My dad (a machinist) attempted when he was just starting out to bid on a government job to build some sort of metal container (let's say a trash can -- nothing to do with the military or technical function) for a battleship. He examined an existing item which he was told to copy, then put in a bid. Only then did he find out that the paint he'd planned to use (which would have been fine -- purposed for seagoing, etc) wasn't good enough. The specs were written in such a way that the ONLY paint on the market that met the criteria was $95/gallon (this was in the 1960s, so that would be, what, $1000 today?) The job nearly bankrupted him, and from then on he refused to do any jobs for the government.
I always wondered why that paint was specified like that. What was the point? Then a friend who works for NASA told me how he was building a component for the robot arm of the space station, and he needed a particular transistor. He knew from experience which one he wanted to use, but he wasn't allowed to specify it directly. Instead he had to describe in in the request for bids in such a way that it would be the only transistor to fit the requirements. This involved a very lengthy and convoluted passage including dimensions, color, and a bunch of other crap that had absolutely nothing to do with the function of the transistor itself. We both shook our heads at the thought that someday, years from now, another project will probably blindly incorporate all that verbiage as a requirement, and nobody will know why.
Of course, in the case of the battleship paint, I presume somebody was getting a hefty kickback.
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Date: 17/11/10 21:16 (UTC)My dad (a machinist) attempted when he was just starting out to bid on a government job to build some sort of metal container (let's say a trash can -- nothing to do with the military or technical function) for a battleship. He examined an existing item which he was told to copy, then put in a bid. Only then did he find out that the paint he'd planned to use (which would have been fine -- purposed for seagoing, etc) wasn't good enough. The specs were written in such a way that the ONLY paint on the market that met the criteria was $95/gallon (this was in the 1960s, so that would be, what, $1000 today?) The job nearly bankrupted him, and from then on he refused to do any jobs for the government.
I always wondered why that paint was specified like that. What was the point? Then a friend who works for NASA told me how he was building a component for the robot arm of the space station, and he needed a particular transistor. He knew from experience which one he wanted to use, but he wasn't allowed to specify it directly. Instead he had to describe in in the request for bids in such a way that it would be the only transistor to fit the requirements. This involved a very lengthy and convoluted passage including dimensions, color, and a bunch of other crap that had absolutely nothing to do with the function of the transistor itself. We both shook our heads at the thought that someday, years from now, another project will probably blindly incorporate all that verbiage as a requirement, and nobody will know why.
Of course, in the case of the battleship paint, I presume somebody was getting a hefty kickback.