Ser & Estar: ¿Por qué se utiliza estar en esta frase?
La frase que me enfada es:
El A-10 está diseñado en torno al GAU-8 Avenger, ...
¿Por qué se utiliza estar en este ejemplo? Yo habría escrito
El A-10 fue diseñado en torno al GAU-8 Avenger, ...
A mí el uso de estar parece incorrecto en el ejemplo.
La fuente de esta frase es Wikipedia.
4 Answers
Hi, Roberto!
These are my two cents:
Está diseñado is correct, and fue diseñado is correct too. Although the sentences seems to be very similar, they aren't. The last one is a hidden passive sentence. It could hide, for example, 'was designed by our engineers'
No matter about the tenses, past or present, they are not important here. I think the main difference is, that in the first sentence, El A10 is the subject. (There is no DC nor IC in this sentences. They are simple active sentences)
El A10 está diseñado en base a otro modelo.
Grammatically, this would be like "the A10 is + feature", "the A10 is ...blue".
La cena está hecha. Dinner is... ready.
Which are the focus above? The A10, and the dinner.
In the second one, equivalent to a impersonal sentence, El A10 is the DC. (For this reason "fue diseñado" can be susbtituted by "se diseñó", "está diseñado" cannot)
El A10 fue diseñado en base a otro modelo.
The A10 was thought (by who-knows-who?=subject) in order to...
La cena fue hecha. Dinner was cooked (by someone)
The focus here is just the process of creation of the A10, of the dinner. The attention falls upon the fact of that someone made something.
A cheeky search returned over 7 million results for está diseñado and over 14 million for es diseñado. To me this suggests that both can be used, unless of course that the authors of one third of the articles don't know how to talk good...
If you think about the term 'is designed' in English, it can have two meanings, subtly different:
1/ Is designed - referring to the process of design, when the designing is being done, by someone who está diseñando la vaina
2/ Is designed - referring to an inherent property of the thing
For the first it seems that estar would be the verb and the second ser. I say this with no knowledge of the rights and wrongs, I just made it up 
Well, the problem here is that the first one uses estar in the present tense and the second one used ser in the past form. So you would have to figure out which one is correct because they cannot be used interchangeably!
You could say se diseñó and avoid the issue completely
