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David DeLaney said:
...Nikolai. Tesla.

Dave, he's the patron saint of mad science for a _reason_
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... What? No. He's the Patron Saint of Big Ideas, Bad Execution.

The man was undeniably brilliant, but that's kind of all he was. He made some major advances in the field of electricity, but he had terrible fiscal management, was an unpleasant person by most accounts and wasn't quite as brilliant as he thought he was. Has his ego been smaller he could have accomplished far more.

I know he's become a popular figure in scifi and steam punk, but he shouldn't be held up above his contemporaries.
 
David DeLaney said:
...the Path can most certainly, given the bullshit-level stuff it was shown to do in canon, predict "human error" very precisely and take advantage of it. It's a precog level that basically invalidates free will, limited only by the limits Eden put on it, which specifically included "can't Path Endbringers" and "can't Path the results of trigger events beforehand". The first one apparently echoed through Eidolon's control of the Endbringers enough that he couldn't be Pathed either.

In this tale, there's info coming in from outside the absolutely huge subset of the multiverse the Path has access to, which it can't 'see' beforehand at all; it ought to be able to see the results of what Taylor has done ... but that may be dependent on at least one Shardbearer getting close enough to find out that info, and right now none have. (Taylor appears to be Shardless in this tale, though the author is a trolling troller who trolls, and QA may just have decided to keep all this delicious tasty DATA to herself for a while.)

Dave, we'll see what happens once Legend gets there
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I was think more against Countesses own human error like what will the path tell her if she asks the wrong question or is asked the wrong question.
 
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Sono said:
People like Taylor just don't really exist. The closest we know of is Da Vinci, and while he had some great ideas, most didn't work when actually built. He was a visionary, a great painter, and a decent designer but a pretty average engineer with some creative ideas.
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Just gonna add on to this with a relevant Depression Turtle vid:



People often forget that "Great People" don't exist outside of Sid Meier's Civilization and that "talent" is just practice, study, and repeated failures you weren't around to see.
 
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Sono said:
... What? No. He's the Patron Saint of Big Ideas, Bad Execution.

The man was undeniably brilliant, but that's kind of all he was. He made some major advances in the field of electricity, but he had terrible fiscal management, was an unpleasant person by most accounts and wasn't quite as brilliant as he thought he was. Has his ego been smaller he could have accomplished far more.

I know he's become a popular figure in scifi and steam punk, but he shouldn't be held up above his contemporaries.
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He invented the vast majority of the fundamental technology needed for an AC based electrical system, including redesigning existing DC motors to work with AC current. He designed a remarkably efficient form of broadcast power that has been adapted into modern charging pads. And in the Voltage Wars, he was the one with the smaller ego. Plus, he had the backing of Westinghouse, which is why much of his technology was ultimately implemented.

Yes, he had a number of less then pleasant personality quirks, but that's why he's the Patron Saint of Mad Scientists, and not of Electrical Engineers....
 
I wonder just how good the cover-up done by the NSA and DARPA is, how many games is Piggot playing with her nominal superior and how thin are the PRT (and Cauldron's) assets on Brockton Bay when not being capable of depending on the local office for an investigation since for a reasonable smart person the aproximate identity of the PRIME ASSET is actually paper thin.

The first clue is of course the fact that Gravtech is in Brockton Bay, the last place DARPA would chose to develop a cutting edge company, with a hole in the middle of the desert being the first choice and any safer city being the second. That shows very close links with the city that a literal truckload of money is not capable of erasing, something that would be confirmed by the fact that the DWU was contracted for anything not involving either a college degree or specialized knowledge, including the bother of issuing TS clearance to them. As a final connection to the city is the very obvious fact that a ship was moved using the tech instead of any other amazing feat of engineering possible (such as doing the same with an operational Aircraft Carrier).

