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The magic middle
It never ceases to amaze me how trains of thought I've been following for most of my life, and writing about for years, can still lead to new realizations. This must be one of the great advantage of teaching. I'm going to approach this new realization in a round about way -- possibly as an homage to Martha Grimes.In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Richard Feynman writes about a brief time in his grad student days when he worked in industry. Here's a quote I've always remembered, this is a mechanical engineer giving him advice for a project, "when you have a gear ratio, say 2 to 1, and you are wondering whether you should make it 10 to 5 or 24 to 12 or 48 to 24, here's how to decide: You look in the Boston Gear Catalogue, and select those gears that are in the middle of the list. The ones at the high end have so many teeth they're hard to make. If they could make gears with even finer teeth, they'd have made
the list go even higher. The gears at the low end of the list have so few teeth they break easy. So the
best design uses gears from the middle of the list." That passage has always stayed with me as an argument for the safety of a middle course.
Now, I've talked before about Hitler's fondness for super tanks and the Imperial Japanese Navy's (IJN's) similar fondness for super ships, but also about how the IJN opted to skimp on protection for their aircraft in exchange for maneuverability and range. And I've contrasted these detrimental extremes with the success of more moderate options like U.S.N. battleships and light fleet carriers. I don't think I've mentioned Soviet tanks, but the T-34 is perhaps the best example of a middle-of-the-range tank, not as good as the best German tanks but with some better features than the U.S. tanks of the same period.
If production issues, maintenance issues, fuel logistics, and the ability to cross weak bridges or be transported on narrow trains were not factors, any sane tanker would want a Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B (King Tiger). But those issues are always factors. I started this train of thought with the exploits of Sepp Dietrich during the Battle of the Bulge in mind. He ended up having to abandon some of the best tanks in the world and escape on foot because he couldn't get across rivers and ran out of fuel. I can't say that he would have done better with Panzer IVs, but I don't think he would have done worse, and they may well have given him options (and time) he didn't have with his King Tigers.
Would the IJN have done better with battleships more like the Iowa's than the Yamatos? They wouldn't have done worse. And it's reasonable to assume they would have had the ships sooner and been a little more willing to risk them in battle. By opting for the extreme end of the scale they stressed their manufacturing sector (not always a bad thing) and limited their other material options. You can argue that what the IJN really needed was a modern upgrade to their excellent Kongō-class ships. Both as escorts to their carrier fleets and as backup for their cruiser forces in the Solomons battles -- fast ships armed with 16" guns and powerful AAA could have made a real difference. (More likely, they would have freed up more of the Kongōs to participate in the Solomons.) But I digress...
My point is that, to again quote what I'm told is an old Russian proverb, " 'Better' is the enemy of 'good enough'." The best possible tank or battleship is almost certainly too much tank or battleship. (Aircraft carriers are a bit of a special case since they require so much room and become more efficient the larger their air group. The "don't-keep-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket" argument against super-carriers falls apart when your non-super-carrier can't support AWACS or fighters competitive with ground based air craft. The U.S.N. wasn't completely wrong, at the beginning of WW2 when they were reluctant to invest in small carriers.)
So does this principle extend beyond war and engineering? I think it's true for the built environment: Buildings, airports, cities (though I have read that buildings over 100 stories tend to be inherently more stable due to factors I can't easily explain.) And I do think people tend to underestimate the disadvantages of Light-Rail vs Heavy-Rail for city transit systems. It certainly applies when it comes to breast implants.
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