The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 72: Orbiter Access Arm Lift, Pad Deck Preparations.
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Ok.
Now we're up on the Pad Deck with our OAA, and we've attached the Environmental Chamber to the end of the arm which will be coming ever-so-close-to, but not quite touching, the side of the Orbiter, and we're up on top of the Arm, putting the Lifting Gear together, and we're not very far away at all from hanging this thing on the side of the FSS, one hundred and fifty feet above the Crawlerway concrete that you see everybody and everything standing on top of in our photograph.
This is an exceedingly-similar procedure to hanging the GOX Arm, so maybe go back to Page 66 if you'd like, to review some of what's going on with what Union Ironworkers have to do in order to get this thing rigged, prior to Lifting it.
And I've already told you I do not have a proper set of drawings for the OAA itself, or the Environmental Chamber which hangs off of the end of it, but I do have a few things which might be of use, and we've seen some of them before, and we're gonna try to focus mostly on the Environmental Chamber first, but since it's part of the Arm... well... you're gonna get Arm stuff too, ok?
Page 71, which we just left, included a link to a (less than fully wonderful) general arrangement isometric view on 79K24048 sheet M-326 showing us the Orbiter Access Arm in its working position, extended, but with the RSS in its Mated position, too.
And I'm not real happy with that view on M-326, so I decided to doctor up one of the 79K14110 Vicinity drawings, with a pasted-in OAA (which, without an actual OAA drawing package to use for source material, involved a surprisingly-ridiculous amount of work to cobble together from the 79K24048 Electrical package, along with a bizarrely reworked/altered sheet from the 79K30000 LUT Demo package, along with a cut-out piece of 79K14110 sheet A-35 just for good measure, and... eeks!), and I also included an added-in plan view of the Space Shuttle Stack, sitting above the Flame Trench for reference with the OAA, and in the end, this version of 79K14110 sheet V-12 winds up having been worked-over pretty damn good, but it seems to work well enough, I suppose.
And here's 79K14110 sheet V-12 with the OAA just kind of slapped down on it, so as you can see where it goes, in relationship to the mated RSS, and in particular the RCS Room, which it winds up directly beneath, but this one is kind of missing a little something too.
So ok, so I did it a second time, and on this version of 79K14110 sheet V-12, I blocked out all of the OAA that has RSS structural elements above it, and in so doing we promptly lose all sense of where the damn thing is actually going, down there underneath the RCS Room and the Left SRB Access Platform, but since we get to look at it in the previous version, we can kind of blink back and forth with the two versions of V-12, and see how this thing is more or less buried in there, with a lot of steel directly above it, and on this page, we're going to dive deeply into the nature, locations, and clearances of that steel (and also the steel that's crowding up underneath it claustrophobic-ally, from below), and I'm trying my best to let you see all of this, in detail, so as you'll perhaps gain a proper appreciation of what's really going on with the mated RSS and the OAA fitting up more or less inside of it.
And this is what they would be dealing with every single time there was an Orbiter on the Pad, with the RSS swung around and Mated to it, while they were doing whatever pre-launch work they might need to be doing (and oh good lordy gollamighty was there ever a lot of that kind of work which had to be done for every single launch). Which means it was by far the most common configuration, but it's not the one you are used to seeing, because what you are used to seeing, is the Space Shuttle sitting there on the Pad with the RSS rolled BACK, completely out of the way, in the de-mate position, with or without the OAA fully extended in its service position with the Environmental Chamber butt up (but not quite touching) against the Orbiter.
And nobody ever considers stuff like this. Nobody ever thinks about it. They just take it for granted, that, ok, there sits the Space Shuttle, in plain sight, with that great goddamned big steel contraption, whatever the hell it is, over there on the side of the photograph, or the video, or whatever, out of the way, and who cares what it is, or what it's doing over there, and ok, fine, whatever.
Here's another NASA vid, for STS-134, with the RSS getting rolled back, and this one has better resolution, but not as good of viewing angle choices, but it's also got weency little ant-people on the Towers to give you a proper sense of scale, and in particular, after the RSS is fully retracted, you can see people going back and forth on the Elevation 215'-0" (Pad A elevation) FSS/RSS Crossover Catwalk (immediately left of the Orbiter's Cockpit Windows), and how that thing came together as the retraction proceeded, and you also get to see the RCS Room Rolling Door get closed, so... that's all kind of nice, right?
And nobody ever gives the slightest consideration to what things might be like, when the gigantic steel contraption was somehow wrapped around the Space Shuttle, completely blocking it from view, and hell, nobody even knows that a thing like that is even possible.
They never see it. Nobody ever shows it to 'em that way, because the Sexy Factor falls waaay off when the Shuttle is unseeable, and who gives a shit about gigantic steel contraptions anyway?
Right?
So for the vast majority of the population who even looks at pictures of the Space Shuttle at all (And how many people do you know, who could not possibly care less about it?), there is zero sensible awareness of what's going on with the OAA when the RSS is mated to the goddamned thing, as must it be, for the overwhelming preponderance of the time we're out on the Pad, preparing things for launch.
And I mentioned on Page 71 about how the OAA is "crammed in underneath" The RCS Room when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter. And in addition to that, it's not quite banging into the fucked-up Antenna Access Platform as it does so, but it's close, and...
It's pretty fucking tight in there, and it's near-impossible to properly visualize this stuff, but way back on Page 30 I took my best swing at it anyway, while I was fleshing out further details and interestingness on the Hated Antenna Access Platform, and I'm gonna link you back to some of the relevant graphics I cooked up in order to try to show you how this crap all fits together once again, because it's time to Hang The OAA, and the time to gain proper understanding of the OAA is...
...now.
And all of this happens with the OAA in its extended position, and by now you may or may not have noticed that, holy shit, the stupid OAA can NOT be retracted back against the FSS and Struts, out of the way, when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter!
There's nowhere over there for it to go when the RSS is in Mated Position.
The goddamned mated RSS blocks it from moving at all, from moving so much as mere inches, toward its retracted position.
It HAS to be extended. Fully.
All crammed in there underneath the RCS Room, slap against the side of the Antenna Access Platform.
Take it or leave it, we're not asking you, we're telling you.
So ok, so now that we're sort of up to speed with this ever so sneaky and hard-to-visualize aspect to the goddamned OAA, let's see if we can try to come up with something to, sort of, let us see how all that works, ok?
And it's a bear, so get ready for it.
Scroll down the page to the next photograph, below the torrent of words and technical linked images that's coming, if you want to. You do not have to understand this stuff in full detail. Not required. Some of it is fairly punishing. That said, My People, the ones who really want to know, will be given a complete explication of how the OAA fits up against the RSS, directly beneath the RCS Room, and a thing like that does not happen quickly. Or easily. Just like when you're out on the job, battling shit like this in the Real World.
I'm going to be telling My People about what to expect. When they're out on the job. And that's why they want to know it. They want to at least have a fighting chance when it's them sitting there at the conference table, explaining why the motherfucking Project is three months behind schedule and a couple of million dollars over budget, in a way that makes it the owner's fault, or perhaps one of the other subcontractors' fault, and we're not kidding around here, guys, the stress generated by exactly this kind of shit, literally, and truly, kills people. So we really REALLY do want to know how to manage things, when it's our turn to do so.
The rest of you guys can skip down the page to go look at the next Pretty Picture that's down there somewhere, ok?
We'll start by returning to 79K24048 sheet M-326, but this time it's marked up to show the cutaway loud and clear, with the OAA down there underneath the RCS Room, as well as the fact that they misrendered the Antenna Access Platform and Left Side Seal Panel in relationship to the OAA (and no, I do not know if the misrender is because those two items are wrong, or if the whole ARM is wrong, or maybe some combination of the two things working against us together).
