Suppose anywhere the plane was shot led to a 1/5 chance of the plane crashing, meaning that all places are equally deserving of armor. Suppose also that the wings comprised about 75% of the surface area of the plane. You'd see 3 planes returning with bullet holes in a wing for every 1 with a bullet hole somewhere else.
So do your study with the plane divided up into equal-sized sections. Or look for clustering and divide it based on that.
Yea. The key assumption for the "put the armor where the bullets aren't" is that the initial bullets are spread evenly over the surface area (or, rather, that the bullets are spread evenly over the cross-section, which you then average over the typical orientation of the plane as it takes enemy fire). This turns out to be a good assumption because planes typically take highly dispersed enemy fire compared to the size of the plane.
On the other hand, if the enemy had extremely accurate guns and (say, for visibility reasons) always shot at and hit particular parts of the plane (say, the parts of the wings next to the necessarily shiny propellers) then the naive reasoning would be correct: the areas that were bullet-ridden on returning planes would be the ones that should be armored.
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Suppose anywhere the plane was shot led to a 1/5 chance of the plane crashing, meaning that all places are equally deserving of armor. Suppose also that the wings comprised about 75% of the surface area of the plane. You'd see 3 planes returning with bullet holes in a wing for every 1 with a bullet hole somewhere else.
So do your study with the plane divided up into equal-sized sections. Or look for clustering and divide it based on that.
Yea. The key assumption for the "put the armor where the bullets aren't" is that the initial bullets are spread evenly over the surface area (or, rather, that the bullets are spread evenly over the cross-section, which you then average over the typical orientation of the plane as it takes enemy fire). This turns out to be a good assumption because planes typically take highly dispersed enemy fire compared to the size of the plane.
On the other hand, if the enemy had extremely accurate guns and (say, for visibility reasons) always shot at and hit particular parts of the plane (say, the parts of the wings next to the necessarily shiny propellers) then the naive reasoning would be correct: the areas that were bullet-ridden on returning planes would be the ones that should be armored.