How to make the design event better.

[Big Bird]

I have to say that I am getting pretty bloody tired of the tit-for-tat arguments that are degrading this forum. I repeat. We are all fighting for the same cause. I know each of the protagonists in the above arguments, and you ARE all in agreement about the intent of the comp, the quality of engineering education in this part of the world, and even many of your ideas of how to improve FSAE. FFS, stop this bullshit arguing and poring over points of order and stand above this destructive nonsense. In particular, those engaged in these silly "Z vs the world" arguments, your antagonism is doing more harm than good. We have reduced a much needed discussion to a name-calling exercise.

GTS, I have full respect for what you are trying to do by giving a judges point of view. It is well needed given the lack of real feedback we have been getting from event judges. But your headline about paranoia is plain offensive and low, and has dragged this debate into the gutter. Take it down.

I am not interested in who said what to who, I am not interested in picking apart someone’s post and quoting the words used in the fourth line of the third paragraph of someone’s post from two pages back. I could not give a fat rat's clacker how you justify your latest minor revision of your argument, or how desperately important it is that we all know that the answer is "red" whilst that other fool is arguing it is "crimson". No matter who you are, what your history is, whether you are a competitor or alumnus or a judge or an official or a marshal or a spectator or an F1 designer or a former competitor's uncle's greengrocer - if you feel the need to post out of spite or to defend your honour or to set someone straight - then you should probably take a Bex and lie down for a while.

No-one wins when we start getting personal.

I am here because I know the FSAE program is the best damn thing that happened to me during university, and was the only bloody thing I did at university that taught me anything about engineering. In my country the event is so close to imploding it is not funny, and it pains me greatly that future engineering students will not get the opportunity I did. And yet in the face of such crisis, we are playing silly little power games, and attacking personalities rather than discussing ideas.

And that is the point. This forum, when it works, is a competition of ideas. As is FSAE. It is a meritocracy. But I have seen both these forum boards and the event itself degrade into ego driven political bun-fighting. It is childish, it is petulant, and it is killing our event.

If you have an idea, offer it. If it is good, it will float. If it is not, it will sink. Your idea does not become better by restating it over and over, and it does not become a better idea by belittling people who have an alternative idea. It is time to stand above the petty name-calling and spitefulness. It is time to stop the silly arguing and tantrums and carefully worded slights undermining your perceived foes. If you can’t bring a bit of goodwill, humility and collaboration to the table – then FFS please inflict your harm elsewhere.

And no, I do NOT accept bullshit cop out arguments that this is the way things are done in industry. If industry is as unprofessional as this, then we will just do better.

My respect will go to those who can stand above the bickering and redirect their energies to something constructive
My respect will go to those who can recognize where they have erred, and are not too precious to apologize
My respect will go to those who can find the ways in which we agree, rather than disagree
My respect will go to those who can prove to us they are here for the betterment of the FSAE experience

My comments on static event improvements will follow.

[Big Bird]

Julian, thanks for your considered thoughts on the Static Events. Fully, fully agreed. Whilst the concept of the Static Event program is generally good, I think the application in flawed.

The concept of FSAE is to expose students to all aspects of an engineering project – it is meant to be an experience in rounding out an engineer’s education. However in practice we find the following issues:
- Inequitable distribution of tasks. In most teams, the preparation of the Cost Report and the Business presentation are left to a few overdedicated souls while the bulk of the team focus on building racing cars. (I know this as I was the poor sucker at RMIT who did Cost Report and Business presentation for about 4 years). Thus the learnings are not distributed throughout the team.
- Similarly in the Design Event, the best students are picked out to present the car and the team’s design knowledge, while a lot of the team are left in the background.
- Unwieldy reports – we make the teams prepare these enormous Cost reports, and then they are too big to accurately assess. What’s more, the cost reports tend to be done by maybe 2-3 team members. Thus, we have 2-3 people repeating the same process over and over and over – for hundreds of parts on the car. They learn about the process of costing, but then they do it again and again and again. The students don’t get any value out of doing it for more than say, 5-10 parts. But by extending it to the whole car, they just get sick and bored with it, and the end result is a report too big for the cost judges to accurately assess.
- Inequitable vehicle costs – as per Julian’s comment above. Cost report cheating / manipulation. Who really benefits from that?

So my ideas:

Vehicle Cost:
Up-front concept based vehicle costing. The SAE publishes a set of vehicle costs based on vehicle sub-systems. If your chassis is steel, its cost report cost is $X. If a carbon tub, it is worth $Y. A double wishbone suspension system is worth $A per corner. A beam axle is worth $B an end. If you have an electric car with 4 hub motors, your cost is $D per driving motor. Each brake system is costed per caliper/disc set. We allocate costs for all major vehicle systems (engine, diff/driveline, suspension, braking, chassis, etc), and once you have picked your vehicle concept (eg carbon tub with wings, a-arms, 4 cyl 600 and 13” wheels), your cost is known. None of this bollocksing around hiding costs of bolts and rod ends and stuff. If your car has an A-arm corner, then that corner is worth, say, $500 - bolts and nuts and rod ends and a-arms and all. The idea of this is that you can work through your design tradeoffs up front as your vehicle competition cost will be known as soon as the concept is proposed.

