So, who wants to win 1 million Euro?

[Tanalia]

A quick question:
...
Does anyone know why they would have listed the numbers with the decimal shifted one place to the left?

From the illustrations in the Apollo 16 ALSEP Manual (22MB PDF), pages 4-10 through 4-15, it looks like extra zero was left off the end of almost every angle scale, probably to improve clarity.

[Noldi400]

In conspiretard-world, nobody ever makes misteaks.

If that was in answer to me, I tend to think there's more to it than that.  Could the elevation & azimuth scales have been marked to coincide with lat & long, to remove the need for one calculation?  And, just due to size, could the scales have been marked in single digits, like a 10x scale?

Besides, it's listed the same way in the Lunar Surface Procedures manual, in a different format but with the same numbers.

[BazBear]

Well it continues to throw me. I still have absolutely no idea what the Launch Escape System was actually used for.

It was fastened into the CM docking probe apparatus and pulled the CM free in case the Saturn V exploded.  Consider it has to be powerful enough to outrun an exploding Saturn V.  That should give you an indication of the potential g-forces the crew would have experienced.

I've mentioned before that my friend Chris was working as an engineer on the Orion LES, and they were using the Apollo-Saturn LES as an example (since the company he works for was the original LES contractor).  He was working from full-scale original drawings of the LES from their archives.  Those who say the "plans for the Saturn V don't exist anymore" don't really realize what "the plans" consist of.  I'd be hard-pressed today to find a machine that could copy or digitize the drawings we were looking at.

Moon Machines has some footage of the (in)famous Little Joe test, where the rocket actually suffered an unexpected guidance failure and added some spice to the test.  It's probably YouTubable.

Sure enough

. The Little Joe LES test footage starts at about 13:40.

[ka9q]

I've mentioned before that my friend Chris was working as an engineer on the Orion LES

I saw the video of the successful test of the complete Orion LES. It was impressive, but I had a strong sense of deja-vu. I kept thinking: damn, that's complicated...just look at all those parachutes...if just one snarls...there's got to be a simpler way...

But I felt the same when I first heard about the Curiosity "skycrane" landing system, and no matter how much I thought about it I couldn't come up with anything better. So maybe the same thing is true for the Orion LES.

[ka9q]

That is much the same level of "G" as a typical "zero-zero" rocket powered ejection seat.

What put those ejection seats in context for me was calculating that their main rocket is an "M"-class engine in the model/high power rocketry classification system. (Each letter indicates a doubling of total impulse from the class below it.) That's a total impulse between approximately 5,000-10,000 Newton-seconds, and using one requires a level "3" high power certification. This is the largest engine you can legally use in the State of California, though other states have higher limits.

[Noldi400]

A quick question:
...
Does anyone know why they would have listed the numbers with the decimal shifted one place to the left?

From the illustrations in the Apollo 16 ALSEP Manual (22MB PDF), pages 4-10 through 4-15, it looks like extra zero was left off the end of almost every angle scale, probably to improve clarity.

Thank you for the link. That manual gives much more detail than the Apollo 17 manual I've been looking at.

[JayUtah]

Full-scale? Did all parts have this?

I would hope not, since a Saturn IC stage drawn to scale would consume an enormous amount of paper.  But yes in general, where full-scale drawings can be made of a part, they were often made up until the CAD era.  A J-size piece of drawing paper is 34 inches tall and as wide as you need it to be (within certain limits).  That's the largest standard size commonly used; you can use non-standard drawing sheets.  The drawings I saw were fastened to the wall -- and it was a long wall!  I have also seen full-size layout drawings of the CM and LM control panels.

During the 1940s it was common to hold the manufactured part up to the drawing to match the profile:  a sort of machinist sanity check.  This harks back to "loftsmen" in the shipbuilding industries who would lay out ship parts in full scale, etched in the wooden floors of the lofts above workshops.  You actually did confirm the part by laying it on the floor.  These loftsmen used long flexible splines tied into curves with ropes and nails in the floor.

[Daniel Dravot]

It probably drizzles three days out of five from September to March, and we get a few heavy falls every year to boot.

We call that a drought.

Don't forget the giant slugs.

This weekend, I will probably see someone dressed up as one.  Yay, Procession of the Species!

??  We don't have anything like that.  I'll let someone else introduce it.

[Captain Swoop]

This harks back to "loftsmen" in the shipbuilding industries who would lay out ship parts in full scale, etched in the wooden floors of the lofts above workshops.  You actually did confirm the part by laying it on the floor.  These loftsmen used long flexible splines tied into curves with ropes and nails in the floor.