Then we'll head all the way back to Page 30 to the part where I hit this stuff VERY glancingly, and pull up a couple of things I needed to show you at that time, but did not bother to further elaborate on at the time, mostly because you weren't ready for it back then, but also because I was going on and on about Compressible Bumpers, as part of explaining this whole area, inside the RCS Room, and beneath it on the Antenna Access Platform, and... at the time, that was way more than enough, and I let it go.
First, 79K14110 sheet M-45, to see some renderings of the OAA in there with the RSS more or less surrounding it, when it's mated to the Orbiter, complete with a couple of views which include the Orbiter itself, to help understand the overall orientation and interrelationships between all the main players.
And this drawing is not an easy read, ok?
In fact, it's a difficult bastard to read, and will leave you feeling like you know less, after looking at it.
We can start trying to figure out M-45 by looking over on the left side, just a little bit above center, at "Plan At RCS Room Floor El. 212'-2", which is looking straight down on top of the whole Orbiter Access Arm, from FSS to Crew Hatch on the Orbiter, and over where I've blue-highlighted the Environmental Chamber, it's giving us Column Lines, and those Column Lines are for the RSS, which is of course mated to the Orbiter in this plan view.
So stop, and give Plan At RCS Room Floor some consideration, ok?
The OAA is showing, and the framing steel which lives on those Column Lines is also being shown, and in so doing, they're telling us that this framing steel, is sitting right there, just above the OAA. We're not hitting the OAA with any of this steel, but you're for sure as hell not going to be standing on top of the OAA where they're showing you this steel, because... hell, there's not nearly enough room to even lay down, on top of the OAA in there underneath that steel. It's CLOSE. Very very close. And they're further telling you that if you go just a wee little bit towards RSS Column Line A with your OAA, trying to swing it around toward its retracted position, while the RSS is mated, you will be dealing with more steel, what they're calling the "RSS Roof", and that stuff is even lower.
So ok. So maybe they weren't being quite as explicit with things as we'd like them to be, but they're still telling us, and it's our responsibility to understand what we're being told, and not theirs, ok? If you wanna come out here and run with these dogs, then you had better be good and ready to keep up with these dogs. 'Cause they've all got work to do, and none of 'em are gonna be stopping what they're doing, to wait for you to catch up. And that's just the way it is, and that's just the way it has to be.
Additional consideration of "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." tells us that the OAA, when it's in its Service Position, when it's flush up against the Orbiter so people can crawl through the Hatch, it's coming at the Orbiter at an angle.
It's not square with everything else up here, ok?
And they even tell us the angle.
In Degrees and Minutes.
And if you don't know what Minutes of Arc are, then this constitutes a Golden Opportunity to do so, because it's not just an academic exercise, it's something we'll need to know, and if we need to know it, then we need to first be able to understand what the hell it is, and that motivation is what we use to get us through.
The OAA sticks out away from the FSS at an ever-so-precisely-specified 76° 36' angle, swinging counterclockwise off of the true north-south alignment of the FSS and RSS when it's mated, from a pivot point which is 5'-6" east of the centerline of the Hinge Column, and 34'-6½" north of it.
And that's that. And with that we've got everything we'll ever need to let us know where this thing is, when we're building the rest of our Launch Pad around it.
The Orbiter, sitting on the MLP, runs the show.
And the OAA is built to the Orbiter.
And everything else in this area is built to the OAA.
And that's that.
And of course that's not that, at all, because "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." is flawed, and it's flawed twice. Once because of a very unfortunate lack of quality with this reproduction of the original drawing, which I am forced into working with, because... there is no other version of this thing that I have ever been made aware of. And the second "flaw" is the drawing itself, which is not fully accurate, and is downright misleading in a few key locations, so... we're going to have to step very carefully around here, and I'm going to try to bring this drawing back, as much as I think I can, while retaining faithfulness to a created on paper (which we sure as hell don't even have, remember) version of this thing, and... oh boy, this oughtta be fun, eh?
We'll start by giving you the bare unrectified, unannotated version of 79K14110 sheet M-45 straight off of the original digital material which I have been so astoundingly fortunate as to come into possession of, and which, of course, is what initially set off the whole saga of creating this narrative, in the first place.
And yeah, that thing's not the best, eh?
And before we go any further, we need to know why this drawing was created in the first place, and it was very definitely not created to help anybody out with the Orbiter Access Arm, and instead it was created so as they could put a ladder in one of the daffiest places imaginable, to give them contingency access to a Panel on the Orbiter that provided a Quick Disconnect (QD, and if you see "QD" anywhere else in these drawings, that's what it stands for) interface for the Water Coolant System.
And "Water Coolant" crops up in more than one place in the Orbiter. One of the places it's used is for the APU's, and you can read up on that end of things here, in Space Shuttle Auxiliary Propulsion System Design Study, which was written way back in 1972, and tells us how they decided against liquid hydrogen in favor of water, for this application.
But I'm pretty sure that's all in the back end of the Orbiter with the Water Spray Boiler System.
Up front, where the Crew Cabin is, you get Environmental Control Life Support System (ECLSS) stuff, and some of that uses water too, and I'm pretty sure our Water Coolant System as it relates to our bizarre Ladder which we might find ourselves needing to use, would be a part of this end of things, and you can read about it here if you'd like.
Here's our "Water Service Panel" on one of the pdf files that were once upon a time freely available from NASA, but at some point, somebody decided they shouldn't let us see this stuff, but by then, the horse was well and truly out of the barn, and you can find these in a variety of places on the internet, in addition to right here, if you look for them.
I pulled mine down directly from JSC, before they screwed the lid down on it, and was smart enough to save 'em to my computer when I did, (and you dear reader, may want to seriously consider scraping the entirety of these Pad B Stories, and saving it to your own machine, and... why not, maybe even creating a torrent or two for it... just in case the Gathering Darkness closes in on me, seeking to Extinguish the Light, and it's copyrighted, and I don't want you trying to sell it for money, but were you to help a little bit as an insurance policy against this thing disappearing forever, that might be a nice gesture) so... ok.
And here's some more, which I've decided not to mark up, but which include a few tidbits of interest for those who would like to know a little more about this stuff. 210b Forward fuselage coolant/air revitalization components 1 shows us the front end of things. And 210c Mid- and aft fuselage coolant system, shows 'em to us farther back, behind the Crew Cabin. Dig in. Have fun with it. Come back here when you're done, ok?
The fact that the OAA is in there at all is merest happenstance. This thing could have been anywhere. But it wasn't. And instead, it was in nasty, near-impossible-to-get-to location on the Orbiter when the RSS was mated to it. And how all of that came to be, I'm sure I'll never know. It just is, and we'll just have to deal with it, as is.
And before we're done with this, we'll know all about that Ladder, but right this minute our attention is focused on "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." on M-45, because it shows us stuff about how the Orbiter Access Arm works that we do not get to see anywhere else, except that it's flawed, and I've got to fix the damn thing, and even the fixes are a pain in the ass, because I must include other drawings which show us what's going on here well enough for me to do the damn fix, ok?
And we're gonna make a couple of fairly intricate loops as we go along, so maybe get ready for that too, ok?
Here's 79K14110 sheet M-45 with just those areas we're interested in for the moment, marked up to help you understand what they're trying to show you, and if this is not the worst drawing in all of 79K14110 as far as poor-quality of workmanship goes, it's pretty damn close.
