Edwin

How a mini computer is made This one starts as raw aluminum, not a circuit board. It gets machined, sanded and anodized before a single chip goes in. The case is half the cooling system. Heat leaves the chips through a thermal pad into the metal, then into the air. Aluminum runs roughly 150 to 200 W/mK and copper close to 400, while a typical gap pad is single digits. The pad is the weak link, so those little green strips matter more than they look. What matters more in a mini PC, the chip or the case around it? Video: Anvil Grit

This is the Airbus Racer, and the trick isn't the propellers. It's the wings. A helicopter can't just add power to go faster. Past a point the retreating blade stops making lift. So the Racer's wings carry about half the lift in cruise, and the main rotor can slow down. The catch is that you pay for that speed in parts. Long driveshafts, wings, more to maintain. That's why Airbus still calls it a demonstrator. Forget the 240 kt target. In cruise the main rotor gets only 20-25% of the torque. Video: Aerowl Aviation

How does a Formula racing car stay glued to the track when taking corners at high speed? Video credit: RaceSimStudios via Instagram.

likely CGI not real footage These lasers fire in the infrared, so you can't see them. In real life you'd just watch the drone start to smoke a few seconds later. It's not an explosion, it's heating. The beam has to sit on one spot until something gives. Video: dronedefenseglobal

This is a Bundeswehr Fuchs, a 6x6 troop carrier that can swim, driving through a half-frozen pond. The hull is sealed and floats. For swimming, a trim vane raises on the nose and two rear propellers push and steer it at about 10 km/h, a tenth of its road speed. The hard part isn't floating, it's the bank. The propellers only help while there's water under them, so getting out comes down to the tires gripping slick mud and ice.

This is a Cat track loader with a drum mulcher on the front, and it doesn't really cut the tree. It beats it into pieces. The drum is covered in carbide teeth and spins somewhere around 2,000 to 3,000 rpm. Every tooth tears off a bite of wood, so what's left is mulch on the ground instead of logs to haul away.

This is a lathe reshaping a steel, and the very top is the hard part. It cuts steps first, then a finishing pass follows the true arc. But surface speed depends on diameter, so toward the tip it falls to zero. The tool starts rubbing instead of cutting, and in constant surface speed mode the math asks for infinite rpm, so the control has to cap it.

This is the part of an SLS launch before the launch And those sparks re hydrogen burn-off igniters. Some liquid hydrogen lingers under the engines, so they burn it off first, before the RS-25s start. The engines then light about 6.4 seconds before liftoff so the computer can check them. Only after that do the boosters ignite, because solid boosters can't be shut off. Once they light, you're going. Video: NASA

This is a threading insert cutting steel while it's still glowing red. Heat is doing a lot of the work. Around 700°C, ordinary carbon steel keeps only about a quarter of its room-temperature yield strength, so the insert shears it far more easily. Video: patelengineering88

A ribbed cutterhead feeds in from the side while it turns. At the start the slab is lopsided, so the cutter only touches the high spots and every turn takes off a little less, until the cut runs smooth and the slab comes out round. About a minute in this clip, from bark to clean cylinder. 🎥 Source: timber_craftman

This is a Japanese F-15J with both burners lit and the nose way up Japan kept the know-how at home, so the upgrade is a home job as well. It started in 2019 for up to 98 jets. Now it's 68, and the first 20 aren't due until fiscal 2029. Video: mikio156v6

Yard of Abandoned shuttles Who knows how much these are worth

Swedish Leopard 2 puts a 120 mm round through a concrete wall and the wall is still standing afterwards. Just a hole in it. The blast went off on the far side, right by the car. My read is a delay fuze. A contact fuze goes off on the face of the wall and mostly blows a hole in it. Give it a delay and the round gets through first, then goes off. Video: markstridsskolan

Just one tool cutting a Spurgear, one stroke at a time. It only cuts in one direction then backs off for the return. The teeth shrink toward the tip of the cone, so the tool has to aim at that point on every pass. I read that Gleason built the first practical machine for this in 1874, also with a single planing tool. Same idea since then and it's still running. Video: realengineerings

A Super Hornet can go supersonic. At air shows the Blues aren't allowed to. On the low sneak pass, the solos target Mach 0.95, roughly 725 mph, and stop there on purpose. Why leave the last 5% on the table? Because the air doesn't wait for the jet. Airflow accelerating over the airframe can hit the speed of sound while the aircraft is still below it, and the Super Hornet makes a noticeably bigger patch of that than the old Hornet. At 50 feet, that shock reaches the ground. in January 2021, one practice pass, a little too fast and a little too close, caused over $180,000 in damage at a California base. The Navy cut the speed cap from 0.96 to 0.95 and banned the pass within 200 ft of any structure, vehicle or person. So this isn't a pilot pushing the limit. It's a pilot hitting a number, exactly, over and over.

This is a diesel pile hammer doing exactly what it's built for, driving a concrete pile into the ground right beside a bridge going up. It works like a diesel engine with one giant piston. A crane lifts the ram, fuel gets injected, and the ram drops. On the way down it squeezes the air and fuel until the mixture gets hot enough to ignite, with no spark plug. As the ram lands, the mixture goes off, the blast shoves the pile further down, and the ram gets thrown back up to fall again. It keeps cycling until the crew shuts it off or it runs out of fuel. The catch is soft ground. The pile pushing back is what bounces the ram up, so in soft soil crews start with a smaller hammer and a shorter stroke. And these hammers have an old reputation for smoke and noise, which you can see in the clip. They come in sizes from about 3,500 lb to over 100,000 lb, and they carry their own fuel instead of needing an external power supply. That's why you see them on remote sites and in all kinds of soil. 🎥 Source: draaa2748

This is a pair of Apaches, and a big part of what you're looking at is armor. The AH-64 was built to survive hits that would end a lighter helicopter. About 1,130 kg (roughly 2,500 lb) of boron carbide and Kevlar protects it. The crew compartment and rotor blades are rated against 23 mm fire, and the landing gear and seats are built to soak up crash energy. The two crew sit in tandem, with the gunner in front and the pilot behind and about 19 inches higher, and a blast shield between them. The catch is weight. Max takeoff weight is about 10,433 kg , and the hover ceiling drops fast in heat or when it's heavy. The canopy glass isn't ballistically rated either. The number that matters isn't top speed. It's two engines at about 1,994 shp each, which is what lets something this heavy hover out of ground effect up to about 3,505 m on a standard day at mission weight. Video credit: Jimmy van Drunen

A ship's missile launcher swings round to aim, fires, and the whole bow disappears into smoke. That cloud is the rocket motor. Most ship-launched anti-air missiles light a solid-fuel motor a few feet from the deck, so the exhaust goes everywhere until the wind carries it off. You're watching the ship breathe it in as much as the missile. It's also why the launcher sits right up on the bow, out in the open with a clear view, and why crews keep people away from the deck around it during a shot. 🎥 Source: thevigilantheroes

This is a rocket engine designed by software, and the company behind it says no engineer drew the geometry. The program is called Noyron. You give it the specs, like thrust and propellants, and it generates the whole engine: the chamber, the nozzle, and the maze of cooling channels inside the walls. Then the engine is printed in one piece from a copper alloy. Their latest pair of 20 kN engines, burning methane and liquid oxygen, went from specification to first flame in under three weeks. The catch is that drawing the shape is the easy part. Everything depends on cooling. In their aerospike the exhaust reaches about 3,500 °C, and the engine only survives because cryogenic propellant flows through channels inside the walls. The results are mixed too. Their 20 kN aerospike managed a single burn because of start-up trouble, and no aerospike has ever flown to space. Video: LEAP 71