The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 54: Grinding the Iron, 135'-7" PCR Main Floor Orbiter Mold Line Framing Modifications.
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No harness.
I don't even see one of those "eyewash" safety lines like the one we saw Dave Skinner wearing, a couple of pages ago in Image 057.
Alas, I have no recall of who this is.
And this is how the work was done, back in the early 1980's.
And nobody minded. Not the managers, not the engineers, not the quality-control people, not the safety people, and most especially not the ironworkers, who were the ones going out into places like this on a routine daily basis, just another day at the office.
Nobody ever fell.
Hell, nobody ever even got hurt.
Union Ironworkers will not allow themselves to be taken into properly life-threatening situations (and nobody is going to make them, if they decide it's not a good idea), and they possess the best-possible appreciation of what is, and what is not, a situation that they should, or should not enter, and they couldn't care less about whether you agree with their appreciation of any given situation or not, and it turns out that a lot of situations that appear to be alarmingly-dangerous are no such thing at all, and they will happily pick up their tools and enter those situations, looking back at you with a sly smile, or even an outright sneer, and get to work.
This is a world that you can never enter.
And it's not because there is someone standing at the door, refusing to give you entry.
You will block any entry into this world, yourself.
You will never so much as approach the open doorway to this world, and you will very definitely never so much as set one foot inside that open doorway. And the thought of walking calmly all the way through it and continuing on, taking yourself down the endless winding paths to be found there, taking in the sights, the sounds, the smells, the sensations which can only be found there? No. Never.
And so, you will never experience the culture of those who inhabit this world.
And you will deny yourself so very very much, as a result.
And you will sit inside your wood-paneled office, blocking all thought of entering such places, and tell yourself you are a success as you do so, but deep inside... in your secret heart... you will know... otherwise... but you will never, ever, let on... and the Union Ironworkers will smile slyly back in your direction... and they will know... the truth.
And we're looking at an area that you should by now be gaining some sensible familiarity with, and much of what we're seeing is stuff we've seen before, but perhaps not in the same way, and there's a lot of different things and systems on the RSS that all kind of come together in this area, so before we delve any deeper into the work that's being done by our Union Ironworker, let us review what we're seeing in this image.
Like I just said, a lot of different things all seem to want to be drawn together into a compact grouping down here, and this is one of the "busiest" areas on the whole tower in that regards, and as such, it provides an opportunity to take it all in, in a single frame, in a single look.
Visible in the photograph, up on the iron or farther distant, just a tiny little bit, or perhaps more, you're getting a look at...
The Pad Slope and Crawlerway, with the wilderness of the Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge beyond, and, impossibly, shrouded in haze, resting on top of that ever-so-thin sliver of visible horizon, the Vertical Integration Building over on the Air Force side of things, part of the Titan III Integrate Transfer Launch area.
The Shakeout Yard on the Pad Deck, carpeted with newly-fabricated steel members and material destined to be lifted into the sky and attached to the RSS, the FSS, or perhaps elsewhere on the Pad.
Just the weenciest little bit of the PBK Access Platform.
The extreme bottom tip of the Canister Guide Rail.
The bottom end of the Right Orbiter Side Seal Panel, with its drive unit (that outputs an astounding 3,500 foot pounds of torque to rotate the panel), lower thrust bearing, and torque tube visible.
The bottom end of the big W36x194 that runs along Column Line C from just below RSS Main Framing elevation 134'-2", all the way up to, and above, the Top Truss at elevation 208'-2", and which (clearly, just based on a visual inspection of the size of this brute) ties the entire rectangular opening in the RSS for the PCR in place rigidly.
The heavier steel at 134'-7¼" that attaches to the RSS Main Framing centerlined at 134'-2" and which holds up the PCR Main Floor Steel, 1½" grating, and ¼" deckplate, at elevation 135'-7".
The outside leaf of the Payload Changeout Room Main Doors, including a bit of the ladder that gives access to the Orbiter Payload Bay Doors Torque Tube flip-up access platforms.
Various pneumatics lines ("shop air", inflatable seals supply, etc.).