And right now, all we give a shit about is found in the top left quadrant of the drawing, mostly involving Plan At RCS Room Floor El. 212'-2" but also, just a little bit, involving Partial Plan At El. 198'-7½" & 212'-2" which is just above "Plan At RCS Room Floor..."
And the reproduction is faded to invisibility, and the original drafting is misleading, and oh boy, here we go.
The Arm. The stupid Orbiter Access Arm. What's going on with that Arm? That what we came here to learn about, isn't it?
Yes. Yes it is.
But it's stuffed up in there in a hole, with cold hard Rotating Service Structure steel threatening it from all sides, and we need to understand how it all fits together in there.
And unless and until I specifically indicate otherwise, everything that follows below is talking about JUST "Partial Plan" and "Doctored-Up Plan" on M-45 repaired Marked Up 1. We'll move on to the rest of the drawing soon enough, but not right now, ok?
On the bare original M-45, "Plan At RCS Room Floor..." contains a bad Orbiter Mold Line. And a lot of it is faded either beyond recognition or all the way out to invisibility. And the way some of the lines that do show were handled is exceedingly suboptimal, and a bunch of that stuff is very very misleading as a result of it.
So we've got a lot to be dealing with, just up in this top left corner of M-45, all by itself.
Once again:
M-45 bare original.
M-45 as you originally saw it marked up, back on Page 30.
M-45 at its present state of reconstruction and marking up, which I'm gonna call M-45 The First from here on, and you'll be seeing why, soon enough..
Bounce back and forth between them to understand what's been done in the name of clarification. Give the altered version a good close squinting at, because some of what I did to it is... non-obvious. Which means you gotta squint at the previous versions too, in order to catch all the changes to the eency-weency niggly little stuff that's going on here. Top left quadrant only. For now.
In the unrepaired versions, it's near-impossible to understand the actual steel they're trying to show you. A lot of it simply does not make sense, both because of degraded material that you can't see clearly, or at all, and poorly-done renderings of the stuff that you can see.
The bottom-right corner of the RCS Room, down where the Environmental Chamber looks like it's just maybe touching a column, makes no sense at all. What's going on where the Location Line from "Access Ladder Attached..." cuts across things along Column Line D? What's that murky crap over there to the left of that "Access Ladder..." line, just below the Column Line D Location Line? And if you look at what I've done to it in the repaired version, closely, it still really doesn't make enough sense, so we have to go back to the Structural Drawing that we built the damn thing to, to see what's going on down there, in just that one little corner of things.
Which I've ever-so-kindly marked up for you on 79K14110 sheet S-59, and what they're trying to show you down there on M-45 is the front side of the RCS Room between the Corner Column at Line D-3.4 and the vertical door jamb steel for the big Roll-up Door on the front of the RCS Room. And it's a very small detail, but it's emblematic of things, and somebody drew some goddamned lines on M-45, and it's never a good idea to be looking at lines on engineering drawings, having no idea what they're there for, or what they might represent, without taking the time to get to the bottom of things, so... ok. Now we know.
And while we're at it here, 79K14110 sheet S-59, Elevation 'A', which is part of "Elevations RCS Room", is the only place where we'll ever find out what's going on up here in the vicinity of elevation 212' and below, at the intersection of Column Lines C and 3.4, and they take us from Elevation 'A', down to Detail 'D', along the lower left margin of the drawing, to make sure we really know what's going on here, and I can see why the poor mechanical guy who had to draw M-45 threw up his hands in despair, and just sort of bodged it, hoping it would pass inspection, and it did.
And what's going on down at that location consists in a great-goddamned-big vertical W36x194 column (which we've already met no end of times previously, since it's RSS Primary Framing, and we are expected to be completely familiar with it, and you may admire its Line 4.6 opposite-hand counterpart's lower end, seventy-five some odd feet below, with nothing whatsoever beneath it except for a gut-churning free drop to the Pad Deck, in the lead photograph at the top of Page 54), which is coming up underneath a plenty big enough horizontal W21x57 beam, which itself has another vertical member on top of it, and that vertical W12x53 column isn't even on center with the vertical W36 column groaning down there underneath everything, holding it all up, and.. that's a pretty whack connection right there, boys and girls, and the mechanical draftsman had zero interest in all this goof-ass structural gobbledygook anyway, and...
You and I get to use this thing... whether we want to or not... and...
Onward.
Over to where the Environmental Chamber runs beneath all that framing and platforming steel, which is a place where things are particularly gubbed up.
Fucking thing don't make a lick of sense.
The Orbiter Mold Line on the unrepaired original is all horsed up, and down where it needs to be tucking back in, as it closes in on Column Line D, somebody just kind of said, "Fuckit" and decided they did not need to finish the curve, and that goddamned thing is extraordinarily misleading, and you find yourself wondering, "Is it platform steel? Is it the Orbiter? Is it framing steel? What the hell is that thing, anyway?"
The Orbiter Mold Line you see on the repaired version of M-45, down where it closes in on Column Line D, was cut from 79K14110 sheet S-41, resized to match its new background, and pasted in there.
And what's up with the flip-up platforms? Are they up? Are they down? Both at the same time? Whu?
And then there's the framing steel that lives behind the hinge line of the flip-ups, tying back to the heavier iron on Line 3.4. That's a goddamned mess, too.
And back farther away from Line D, back where it's solid floor steel without any flip-ups, they've put a member in there all nice and neat, and then, just to confuse the hell out of everybody, they put an Orbiter Dimension Line "Zo - 400" right next to the location line for Column Line C, and dammit, that's not a steel beam in there, no matter how much it might look like one.
And while we're on the subject of lines, I may as well take this opportunity to draw your attention (presuming it hasn't already jumped out of the tall grass directly at you, on its own) to the fact that the business of rigorously following all the standard conventions involving the use of double-dash, single-dash, repeating-dash, and unbroken lines has been cast overboard in this blighted little corner of the universe where sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't, and it almost looks as if they decided to do this whole area in either phantom (double-dash) or center (single-dash) lines, except for the stupid Ladder and the Panel on the Orbiter, and that doesn't make any sense, and I'm not even going to bother pointing any of it out, above and beyond the mere fact of writing the words in this paragraph. Fuckit. And it may or may not have been done better and/or correctly on the fucked-up paper-original, and it looks vaguely as if they might have tried, but that visual information has gone the way of the dinosaurs, never to return, and I just filled it all in any old whichaway, and I've got a few labels in there to guide you along through this very dark forest and you guys are big girls, and big boys, and I have every confidence in you, and you'll be fine, goddamnit.
And there's also nothing at all about the rendering of the Environmental Chamber that might cause you to believe it's underneath all of that steel and mess, anyway. Nothing.
And we'll ice this cake by going up to "Partial Plan" and looking at the stupid Ladder, which is done in hard line, even though it's down there attached to the underside of that flip-up platform it lives on... and what the fuck are we doing with a Ladder of all goof-ass things, welded on to the bottom side of a goddamned flip-up platform anyway?
Not now. Stick around and we'll get to it. I promise. But not now. We've got more than enough on our hands as it is, right now, ok?
And I tried to label, and mark, and highlight, and fill in, and erase, and...
You do not want to know how much time and effort was expended in making sense of this crap in the first place, and then correcting the motherfucker in the second place. Gah.
And there should definitely be a sense of familiarity with what we're looking at now, because we've been here before with this narrative.
Twice, even.
The lead photograph on Page 29 gave us an excellent look at the Orbiter Mold Line which cuts a large rounded-off hole in the RCS Room Floor at our good friend, Elevation 212'-2".
And the lead photograph on Page 30 showed us even more, from underneath, in this exact same area.
