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Post by Tanalia on Jun 12, 2007 19:06:34 GMT -4
Here are a set of diagram & blueprint copies that should provide the measurements you need.
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furi
Mars
The Secret is to keep banging those rocks together.
Posts: 260
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Post by furi on Jun 13, 2007 7:57:33 GMT -4
Thanks Thats a beauty, now for a lot of conversion to metric, and a depressingly large use of my Tan button on my trusty casio. (my initial 15% error was due to a me turning into Gumby when creating one of my calcs, luckily I spotted it after 3 other force calcs showed the error).
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Post by donnieb on Jun 13, 2007 10:00:19 GMT -4
It is really remarkable to see those hand-drafted drawings. No CAD in the mid to late 1960s!
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Post by sts60 on Jun 13, 2007 10:45:54 GMT -4
I've mentioned before that I used to work with* Caldwell Johnson, the design engineer and longtime associate of Max Faget. I have a signed lithograph of his original drawing for the Mercury capsule on my wall at work. It is an impressive blend of engineering genius, technical competence, and artistry. If I can find a way to take a half-decent picture of it, I'll post it here.
I also have somewhere a freehand drawing of a Shuttle middeck refrigerator/incubator module he did when discussing some changes we were making to the unit's firmware. I kept it because it's an understated little work that shows the intuitive grasp C.C. has of his subjects and how well he is able to express that with a pencil; far better than many engineers of today equipped with fancy CAD/CAE packages on their computers.
Caldwell had another advantage over the computer generation, too. Where we worked, not from his old stamping grounds at JSC, the summer thunderstorms routinely knocked out power in the afternoon. As we reclined back from our darkened monitors, C.C.'s voice would float over the cubicles: "Drafting board's still up!"
* "For" is more accurate. He was Chief Engineer at our outfit.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Jun 13, 2007 11:19:45 GMT -4
I am of the generation that was at the tail end of the hand drafting era. I certainly did my fair share early in my career. I’ve never bothered to learn CAD, which became my excuse for having all the drafting tasks assigned to the new kids fresh out of college (sometimes it’s good not to know such things). Every now and then when I need a quick sketch of something I get out the old triangles and go to work. Furtunately I'm young enough to have just missed the slide rule era by a few years.
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 13, 2007 11:35:18 GMT -4
Heck, I can letter better than that!
I've spent a number of years putting useful, productive computational tools into the hands of other engineers, including CAD/CAM/CAE tools that work the way they work instead of the way their programmers wrongly envisioned that they should. However, I am very much of the draw-by-hand generation. There is still nothing more satisfying to me than the first stroke of crisp India ink across a creamy smooth sheet of vellum or the rich chroma in a pool of gouache.
Engineering drawings today often lack artistic qualities because production expectations necessitate their being produced automatically without much regard to presentation. That's because aesthetic presentation is algorithmically complex and thus generally eschewed. Earlier engineering drawings are visually satisfying because they were worked and reworked by their draftsmen as the picture emerged. Slower, yes, but better. And I've found that those who can draw credible drawings freehand with pen or pencil are those who can best use the automated tools. AutoCAD doth not a designer make.
Years ago, during the renovation my church, I uncovered the original architect's drawings from 1910. I convinced the vestry to appropriate a sum of money sufficient to reproduce some of them as art, in which form they are now sold in the church gift shop. The annotations that today would be depicted as a dry callout were rendered in those early 20th century drawings in calligraphy!
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Post by gwiz on Jun 13, 2007 12:30:51 GMT -4
Caldwell had another advantage over the computer generation, too. Where we worked, not from his old stamping grounds at JSC, the summer thunderstorms routinely knocked out power in the afternoon. As we reclined back from our darkened monitors, C.C.'s voice would float over the cubicles: "Drafting board's still up!" During my time at BAE aerodynamicists were not expected to use CAD, but when I went to McLaren I found I had to learn the CAD system. In fact, pretty well every one on the aero team did apart from the technical director, Adrian Newey. He had the only drawing board, and part of his phenomenal productivity was due to other people getting the boring job of putting Adrian's freehand shapes into the CAD system.
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Post by BertL on Jun 13, 2007 13:03:24 GMT -4
Still eagerly waiting for rocky's response.
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 13, 2007 13:28:36 GMT -4
...getting the boring job of putting Adrian's freehand shapes into the CAD system.
I wrote a whole Master's thesis on this topic.
Sketching initial designs freehand invokes a cognitive construct designers call the eye-mind-hand. It's enormously powerful. The eye, mind, and hand work together in synergistic fashion to generate, evaluate, and refine design concepts in a rapid cycle. CAD generally does not facilitate this because it sets a slower pace and requires gestures dicated by computer UI conventions that fail to activate the cognitive feedback mechanism. One cannot "sketch" in a typical CAD system, leading to a hard-edged, unidirectional interface between sketching and CAD drawing. The important parameters of a design are most grossly affected early in the process during sketching, yet that's generally when you want the additional analytical help a computer can provide. It's disappointing when the most productive and potentially effective stages of a design happen before it's "put into the computer."