At Chatham Dockyards on the Tahmes there are three Drydocks, two of them areee from the 18th Century and one was used to build HMS Victory. They have a vast wooden roof over each one built like an upturned ships hull. Their last building job was the Oberon Class Submarines in the 1950s and 60s. Next to the docks themselves is a 'laying out floor' It is still marked with the full size plate dimensions for the hulls, like a giant sewing pattern.

[ipearse]

Technically-speaking, Chatham Dockyard is not on the Thames, it's on the Medway, which empties into the Thames Estuary, but close enough.    Yes, it is a fascinating place to visit, and the mould loft floor with all the patterns drawn out has to be seen to be believed.

[gwiz]

During the 1940s it was common to hold the manufactured part up to the drawing to match the profile:  a sort of machinist sanity check.  This harks back to "loftsmen" in the shipbuilding industries who would lay out ship parts in full scale, etched in the wooden floors of the lofts above workshops.  You actually did confirm the part by laying it on the floor.  These loftsmen used long flexible splines tied into curves with ropes and nails in the floor.

In the earlier part of my career we still had a loft department at Hawkers producing full-scale drawings on plastic film, which gave better stability than paper.  It helped that the Harrier wasn't that large an aircraft.  No nails in the floor, though, but spline weights, lead weighted with a clip to hold the spline down.  They later installed a Kongsberg computer-controlled drawing machine, big enough for full-scale drawings.  Before we got our own printers, we'd borrow it to draw graphs for reports, lots of them across the width of the film and cut them out as A3 or A4 size, then xerox on to paper.

[JayUtah]

In the earlier part of my career we still had a loft department at Hawkers producing full-scale drawings on plastic film, which gave better stability than paper.

Yes, my last hand-drawing stuff was done on acetate or polyester drafting film.  Also, in my home studio I actually have the first drafting table I ever used professionally, in an engineering drafting "bull pen."  Although the drafting machine was removed and sold, I managed to win the bid for the table from the liquidation auction when the company was acquired.

At the other end of the spectrum, I recently acquired the 1909 original drawings for the Episcopal church in my neighborhood, patterned after English parish chapels.  The architect was a friend of my father's and spoke of his trips to England to study the parish churches.  His drawings are on drafting linen -- finely woven linen starched and then calendared.  There is a talent to using India ink in the old style ruling pens.  The annotations are in calligraphy.  They're presently at the University of Utah library undergoing stabilization and restoration.

[Captain Swoop]

I remember using Drafting Linen as a youngster. It makes fantastic sails for model ships these days.

I worked on a support contract 6 or 7 years ago that included Kvaerner Engineering on Teesside.
Their building had whole empty floors that used to be filled with drawing offices, all replaced by CAD systems.

I was in the last Technical and Engineering Drawing class our school ran. It used to be an 'O Level' course but disappeared more or less overnight.
Can you imagine an entire working career just drawing bolt heads and screw threads?
I had a couple of school friends who went in to drawing offices and that's what they did all day. I suppose as your career went on you get more important things to do.

[JayUtah]

I remember using Drafting Linen as a youngster. It makes fantastic sails for model ships these days.

I should get my 30-inch model of USS Constitution out of the attic and try that.  I'm just amazed that I can hold 100-year-old drawings in my hand and they look as crisp and fresh as the day they were drawn.  In contrast to CAD, which lasts only as long as the next software revision.

Can you imagine an entire working career just drawing bolt heads and screw threads?

Yeah but some of those guys were proud of how fast they could crank that stuff out.

I had a couple of school friends who went in to drawing offices and that's what they did all day. I suppose as your career went on you get more important things to do.

That is true, and engineers don't draw in general.  However the belief during my education was that an engineer who can't draw isn't really worth much.  I quickly came to realize that.  CAD aside, the best engineers I've seen (and architects too, for that matter) were those who could freehand a passable drawing as they went.  I discovered later (and wrote a thesis on it) that the eye-mind-hand phenomenon is pretty real.  People whose product relies on high levels of spatial reasoning do better at their jobs when they can demonstrate basic competence at 2D drawing such as was classically taught to engineers and architects.

[Peter B]

In the earlier part of my career we still had a loft department at Hawkers producing full-scale drawings on plastic film, which gave better stability than paper.

Yes, my last hand-drawing stuff was done on acetate or polyester drafting film...

I did Technical Drawing at school from Year 8 to Year 10 back in the early 1980s. We did most of our work with pencils on paper, but in Year 10 we got to do some work with pens on some other sort of material which we could only use one side of. Would this have been acetate or polyester drafting film?

Incidentally, at the start of Year 8 I had to choose between doing TD and Latin. I wanted to do both but they were on the same stream, and it was very hard making a selection. On the upside, the skills I learned in TD are still with me: when I drew up plans for an extension for our house, the draftsman apparently didn't need to do much more than copy what I'd prepared.