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Post by dwight on Aug 10, 2005 15:00:13 GMT -4
The Scott Sullivan books are excellent reference books. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Essentially they are a from-ground-up build of the LM and CSM with loads of info regarding important dates in the timeline of both spacecraft. In addition www.apollosaturn.com/ has a good deal of reference material. Mind you the CSM Sullivan book is hard to find, but still available. Your best bet is via the used book dealers link on the amazon.com site when you bring up that book in a search. There is so much I learned about the two craft via Scott Sullivan books. Again, I can't speak highly enough of them. As fort the CD ROM in the LM book, I haven't had the time to review it yet, as I only got the books a few weeks ago. I found enough information on the internet to build a decent Saturn V 3d model in Lightwave albiet with very technique-rusty designer (me) at the helm. Cheers Dwight
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Post by TaeKwonDan on Aug 10, 2005 15:45:07 GMT -4
To add some more concept of scale, I emailed my wife, an architect the following question:
How many individual sheets of paper would you estimate going into the drawings of a standard strip mall or office complex? And I mean everything from building blueprints, to wiring diagrams, etc.?
Her response:
Now this is for something much less complicated than everything that went into making Apollo work and she only counted final drawings where as I know for a fact they save and date interim designs before client changes and red-lining.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 10, 2005 16:05:40 GMT -4
House plans or other plans for standardized construction are typically more relaxed. If you know, for example, that a house will be built using balloon framing (the standard for more than a hundred years) then you don't need to specify the location of every piece of the structure. And the electrician will have leeway in running wires and conduits through the structure; it doesn't matter what exact path a wire follows from switch to fixture. A residence electrical plan can be done using only one sheet per floor. The electrical plan for an airliner or a spacecraft would be on the order of 500 drawings.
We're in the middle of building upgrades to our facility at work. I'm leafing through a sheaf of drawings about an inch and a half thick. And this is "straightforward" construction.
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Post by TaeKwonDan on Aug 10, 2005 16:17:42 GMT -4
Definitely part of my point. And based on my wife's desk and office in general you still end up with a boatload of paper for these straigh-forward designs.
I can't imagine the airplane hangar you would have to store all drawings related to Apollo in.
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Post by JayUtah on Aug 10, 2005 16:38:26 GMT -4
You don't store them all in one place. North American, for example, designed the Apollo service module. Anything they design and build, they have the responsibility to store the documents. The cryo tanks in the SM were built by Beech, with a distribution system built by Hamilton Standard. Beech and North American will naturally exchange some drawings as part of the development; they will have to negotiate how the tank is integrated into the final assembly. That doesn't mean Beech supplies all its drawings to North American; only those that pertain to integration. Beech is required to retain its detailed design drawings by law until the item to which they refer is no longer in service. But they are not required to put it in a central repository or to transmit it to any party other than the government or the customer (in this case, the same entity).
What this means is that with something like 2,000 subcontractors for the Apollo spacecraft, the full set of drawings is never in one place; it's spread out all over the country.
When an individual service module has flown and is thus taken out of service, the contractors may destroy certain ephemeral documentation pertaining to that item. It is deemed no longer necessary. Usually the contractor is glad to destroy it because he can reclaim the space for storing other required documents. When the last service module has flown and the contract is well and truly terminated, the contractor may destroy some of the more general design documents. Again, this is standard practice, and it is advantageous for the contractor to do so.
A contractor usually wants to retain as much of the material as necessary to protect any intellectual property he has developed in the process. You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. But you definitely get rid of the bathwater. Some of that material does have historical significance, but a contractor is generally not motivated to act pro bono in the national historical interest. Many individuals do, and the trash heaps of many Apollo contractors were picked over by souvenir hunters. But whether a certain item was retained or discarded depends on the policy of the individual contractors -- all 2,000 of them. Once the statutory retention requirements have been satisfied, the contractor usually wants his storage buildings back.
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Post by Sticks on Aug 10, 2005 17:07:21 GMT -4
I used to work for a software company doing accountancy software You should have seen the paper trail for a single client modification or change to base product Getting back to the original question sort of.. As there are only 136 days left to Christmas What book would you reccomend for any fan of Apollo into looking at "schematics"
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Aug 10, 2005 19:11:20 GMT -4
To add some more concept of scale, I emailed my wife, an architect the following question: How many individual sheets of paper would you estimate going into the drawings of a standard strip mall or office complex? And I mean everything from building blueprints, to wiring diagrams, etc.? I'm a general contractor so working with blueprints is an everyday part of my job. I'm currently working on a bid for an approximately $60 million wastewater treatment plant. To bid this project we were issued 540 blueprint-sized drawings and nearly 2,000 letter-sized pages of specifications. We don't submit our bid for another couple weeks, yet we've already received almost 400 additional pages of new or reissued drawings and specifications due to design changes and/or clarifications. This is just the documents issued to the contractor for bidding. Not included are the thousands of additional documents generated by the various engineers and architects involved in the design. Bidding this project my company will produce at least half a file drawer full of documents; and this is in the age of computerization. Go back to the 1960s and you could at least double this volume of paperwork. You can also add to this all the bid documents generated by our material suppliers and sub-contractors. Should we successfully procure this project then we really start to produce a lot of paperwork. Each material supplier produces shop-drawings providing product data, dimensional data, and installation details for their particular product. The shop-drawings submitted to the general contractor will easily fill several file cabinets. Additionally, the material suppliers produce manufacturing and assembly drawings for their own use that the general contractor never sees. These additional documents likely out-number those sent to the contractor. There are also lab reports being generated by the firms performing concrete tests, soil density tests, etc. Furthermore, the general contractor must generate a set of as-built drawings detailing all deviations from the original design drawings. The equipment suppliers must submit operation and maintenance manuals, which can fill a couple more file cabinets. If you were to gather up all these documents into a single place, they would probably fill a tractor trailer. And this is just a sewage treatment plant -- nothing nearly as complex as a vehicle meant to send men to the moon.
