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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

The photo is pretty interesting in that some whole panels are completely unscathed right next to ones that are literally covered in impact craters. Maybe they should selectively breed the surviving panels together to get a new generation of more resilient panels.

Only slightly tongue-in-cheek. It's very unlikely that the unscathed panels had no impacts at all right next to panels that had dozens of them. So the surviving panels must have just been meaningfully more robust than the others.

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the more likely explanation seems to me that not all panels were hit by a sufficiently large hailstone to cause an initial break. once the structural integrity of a panel is broken, smaller stones can damage it further that wouldn't have otherwise..

Probably not just the size of the hail that hit it, but where the big pieces hit it. At a first guess they're using tempered glass, and that's a lot more likely to fracture if you hit it near the corners than the centre.

> So the surviving panels must have just been meaningfully more robust than the others.

Or the variability was in the hail -- panels are designed for this kind of weather to some degree, but sometimes you get a storm on the edge of the design limits.

It is likely that once one very large hailstone caused cracks, follow-up strikes that would have bounced off an intact panel created further cracks in the already damaged and now weaker panel.

So the still intact panels are probably not significantly stronger, they were just statistically fortunate in that they didn't receive an impact that started a progression of further damage.

https://bigmemes.funnyjunk.com/pictures/M_86dcf4_64411.jpg

WW2 airplane armoring?

Would be cool to model an RNG off of this photo. I''m sure people have already tried raindrop fall patterns, etc

Now you know where to reinforce the airplanes before sending them back to war. Hint: the engine

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