Of the many things I love about the Space Shuttle program, one of the sillier ones is that a significant part of the launch profile calls for "throttle at 104%".

Turned out the engine could safely run at higher power than expected, but the engineers kept the original scale. One abort scenario for multiple engine failure specifies throttle at 109%.

@starkatt The basic copper wire that you get from essentially any source (called "ETP" or "Electrolytic tough-pitch" copper) has a conductivity rating of 101% IACS (International annealed copper standard (conductivity)), simply because purer, slightly higher-conductivity copper has become economically available since the standard was made (originally defined such that 100% was the conductivity of generic copper wire on the market)

@starkatt Any day in which you can say you learned is a good day!

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