Second clue is of course who are the lead figures in Gravtech, Angus Drekin, liason of the Brockton Bay University's Gravitational Physics department and chief science officer of Gravtec, and of course Danny Hebert, DWU hiring manager and CEO of Gravtec Engineering. A casual investigation of Angus would eventully show some personal and professional relation with Brendan Calhoun from DARPA, mostly through non-classified scientific events and publications (something a PRT researcher can get without even touching confidential information), from Angus CV they would also get the fact that he was not particularly interested in gravitic research nor at the top of the field until a few months ago, and the very obvious fact that BBU lacked a Gravitational Physics department. From there looking for current and former BBU students would be natural, and they would find the connection between him and Danny's wife simply because a hiring manager who at best is moderately good at local politics (he was capable of keeping the DWU alive but not of applying enough pressure to fund the ferry) is not the best man for a new tech company that would have its pick of extremely capable, well connected with both the Pentagon and the Congress and known to be loyal suppliers to the US captains of the industry selling their first born to get a piece of the action. Not even when Gravtech is gifting jobs, since in that case it would be more logical to get Danny a job in personnel and get experienced business experts as CEO and CFO.

And that's with information that the local PRT/Protectorate already got available since their first visit to the Docks or can get through newspapers, magazines and public school annuaries, no need to get court orders or start illegal clandestine operations. So for Costa-Brown to be so much in the dark I guess that both Piggot and Armsmaster decided to be nearly as obstructive as the DoD.
 
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BF110C4 said:
So for Costa-Brown to be so much in the dark I guess that both Piggot and Armsmaster decided to be nearly as obstructive as the DoD.
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Well, part this, part "but mah Thinkers!"
Worm in general shows a near terminal disregard for anything not parahuman. Despite the fact that some 95% of parahumans die to a bullet to the head as easy as a normal.
 
Elfalpha said:
I find it a little odd that DARPA don't appear even slightly suspicious of the same things Rebecca is, namely that even if Taylor isn't a parahuman, there's something missing from the picture.
Especially since as I understand it she didn't actually figure out how the power supplied for gravity tech worked until some way into things.

Then again, once they find out she can reverse engineer tinkertech to a level that would make Dragon jealous, that becomes the simplest explanation. It's also quite possible they're aware she's working on tinkertech as a side hobby of sorts.
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DARPA was approached by the professor Taylor went to. The one who read her, basically, "Screw your Understanding of Physics" work. The one he understood. Then he talked to her at length about it, and she explained things with the absolute confidence of someone who wrote it.

And then he took that to someone else, and the same thing happened. Then she went to DARPA proper, explained it to their scientists (who understood, at least as far as anyone does when hit with a "All your Physics are wrong" discussion), and they and their engineers could not only follow along as she built a device based on her theories, they could replicate it without her. Which they did while subjecting her to all the "Are you certain you're not a parahuman" testing.

DARPA was suspicious as hell. But what they have is basically a new physics paradigm, one they can understand. No one understands TinkerTech, but they can understand this. They can derive things from this. They can build things that only work if that understanding is true.

No black boxes, no magic, no shell games. "Here's how the universe works" and "Okay, if the universe works that way then Bob here can do X, Y and Z. Bob, go try X." and then X works.

That doesn't rule out some crazy thinker 10 "KNOW ALL THE PHYSICS" abilities, but that's not how thinkers work in general, and also they've subjected her to all the tests.

For her to do all this as a Parahuman who is just BSing reality, as opposed to "genius who just revolutionized science", requires her to be a high level Tinker and Thinker (to come up with an explicable and understandable basis for her new 'science'), a Stranger (to hide all signs of being parahuman), a Master (to be able to TEACH her BS physics), and Trump (to let anyone who sees her BS science and tries to build things off it make stuff that works).....

So either she's basically a genius who (admittedly with a little alien help to get her started), basically overturned the current physics paradigms and opened up a massively fruitful way to look at the universe OR she's the strongest parahuman to ever walk the planet, as she can literally force reality into a new shape, and give everyone who learns her views on reality the ability to make reality that way.
 
Userid70 said:
Looking into things you are not cleared for when in a government job can be classed as treason and one of the few nonviolent crimes that can carry the death penalty.
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JoshuaSweetvale said:
But Alexandria and Contessa (and Numberman) are steering government policy and manipulating the public subconcious. (Why nobody's just sniped certain capes is explicitly Contessa making the few desperate attempts fail.) Without consent from the governed! And that's treason.
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People need to stop claiming stuff is Treason. No, that would not, in any way constitute Treason in the US, Treason is a very clearly defined crime, the only crime defined in the Constitution in fact, and neither of those fits the definition.

