When designing machinery or constructions, deflection under load is often the limiting factor. In those cases the stiffness of the construction is much more important than the strength of the material.

Now the stiffness of a construction is determined by both the shape and the material stiffness or Young's Modulus.

But AFAICT, little if any progress has been made in improving the Young's Modulus of alloys.

Additionally, often the ultimate strength of metals isn't really important in a design. In general designers want to make sure that the stresses in the material don't exceed the proportionality limit.

When the book came out, it was the first sci-fi book in years that I couldn't put down.

And the film stayed fairly true to the book, which is also uncommon.

Technically, you could say that the Martian is more *engineering*-fiction; it's not about discovering new principles, but making stuff work. Even in ways it was never meant to, and without the proper means. In that aspect is also great *hacking* fiction.

As an engineer myself I loved it. Especially the book. Stuff going wrong is very recognizable in engineering practice. Every experienced engineer has had their "oh, shit" moments.

Circa 1990. 368SX-16 through a discount program at school during my bachelor's. If memory serves, it had a 40 MB harddisk. Didn't buy a DX so I could buy a deskjet printer as well. Installed MS-DOS 5.0 when it came out. Looked at QBasic, but didn't like it. Mainly used it to run WordPerfect and Turbo Pascal and later Turbo C.

At school we used a 386DX to run NASTRAN on Xenix. That was my first contact with UNIX.

I upgraded components over the years until I had a 486 around 1994. Installed OS2 2.0. Used IBM's compiler, but it was buggy and expensive. Installed GCC and GNU Make. Then a friend showed me Linux.

It must have been in 1996 when I downloaded a dozen floppies worth of Slackware in the evenings using my modem, and dove right in. I've been using Linux and later FreeBSD ever since.

Good times. :-)

Their rocket blew up, they've been trying to find out why.
(Not uncommon in that business)

Is anybody surprised that this costs a lot of money?

Looking at the video frame by frame, it looks like the explosion starts between the rocket and the tower...

A fitting tribute! Thank you for sharing it.

And thank you Sir Terry, for your wonderful stories.

A flash website in 2013?

8: Meh

The problem with all these powered lift gizmos (like the Williams X-jet and the Hiller VZ-1) is that you tend to fall out ouf the sky when your engine fails... The Hiller VZ-1 which is also a ducted fan used *two* 30 kW engines, but barely flew out of the ground effect and was limited in speed. More powerful versions had other control problems.

Given the legal terror tactics employed by the MPAA and the RIAA, would it be possible to get both organizations labeled and subsequently banned as terrorist organizations?