And a couple of the ever-ubiquitous floats which so very much of this work was done from (when you're not doing your work with a grinder sitting on the ¾" thick mounting plate for the Side Seal Panel Drive Unit, of course).
There's plenty more, but for now, this should be enough, yes?
Ok, so what's our Union Ironworker doing?
What's going on with the grinder?
And we return, once again, to our old friend, the Orbiter Mold Line at elevation 135'-7", which we've met more than once in the past, and at least one time I was bemoaning the fact that we no longer possessed the drawings that it was originally built to, and was pissing and moaning about having to use modified drawings, detailing the waves-of-butchery which this whole area underwent "later" and now, at long last, it has become "later" and we find that our modified drawings are now exactly what we want, and... that's kind of nice, right?
Except that we're dealing with PRC/BRPH drawings, and they're...
...less than fully-wonderful.
Observe.
Version The First. Oh, wait, there is no version the first. That's the whole problem with it. I've been unable to show you any of what we used to furnish and install the RSS Perimeter Floor Steel in the area of the Orbiter Mold Line at elevation 135'-7". Sigh. Here's the only thing left, and it's pretty poor, but unless and until a miracle occurs, this is all we're ever going to have for the original Orbiter Mold Line steel down here, although the old Pad A drawings do at least show us the original Floor Framing (note the dates in the title block, which are all 1975) which the Orbiter Mold Line Steel tied to, and really, maybe it's not so bad after all, because from here on, there will be no "Mold Line" steel of any kind, and instead we get a series of...
...contraptions...
which will be hanging off of the Main Floor Steel down here at 135'-7", and for that Main Floor Steel, we do have drawings, some quite a bit better than others, but at least it's something.
Version The Second (bottom right quadrant of this drawing, and again, note the dates in the title block, which have now all become 1983), which alas, is one of those damnable PRC/BRPH abominations. One of those others, and for which we do not have a sensible drawing of the contraption which hangs off of it. Having said that, the Tale of the Contraption, the Tale of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, is a cautionary one, thereby making it very worthy indeed of not only being told, but being told in the greatest level of detail possible.
That we have not yet found the drawings for this OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers contraption in no way means that we are not still looking for them.
It was during this time, going from version the first to version the second, that the photograph at the top of this page was taken.
And then came Version The Third, but by that time, I was long-gone, locked in mortal combat with A Dragon Most Fell down at Pad 41, and no longer had time for The Affairs of Pad B anymore.
But we're here, now, and while we're here, please allow me to point out some of the interestingness in the title block of this drawing.
On the surface, it appears to be nothing unusual, and is just another sheet in the big 79K14110 package which was originally done by RS&H, whose name, and which drawing package number, both appear as per normal down there in that title block.
But what's this? What's this date doing down there? What's "8-27-86" doing down there? And whose signatures are down there near it? And even the style of the lettering, for both the date, and the identifying letters and numbers associated with it... look a little... different.
Hmm hmm hmm...
And no, no I don't know the exact provenance of this drawing, but I can tell you for certain that it's not one of the originals, and instead has been sort of shoved in there with them, kind of on the sly, almost as if somebody didn't really want to be drawing attention to things.
Why?
Never in my life will I know, I'm quite sure.
But my gut feeling is that it had something to do with sweeping the whole affair of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers under a rug, in an effort to walk away from it as unobtrusively as possible.
Kind of on the sly, perhaps.
And we will be getting to this "Affair" soon enough.
But not yet.
Not right now.
Right now, let us return to the photograph at the top of this page, and the task immediately at hand, ok?
By the time I took this photograph, they had already removed the Orbiter Mold Line steel, had already cut back the PCR Floor Steel that held it up, and were in the process of finishing up with the installation of the new (second incarnation) PCR Floor Steel that replaced it.
And to install the new steel, they first had to demolish the existing steel, and since our low-rent PRC/BRPH drawings don't seem to show it well enough, I went ahead and created something from the old Pad A drawings, which gives us a nice sharp look at what had to be torched off before anything new could be welded on.
And this is what got torched off.