United States Constitution. Article III said:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
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Having PRT portrayed as incompetent and every other government agency as hypercompetent is really divergent from what happens in reality and is jarring to me while reading this. They all hire from the same pool of people, they have different charters and every one of them is headed by people who want to grow their fiefdom and they compete with each other in areas they overlap.

DARPA is a research group, not a military operations group. DIA is the military organization most likely to be involved in making sure military things remain secret mostly from foreign entities. FBI cares about internal security, CIA mostly external. FBI gets real pissy when CIA works internally. PRT is supposed to be an equal level group involved in knowing everything about parahumans. All these groups rotate personal between them and compete for the best. PRT is no better or no worse than any of the others.

In this chapter we saw a normal charter competition. Becky knows a parahuman is involved and is unwilling to take the word of a competing organization that the person isn't parahuman due to the extreme unlikelihood of that being true. Most likely a thinker if tinker restrictions are not in the stuff produced. They are deliberately keeping information from her that she feels entitled to know and she has the security clearance as a department head to actually know. They are all playing power games and so far their common boss is siding against her. She won't stop pushing.
 
Morat20 said:
DARPA was approached by the professor Taylor went to. The one who read her, basically, "Screw your Understanding of Physics" work. The one he understood. Then he talked to her at length about it, and she explained things with the absolute confidence of someone who wrote it.

And then he took that to someone else, and the same thing happened. Then she went to DARPA proper, explained it to their scientists (who understood, at least as far as anyone does when hit with a "All your Physics are wrong" discussion), and they and their engineers could not only follow along as she built a device based on her theories, they could replicate it without her. Which they did while subjecting her to all the "Are you certain you're not a parahuman" testing.

DARPA was suspicious as hell. But what they have is basically a new physics paradigm, one they can understand. No one understands TinkerTech, but they can understand this. They can derive things from this. They can build things that only work if that understanding is true.

No black boxes, no magic, no shell games. "Here's how the universe works" and "Okay, if the universe works that way then Bob here can do X, Y and Z. Bob, go try X." and then X works.

That doesn't rule out some crazy thinker 10 "KNOW ALL THE PHYSICS" abilities, but that's not how thinkers work in general, and also they've subjected her to all the tests.

For her to do all this as a Parahuman who is just BSing reality, as opposed to "genius who just revolutionized science", requires her to be a high level Tinker and Thinker (to come up with an explicable and understandable basis for her new 'science'), a Stranger (to hide all signs of being parahuman), a Master (to be able to TEACH her BS physics), and Trump (to let anyone who sees her BS science and tries to build things off it make stuff that works).....

So either she's basically a genius who (admittedly with a little alien help to get her started), basically overturned the current physics paradigms and opened up a massively fruitful way to look at the universe OR she's the strongest parahuman to ever walk the planet, as she can literally force reality into a new shape, and give everyone who learns her views on reality the ability to make reality that way.
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Plus there's the element of intrinsic bias, too - DARPA really, really wants Taylor to be what it says on the tin, a normal human who happens to be just that damn smart. Because it validates everything they have worked on for decades - screw the parahumans, we're closing in on how they work, and we can potentially actually explain it rather than just declaring it all magic. Sure, it might have taken Tony Stark 2.0 to make it happen, but it happened, and most of them now know enough that they can at least maintain it and potentially improve on it, now that the big conceptual barriers just got run over by a bulldozer. They realise enough to know that wishing its' true is dangerous, of course, but that doesn't change that they're very glad they haven't been able to disprove it, and I imagine that there's a strong undercurrent of "Don't borrow trouble" - until someone comes up with a proper Parahumanity test that she fails, she's not parahuman and they're very happy with that answer. Of course, they will fight ruthlessly against an Improper test based around "normal people aren't that smart".

The real funny moment is going to be when Piggott finds out what's going on - it's a reverse Lex Luthor situation, with her being what Piggott so desperately would love to see, a solid chance at a world where Parahumans aren't running things. If the military goes after Nilbog with power jammers and stealthed flying railgun tanks, then basically steamrollers her nightmare without even bothering to call in a single Parahuman, it'd be the happiest day she'd have had for years.
 
kelgar04 said:
I have to ask even though she is a parahuman does Costa Browns have brain damage or somekind of mental disorder other than the telepathic tumour in her skull? Because she is playing with fire her office may give her some clout but chasing after stuff that is not covered by her security clearance is a good way to end up on the receiving end of official displeasure.