The difference to what we have now is that we have costing based on components. Thus the competition cost is calculated and assessed over hundreds of items. Far too much scope for cheating. If we base the competition cost on say, 10-15 major components or systems of known published costings, policing of competition cost becomes much simpler and more transparent.

As for costing the individual components, (still a valuable professional skill), we seperate that from the competition cost of the whole car. A good outcome for a team is that a number of students are engaged in the process, and that they do it well. So we reward teams that have programmes that engage a good number of students, and who all have knowledge of costing of manufacture.

So we break the car into nominated systems, with say 5-10 connected parts per system. 15-20 students are nominated as the team’s cost report competitors and each of them has to complete a roughly 5 page costing report on one of the nominated systems. Maybe 2-3 are picked out at random, and these students are then interviewed and assessed at the event.

The cost report score is the number of reports submitted (say, up to 20), multiplied by a quality factor determined by assessment of the 2-3 randomly picked out reports.
Justifications:
- We want more than 2-3 students learning from the exercise. A good outcome is that we have say 20 students per team benefitting from the event. The score linked to number of reports submitted encourages more involvement
- We want to encourage collaboration and mentoring within the teams. Picking reports at random puts teams at risk of losing points if not everyone is up to the same standard. Thus, it is not in the teams best interests to submit any sub standard reports
- Cost judges no longer have 200 page reports to scan over – they have maybe 10-20 pages per team, which enables tighter scrutiny and more accurate scoring.

I’ll get onto the Presentation Event later. I’ve written enough for now…

[Big Bird]

GTS, firstly, if there was any implication that anything more than the second paragraph was specifically aimed at you, then I apologize. I changed the order of some of the paragraphs and can see that you might have thought the third one was directly targeted at you as well. It was not.
If there was some belief that I am defending Z, I am not. My post was aimed at ALL involved in this tit for tat. I have written to Z privately on this issue, and am considering how I might proceed further. Yes, I recognize that you had offered to meet to resolve this, I was pleased to see the olive branch offered and I was considering how we might arrange this.
My point is that we must STOP THE BICKERING. We are ALL engaged in this. It is damaging to us all.
As someone who is battling a neurological condition, I know the damage that can be caused when mental instability is insinuated. That sort of stuff sticks. I do not care if it is Z, or whether it was aimed at you, or me. That sort of stuff does not belong on this forum.
Most of your argument is exactly my argument, and it is quite odd that the whole point of my argument is being used against me. Yes, it is a volunteer run event. I know that as well as anyone. And I am giving as much time and energy as anyone volunteering and mentoring teams and the like. But crying self-righteousness about all we are giving will not mean a jot if the core product is flawed. And, speaking of our Australian event, it is. And we ain’t going to find a solution if we sit around arguing who is a fool and who is a sacred cow.
Our country is becoming increasingly irrelevant because we are too bloody precious. Our culture is increasingly focussing on pointing out others flaws, and protecting our own little piece of turf by pointing to the faults of others. We have an ineffectual government that spends its time opposing its opposition. And here on these boards, we are doing no better.
So, resolution. Wangaratta. I nominate Labour Day weekend. I will supply venue, food, and accommodation. Agenda – resolution of these arguments, and building collaboration. GTS, Z, I expect you both there. Complaints about the date can be appended with a better alternative.

[GTS]

Thank you Geoff. Comment removed.

I posted what I did because I think it fair to note when a contribution is so OT that it can't represent the best interests of anyone directly involved. It's a thread on improving design event, not on debating the merits of having it at all. It's about how to make it better whilst acknowledging what resources and constraints there reasonably are, not about deriding volunteer efforts at large. There is very little time to gather low-hanging fruit for 2015 FSAE-A, wrap it into a rule addendum and pack it on it's way. There is a short amount of time beyond this to find relevance for an industry outlook that'll change irreversibly in 2018, for parity efforts with overseas competitions, for sponsorship, for making life easier for EV entrants, for a lot of necessary things.

It breaks my heart to speak with faculty and hear 'this is probably the last year we'll be supporting Formula SAE'. From teams that won competitions, or were even instrumental in getting the event back to Australia way back when. Remember when Australian industry made, dollar-for-dollar, the best cars in the world? (Sorry rest of world but we'll insist it's true.) Times are changing and the competition must adapt. DE is the most transferable element of the entire competition. Some universities like cheap and fast racing, and do Formula Vee/Ford/E30 racing/time trials/etc. The majority do FSAE, precisely because it offers what it does. Making the static events better is important, and I'm all for robust discussion here. Let's be honest though - the disucssion needs to stay here. Not on getting rid of things. Let's just keep it OT without indiscrminately slagging off those that volunteer time and skill to make the event possible. It's not hard.

