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Post by officerfriendly on Nov 15, 2007 18:41:33 GMT -4
Some poor sod used the old 'why will it take till 2030 to get back to the moon, why don't they just use the old blue prints? I responded by telling him to build an open wheeler from 1968 then win next years Indy 500. HBs are so interesting from a psychological perspective. I won't believe anything without empirical proof, they won't believe anything with empirical proof. There's a thesis for psychologists in there somewhere.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Nov 15, 2007 19:12:38 GMT -4
Some poor sod used the old 'why will it take till 2030 to get back to the moon, why don't they just use the old blue prints? I responded by telling him to build an open wheeler from 1968 then win next years Indy 500. Exactly. I'm certain Ford could replicate a 1969 Mustang if they really wanted too, but it wouldn't be easy or practical because their factories aren't set up to do it anymore. Why would they do that when they could design a brand new Mustang and incorporate all of the technical improvements that have occurred since 1969? Would the people who work for Ford even know how to build a car the way they did over 30 years ago, or has the use of robots etc. changed the way they do their job so much that they wouldn't even know where to begin?
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Post by gillianren on Nov 15, 2007 20:38:53 GMT -4
And welcome aboard, Officerfriendly!
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Post by echnaton on Nov 15, 2007 20:58:50 GMT -4
Welcome, officerfriendly.
I've told some HBs that the Saturn 5 capsule and LM were designed to accomplish the goals of the Apollo program. The new program has different goals and requires different hardware. So we go back to the drawing board for a new design. Like with Apollo, the design of the rocket will both limit and expand the ultimate mission goals, they are closely tied together.
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Post by sts60 on Nov 16, 2007 13:05:51 GMT -4
Hi, officerfriendly. Welcome.
It's not just a matter of having diagrams. It's tooling no longer in existence - facilities torn down or modified for other purposes - parts obsolete for decades - materials no longer used - and, most importantly, practical knowledge long since dispersed or forgotten. I work in aerospace, and we deal with that on a regular basis, even for systems which are in semi-continuous production. Never underestimate how crucial is the actual hands-on experience of the people who've "been there and done that." And even that degrades rather quickly when those people go to work on other things; it's much worse in this case, as most of the Apollo workforce is retired or passed away. (Some are still at it; I work for one now and have worked for/with others previously.)
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 16, 2007 14:14:17 GMT -4
It's not just a matter of having diagrams. It's tooling no longer in existence - facilities torn down or modified for other purposes - parts obsolete for decades - materials no longer used - and, most importantly, practical knowledge long since dispersed or forgotten.
I can't possibly agree more. My experience is similar to Sts60's.
I really hate to play the "you have to be there" card, but in this case it's really true. If you haven't spent much time in high-stakes engineering efforts and hard-core, leading-edge manufacturing endeavors, you probably won't have an appreciation for how that work is done and why it just can't be picked up instantly after a decades-long hiatus.
Building spacecraft ain't like building spice racks and doghouses. You don't just run down to Home Depot and buy materials and do the work with the handful of general-purpose power tools you've got cluttering up the garage. Aerospace design and manufacture is an entirely different animal.
Most hoax believers have a quaint notion of the command module "plans" being a roll of drawings you could tuck under your arm, and anyone with some basic metal-working skills could build it, given those plans. Nope. There are literally hundreds of thousands of individual graphical drawings and literally millions of sheets of paper containing drawings, schematics, assembly procedures, computations, and other support information. All that was necessary to make the spaceship.
But all that is not sufficient. That's all propositional knowledge. You can read any number of books on how to swim, but that doesn't mean that, having read them, you can jump into the river and expect to swim as well as an expert. You have to have practical knowledge, even when the production processes are automated and computer controlled.
