On 26/12/16 05:47, John Rumm wrote:
On 25/12/2016 23:52, T i m wrote:
On Sun, 25 Dec 2016 14:11:01 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

snip

See, it's not all about efficiency directly but questioning *if* there
were any *other* improvements that could be made that *could* have
other benefits ... like faster recovery-time or reduced scaling.

A larger (surface area) element at lower temperature may result in
slightly less scaling.

Ok.

It should not make much difference to the
recovery time though since the limit is usually the rate of heat input.

Understood ... the fact that it might make *some* difference though
(then) could be of interest to some. ;-)


Perhaps, but enough to make it worth doing something?

Much as any engineer tends to view the world as a sub optimal
implementation that needs to be fixed,

Complete lie.

No true engineer regards it like that.

Its is a chaos of compromises, all just good enough to not be worth
fixing except for a very very few cases.

Stuff that works massively worse than other stuff, tends not to exist
after a while.

Unil some romantic idiot decides to reintroduce it and con billions out
of people to pay r it.

Windmills spring to mind....bit eventually those too will pass as te
money spent on them will not be spent on stuff that actually works to
keep the soceity and its culture intact, and someone will take over and
build probably treadmills for all the surplus snowflakes and greens.


there comes a point where you
need to choose a problem big enough to make it worth spending the effort
fixing it.


And that is good engineering philosophy.

Go to a company like Prodrive, and the engineers there will be analysing
rally car performance in tenths of a second per stage per million pounds
spent.

And the technology with the most tenths gets the budget.

Don't confuse real engineers with people like Clive Sinclair or James
Dyson, or the people behind e.g. Microsoft or Apple.

There is stuff that is designed to sell, and there is stuff that is
designed to work.

In the consumer market, the two are almost unrelated.