"Richard Smith" wrote in message ...
....
What should I be asking them for? They have a lot of stuff, and many
big industrial customers, so I need to have a good idea and and get
very close to the final solution - within reach of them being able to
suggest detailed optimisation.
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That's a difficult question when your idea is innovative. When I was
prototyping a lab demo of a multiplexed laser crosslink between satellites I
couldn't directly mention it, or people would look at me as if I was hearing
voices from outer space. I had to define the items I wanted to buy in
down-to-Earth terms they recognized, then quietly modify them into what I
needed, sometimes in my basement machine shop. A warped part that was too
thin to flycut flat had to be fitted to its heatsink by smoking and
scraping, like an old-time British gunsmith.

One of the engineers involved had helped design the Apollo lunar lander
computer and told me the real story of its supposed failure. It ran a loop
of all its tasks, one of which was to reset a hardware timer that would
light a warning lamp if it ever timed out, presumably because the computer
had crashed. As designed there was plenty of timing margin, but after he
moved on the inevitable '"feature creep" kept adding more to do and the moon
landing put unexpected demands on the software, such that the timer wasn't
being reset soon enough and the warning lamp flickered on between timeout
and reset. The computer was still working perfectly.