I vote for “easiest to design”, plus “less expensive” (as you need a lot of custom parts to pull it off), and sometimes more repairable (e.g. loosely-coupled modules can be swapped out more quickly).
At my old job we made extremely space-constrained and weight-constrained precision sensors, where price was no object, and did things vaguely like you mention plenty (e.g. parts that were simultaneously functional and structural, all subsystems intermingled together).
Certainly not always, though. If a mirror has a demanding spec on its mirror-ness, then you shouldn’t use it to channel heat or stress (which compromises flatness), better to have a separate part for that. Just like the “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” post—a dedicated mirror next to a dedicated heat-sink is probably much better in every respect than a single object performing both functions.
I vote for “easiest to design”, plus “less expensive” (as you need a lot of custom parts to pull it off), and sometimes more repairable (e.g. loosely-coupled modules can be swapped out more quickly).
At my old job we made extremely space-constrained and weight-constrained precision sensors, where price was no object, and did things vaguely like you mention plenty (e.g. parts that were simultaneously functional and structural, all subsystems intermingled together).
Certainly not always, though. If a mirror has a demanding spec on its mirror-ness, then you shouldn’t use it to channel heat or stress (which compromises flatness), better to have a separate part for that. Just like the “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” post—a dedicated mirror next to a dedicated heat-sink is probably much better in every respect than a single object performing both functions.