And that's a fairly substantial piece of completely-wasted furnish and install in the beginning, a thing that never saw a Space Shuttle before its life was unceremoniously cut short and relegated to the landfill, and we have to start wondering why, and slowly, ever so slowly, I find myself being drawn down into the OMS Pod Rat Hole, but I'm not quite ready to be drawn all the way down there yet, even though I find myself dipping my toe deeper and deeper into this unpleasant pool of inky-black water.
So for now, let us simply address that "why", and maybe leave it at that?
Maybe?
And to understand that "why" we need to understand one of the sneakier foundations upon which an awful lot of the work that was done on the Pad when I wound up back out there working for Ivey Steel was prosecuted.
They were by now flying, from over on Pad A, and in the process of flying, they were also in the process of learning.
And learning is all well and good, but they were doing their learning while they were putting people into orbit with the power of a tactical nuke, hammering them into the sky, far above the atmosphere, at the stupefying speed of just a little bit under five miles per second, and that's...
...insane.
And it's so insane that the human mind just kind of blinks out when it encounters such a thing, and although it appreciates the fact that something significant is going on, it utterly fails to intuitively grasp that something in any meaningful way.
So let us stop right here and see if we can convert this into something else that we might be able to grasp intuitively.
Just how radical is what they're doing with their Space Shuttle, anyway?
It's fast, that much we know, but it's too fast to comprehend.
Ok, let's try and look at it another way. Maybe a way that we can at least begin to grasp what it means to be going that fast.
Let's look at it from the point of view of a single crew member, maybe. Just one human being, carried along inside the Orbiter, traveling that fast.
How much energy does that single crew member gain by being hammered into the sky, far above the atmosphere, at the stupefying speed of five miles per second?
And to find out, we get to play around with a few numbers as we do so, and let's turn "just a little bit under five miles per second" into miles per hour (we're all familiar enough with that, right?), and the miles per hour that a Space Shuttle is traveling turns out to be 17,500 miles per hour, and that's gonna be one hell of a traffic ticket if only the cops could figure out how to catch up to you and pull you over.
Ok. One crew member. And for the purposes of what we're doing here we'll assume that our crew member weighs 150 pounds, which is a perfectly reasonable number.
So now we have our single 150 pound human being inside the orbiting Space Shuttle traveling along at 17,500 miles per hour.
Ok, fair enough.
Now. We all know that the faster things move, the more energy they gain. The more wallop they pack. Hit me with a baseball traveling at one mile per hour, and not much happens when it hits me. Everybody knows that. Hit me with a baseball hurled at me by a professional baseball player at ninety-five miles per hour, and things change. And they change a LOT, and that baseball is gonna knock the crap out of me, and if it hits me in the head, it might very well hospitalize me, and it could even possibly kill me. At least one person has died from it in Major League play. It has happened.
At ninety-five miles per hour, give or take. Which is quite a bit slower than our Space Shuttle is moving.
Ok.
It turns out that there are precise units of measurement for a lot of things that we don't often think about precisely all that much, and one of those precise units is Joules, and Joules are used to measure all forms of energy, so lets go find a calculator on the internet somewhere, and see how many Joules of energy our 150 pound astronaut might have accumulated in the process of being accelerated to 17,500 miles per hour, riding along inside the Space Shuttle.
And we punch 150 pounds, and 17,500 miles per hour into the on-line calculator, and it spits back 2082072606.2181 Joules, and now we seem to be going backwards with this and it's getting less comprehensible instead of more comprehensible, 'cause now we've not only got ourselves a stupid unit of measurement, but we've also got a stupid number of whatever the hell those goof-ass units are, to go along with it.
Bear with me. We're almost there.
Let's go back on line again. And this time, let's see if there's anything out there that might convert our incomprehensible 2082072606.2181 Joules of energy into something we can understand on a gut level.
And it turns out that there are conversion pages out there which will take care of this, and do so in many different ways, but I've always liked things that leave an impression on me, and I'm gonna convert my 2082072606.2181 Joules of flying-at-17,500-miles-per-hour-energy into TNT-equivalent-energy (Everybody likes TNT, right? TNT goes BOOM!), and...
...when I do the conversion it doesn't even look believable...
