I naturally understand why this is. We always say “more moving parts makes there more chance for failure”. But why is this? Is it just how the universe has to be due to the laws of physics?
For instance an airplane is pretty complex but the aluminum that makes up the structure of the plane rarely needs to have complete overhauls while something like the engine is constantly being serviced and kept up to standard.
What is it about spinning parts, heat, and lots of piping that make something constantly be trending towards breakdown?
In: Engineering
It’s a statistical phenomenon. If we have unrelated events, the more of them there are the more likely that one of them will happen. This is the same concept as “the more times you flip a coin, the more certain it is that your coin will land on heads at least once”.
Every additional part is another unrelated failure mode – another possible thing to go wrong – so the probabilities combine to make it likely to fail faster.
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