Tooling is not trivial. Did you all see the photo at BAUT of the Orion lower heat shield prototype under construction? Do you see the custom-fit wheeled cart it sat on? That didn't arise magically. There's no catalogue where you can order an "Orion Spacecraft Lower Heatshield Dolly (Inverted)." Someone at Boeing had to design and build it. It takes literally hundreds of thousands of such tools to build a spacecraft, from the lowliest of hoist bridles cut from a simple I-beam to the most sophisticated assembly fixtures that come with integrated electronics, sensors, and actuators.
You design things with a knowledge of the methods and matierals you use to make them. When those methods and materials improve, the designs must change qualitatively to accommodate them. The improvement is seen as progress, so reaching back to embrace long-obsolete methods pretending that you'll save some effort is just not that way it works.
You also design things with a knowledge of how they'll be used. A spice rack can actually hold many things that are the same size as spice jars, and so it's a relatively general-purpose design. Spacecraft cannot be built so generally. An Apollo spacecraft is designed to carry out Apollo-type missions, which had limits on reliability, pilotability, duration, payload, and mission profile. We don't expect to duplicate the Apollo missions; we expect to surpass them. Therefore a different, better design is needed for the spacecraft that will accomplish them.
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Post by Ginnie on Nov 16, 2007 16:52:35 GMT -4
I can't believe you. It's too complicated. ;D
It's hard to go back. The closest thing I can think of in my life to this is trying to teach someone the old ways of cut and pasting, layout etc. vs. Illustrator. You would have to rebuild machines such as the Marisawa Photo Typesetter, or a Linotron 505 Control Unit. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the VariTyper Headliner, used for composing lines of headline type. And does anyone even use a Rapidograph pen anymore? Just drawing a perfect straight line with equal width would be challenging today. I remember having to do a simple form with multiple columns and such, and my Instructor inspecting it with his magnifying eyepiece, looking for imperfections in the lines! Computers are relied upon to do a lot of graphics work and they are easy to use. When I think of the work involved thirty years ago just to produce a folded flyer compared to today. Now I can whip one up almost complete in OpenDraw in half an hour. So it's illogical thinking to just 'get out the blueprints' and build it. There are new ways to do things, better technology, different methods etc. to use today. The past is gone.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 28, 2007 10:55:25 GMT -4
I can't believe you. It's too complicated. ;D It's hard to go back. The closest thing I can think of in my life to this is trying to teach someone the old ways of cut and pasting, layout etc. vs. Illustrator. You would have to rebuild machines such as the Marisawa Photo Typesetter, or a Linotron 505 Control Unit. I don't know if you're old enough to remember the VariTyper Headliner, used for composing lines of headline type. And does anyone even use a Rapidograph pen anymore? Just drawing a perfect straight line with equal width would be challenging today. I remember having to do a simple form with multiple columns and such, and my Instructor inspecting it with his magnifying eyepiece, looking for imperfections in the lines! Computers are relied upon to do a lot of graphics work and they are easy to use. When I think of the work involved thirty years ago just to produce a folded flyer compared to today. Now I can whip one up almost complete in OpenDraw in half an hour. So it's illogical thinking to just 'get out the blueprints' and build it. There are new ways to do things, better technology, different methods etc. to use today. The past is gone. I'm a comic artist and I used Rapidographs extensively for panel borders and lettering before I got sick of constantly cleaning and maintaining them (plus nobody can agree in which orientation you are supposed to store them: right-side up, upside down, sideways, whatever). My old comic teacher would similarly inspect our panel border lines to make sure they maintained their weight and were properly connected at the corners. Even though comics are increasingly being manufactured digitally, the bulk of comic work is still done the old-fashioned way and is the predominant market for many of the tools architects and draftsmen used to use.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 28, 2007 11:26:37 GMT -4
I was taught to use ruling pens. Uphill in the snow, both ways. Used well, they're very satisfying. There's no thrill like that first, crisp micro-thin line of india ink on a fresh sheet of vellum. But as with most dippable pens, sooner or later it blots. This happens often when the pen is used poorly or the maintenance is sloppy.