Our astronaut, traveling inside the Space Shuttle, all by themselves, nothing else, not even the clothes they're wearing, has gained kinetic energy to the point where, if you removed them from the Shuttle, and suddenly slammed them against a wall and stopped them cold in an instant (don't do this, it kills the astronaut)...
...you'd get a particularly-violent explosion, equal to setting off 500 POUNDS OF TNT!
Just the astronaut's body. Traveling at 17,500 miles per hour. If stopped suddenly. Would cause an explosion equal to the detonation of 500 pounds of TNT.
This is a jaw-dropping amount of energy, and to think it has accumulated in the physical flesh and bones of a single astronaut in orbit, literally making that flesh and those bones over three times more explosive than TNT, pound for pound, is more or less beyond imagining.
BOOM!
And they're sending these people up there, and they're learning how it works while they're doing it, and...
Holy. Shit.
What if something goes wrong somewhere along the line? What then?
And we already know the answer to that, sort of, and Bad Things are what happens, and we don't really need to know just how bad, 'cause once somebody's dead they're dead.
And one of the things they were learning as they were sending people up there, was that their Space Shuttle behaved differently than they had at first calculated it would, and, weirdly enough, one of the different ways turned out to be how it reacts to...
...rainfall?
Where'd that come from?
Who ordered that?
What happened to the 500 pounds of TNT?
How does it even...
Rainfall?
Are you sure about that?
Yes, yes indeed, I'm quite sure about that, and to clarify, to make doubly-certain we're all on the exact same page here, we're not talking about sending one up through a rainstorm, but instead we're simply talking about what happens when it's sitting out there on the pad, waiting to get launched, beneath a Florida Sky, which is a sky that contains quite a lot of rain sometimes, and sometimes the Space Shuttle finds itself sitting out there on the launch pad, getting rained on now and again, before they decide to launch it, long after the rain has gone away, on the driest sunniest day imaginable.
And you're telling me that makes it react differently when they launch it?
Forget the stupid TNT.
Now I wanna know what's going on with the goddamned rainfall.
How the hell does a thing like that make a difference to... anything?
Very well then...
In the beginning...
They thought they could just roll the damn thing out there to the pad, completely exposed to the constantly corrosive and occasionally violent Florida beachside weather, and let it sit for days, weeks, and sometimes months, just like any other rocket, or maybe an airplane sitting around at the airport, but as time went on they discovered that might not have been such a great idea.
And to understand how this might not have been such a great idea, you have to understand that the Space Shuttle's exterior surfaces are covered in Tiles and Blankets and Reinforced carbon-carbon.
This exterior surface is the Shuttle's Thermal Protection System.
It's the stuff that keeps the Orbiter from burning up on re-entry. Pretty hard-core pass-or-fail system, and in fact it did fail one time, and that's not good, and my heart still goes out to all those people, all these many long years later. It's tough. It's tough as fuck, goddamnit, and when things go badly wrong.....
Anyway all that TPS stuff looked pretty damn slick on paper, but, as ever, the real world has a way of coming around at you all sneaky-like, from the side, or behind, and then throwing things right into your face.
And it turned out that the tiles and the blankets both had a propensity for taking on water when it rained, and then holding on to that water, and wicking that water elsewhere, in ways that they had not initially considered, or even so much as suspected, which water then stayed put and remained as part of the vehicle on launch day.
Water is nasty stuff as a complicating factor in engineering, and holds no end of deeply-unpleasant surprises for those who fail to take its full set of characteristics, some of which are deviously subtle and non-obvious to even the most diligent of observers, into account when designing things.
Water, despite its ever so light and splishy appearances, is fucking heavy.
Go fill up a common plastic five-gallon bucket with water and then pick it up and carry it around somewhere. Maybe try to run up a couple of flights of stairs with it. Water is fucking heavy. And that's just a mere five gallons. Multiply that five gallons by ten, a hundred, a thousand, or even more, and suddenly you're dealing with some seriously consequential stuff that has the power to really fuck you up.