As well as have people in intelligence start to look at her because she is acting irrationally and perusing this.
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Would be pretty funny (and ironic) if they decided she was Mastered.

mp3.1415player said:
Note: magical girls may have lizard bits... This is normal.
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Mercury was playing with her computer, Venus reading a fashion magazine, and Moon was chowing down on a batch of cookies Jupiter just finished making.

Mars ground her teeth. "Dammit!" she yelled, grabbing the tail poking out of her fuku. "Am I the only one who thinks having tails is weird here!"

Moon, of all her friends, was the one to give her a heated glare, which was less heated than it would have been if she didn't have 5 cookies crammed into her mouth at once. "Look Mars, I know it's strange, but this all got started when talking cats gave us magic school uniforms, so really, what's the big deal about talking lizards giving us magic tails?"
 
Mr_Rose said:
The trouble is, in her death-throes, the goddess said "thou shalt not" and the Path was occluded.
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Worse then occluded - a lot of what cuntessa (and by extension the rest of Dicktor mothers boyband) does is actively helping the cycles, and doing exactly what they would have done anyway. Path To Victory, yes... But whose Victory?

Memory Gem said:
I believe the Can Can will be much funnier.
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I Hate you... Why? because I just got a set of mental images; First, ziz doing a rendition of the 'big butts' dance, followed by she and Bobo (Behemoth) doing a rendition of the 'Pizza Hut' Dance, then all three doing 'Shake it off - i don't need that kind of image, Darnit!
 
zzfanz said:
Having PRT portrayed as incompetent and every other government agency as hypercompetent is really divergent from what happens in reality and is jarring to me while reading this. They all hire from the same pool of people, they have different charters and every one of them is headed by people who want to grow their fiefdom and they compete with each other in areas they overlap.
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The PRT is also hampered by their Chief Director operating to advance Cauldron's goals, which in many ways are counter to the stated goals of the PRT; where the PRT exists to capture parahuman criminals to protect the civilian population, Cauldron wants as many parahumans on the streets as possible to maximize new triggers and insure they get proper combat experience. Thus the PRT usually following the Unwritten Rules, which themselves are designed to maximize conflict by having just enough protections in place to keep as many parahumans active as possible.

It's safe to say that a number of best choice options for staff were passed by so no one that was too good at their job would start actually arresting the parahumans Costa-Brown wants to keep in play.

Plus, the PRT is the agency that most depends on parahuman support. With Taylor's subspace experiments screwing over Thinkers that look in her general direction, they have lost much of the support that they rely on. Add in the fact that the local branch has too damn much to try to work on as is, and it's no surprise that they will take any excuse to let someone else's problem stay someone else's problem, no matter what the top office wants. At best, Piggot might use the request to justify getting enough extra support to clear out some other issues first, never mind that doing so will ruin one of Cauldron's pet projects...

Which leads to the biggest fly in Costa-Brown's attempts to investigate; this is happening in the city Cauldron wrote off, and thus is the place she has the fewest resources to work with, and an uphill battle to get those resources back in place. After all, Cauldron isn't going to risk loosing Contessa by sending her into a place where her powers are now unreliable, just to investigate an allegedly non-parahuman staffed DARPA project without an VERY good reason. Right now, the reasons just aren't good enough; particularly since the PRT can still get some of the end products of the research if they just wait a bit, and can already get comparable Tinkertech. Point in fact, because DARPA is designed to facilitate R&D, the throughput to the PRT will likely be faster if they just stop trying to interfere.

Basically, Costa-Brown is being an idiot about things, and may not even have Cauldron backing her up.
 
I'm fairly certain that Taylor's Subspace Receiver(s) and possibly the AG-drives are what's causing Brockton to turn into a blind spot.

The Subspace Receivers because one of her feeds seemed to tune into Leviathan (a video of just deep underwater? That sounds like Leviathan) which probably triggers the same blind spot that Eidolon has. Or it looks like a constant Trigger event due to it hitting different subspace frequencies but never settling on one so there's never a concise "This is what power this person has". OR (most likely in my mind) it's shards going "Multiple shards connected to one non host: must be an Entity" and erroring out as an Entity safety (only Cauldron Shards other than Contessa would be free of this limiter).