And the goddamned OAA is supposed to be fitting into this stuff... somewhere, and god damn it, we're gonna learn exactly where, before we're done with this, no matter how fucked-up 79K14110 sheet M-45 might actually be.
Let us now turn our attentions elsewhere on this marvel of a drawing. Let us now give the lower left quadrant of M-45 a look, now that we've established at least a sort of half-assed understanding of the steel structure that fills the spaces just above the OAA, as depicted in Plan At Elevation 212...
Oh boy, more fun!
And without further preamble, the Second Doctored Up Version of 79K14110 sheet M-45. M-45 The Second.
Drop down below "Plan At RCS Room Floor...", and you get "Elevation Looking South" in the far bottom left corner of the drawing, and right next to it, to the right, "Elevation Looking East", and these two Elevations take up the entire bottom left quadrant of the drawing, and that quadrant is our area of interest at this time, and it's plenty more than enough, all by itself, let me assure you.
Go look at that stuff, ok? Now, please. Don't even bother trying to make sense of it. I mean, yeah, there's the Orbiter, and a bunch of steel and stuff, and a bunch of words and arrows, but just leave that alone, ok? We're gonna do it, but first, just give it the old once-over so as you're at least aware of our general location and point(s) of view. Click the link and go there, take a little time to just sort of... admire it, and then come back here when you're done.
Thank you.
And in the meantime, while you were away, I've decided to upgrade this drawing from being one of the worst in all of 79K14110, to being the very worst. Hooray!
We're trying to learn about clearances, for all that crap which surrounds the OAA when the RSS is mated to the Orbiter (And please do not forget about the Hinged Left Guide Column, which we met back on Page 66, and which you are presumed fully cognizant of and fully familiar with, and no, NONE of that shows on M-45, so... mind, ok?)
And here's 79K24048 sheet S-224 again, just to refresh your memory of where that Hinged Guide Column fits in to its surroundings right next to the OAA, but try as you might, you will never find the Canister Guide Rail or the Big W36x194 which I've had to include and label on M-45, and it's almost like they wanted to hide that shit, across several different drawing packages, but for the life of me, I'll never know why.
Ok. We need to stop here. I've just shown you the second doctored-up version of M-45, and it's riddled with dimensions, a lot of which were never on the original, and I did not have room on the drawing to tell you where I got all those dimensions, and it's getting out of hand, and who's to say I'm not just making this shit up, so I'm gonna give you a list of where it all came from, so as you can check my work, to verify I'm not just making shit up, and even just that is gonna be a giant fucking pain in the ass, because some of the dimensions had to be derived, and I also for sure as fuck do not trust all of them equally, and...
Fuckit.
Here we go.
Working more or less high to low in our Quadrant of the Damned on M-45...
Bottom of W21x57 El. 210'-3¼" on M-45 The Second, is derived from 79K14110 sheet S-41, RCS Room Floor Framing Plan @ Elevation 212'-2", which tells us there's a member running from Line B to Line D on Line 3.4 which is a W21x57. 79K14110 sheet S-59, Elevation A (which is cut from 79K14110 sheet S-43) is showing us the Line 3.4 side of the RCS Room, and agrees that there's a "W21" at Floor Level in the RCS Room on Line 3.4, at Line C (which is what we're seeing on M-45 "Elevation Looking South" even though it does not specifically tell us that), and tells us to go to Detail D on that same drawing, S-59 to see what's happening with the "W21" at Line C-3.4, and that Detail D tells us there's a W36 column coming up vertically beneath our W21, and it also tells us T.O.S. (Top Of Steel) of the horizontal W21 beam is at elevation 212'-0¼". Ok. From there our Manual of Steel Construction tells us that a W21x57 is exactly 21" deep (which is rarely the case for members specified by inches of depth, if you were wondering), and when we come down exactly 21 inches from 212'-0¼", we wind up at 210'-3¼", and ok, there you go, our first derived elevation, tra la la. Check it yourself, if you don't trust me (and you should, and you should strive to develop this as a habit, if you ever Get Into the Business, and you don't do it because you don't like me or you don't trust me, you do it because it'll keep you out of one HELL of a lot of trouble at some unknowable point down the line, in the future, and Future You will thank Today You profusely for developing this life-saving habit, ok?).
Top of OAA El. 209'-6" is given elsewhere on M-45 The Second, and we'll get to that side of the drawing, but not right this minute, although we'll happily use what we're given as the elevation for the top of the OAA, and of course, the only part of the OAA we're really interested in, is the Environmental Chamber, so if you see me say "OAA" kind of don't forget that it's the Environmental Chamber that's our immediate Subject of Interest, and the rest of the Arm, can be ignored for the most part.
Which, also of course, allows us to derive 0'-9¼" Headroom Clearance Above OAA, as the RSS is grandly steaming in toward us, coming in at us around from the side like a battleship, with the bottom flange of our W21 passing directly above the Environmental Chamber as it does so, which sounds all well and good for room enough, except that it's not, and What This Part of the Drawing Giveth, That Part of the Drawing Taketh Away, and we'll get there soon enough, ok?
And 198'-8⅜" bottom of OAA turns out to be a rat bastard, and as far as I've been able to tell so far, they never do give it to us directly, and instead...
We find ourselves having to work indirectly with things, to an unknown degree, and we're gonna be heading over to 79K14110 sheet M-70 real soon now, in just a couple of more paragraphs, where the tops of the Left Side Seal Panel and the Left Canister Guide Rail come together right next to the Big W36x194 Column at the far end of the Antenna Access Platform where that annoyingly-complicated Flip-up Platform tucks in to the top of the Left Side Seal Panel, and I didn't bother giving you clearance between the bottom of the OAA and the Antenna Access Platform because the OAA doesn't quite make it that far, so there's no actual overlap, but with the Canister Guide Rail, there is some overlap, and careful there Lou, don't go swinging the OAA into that W36x194 column while you're at it, ok?
And the Big W36 in particular, is close. We don't quite hit it, but we come... close. Very very close. Or actually, I should be saying, "It doesn't hit us," because the poor OAA is already fully extended, up against the side of the Orbiter, unmoving, unmovable, and it's the RSS that's in motion here, W36 column and all, and if push was to somehow come to shove, the OAA has nowhere to go, and every time we mate the RSS to the Orbiter it's truth-or-consequences time with that W36 and the OAA, and... like I just said... careful there, Lou, ok?
And as we're having to deal with all of that crap, we notice, "Oh by the way," that in 79K14110 sheet M-70, Section D, which is cut from 79K14110 sheet M-68 (and yeah, I had to repair and rebuild that goddamned thing too), they've ever-so-casually dropped in a little note that says, "Swing Arm Clearance Xo 559.62", and ah, shit, now we gotta go back to the fucked-up Orbiter Coordinate System and see if we can convert that into the feet and inches system we're using to build the stupid tower to, and...
Hairy enough for you yet?
And at no point does anybody ever tell you what "clearance" actually means in this instance, and is it the lower edge of the actual steel (or aluminum, or some bracket, or...?) of the OAA's Environmental Chamber, or is it something which contains within itself some margin or other, which means we might have just an extra smidgen or two of squeak room for this thing to not hit what's underneath it over here, and...
Giant pain in the ass is all it'll ever be, and it's also all we're ever gonna get, so... grin and bear it, I guess.