This completely unforeseen uptake of water by the Thermal Protection System (at the very beginning of things, they were originally spraying the Orbiter with literal water repellent and they thought this should be good enough, but it most assuredly was not) meant that the Space Shuttle was significantly heavier come launch day, than it was when they first rolled it out to the pad, which therefore would very clearly demand additional energy to lift the now-heavier Orbiter and insert it into its intended orbit up there somewhere a couple of hundred miles above your head and traveling at five fucking miles per second, and which additional energy, above and beyond whatever it was you had originally been given to work with once the tanks had been topped-off and the thing was fully-fueled, was nowhere to be found, and there's not any gas stations up there, so you work with what you've got, or you don't work at all.
Nevermind what that selfsame deviously-subtle water might have been doing to things, down there underneath the surface, unseen, unseeable, wicking, migrating, following surfaces and edges around to strange and distant places as water will, into things further away than you might at first, or even ever, imagine, including working its way along and into faying surfaces, possibly introducing corrosion into areas where corrosion would be fatal, or who knows what else.
Just the mere weight of the stuff alone was enough to cause very real problems going uphill (and downhill, too), and then of course when you're up into the rapidly-darkening sky a mile or ten, and climbing higher and higher, it gets cold and all that water will very reasonably freeze, and the expansion of ice formation which routinely splits boulders down here on the ground introduced yet another whole set of potentially fatal issues, and yeah..... fucking water.
And so, piecemeal, by slow degrees, as the ever-worsening scope of the very real problem with the fact that it rains like hell in Florida on a regular basis continued to manifest itself in more and more and more unforeseen, unpleasant, and unexpected ways, they built themselves quite the OWP edifice on the RSS and then on the FSS, too.
And we're now entering that territory, and the work depicted in our photograph at the top of the page (and one level down, too, at elevation 125'-0", which we saw on Page 52) reflects the changes wrought during the very earliest phases of that part of the overall (and insidiously-growing over time) effort, which were dedicated to the first attempts to specifically protect the Space Shuttle's OMS Pods from the growing realization that they had a problem here.
In just this one area, the area of the OMS Pods and nowhere else, evidence shows that they had gotten wise to at least this limited part of the much larger overall problem, before they flew for the first time, but this was still after they had originally built both of their Rotating Service Structures, which means that the PCR Floor Steel on both RSS's was put to the torch in the perimeter area abutting the OMS Pods and replaced with something they thought was better. Better than nothing, it may have been, but it was very definitely not better enough. And we will travel that road, soon enough, but not now, ok?
And of course, just as soon as we enter this realm, we discover that we've got lousy drawings, and...
Pshit.
Let us review...
I've already shown you "Version The Second" (which includes the newer steel that's being finished off, in the photograph at the top of this page), with the best 79K24048 drawing there is, S-267C, lousy as it may be, and I've also already shown you "what got torched off" (using the excellent Pad A drawing, 79K04400 S-82, to see what we'd originally installed in this area that held up the original Orbiter Mold Line steel (for which, alas, there is only my very inadequate field sketch), and now I'm going to extract that portion of 79K24048 S-267C which includes only our area of interest, enlarge it a little, kinda try and clean it up a little, and then we're just gonna have to live with it, when we start talking about the newer PCR Floor Steel in this area, abutting the as-yet-uninstalled OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers, which is something else I have no proper drawings of, but which at least sort of shows up on our trimmed piece of S-267C, so as we can get a feel for all the main players down here at RSS elevation 135'-7", and how they fit together, and it's all overlapping and layered, and everything's all crammed in there cheek-by-jowl, and it's pretty complex, so here's a few little somethings to maybe help a little bit with that complexity...
First off, here's the "underneath" steel (and mind that damnable 8"Ø/6"Ø air supply duct for the inflatable seals on the Side Seal Panels, because the poor way it's rendered with lines on this drawing will cause you to want to think it's steel framing, but it's not, and while you're at it, mind the evenly-dashed perimeter air supply line to the two air-hoists that raise and lower the flip-ups on the Pod Covers, too).
And now you get to see it with the Floor Framing (modified, Version the Second, and also including the slightly-angled PCR Main Door lower track cutouts at the same elevation) which sits down on top of the "underneath steel, (and mind the devilishly-tricky outlines of the Pod Covers, and the Orbiter Tail Cover, and the Inflatable Seals, and the Big W36, and the Canister Guide Rail Supports with the Guide Rails and Side Seal Panels hanging off of them, and the bits of Insulated Metal Paneling, all of which want very much to confuse you and cause you to not be able to recognize the Floor Steel.