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Post by echnaton on Aug 10, 2005 21:07:19 GMT -4
Bob
Upon completion of such a project, how much of that documentation would be kept? How much would be turned over to the client? How much destroyed?
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Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 10, 2005 23:05:25 GMT -4
I see margamatix hasn't been back to reply to this thread.
I would point out the luncy of this statment though:
"In light of what you say, I will dismiss them as idiots."
Just because someone says something wrong, doesn't make them an idiot, nor does it make everything else they say wrong. This seems to be another trait I have seen in CT's of all shapes and sizes. They will dismiss an entire argument if one little are has a mistake in it, even when it doesn't affect the result. Often they will discredit any further information from the same source because of that previous mistake as well.
One thing Jay says often is that each situation needs to be taken on it's own merits, and this seems to be something a lot of people can't do. Just because they made a mistake in one area, doesn't mean that they are alwys mistaken. This even applies to Jack White and Hogaland and others. While it is unfortunate, we can't debunk Sibral's claim that the LM was flimsy by pointing out that he has no idea about the LLTV crash or that he only showed selected parts of his "Smoking Gun" video and thus is an idiot. It'd be nice to be able to do that, but we can't. While we can point out other errors to so the increased likelihood that he doesn't have a clue about spacecraft engineering and thus wouldn't know a good LM if it fell on him we also educate on why he's wrong with the LM. While it can be a pain, hopefully it also teaches in some way that we do what we preach, take each claim and each situation on it's own merits, something that the CTs and HBs need to do more.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 10, 2005 23:10:02 GMT -4
Just because someone says something wrong, doesn't make them an idiot, nor does it make everything else they say wrong. This seems to be another trait I have seen in CT's of all shapes and sizes. They will dismiss an entire argument if one little are has a mistake in it, even when it doesn't affect the result. Often they will discredit any further information from the same source because of that previous mistake as well. And at the same time they will latch on to anyone that supports their beliefs and ignore any mistakes they have made. Many hoax believers have selective vision.
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Post by ajv on Aug 10, 2005 23:15:12 GMT -4
Many hoax believers have selective vision. Many people of all kinds have selective vision.
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Post by LunarOrbit on Aug 10, 2005 23:17:11 GMT -4
That is true, of course.
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Bob B.
Bob the Excel Guru?
Posts: 3,072
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Post by Bob B. on Aug 11, 2005 0:19:18 GMT -4
Upon completion of such a project, how much of that documentation would be kept? How much would be turned over to the client? How much destroyed? As Jay mentioned in one of his earlier posts, there is no single repository for all this documentation. Each party involved in the project has and retains a part of the paperwork. For instance, if one wants to see a fabrication drawing for some specific component, it may be necessary to go to the manufacturer who made it. The owner, engineer, or contractor may not have, or even seen for that matter, the particular drawing in question. In general, the only thing that initially gets through away are duplicate copies of things. There is no point in keeping ten sets of blueprints around when you need to keep only one for reference. The as-built drawings and the operation & maintenance manuals get turned over to the owner (or client). Copies of submittals and shop drawings are disseminated to the applicable parties at the time of construction, e.g. manufacturer, installer, general contractor, engineer, owner, etc., thus all these parties may retain a copy for a while. Probably only the owner would keep a copy long-term. As a general contractor we tend to keep documents where we can get at them fairly easily during the project warranty period, which is typically one year. After that we box everything up and put it into storage. I believe we are required by law to keep construction documents for a certain period of time, though I don't recall what it is. I don't think it is any longer then about ten years. It may sit around longer than that if we don't need the space, but every so often we need to clean house and free up storage space. At that time we throw all the old stuff away.
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Post by gwiz on Aug 11, 2005 3:29:53 GMT -4
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Post by colinr on Aug 11, 2005 3:40:31 GMT -4
Having worked in the North ea Oil industry , and in particular having spent 5-6 years providing IT support for a major oil company's Tecchnical Library - I can tell you that the drawings for a major project such as an oil production platform can occupy an fair sized warehouse , I know i used to work in one! - in addition managing the change process for drawings is an art in itself , with hundreds of drawings requiring amendment on a regular basis .
Ok this is where the system differs from Apollo, the entire project was over in the time it took for say BP to find the forties field, build the platforms, and start producing oil. in addition the expected lifespan of these structures now seems as tho' its heading for 50 years at least ... - but sure as fate they'll still be using the drawings some unknown , and now retired draftsman , produced many years ago ....
Sorry slight diversion there !
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