And if you're wondering why I might be going to such extraordinary lengths to walk you through this unpleasant district of The Dark Forest... well... a little while ago I mentioned "if you ever Get Into the Business," and this is exactly the kind of shit you're going to be finding yourself having to deal with, and you're thinking, "Ok, so what," except that your thinking is incomplete, and what we're dealing with here, In The Business, can turn out to be the loss of eye-wateringly large sums of money, in addition to the continuance of your own employment coming to an abrupt end, and it doesn't really matter if it's lines on paper, or lines on a screen, or if it's two-dimensional, or three-dimensional, and you can rotate it around and look at it from all angles when it's 3-D, but that doesn't matter, because... it's just lines, and the paper, or the screen, will very obediently put whatever line somebody dictated it put, at whatever location that pleased them, and there's always going to be some asshole with more power than intelligence (or morals), telling you to, "Make it like the drawing shows," and if the miserable sonofabitch is making demands like that because he's crooked, and knows full-well that it's impossible, as-shown, but he also knows it's gonna cost him a bundle of money to make it right, then he's gonna lean into it, with every bit of strength he's got, and YOU had better be on top of this shit to a degree where you can take the stick he's coming after you with, snatch it out of his hand, and then turn it around and shove it up his ass, and break it off up there, and the only way to be able to do that is to be on top of this shit, and there's this guy's set of drawings, and that guy's set of drawings, and some other guy's set of drawings, and they all sure do look pretty, and all the lines on all the drawings close up nice and neat, but yet somehow, the wholeness of the thing fails to pass the Sense Test, and it's up to you to keep people with sticks in their hands from being able to do to you what they want to do, and...
Are we getting the idea here yet?
They're playing hardball, and they're not kidding, and they will hurt you if you let them, so you must be able to integrate different things from different systems, or even the same system, the hard way, the old-fashioned way, and in the process of integrating things, it goddamned better well motherfucking fit, and be buildable, or...
...you're gonna be looking for a new job, and your former company is going to be looking for people to purchase their assets in Bankruptcy Court, and no, I'm NOT exaggerating, not to the slightest degree, because I've seen it, with my own eyes, and you never know where the next Horseshit Event is gonna be coming from, so you must, at all times, know everything about the situation you're dealing with, good and bad, and about what's going on with and around it at any given time, and...
...this is why they don't just grab people off the streets to do this kind of work.
Construction Management is a BASTARD, and no slack ever gets cut, no mercy ever gets shown, and no credit for doing it right ever gets given, and you either learn to swim in that water or you don't, should you ever find yourself having been pushed into it, unexpectedly, and the choice to Get Into the Business is entirely yours, and I'm letting you see all of dirty underside of things here out of the goodness of my heart, so as you might, maybe, thereby be enabled to make a somewhat more-informed decision about things, before you find yourself nostril-deep in this very cold, and very dark, water.
That said, on the other side of the coin, the sensation of getting it right, of making sense of a very difficult technical thing, of finding ways to beat NASA's Rocket Scientists at their own game, is very heady wine indeed, and taking a deep draught of it can be one of the most pleasurable and satisfying things you'll ever experience in your life.
But. You must never forget that as you are enjoying your very-heady wine, you are being supported by a small raft, floating on top of some frighteningly-deep water, and that water is very cold, and very dark, and it will take you if it gets a chance to.
Ok, where were we?
Oh yeah, we were deriving things, and I was warning you about it, because when you derive something off of the Contract Drawings, you are, in essence, buying it. Step one inch away from anything that's in black and white on the drawing, as produced by the engineering, and the contractually-specified entity they work for, and...
...it's yours...
...and if it's wrong and if you failed to submit paper on it in advance, if you had the slightest lingering doubt or question about any of it, well then, that becomes yours too, and depending on the wrongness, the time and money penalties for being wrong can get...
...substantial.
If it was right there on the drawing to begin with, and you're being a good little doo-be, and you're doing what you were told to do, and it turns out to be very expensively fucked-up, then you submit paper on the motherfucker (and yeah, you'd better know how to write, or learn how to write on the double-quick, in a technically-precise and utterly unambiguous way that will withstand high-powered adversarial scrutiny in a court of law), and once the miserable sonofabitches are finally forced into owning their mistake (which may or may not be a quite wild-and-woolly process in and of itself), you get paid for the extra work in the form of a Contract Change Order, and all is well with the world (over on your side of the house, anyway).
But.
Step that one inch away from anything that's spelled out plainly in the contract documents...
...and god help your mortal soul.
So when we're deriving things...
We learn pretty quickly to be very very VERY careful about it, and we double-check and we triple-check, before we...
...commit.
Ok?
And if the OAA bangs into the tower, because we made a mistake in deriving things...
...horrifying amounts of money will suddenly lurch into motion, start swirling around in a mad circle, and then funnel down into a bottomless pit from where it will never return, and...
...are you sure you had your people read... Every. Single. Word. in this thing? All 632 pages of it? Every single bit of it? Because if you missed something in there somewhere...
...Careful there, Lou, this shit's pretty expensive when you get it wrong.
And we have not yet left M-45 The Second behind, and now we move on to 198'-2" top of Canister Guide Rail, and at least this one actually does get spelled out directly on a drawing, and you can see it for yourself on 79K14110 sheet M-70 Section D, which we've previously visited here, and which I'm giving to you again, just to maintain your familiarity with it.
But of course they're not gonna be making any of this stuff easy, and we have to, yet again, derive 0'-6⅜" Clearance between bottom of OAA and top of Guide Rail, because they decided to give us the top elevation for that margin of clearance in Orbiter Coordinate System units, "Xo 559.62," (which derives to a mere ⅞" above the level of the Antenna Access Platform, which sits at elevation 198'-7½", as a nice hard well-established reference point for stuff in this area, and notice please, on M-70, how they just decided to drop that five one-thousandths, third "significant" digit when you convert decimal ⅝" from the original fractional .625" in Orbiter Coordinate System horseshit units) but then they gave us the bottom elevation for that margin of clearance in the usual feet and inches nomenclature which we're building the tower to, and we must convert one of them into the other, so as they're both the same, and become therefore comprehensible, and since we're building the goddamned tower to goddamned feet and inches, ok motherfuckers, we'll do the conversion and we derive yet another dimension which permits us to finally understand what the fuck it is that we're looking at here, and...
Careful there, ok? This is an excellent place to get hurt, if you're being insufficiently careful.
And our final complicating item in this area (which is not shown anywhere on any version of M-45), is the Left Side Seal Panel. We first met the Side Seal Panels back on Tracking the Steel: Page 3 - Orbiter Mold Line Grating Panels Elevation 135, and for the moment, it's enough to know the top of the Side Seal Panel is the exact same elevation as the top of the Canister Guide Rail (and you can verify that by looking at M-70 once again, taking note of the ¼" Teflon Weather Seal shown in Detail 'D'), and the Teflon Weather Seal provides a coplanar seal between the top of the Left Side Seal Panel (which moves) and the top of the Canister Guide Rail immediately adjacent to it (which does not move), which of course is specifically located at elevation 198'-2" on that same drawing, so there can be no surprises with this thing, ok? We'll visit it shortly, in a marked-up photograph which we've already seen, although it's been a while.
And we'll stop right here, and take a couple of looks at marked-up versions of Image 031 which is the lead image for Page 30, so as you'll have a better (not good, but at least a little better) chance of properly visualizing this whole OAA mess up here.
And our first look will be at Image 031, very-high-resolution, with a few of the main players marked up, but without the addition of the OAA Environmental Chamber, which, when it's actually there, you're looking very nearly right down the barrel of it.
And now I'm just gonna paste the OAA (Hand-drawn, and there's perspective effects, and let's not forget that this is a montage of three PRINT PHOTOGRAPHS laid down on a photo album page that got scanned, so don't gimme no shit if it's not perfect, ok?) in there on Image 031, but of course when I do that, it covers everything up and that's not very satisfying, is it?
