Interesting, I think it’s different for structural engineering because you’re doing calculations in accordance with a code of practice and the spreadsheet needs to be adapted to tweak the inputs and outputs of a standard formula and apply it slightly differently for different bridges / structural arrangements. I’ve written loads of spreadsheets that have been used and adapted by other people in my company, I honestly don’t think they are that difficult to understand (or people wouldn’t have been able to build on them and adapt them).
I can see that lab software is quite different, especially if you have very well defined procedures and you are repeating exactly the same test again and again with the same inputs and outputs.
In structural engineering (bridge design etc), we use quite complicated spreadsheets for calculations; a database wouldn’t be the right tool for that job. We use excel because everyone knows how to use it and it’s easy to print to PDF and see the inputs and outputs and any graphical summaries you have added. Using a spreadsheet makes it easy to check and easy to adapt/change when you want to do a slightly different calculation next time.
I’ve tried building spreadsheets of similar complexity in libreoffice and it’s true they are very slow in comparison and more prone to crashing.
Libreoffice works well for some tasks and I enjoy using it at home but honestly if I tried to use it at work it would cut my productivity significantly. I’m probably using it more intensively than most people though.
Those fenders would have done basically nothing for a ship of this size. You’d be looking at a 20m diameter cofferdam full of concrete to be able to take a hit like that without failing, I did some basic calcs and the ship was about 100,000DWT so the impact force would be in the order of 315MN, absolutely huge.
Yeah, you’d struggle to design a foundation that could take a hit like that, it would be something like a 20m diameter cofferdam full of concrete. The ship that hit it was about 100,000DWT so the impact load will be something like 300MN.
The bridge did have some small dolphins / navigation guides in front of the piers but they were likely designed for a very small impact load from a small vessel losing control.
I’ve wanted this for years; in the past manually flashing the privileged extension after every system update was such a pain that I quickly gave up on it.