Out of interest are you an actual engineer? For the record, and to be clear here I'm a chartered engineer in mechanical engineering, so I work in a professional engineering environment, and the cynicist in me makes me sceptical if I think someone's is simply on the first peak of Dunning Kruger, but responding as if they were a pro, especially when they make themselves out as a forum spokesperson.
Well, I've built many things that go over 200 MPH with people in them, safely, boats and houses and I am NOT an engineer by trade or education.
Over 70% of the WWII ships that were designed, built and operated by the USA where not designed by a man trained as a Navel Architect or Engineer:
The class of 1910 dropout who designed the SS
United States—the fastest, safest, most beautiful transatlantic liner ever built—had the diction of a Philadelphia aristocrat, the mind of an artist, and the mouth of a sailor (a trait picked up from years of working in shipyards).
William Francis Gibbs’s love affair with ships began when the eight-year-old and his father watched the ocean liner
St. Louis roar down the ways at Philadelphia’s Cramp Shipyard. “[F]rom that day forward I dedicated my life to ships,” Gibbs recalled. But when he arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1906, he had no apparent knack for engineering or leadership. Shy, sickly, and terrified of simple addition, he got into Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School at 20, despite abysmal grades, most likely because of his family’s wealth. His self-made father, who earned millions manufacturing gas equipment with Peter Widener (grandfather of Harry, A.B. 1907), was not happy when his son chose to study engineering. “Most of the engineers he knew,” Gibbs said, “were pretty impractical people.”
The introverted Gibbs was not popular—his rambunctious peers often “filled him with alarm.” He was a prep-school-educated Protestant living in a “Gold Coast” dormitory, but no final club wanted him. Alone in his Claverly suite, he studied blueprints of the newest British naval vessels late into the night. Yet he carefully locked his desk when he left his room, fearing ridicule as “the eeriest of all the eccentrics in three centuries of Harvard life if it were known that he was busy improving British battleships.”
Meanwhile, he proved a bad engineering student, and withdrew from Harvard early in his sophomore year. After a round trip to Europe with his younger brother aboard Cunard’s new liners
Lusitania and
Mauretania, he returned to Cambridge the following fall, switched to economics in the College, and excelled. Yet he did not graduate: his father went bankrupt, and Gibbs left school.
Eventually he enrolled at Columbia and worked his way through college and law school there. Yet he kept his passion for ship design. “I studied engineering at night out of books,” he recalled. “That’s the way to really learn things—by
yourself.” In 1915, the unhappy lawyer finagled his way into an apprenticeship with the nation’s leading naval architect, Admiral David W. Taylor, who led the U.S. Navy’s expansion under Theodore Roosevelt.
Gibbs never looked back, steadily building up his own naval engineering firm and hiring talented subordinates. (“Take it away,” he was known to snarl when shown what he deemed inferior workmanship. “Bring me the best.”) He married the cultured Vera Cravath, whose father was one of the most powerful lawyers in New York. In the 1930s, encouraged by ship enthusiast Franklin Roosevelt, Gibbs designed the revolutionary
Mahan-class destroyers, the first combat vessels to use high-pressure, high-temperature steam turbines. Their speed and maneuverability probably helped win the war in the Pacific. During World War II,
Gibbs & Cox designed 70 percent of all navy ships, including the Normandy landing craft, and devised a means to mass-produce
Liberty Ship cargo vessels faster than the enemy could sink them.
I'd say that that the designation "Engineer" (which until recent times, NASCAR teams would not hire because engineers were frequently being proven wrong when they were saying how something was impossible to do a certain way) just allows you to talk the talk and pretend that you are superior in knowledge. Maybe you do have more knowledge, maybe you do not. Most of us have quit a bit of EMPIRICAL knowledge if not EDUCATIONAL knowledge and many of us have both.
Have you read the FAQ section at the top of the page yet? If not, I kindly and strongly suggest that you do.
But, also I would suggest that you calm down a bit and take RandomEars advice.
We are welcoming you and kindly, from the bottom of our hearts, making these suggestions. And hope that we can all learn something from each other.
Thank you for your consideration.
EJ3