And of course I had to just kind of guess at it, starting out with the end-on view of the Chamber, which I clipped from over on the right side of M-45 (and we're definitely not done with revisits to that thing, either). And to get it to even half-ass match the scanned print photographs from a photo album page I'm working with here, I had to twist it around it pretty good, to match (sort of) the bizarre perspective distortions which are inherent in those photographs (three of 'em, slapped one on top of another to make up Image 031), plus the fact that it's coming in at us at an angle of roughly fifteen degrees off from the grid pattern of all the structure you see around it, and then hand draw the rest of it, as best I could, and while we're talking about this crap, maybe give that end-on part of the Environmental Chamber you're seeing here in light blue with darker blue double-dash phantom lines to let you know where the Crew Hatch on the Orbiter is, along with its immediate surroundings on the Chamber, a comparison with the business end of the Chamber you see in the Image 130, which leads off the top of this page, and yeah, that shit don't match, either, so the whole thing is quite a bit less than optimal and yet, even with all of that going on, you still come away with a feel for how this thing comes reaching in at you from across the way, over where the Hinges on the far end of the OAA are bolted on to the FSS, crossing a whisker above the top of the Canister Guide Rail and the Side Seal Panel as it does so, not quite bashing into the Big W36x194 going by that, and barely squeaking in underneath the RCS Room Floor Steel and Flip-up Platforms which are pressing down on it from up above, and... this fucking thing is CLOSE in there... but it fits. Barely.
I also chose to not attempt any shadowing effects with the cartoon-looking Chamber sitting where I put it, but rest assured that in the real world, on those days when, for whatever operational, test, QC, or any other reasons, the RSS was swung around into the mated position, but without an Orbiter sitting over the Flame Trench, in that area back there on the left side of this thing as you see it in my doctored-up photograph, it would get pretty dark, and the artificial lighting back there would be pretty much mandatory, to let you see where you were going, should you have been so unfortunate as to have to get up in there to do whatever task you may have been chosen to do. And of course, with the Orbiter there, it gets even darker.
Go back to M-45 The Second, down in the far bottom left corner, and give Elevation Looking South yet another look, to see just how far this thing sticks out past that Canister Guide Rail (which is shown on the drawing), and the Side Seal Panel that's right next to it (which is not shown on the drawing), ok? And as we learned about the Hammerhead Crane so very very long ago on Page 44, none of this stuff manages to quite stay put as you're out there with your buddies tromping around on it, and it bends, and it flexes, and it better not hit anything, goddammit!
And hey, why not, let's do Image 031 with the Environmental Chamber pasted in, but this time without any arrows or labeling. Plain vanilla. What you see is what they got.
And now, finally, we can return to M-45 yet again, and see if we can finish this thing off, for once and for all, and get back to hanging the goddamned Arm on the tower, how 'bout?
So ok. So here it is. 79K14110 sheet M-45 The Third.
And we're now working pretty much the whole right side of our blighted drawing, and things are rendered commensurately larger, and you might expect that as a result of things being larger, that they would also be more comprehensible, but if you did, you'd soon find your expectations dashed to bits on the Sharp Rocks of Reality, and the fuckups and the omissions over here on The Right Side of Hell, are so goddamned monumental as to defy making useful sense of this thing, unless you really bear down on it.
And I'm gonna have to address the fuckups and omissions first, or otherwise we'll never be able to figure out the (actually quite simple) things we'd like to learn about the place, as a real-world kind of deal, where steel is hard, and inflatable seals are soft, and ladders go up and down, instead of sideways.
And for simply being able to successfully visualize this goddamned thing, we must immediately take into account that whoever it was that made our renderings on the right side of M-45, did so in a way that makes what they drew (which looks completely reasonable to a casual glance, and stands as an exemplar of what I mean when some sonofabitch is telling you to "Make it like the drawing shows" and what the drawing shows is... not of this world, and really not even of this three-dimensional universe, and we must convert Pretzel Dimension Universe into our old familiar Three Dimension Universe, and... oh boy, here we go.
And oh yeah, they did it to us TWICE, in two completely separate ways!
Dammit!
And the first one is (sort of) easy enough to understand, and consists in a mirror-image reversal of things and... have you ever really considered what's going on with a mirror when you look into it and discover that the writing is all backwards in some weird way, but everything else seems to look perfectly normal, and... how the fuck does a thing like that work, anyway?
Might help to give mirrors a couple of minutes of our time, perhaps.
And when we look into a mirror, the dimensionality, the left-to-right, up-and-down, front-to-back, three-dimensional interrelationship of things we see in the mirror has been altered. And the alteration is not particularly straightforward, and mirrors give people trouble when it comes to properly and correctly understanding what's going on. And, instead of giving it the Idiot's Shrug and saying, "It's a mirror. That's just what it does, is all," which of course is no kind of understanding at all, we'd like to really know what the hell's going on here, and not be like the Idiot who blithely goes on about his life, aware that something's happening, but having not the slightest clue as to exactly what.
And a mirror reverses front-to-back, the near-to-far dimension, and in so doing, it winds up causing human brains to think that it's flipping left-to-right, instead.
But it's not.
And that shit's just weird, and it is strictly an artifact of human perception.
Step through the mirror, and take a look back out at yourself standing there looking at it, along with some writing to make the effect completely unmistakable, and something funny happens, that people never seem to notice.
If it was really me, along with with some writing, in the mirror, looking back out at myself in the real world, a very sneaky transformation has to take place, or otherwise I won't be able to look back out at myself from inside the mirror.
And the "transformation" is just the most stupidest, most ridiculousest, most subtle thing imaginable, and it consists in the fact, that if I'm now inside the mirror, looking back out, I HAVE TO TURN AROUND TO DO IT.
And just as soon as I've turned around, my left shoulder and my right shoulder (and of course all the rest of my right and left halves) HAVE SWITCHED PLACES!
Well, duh.
Except that when I'm looking in, looking in to my Mirror Self...
Those left and right shoulders did not switch places, even though, clearly, I'm looking right back out at me, and...
That's because near and far have been reversed and everything else has not and the only way for me to be looking back out at myself without actually having to turn around to do it, is to mirror-image reverse myself and...
Front to back, ok?
Side-to-side is just a collateral effect of not having to turn around to do it!
And then, of course, some of you are going to try and cheat, and you're saying to yourself, "Well fuck this guy, I'll keep left and right unswitched with each other by standing on my head!"
"HA! That oughtta teach him!"
Except that fails miserably too, because the front to back dimensionality reversal of the mirror image remains utterly unaffected by your lame attempts at trickery with left and right, and even when you're standing on your head, looking at you in the mirror, it's still all fucked up, and the writing is still some kind of deranged part-gobbledygook and part-normal-enough letters, and the overall effect is writing that steadfastly remains utterly incomprehensible!
So go right ahead, Mister Trickster, stand on your head, or spin around in circles all you want, but whenever you look into a goddamned mirror, the writing is still gonna be all fucked up, (and you're still gonna be all fucked up too, but you're bilaterally symmetrical, so you never manage to even notice the fuckery that remains in plain sight, whether you're seeing it or not) whether you like it or not.
Give that one some thought, perhaps.
So anyway, that's what we're about to have to start dealing with, in our doubly-flawed right-side of M-45.
And as prelude to the first flaw, the "easy" one, "South Elevation" and "East Elevation" on the right side of M-45 are wrong, completely mislabeled in backwards fashion, and they're actually the "North Elevation" and "West Elevation" and I've scratched through what was written, and corrected it to let you know you're seeing the North side of things, and the East side of things, and how something that blatant might have slipped through the Review Process is beyond me, and it causes me to have serious doubts that there even was a Review Process, but...
