fwiw,
My son is a mechanical engineer. He designs the structure for satellites. There is no opportunity to perform a repair after launch. Quality is critical and so is weight (mass). They cut it as close as they can (dare).
I am a software engineer. In the late 80's we were designing software to perform automatic mesh generation and stress analysis. We were the first company to figure out how to automatically create a mesh. If you are not an engineer then my use of the word mesh probably means noting to you. That is OK.
What we were doing in the late 80's required a multi million dollar mainframe computer to run. My son uses a high end PC running Windows to run those simulations.
When you make it easy to create a mesh automatically (minutes instead of days) and you have enough computer power to run the simulations (PC versus mainframe) then the design engineer can execute a tremendous quantity of tress analyses.
Therefore, it is my opinion that today's engineers have a lot less slop in there calculations than they did 10 years ago. Because they can now and could not back then.
Just one man's opinion.
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