My collection of Rapidographs is gathering dust (horizontally) in a drawer. You're right: they're just too much hassle to keep clean and well maintained. You can still buy them, but at an average of $35 apiece you can't afford to have a good collection. They're being outsold fifty to one by the fiber-tipped cheapies. They're disposable and convenient and come in nearly all the traditional sizes.
Unfortunately I don't like the ink. The ink has to be liquid enough to flow through the fiber tip, and that means it's not always opaque enough to reproduce well. India ink is like thin paint. Black india ink is black.
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Post by Data Cable on Nov 29, 2007 3:21:10 GMT -4
My collection of Rapidographs is gathering dust (horizontally) in a drawer. Wow, most things collect dust vertically. You're keeping that gravity generator reverse-engineered by NASA from alien technology in the drawer next to it, aren't ya.
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reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Nov 29, 2007 4:16:59 GMT -4
Do I ever agree. I get that same feeling every time I dip my brush to paper. Inking is my favorite part of drawing. My problem is that often I rush the pencilling to get to the inking, and then I have to make all the major drawing decisions with my brush.
Since I retired the rapidographs, I've had considerable trouble finding a pen that I like that I can use to letter and draw panel borders. I can't use a lettering nib because I'm left-handed (dragging the nib to the right at that angle stabs the paper), and felt-tip pens just don't maintain a consistent line weight. I hate the look of digital lettering so I'm kind of stuck with plenty of bad options and no good ones. Got any advice?
I agree. That's the major flaw of the Rapidograph. It's especially frustrating when nearly all of your thin lines disappear at reproduction. I tend to use a nib now for nearly all my thin detail work, and I've come across an ink that flows well through both nib and brush and dries relatively dark: Higgens Black Magic. It kind of spoils pretty quickly but I do so much work I never have to worry about it.
If I'm doing work intended to be shown as an original, I switch inks to the PH Martin's Black Star Matte. It dries super flat black, but it's so thick and corrosive it won't flow through a nib and it will destroy a brush if you don't thoroughly clean it out every few minutes.
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Post by Ginnie on Nov 29, 2007 17:28:59 GMT -4
Ever try Speedball calligraphy nibs? I think you can get left handed ones. The only problem with these is that if you use waterproof ink (which tends to be thicker) you have to clean them more often. Also if you are drawing a l-o-n-g line, the ink gets less opaque as you keep going, and can run out of ink before you reach the end. You can also buy them with ink resevoirs built in, but you won't be able to use that nice dark ink that Jay was talking about. I used to cheat sometimes. I would make two parallel thin lines and use a brush for the middle.
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 29, 2007 18:12:31 GMT -4
I love Higgins ink.
I have some metallic inks that will destroy any brush that comes within six inches of the bottle.
Sometimes I use a watercolor rigger brush with a bridged straightedge. That's a technique Syd Mead teaches. It takes some practice. It doesn't give exacting line weights, but it's fast. Use fingernail clippers to trim the rigger bristle points.
You can indeed get lettering nibs with the bevels set appropriately for southpaws, but the problem is in the morphology of the Roman alphabet. The crossbar of capital A, for example, can be drawn either left-to-right or right-to-left. But the loops in capital B, P, and R, and the body of C can't be drawn easily with the pen held in the left hand; it's nearly impossible to draw them without pushing the nib at some point.
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Post by Ginnie on Nov 29, 2007 18:58:20 GMT -4
Should left handers be even attempting such things? ;D
How come I can write backward B's and C's etc. then with no problem?
Aah, Higgins. I can see two containers on my art table.
But horror of horrors - they aren't your beloved black but a red and a green!
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Post by JayUtah on Nov 29, 2007 19:21:19 GMT -4
'Tis the season. Perhaps you have developed better penmanship technique. The Speedball calligraphy nibs you identify often have nib tips bent to be parallel with the paper, allowing them to skate across the paper in any direction. In which case that's a good recommendation. Perhaps the nibs Reynoldbot uses have the ordinary pointed tips that cause digging into the paper when pushed.
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