And in truth, they're not even properly "elevations" in the first place, and they never should have used "North" and "South" to identify them in the second place, and there'll be more about that soon enough, but not right this minute...
So be sure to stop and remind yourself that with the RSS in the Mated position (as it's shown, repeatedly, on M-45, never forget), Column Line B is the north side of the RSS, and Column Line A is the south side of the RSS. Going the other way, Column Line 1 is the west side, and Column Line 7 is the east side. Count up your column line numbers, increasingly higher and higher in number, heading EAST as you do so. Count up your column line letters, going from A to Z in the alphabet, heading NORTH as you do so.
But only when the RSS is in the mated position, ok? Roll that sonofabitch back, into the DEmate position, and everything goes straight to hell, and becomes quite a bit worse than merely useless. Which might be a bit of a hint about the wisdom of using things like "north" and "south" when discussing the RSS in the first place, but let us give that a rest. For now.
For the particulars of the RCS Room itself (which is where we are, and which is what we're interested in), with the RSS in MATED position, Column Line B becomes the south side (See how things can switch around when you improperly use North and South instead of Column Line Numbers/Letters for this stuff?) and Column Line D is the north side. Going the other way, Column Line 3.4 is the West Side, (And this is the side we're working on, where the OAA comes in underneath it.), and Column Line 4.6 is the East Side. Of the RCS Room. With the RSS in mated position. Any questions?
My guess on how this profound dopiness with badly-mislabeled "Elevation" views on the right-hand side of M-45 might have happened comes from the fact that, over on the bottom left quadrant of M-45, you get "Elevation Looking South", and "Elevation Looking East", and both of these are of a very non-standard nomenclature, and ok, we're not getting a "South" or an "East" Elevation view, but instead, we're looking in those given directions (looking at things through a section-cut of the vertical plane of a very unspecified cut-line, located god-knows-where), and... can you see how this stuff will snowball on you, in a hurry, should you fail to notice that you missed that first, properly-correct exit ramp on this freeway?
And then, over on the right side of M-45, which is our present area of interest, they just dropped the whole "Looking" part of things. They just dropped it, and said "Fuckit", and blithely went on to call it a South Elevation and an East Elevation, and goddamnit, this shit is just WRONG.
So I corrected "South" and "East" for you by red-lining them into the drawing.
Which, of course isn't nearly enough, but it's at least some kind of a start, and it better damn well be warning you that things around here...
...are not as they're purported to be.
And of course they're never going to give us a properly-specified vertical section cut-line plane for either one of our bogus elevation views over here. And really, now that I'm this deep in their shit, I may as well revisit the fact that neither one of these "elevations" is any such thing, and instead they're motherfucking section cuts goddammit, and should be labeled, located, and identified as such on the drawing, but... what's the use? It's all fucked up. Don't matter what you call it, 'cause it's all fucked up, and that's never going to change, no matter what you decide to call it, 'cause... Fucked. Up.
Elevation views are external, goddamnit. You're looking at something from the outside when you're looking at an elevation view. And section cuts are internal. You're looking at something that's been sliced open to see its otherwise-hidden internals, ok? HUGE difference there, and it must always be kept in mind, or otherwise you lose all hope of understanding what the fucked-up drawing is showing you, ok?
The assholes.
And we step the Bullshit Factor way up by having the whole world over here on the right side of this wretched drawing done in phantom line with just a very few hidden lines (go back and look at the goddamned standard nomenclature for this stuff so you can really understand what I'm on about here) and a few solid lines, and... these motherfucking line-styles are motherfucking telling us something, and what they're telling us is that the whole place is rendered abysmally, horribly wrong, and you can bet your ass we had to submit paper on this monstrosity, and the miserable sonofabitches tried to hand-wave it away in a dismissively-insulting manner, and tell us "Well, it's obvious to anybody who knows anything at all about this kind of work," but...
No.
It's not "obvious," and you yourself do not know what's actually going on here, so maybe you need to get up out of that fucking chair and go back to the engineering and drafting end of your offices and ask them about your own worthless rendering to find out, and you're being dishonest about it, and...
If you're gonna make us build the goddamned thing, then you're also going to have to specify, in sufficiently-fine contractual detail, just exactly what the fuck it is that we're building here. And maybe where it is, too.
And the far-too-extensive use of phantom lines, which for the most part are supposed to be used for depicting nearby things in the vicinity of what you're interested in to give you a sense of place, or maybe alternate locations of the things your interested in (which should therefore all be shown in hard line when not in their "alternate" location), that causes this whole place to look like it's behind something we're interested in, even though it's not done in hidden line, but the psychology of the thing results in your brain, like it or not, presuming that all the phantom-line stuff is somehow less-substantially farther away, and... oh boy.
So. We start off with some mirror-image fake-elevation-view column line fuckery, and then, going from there...
The shit gets pretty damn deep, is what happens going from there...
In our
Go look at it. Go look at them.
M-45 The Third, once again, for review.
Ok?
Two stupid flip-up platforms, and they're not even very big flip-up platforms. Two lousy flip-ups.
And it's not like we don't know how to build 'em, either, because we do. We originally met them, a long time ago, when we were first learning about this area, on Page 29, and we even got a photograph of this same exact area, over on the other side of the RCS Room, in the image at the top of that page, and we also got introduced to 79K14110 sheet S-41, which builds them with C10x15.3 and W10x15 framing members, on that page, too.
And as part of telling us how to build them, S-41 refers us to 79K14110 sheet S-105 which gives us the precise dimensions for the perimeter channel framing on both flip-ups that faces the Orbiter, although it does so using the odious Orbiter Coordinate System nomenclature, and no, I'm not going to convert any of it into sensible feet and inches to get it to match everything else. You do it. I don't want to.
Additionally, S-41 also gives us a section cut (See? It's not like they don't know how to do section cuts, ok?) right through our Ladder Flip-up, and that section cut takes us over to 79K14110 sheet S-59, where we get to see exactly what's going on in there with the flip-up, complete with hinge call-out, a nice sturdy piece of a W10x22 welded to the Fixed Framing Steel with a 1⅝" Stop Bar at each hinge, and a very loud and very clear single C10x15.3 perimeter channel over on the side of the flip-up that faces the orbiter. Ok? We get the whole thing. Nothing was left out, ok? We get allofit.
Ok, fine, where are you going with this, MacLaren. What's the big deal here?
Alright. For starters, get a look at the "Ladder" Flip-up as it's depicted in its "Up Position" (darker green) over there on the
Ok. Now. The raised platform framing part of things is very definitely shown in phantom line, and, with two very-weird exceptions, nothing in this whole right half of the drawing gets shown in hidden line, and of course this only adds to the psychological effect that all the goddamned phantom lines have of making you think it's all farther away somehow. And of course the fact that they're calling it an "Elevation" only adds to the misdirection by causing us to think we're looking at this thing externally somehow, instead of internally, via a section cut, which has been sliced through the RCS Room Floor someplace a trifle beyond a near-side bracketing location which is at least 2'-4" past Column Line 3.4, and a far-side bracketing location just inboard of the Orbiter-side perimeter members of our two flip-ups, (and you can go back to S-41 to see where I get that set of bracketing locations if you want to, 'cause it's there) and this is exactly what we're being shown here (Hint: The pair of wholly-unidentified W10's, one immediately to the right of our Ladder Flip-up, and one just beyond Column Line C, is the smoking gun with this one.), whether they choose to admit to it or identify it on their own (which of course they don't).
