved, but a journey forward on a never-ending road… through an unspeakable swamp of neck-deep stupidity.
Why not? That sounds like exactly the thing you’d want to admit… because it means you’re learning. You’ve found something you don’t know, a way to grow and understand more…
Ugh. The day I know how everything works, the day there’s nothing left to learn… that’s the day I cancel all my clone contracts and self-destruct my ship in the center of a star.
You don’t want to be that tech because it means you took something that worked and made it not work. It’s particularly bad if someone was depending on it to work, it didn’t, people are dead, and it’s your fault.
And absent the specialized knowledge I mentioned, you’re unlikely to have learned very much in the process.
(Training is handled under controlled circumstances or with oversight. Apprentices are supposed to work with proper supervision; it’s why they’re apprentices.)
I did mention we’re the curious ones, right? Most Caldari are very job-oriented, as in, “You know how to do the job right, so do it right, get it done, and let’s go get a drink.”
Well you don’t do it when it might be needed at a moment’s notice! That would be insane.
What I’ve learned during my time in Horde is that the standards for getting a pilot’s license are far too low. I don’t know how to feel when someone finds a new way to fail at something that is designed to be almost impossible to mess up.
When that happens to me these days, I feel elated: They’ve shown me an all-new type of stupidity to design against in the future. It’d be like someone telling Boat ‘look… space you’ve never conquered…’
Sometimes it feels like some people got their license just by having a pulse and they barely got that far. I imagine the examiner saying" well, you’re capsule compatible, have some brain activity, and you have a pulse, so we can overlook your single digit IQ." Or maybe they just bribed the examiner into giving them a license.