And now the upper surface of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers in there with all the rest of it.
And finally the Inflatable Seals.
Nice, huh?
Not really, but maybe one day a set of good drawings will fall out of the sky into my lap, and if that day ever comes, then I'll redo this part, or maybe I'll just add that in, and leave the crummy part you're getting now, as-is, to let you see what some people were forced to work with at different points along the line, as this phantasmagoria continued blinking and shimmering, morphing and shape-shifting, ever forward, ever changing, as each new directive was handed down from on high, and incorporated into the overall wholeness of it all.
And if you're wondering...
...no, it wasn't easy.
None of it.
And now that we're here, and now that we're talking about all of these modifications to the Pad, amongst which is of course the addition of the OMS Pod Heated Purge Covers which we just met on a drawing for the first time, but the Pod Covers were only one small part of a much larger overall thing (and that thing is coming, and you are HEREBY given fair warning that's it's gonna be a bear), and in our photograph up at the top of this page we're getting a really good look at the bottom end of the Side Seal Panel, the part where it pivots, the part where the actuator swings it around on a 65-foot tall vertical torque tube, and I mentioned a hundred years ago about what they did to the Side Seal Panel, and how "it's all hard-welded steel over on the Line 5 side of things, with no flip-up," frozen in place for now and forever more, but only on the Orbiter Right Side (RSS Side 2), and I also made the briefest mention of the RCS Room Door being offset for the same reason, and we've now reached that part of the narrative where "what they did" has become "what we're doing", and...
Oh boy, here we go again...
How the RSS meets the Space Shuttle...
Well...
It's a Rotating Service Structure...
And some funny stuff happens because of that.
So let's look at a drawing which will tell us what, exactly, they welded down over on the Orbiter Right Side of things.
And for that, we take a look at 79K24048 sheet S-267B, which gives us an isometric view of things, not very well rendered, but it was all we were given to do the work, so it's all we're gonna get to see the work.
And oh by the way, I don't feel like I've piled it on quite enough yet, so once we're done with what's now at hand, we're going to look at S-267B, farther down on this page, again, this time with an eye toward finishing what I started back in Part 1 of these stories, back on Page 31. So first we'll take a loop through the Side Seal Panels with their flip-ups, as they they interact with the Orbiter during the rotation of the RSS, and then we'll take a second loop, out to the Monorail Transfer Doors and back.
What jolly fun it all is!
Ok, back to Side Seal Panels and the Flip-ups which interact with them.
And of course it's tricky, and when we start digging into it, we start finding stuff, not all of which is easy to understand, and not all of which even makes sense, and now we're dealing with two difficult-to-understand and quite counterintuitive things, which affect each other, so let's go back and review exactly how the Side Seal Panels function, and what needs to happen before they can pivot around out of the way, doing their thing to keep them from bashing into the Orbiter when the RSS rotates around and mates with it, and I made some nice drawings which show the action on Side Seal Panels in relationship to the PCR Main Floor Flip-ups down at 135'-7", but it's exactly the same with the Antenna Access Platform Flip-ups at 198'-7½", and it's the Flip-up at 198'-7½" over on the Column Line 5 side of things (RSS Side 2) that got welded down, freezing the Right Side Seal Panel in place, immobile, forever.
Ok.
Now, what's all this rotation mumbo jumbo you keep talking about, anyway?
Have a look at Pad A Drawing Package 79K04400 sheet A-25, (mind the elevations).
And this is all because the RSS is tied to the Hinge Column, tied to the central point of rotation, (which everything else swings grandly around in majestic circles when the RSS moves), along COLUMN LINE B.
And if we look straight down upon our RSS, as it swings grandly around, with Column Line B as the radius line for the center of rotation, funny things happen as the RSS meets or departs the Orbiter, depending on which side of Line B any given thing might be sitting upon.
Let's presume we're sitting pretty, mated to the Orbiter, and it's time to back away and demate (They wanna fly. We're in the way. So we gotta move.), rotating our RSS clockwise as seen from straight above, looking down on it, and get it all the way back there out of the way in its fully-retracted position.