That's not exactly the same as the situation where the senior designer gets to lunge ahead in cape-and-sword fashion leaving his underlings to do the tedious work, but this situation arises precisely from a known deficiency in the traditional CAD workflow model.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Jun 13, 2007 14:51:54 GMT -4
There is still nothing more satisfying to me than the first stroke of crisp India ink across a creamy smooth sheet of vellum or the rich chroma in a pool of gouache. As a comic artist, I can wholeheartedly agree.
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Post by Ginnie on Jun 13, 2007 16:57:36 GMT -4
In 1976 I took a course in Offset Printing. I learned to do layout, cut and paste (literally!), use an IBM Selectric (a fancy typewriter), produce negatives for the plate, make the plate and print on a Multilith 1250 press. We used rapidograph pens, a Headliner machine which produced headline type photographically, light tables, rulers and triangles to do our work. I could tell if the temperature in the developing bath was too cold or warm by putting my finger in it. When I finished the course I couldn't get a job because so many lithographers were getting them. This previous generation of printers, the lithographers found their older technology obsolete (expect for specialized work). They were so numerous and moved into the Offset Printing trade. I wonder if in the 90's a similiar thing happened when the computer started taking over the printing trade.
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Post by nomuse on Jun 13, 2007 16:58:13 GMT -4
I've always been struck by the very different way Costumes approaches the plans process. The Scene Shop gets drawings. If they have trouble with them, the Master Carp breaks them down into even more detailed drawings. Costumes gets a sketch of what the costume looks like when worn. They interpret the sketch in techniques and materials to arrive at something that in the end looks as much like the sketch as possible.
Over-simplification, I know. Ignores the use of Painter's Elevations, and that good designers will provide a model which will be available to the shop. And ignores that in a more structured Costume shop a head cutter will breakdown the Designer's idea into fabric pieces, leaving fewer artistic interpretations to the sewers. But I still find the basic division to be there; Costumes gets a "plan" of what the total thing will be. Sets get a "plan" of lots of little bits which, if the designer did their homework, will correctly assemble into the final thing.
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Post by nomuse on Jun 13, 2007 17:01:24 GMT -4
Around art circles they like to repeat a quote attributed to someone at Pixar; "It's easier to train an artist to use a computer than it is to make a computer user into an artist."
Odd the number of 3d people -- game level designers, modelers, animators, concept artists -- who have a community theater background. Mostly lighting design!
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Post by JayUtah on Jun 13, 2007 18:25:33 GMT -4
This thread is starting to turn into one of those "uphill in the snow both ways" exchanges. I hope the youth will pardon our nostalgia and be kind to us in our old age.
Yes, I too remember when "cut and paste" meant a razor blade on a rubberized mat and pots of evil-smelling goop and tubs of warm wax, rubber rollers and dastardly fingerprints emerging on putatively camera-ready material.
I have a closet in my house occupied floor to ceiling by things with which to draw and upon which to be drawn. My uncle -- a retired professional architect -- eschewed the computer. In his retirement he does the occasional residential commission, one of which customers, upon seeing the first draft of the plans, remarked, "Wow, these look like they were drawn by hand!"
My friend who designs sets professionally builds sketch models. He produces drawings when needed, but his sketching is done mostly in bits of foamcore hot-glued together. His eye-mind-hand is attuned to that, and often the carpenters have worked largely from the model.
At my theater, professional and occupational constraints force us to adopt the traditional design methods, except for our set for Man of La Mancha which transformed the entire theater into the dungeon cave. It was executed expertly in high-density expanded polystyrene cut with hot wires and coated with epoxy, all according to a scale model placed in the center of the stage for reference. There simply was no better way to express the form. In contrast the expanded styrene forms used in our 1776 set were rigorously CADified, printed in full layout for comment and approval, and then sent out for contract manufacture.
I've seen a number of different approaches to design and execution both in and out of the theater. Fundamentally it's all theater -- it all has to work and look good and fit the budget. The variables just change a bit. But design and execution are collaborative art. There is no one true model by which the collaboration occurs. Occasionally division of labor suggests some standard interfaces. But fundamentally the design advances from sketch to finished product according to various processes of refinement and reinvention. Often a designer will allow a prop to be finished in detail using whatever the prop shop has on hand. Often the underlying structure will be left up to our skilled welders and riggers. As long as the collaboration works there's no real basis upon which to nit-pick it.
Pixar is interesting because there, more so than elsewhere, the mutual respect between Ponytails and Propeller-Heads has become ingrained in the culture. I have worked at places where the artistic and technical components seem to live in different worlds, each rolling its eyes at the other. Pixar's artists have respect for the limitations and potential of the computers, and the engineers have an appreciation for what art entails. Therefore there is little distinction between "story ideas" or "art ideas" or "technical ideas." There are only ideas.
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Post by wingerii on Jun 13, 2007 18:41:15 GMT -4
My fine mechanical pencil skills are reserved for back-of-envelope circuit schematics.
"What's this squiggle supposed to be?"
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