Alternatively the specific mode of Anti-Gravity is not something the Entities have encountered before, and as they're innovative as a brick any predictions coming across the AG units are going "WTF is this?" and erroring out. I think this one less likely since theoretically shards like Armsmaster's should be able to read the science behind the AG generators from Armsmaster's reading and pass it along to the Thinkers via the Shard Network. OTOH Contessa's shard wouldn't be part of Scion's network would it? So maybe to Scion Thinkers BB isn't a total blind spot (though each of Taylor's new ideas are until a Parahuman gets ahold of the concepts behind them), but Contessa, being off network, isn't getting the updates needed to parse the region.


RE: Doctor Mother, I'm pretty sure she's not the one from the bronze age, that's Fortuna, the little girl that grew up to be Contessa. Doctor Mother is from anther world that was at least late industrial revolution, maybe early computers (anywhere from 1850s to 1940s). The other members of Cauldron were from modern society, but they, for one reason or another, were willing to potentially sacrifice their humanity (become a Case 53) in order to gain powers, which doesn't bode well to their moral or mental stability. (Plus they have a rather serious Sunk Cost fallacy going on: "We've done horrible things, but we're the ONLY ones who can save the world, otherwise the horrible things wouldn't have been worth doing")
All in all Cauldron may have had a few good ideas, but their core idea was proven to be faulty in canon. They didn't kill Scion, they barely wounded him by applying a dimensional shear to a planet busting gun. What killed him was Taylor bullying him by reminding him that his equivalent to a wife died, then teasing him with her being alive, and then blowing up her effigy in his face until he basically said "Fuck it" and committed suicide.


RE: Taylor Plagiarizing all I can say is "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
 
Jacen1 said:
The "spark" that is generated when a rail gun projectile leaves the rails can easily be compared to a bolt of lightning in terms of heat and intensity. No known conductive material can stand up to those temperatures for very long.

One option would be to somehow create regenerating rails; ones where the ends are replaced after being vaporized between shots. Or, to have the rails be longer then needed, with loading taking place near the middle with the rails being advanced with each shot to compensate for the lost ends. Or developing an entirely new class of materials that can withstand higher temperatures while still being sufficiently conductive; perhaps something like a superconductive ceramic....
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A simple solution that I came up with two minutes after hearing about the rail degradation problem would be to have a segmented rail that on every shot gets pushed up the barrel by introducing a new segment at the breach and shoving the rest of the segments one step down the barrel. The last segment is pushed out the end and captured for re-manufacture. The segments are of course locked in place as you prepare to fire... otherwise the gun briefly becomes a short range scatter gun, this would not be good.

The segments would have to be extremely precisely manufactured since they really can't present an uneven surface to the projectile but I think we could manage that with todays CNC mills. The remanufacture of a rail segment would probably involve removing a modular surface layer and putting a new one on and then ensuring that the segment has the correct dimensions. The old surface layer might even be able to be melted down and recast using onboard resources (I'm assuming a ship mounted system).

Two forces produce wear on the rails, the heat as a crap ton of current is transferred through a small contact surface into the projectile and the friction of the projectile sliding (extremely rapidly) down the barrel. You can use a conductive lubricant to ease both these problems.

My lubricant of choice would be dusting the surface of the rails with graphite powder, it will basically turn to plasma as the projectile passes but it will only burn AFTER it has passed (and air can exist there again) and is thus useful as a conductive lubricant. A brush that both removes soot buildup (might also remove some of the metal oxide buildup) and applies new graphite powder would have to be rammed down the barrel between shots. But since you might want to wait for a few seconds to allow heat dissipation to occur you have time for that.

Simple solutions that work for other similar but different scenarios that I think will work. But probably not otherwise I imagine someone on the project would have already thought of doing it. Modular contact surfaces are used in (some) high current contactors, the contact surfaces are pitted after only a few uses and are automatically switched and graphite powder was used as a lubricant in old (really old) mechanical high voltage varistors, it prevented the two surfaces from welding into each other.
 
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Only problem is how to hold the segments while still maintaining the cohesive rail for the railgun. Given the fairly exacting tolerances and manufacturing difficulties, that would not be possible.
 