Probably a good opportunity to stress, again, that not all the change needs to come from the organisers either. Sharing of resources, open sourcing of various project elements, organising open mic nights, document repositories, you name it... there's so much you can all organise among each other to help this much, there are very many alumni that can help with resources to make it easier to get more out of, and put more into, your design management, FSAE experience and legacy. Please don't leave it all up to us (where 'us' is 'not the students'). There is only so much we can do, and this is your time. Be creative in making the most of it.

To Wangaratta.

[Mitchell]

So, resolution. Wangaratta. I nominate Labour Day weekend. I will supply venue, food, and accommodation. Agenda – resolution of these arguments, and building collaboration. GTS, Z, I expect you both there. Complaints about the date can be appended with a better alternative.

I am sure there would be a few teams, both local and interstate, that would be willing to send representatives if this were to become an event. I imagine a "Design Design Event to Win". Add some structure and aim to have a draft proposal organised?

[JulianH]

I'm with Jay here.
Counting bolts and "number of steps to mount part A to part B" are quite useless points.

Maybe we can go to a concept like the "old" sustainability report at FS UK:
You insert the weight, the material and the manufacturing process (casting, milling 3-axis, milling 5-axis, laser cutting, prepreg, vacuum infusion...) of the most important parts and it gives you a number -rounded to the nearest dollar- for this part. I don't care about "what 1000 cars would cost". Nobody is building 1000 race cars a year...

If this process can be monitored, the cheating could be reduced. It could be difficult if a team is stating "our uprights way 150g" but then they probably have to weigh in this part after the competition and get a substantial penalty if the weight is outside a +- x% zone.

I think we have to reduce Cost to a top-level approach and then we can start "awarding" teams that are trying to build a cheap car.

[Tim.Wright]

I've never liked the idea that cost and design are assessed independently...

In the real world assessing the quality of an "engineering" job is the simultaneous assessment of design, cost, materials and processing. Design features such as rod ends in bending, single shear upright mounts, control arms loaded in bending, trade-off in suspension kinematics can ALL be validly justified when you take cost, materials and processing into account. They might be bad/inefficient designs, but if they make a significant cost saving, then they are solid "engineering" choices.

Conversely, I think that "engineering" points should be subtracted where designs are unnecessarily expensive or where an extra cost has been incurred, but no performance advantage demonstrated. An example could be a complicated rapid prototyped upright which is not lighter, or stiffer than a machined alternative. It should be marked down in design for obvious reasons, but I think it deserves a double hit for not properly considering the cost and processing.

In the end though, the overall assessment still needs to be performance biased. A flawlessly executed 120kg full composite machine with a 75kW custom drive train which can pull 2G in cornering should rightly be assessed as better than a well designed 150kg steel brown go-kart making 70kw from a well sourced commercial motor that can corner at 1.8g even if the performance/cost is much lower on the first example.

[JulianH]

One problem with Cost is Sponsoring in my opinion:

Sponsoring screws up the typical "Cost vs. Performance Tradeoff" of a typical engineering decision.

Two examples: The motors that are developed by Zurich are incredibly expensive. But we got them for free. Nobody would pass on the best motors in the competition just because you "normally" would not use them.
Another one is Selective Laser Melting... some teams have an institute or a sponsor doing those things to get maybe an upright or what ever at some less weight. For free obviously. If you don't have access to such things, you would use another method / other materials because it would be a better trade-off for Cost/Performance.

To exaggerate: It could be possible that a team can use SLM uprights for free but would have to pay for milling/welding. What now?

I think it would be difficult to assess those areas in a "combined Cost&Design" event.

[GTS]

Julian

It should be costed as the Design Brief: a car for a small production run. Let's not confuse production intent and prototype costs here.

It should also be designed as per the brief - if you're running unobtanium that has no place on a production example, you're doing it wrong. Unless you can prove that it can be produced readily and meet the design brief.

Teams should happily pass on anything not meeting design intent, as it's irrelevant to the design brief. This should be better policed. Similarly, if a team can prove something new and relevant can actually be made on cost for quantity, so be it.

What a team pays or doesn't to make prototypes is exclusive of the Cost Event. You don't cost a production BoM on what your first prototype actually cost.

There are competitions that allow complete freedom in cost-no-object prototyping (e.g. solar car racing); FSAE isn't and shouldn't be one of them.

[bob.paasch]

One problem with Cost is Sponsoring in my opinion:

Sponsoring screws up the typical "Cost vs. Performance Tradeoff" of a typical engineering decision.

In a way, the same can be said for "Education". GFR uses a carbon-fiber monocoque chassis for our cars for several reasons, but the most important reason is our students want to learn carbon-fiber monocoque design and manufacturing techniques, and companies want to hire these students because of their knowledge. The decision process is customer driven, our customers (the students and companies that hire them) want this (customer needs) and we give it to them.