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This is not a "genius" problem. This is mundane number crunching that every military has been doing for hundreds of years with ever increasing accuracy.

You need a few bombs and some places of varying geology to set them off. You take those data points, cross reference with all your historical knowledge and should be able to say whether a bunker of given construction a given depth under a given geology can be breached.

I hate how allergic to just testing and prototyping things modern engineering culture is.

Yeah, the bomb is expensive, but you gotta test it too so if you do it all right you get two birds with one stone.






They tested those bombs plenty. It's clear that they punched three holes in that mountain, but it's a whole frickin' mountain.

Never mind the fact that bomb damage assessment is one of the most difficult problems in photograph interpretation -- it's hard enough when the target is above ground, worse when it isn't.


I agree, but I don't think it's entirely unique to this era.

The US Navy's torpedo station in Newport, RI produced torpedos that were really prone to failure during the first few years of WW2.

IIRC, the problem persisted so long because an admiral in charge refused to provide enough torpedos for adequate testing.

(Sorry if there are any errors here, I can't easily fact check at the moment.)


That's accurate. They sped the torpedoes up, but failed to redesign the trigger, with the end result of ideal (and taught) geometry shots having a low chance of detonating. (Among other problems)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo#Problems




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