Valdimarian said:
Doctor Mother, I'm pretty sure she's not the one from the bronze age, that's Fortuna, the little girl that grew up to be Contessa. Doctor Mother is from anther world that was at least late industrial revolution, maybe early computers (anywhere from 1850s to 1940s). The other members of Cauldron were from modern society, but they, for one reason or another, were willing to potentially sacrifice their humanity (become a Case 53) in order to gain powers, which doesn't bode well to their moral or mental stability. (Plus they have a rather serious Sunk Cost fallacy going on: "We've done horrible things, but we're the ONLY ones who can save the world, otherwise the horrible things wouldn't have been worth doing")
All in all Cauldron may have had a few good ideas, but their core idea was proven to be faulty in canon. They didn't kill Scion, they barely wounded him by applying a dimensional shear to a planet busting gun. What killed him was Taylor bullying him by reminding him that his equivalent to a wife died, then teasing him with her being alive, and then blowing up her effigy in his face until he basically said "Fuck it" and committed suicide
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Yeah Doctor Mother if memory serves was an art student from a relatively advanced earth somewhere in Africa I think the Ivory Coast. Before she decided to hang up her paint brush and become a barber surgeon and cut up eldritch abomination and make people do a power wine tasting with them.

Countessa was from a peasant girl from a Bronze age or maybe Iron age earth who planet got hit by Eden when she was driving and drunk. Got a shard from Aberdon, TBH without her shard I'm not sure how functional she would be since she got her power at such a young age that her mental and social development maybe stunted.
 
cryptoam said:
Only problem is how to hold the segments while still maintaining the cohesive rail for the railgun. Given the fairly exacting tolerances and manufacturing difficulties, that would not be possible.
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Yeah tolerance for a rail fun I imagine would be fairly tight would all need to be computer aided production just to get all that right and within range.

That's going to drive up production time and price big time as they work to get it right. They may have to build a whole new generation of tools for this if they want them in mass production numbers.
 
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Also need to handle potential damage/interference from the environment. At least for naval applications, corrosion from seawater and dust can cause problems.
 
cryptoam said:
Only problem is how to hold the segments while still maintaining the cohesive rail for the railgun. Given the fairly exacting tolerances and manufacturing difficulties, that would not be possible.
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Precisely holding a mechanical device has been solved for at least 4 decades, we can automatically switch tools on a CNC machine and ensure that the tip of that tool is where we want it with a precision of micro meters. We don't even need any adjustment after the switch, the mounting is that good. This is not that hard and neither is it delicate you just have to make sure that what you are mounting it to is massive enough to not care about the forces you are subjecting it to. I imagine this would make the barrels of these guns look sort of fat and heavy but... eeeh, who cares?

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cryptoam said:
Also need to handle potential damage/interference from the environment. At least for naval applications, corrosion from seawater and dust can cause problems.
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This should also be simple if maintenance heavy, blow a stream of hot nitrogen down the barrel any time you aren't using it and put a plug in the end so that nothing more than trace amounts of air can find itself in your expensive gun. The nitrogen separator would also remove any water vapour or salt from the gas stream. The separation assembly would require lots of maintenance out on the sea but I imagine the navy would be used to that.
 
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E M Berner said:
Precisely holding a mechanical device has been solved for at least 4 decades, we can automatically switch tools on a CNC machine and ensure that the tip of that tool is where we want it with a precision of micro meters. We don't even need any adjustment after the switch, the mounting is that good. This is not that hard and neither is it delicate you just have to make sure that what you are mounting it to is massive enough to not care about the forces you are subjecting it to. I imagine this would make the barrels of these guns look sort of fat and heavy but... eeeh, who cares?

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This should also be simple if maintenance heavy, blow a stream of hot nitrogen down the barrel any time you aren't using it and put a plug in the end so that nothing more than trace amounts of air can find itself in your expensive gun. The nitrogen separator would also remove any water vapour or salt from the gas stream. The separation assembly would require lots of maintenance out on the sea but I imagine the navy would be used to that.
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Machinist here: If I'm holding within 0.0005 inches I consider myself lucky. Granted, I'm machining aluminum and steel, not whatever superconductive crap Taylor came up with, -and- I'm using 20-year-old machines to do it. Even so, getting micrometer-scale precision (0.001mm) is VERY difficult, at least with the machines I use. There's a reason tolerances for those tend to be in +/-0.01mm range.
 
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