cost to have boat designed

[ancient kayaker]

I must confess my image of a NA is an older person deeply immersed in practical knowledge as well as theory, comfortable with a computer but not wedded to it. I suppose because that is a good description of me as an engineer. It is hard to see a NA as a geek. There are few engineers I know who qualify as geeks, there are people who have the paperwork but engineers as a class tend to distinguish among themselves who is a real engineer and who is a backroom geek. By geeks, or specialists to give them their proper title, I mean those who tend to immerse themselves in one aspect of the job such as structural analysis, control mathematics, or (God forgive them for the mess they’ve made) software.

The NA, like the true engineer, sees the overall picture of the design and how it relates to construction, application, the marketplace, safety and all the “ism’s.” Nonetheless, generating a design for others to build is an intellectual pursuit.

Sometimes there are distractions that can be a real annoyance. I include the qualifying and examining organizations out there such as ISO; my last company had an entire department devoted to the acronym business. It has to be done, but it takes time away from "real work" so I preferred to work for a company large enough to have lots of specialists whose sole responsibility was to check that I wasn't accidentally breaking some cherished rule and otherwise keep out of my way. Bit like the lawyers I suppose, but the geeks at least spoke the engineering langauge.

I note that while computers hardware costs go down software costs continue to go up with no sign of a limit! When I first I started to hit keyboards a small workstation was $60k and the program was $2k, ten years after that it was $25k and $5k, a net downward trend, now it's the other way round. The net trend will now increase because of diminishing returns on the hardware side versus no upper limit for software cost. There is free software which is not something I understand as it goes against every rule of marketing.