And in the middle of all of this ambiguity, the ladder is very definitely shown in hard line in its vertical orientation. And that ladder is hanging off of a platform rendered in phantom line (double-dash), along with one of the two very-weird use cases for hidden line (continuously-dashed), which we'll get to in a couple of minutes, but not right now, ok?
No question about it. They did all of this on purpose, meticulously in fact, and the locations of all this crap, although they are a mighty pain in the ass to pin down, are rock solid, ok?
And then, below the depiction of the platform in its raised position, we're also shown a depiction (viewed end-on) of the platform in its lowered position (lighter green), and again, that's shown in phantom line, and the damned ladder (for the lowered position only) is also shown in phantom line, making it look like it's farther away, whether it is or it isn't (and since they're refusing to use hidden line for any of this part of things, there's no way in hell to tell what's near, what's far, what's in front, or what's behind, anyway).
And it's that "what's in front, or what's behind" that's the source of all the trouble here.
If the ladder were behind either the raised, or the lowered depiction of the platform, then standard procedure tells us that the shown platform should be in hard line, and the shown ladder should be in hidden line.
Period.
And this is perfectly normal engineering drawing convention. Standard procedure.
Well then, since the vertically-oriented version of the ladder, which lives underneath the platform, is shown in hard line with the platform in its raised position, that means the ladder is closer to us than the body of the platform, and for the raised-platform depiction of things, the only way that can occur is if the platform flips down, coming in our direction as it does so. As depicted, this can only occur if we're looking face-on at the underside of the raised platform, ok?
We're very definitely looking at the underside of a flipped-up flip-up, which will flip down, by moving toward us as it does so.
Now stop. Stop and make sure you really understand that.
Everything about this particular part of M-45 is telling us that the Ladder Flip-up comes our way as it's being lowered into its down position.
Except that it can't because we're over on the Line 3.4 side of the RCS Room with this stuff, and the drawing very clearly shows Line 'D' to the left of Line 'C', and the only way for that to happen is for us to be (section cut, remember?) embedded in the Floor Steel over there somewhere between Line 3.4 (which must be behind us) and the Orbiter (which must be in front of us), looking East, and once all of that condition is met, the goddamned flip-ups we're looking at must be moving away from us as they go from their (both of them) shown raised positions down to their lowered positions (only one of which is shown, only the Ladder Flip-up gets shown in a lowered position), which means we're actually looking face-on at their top sides, and...
This drawing is a goddamned piece of shit, and I do not like it. In fact, I hate it.
And I'm not done hating it, either.
Not by a long shot.
There's more.
Let's return to the subject of hidden lines. Lines which are shown as continuously-dashed, as per standard engineering practice.
Ok. Fine.
And let us further narrow this thing down, all the way down to only the raised Ladder Flip-up.
Nothing else.
Just the one Ladder Flip-up, in the one (raised) position.
This one, the same one we've already seen faaar too many times already, on our old friend M-45.
And over on the left side, with the raised flip-up in "profile" view, we can see how the ladder attaches to the C10x15.3 perimeter framing members, once back by the hinge, and again, out on the end of things closest to the Orbiter (which would be the "top" end of the platform, as-depicted), and the ⅜" by 3" FB (Flat Bar) ladder stringer bends around and extends 1'-3" down to the Orbiter-end C10x15.3 where it gets welded on, and back on the platform-hinges-end of things, they're calling for another piece of flat-bar that extends at a right-angle from the stringer the same distance down to the platform-hinge-end C10x15.3, where it too is welded on.
And I guess if I do not stop right here, and take a little side trip into the world of Ladder Stringers, as is generally encountered on NASA's launch pads, I'll probably never get another chance to tell you...
That they suck donkey balls!
⅜" by 3" steel flat bar makes for a particularly lousy, and occasionally particularly painful, thing to have to grip on to with any kind of weight-bearing force. And no, you're not allowed to wear work gloves, because you're up here with fucked-up sheets of flapping paper in the wind, and a fucked-up pencil, and just you take a go at efficiently working that stuff on a clip-board, or just a note pad, or even loose paper, bearing down with the pencil to make a mark on it, with the goddamned paper laid against whatever hard and (hopefully) smooth-enough surface may be close at hand, up in the sky somewhere, wearing heavy gloves, and... you'll learn pretty quick how that works. And of course everybody is saying, "Well, duh, you're supposed to be holding on to the ladder rungs (Which, being ¾"Ø round bar, are also just about as suboptimal as hell, but not now, ok?) except that, in the real world, that's not how it works at all, and when it's your turn to be climbing around on this crap, holding a clip-board, reaching (much too far for safety) out with a tape measure, trying to read a drawing while looking around some fucked-up corner at an otherwise hidden thing, trying to make a field sketch, and other cheerful things people get to do in high places, you will learn right now that the variety of reasons that you just might be required to hold on to the ladder stringer instead of the goddamned ladder rungs, knows no upper bound. There will always be a new and even-more-wonderful reason to have stop, let go of the rung with one hand (or even both hands), and grab the goddamned stringer (or maybe let go of the fucking thing altogether and work it into the crook of your elbow and hang out over the Gulp of Death and hold on for dear life that way), and... that's when you'll find out, ok?
Maybe go find some of this stuff somewhere. ⅜" by 3" steel flat bar. Stand it up vertically in front of you, up above you a little, securely fastened to whatever, with its narrow aspect facing in your direction. Just like you see it there on the drawing. Now grab hold of it. One-handed (it happens), and then try pulling your full weight upwards or just maybe hanging out away from the ladder itself at arm's length (perhaps with a 200 foot Death Drop yawning malevolently directly underneath you, maybe with a few widely-separated W8x13's that don't have any grating or deckplate on 'em yet, intervening between you and the distant concrete), and then come back here and you and I can talk all about it together, ok?
Another favored place for having to deal with this stuff is where the ladder stringers extend three feet or so above the top rung on the ladder (which you will find in a lot of places, where ladders take you up, and over something narrow, like maybe one of the big pipe diagonals on the FSS close to where it meets a Perimeter Column, and then back down on to the decking on the other side), and in that situation, the goddamned stringers get all twangy on you (they're freely extending up into vertical space with zero lateral bracing of any kind, anywhere), and they twang back and forth frighteningly, side-to-side, as you curse the stupid motherfucker who spec'd out the evil fucking ⅜" by 3" flat bar, and...
You should be so lucky as to get to experience shit like this in person, but I'm guessing you're not gonna, so...
You'll just have to take my word for it, ok?
Meanwhile, back at the drawing, you'd think it might be kinda hard to fuck something this simple up, right?
I mean, there nothing to this thing. Small rectangular flip-up platform, C10x15.3 perimeter framing members, and a single W10x15 member running down the middle, hinge-end to Orbiter-end, to stiffen it up a little, and, aside from the daffy ladder that's welded on to it's underside... that's all there is.
Nothing more than that.
Here's Image 031 again, this time without any OAA stuff pasted in, and instead, our little flip-up with it's ladder, is highlighted and labeled so as you can have no doubt as to how this thing wound up, in the form of real steel, in the Real World, and yes, it's just exactly what you'd expect it to be, and yet...
And you would be hard-pressed to imagine how a drawing that shows you this thing could ever result in paper flying back and forth between NASA engineering, and those of us tasked with putting the stupid ladder on this thing (which occurred back in Wilhoit days, so you're talking Dick Walls, Tom Kirby, Cliff Reeves, Red Milliken, and Elmo McBee puzzling over the drawing down in the field trailer, trying to make sense of it, and, following that, even more reluctantly coming to the realization that we're gonna have to submit paper on the sonofabitch, with all the hate, discontent, and lost time associated with such a thing once it arrives at somebody's desk over on the NASA side of the house, and...
So...
Well...
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