If we leave the LEFT Side Seal Panel right where it is, and leave the two flip-ups associated with it, one at the Antenna Access Platform, and the other one down at the PCR Main Floor, both left as-is in the "down" position, we're gonna be taking a piece of the Orbiter with us, when we go by, as we start rotating around toward the demate position.
And I don't care if it's only an inch-deep piece, it's gonna be one whole side of that Orbiter, and you don't go taking pieces of the Orbiter with you when you pass by it on your way from here to there with your RSS.
They don't like that.
They don't like that at all.
And they're not gonna fly until someone has repaired the damage you just caused with your careless driving of the RSS, and repairing an Orbiter involves just a little bit more than maybe repairing a scuffed rear quarter panel on your car because you thoughtlessly cut a corner too close in a parking lot, and had yourself a little interaction with one of the bollards out there.
Looking down from above, as you're seeing it on 79K04400 sheet A-25, things to the LEFT of Column Line B, things you encounter as you head toward line C, and (even moreso) Line D, are Bad News, just waiting to happen, 'cause when the RSS starts backing away, things to the left of Line B don't just pull straight back, and instead they kinda give it a little crabwise, sidewise, move, headed inbound, headed toward the left side of the Orbiter, and we've already learned just how close everything is to that Orbiter when we're mated, and no, there isn't any margin at all, and yes, you're going to be passing through the Orbiter as you sidle on over toward it, while backing away from it.
Not good. Not good at all.
Some of you could pick all of that up in an instant, and may be wondering to yourselves why I'm belaboring this issue to such lengths, but here's a piece of news for you: Not everybody sees this stuff like you do, and not everybody sees this stuff at all, and you've gone through life projecting yourself upon everybody else around you, presuming they see what you see, and if they don't they're idiots, except... that's not true, and in your ignorance, you were simply presuming, and it kind of makes me wonder what else you might be presuming, and of course the inverse is just as true as hell too, and there's a lot of stuff they are picking up in an instant, which you are utterly blind to, so... ok... let us perhaps be a bit more forgiving toward one another, and forbear when forbearance is called for, and for those of you who do not pick all this up in an instant, I'm gonna mark our good friend A-25 up some more, so as that the sense of what, for you, might be a difficult thing to envision, is hopefully made more clear, hopefully made sufficiently clear.
All well and good. I hope.
But what's going on, on the other side?
Over on the right side. What's the story over there? When we first built the tower, when Wilhoit was erecting the iron that Sheffield Steel had fabricated and delivered, that Right Side Seal Panel was a mirror-image of the Left one, complete with 65-foot-tall torque tube, 3,500 foot-pound drive unit, and a pair of flip-up platforms that lifted up and out of the way to let it swing around the way it's supposed to, at the top (Antenna Access Platform) and bottom (PCR Main Floor), and that's exactly what you're seeing in the photograph up at the top of this page.
Same deal, right?
Wrong.
And therein, some interestingness lies.
It was designed by the same high-powered engineers who designed the Left one, the best people in their field, the same ones who very sensibly offset the RCS Room door, and yet they not only got it wrong, but it stayed wrong for almost ten years before anybody picked up the mistake and corrected it!
Whoa!
Pretty radical, if you ask me.
So now that we've had some time to study our marked-up versions of A-25 and see how this whole rotation deal works for stuff that's out there past Line B, headed toward Lines C and D, when it comes to not bashing into the Orbiter and tearing pieces off of it as we swing the RSS around, let's go take a look at that RCS Room Door which I mentioned a long time ago that I would be returning to for this very purpose of explaining what the deal is with that thing, by looking at different Pad A (mid the elevations) Architectural drawing, A-29, now that you're somewhat familiar with the sense of how I'm showing you all this stuff.
Yeah yeah, ok ok, but how 'bout we get back to the point? How 'bout we get back to what's going on with the Right Side Seal Panel, ok?
Ok, fine.
You're now presumed fully qualified when it comes to understanding the Arcs of Rotation for stuff on the RSS in general, and the stuff out there past Column Line B in particular, so when you see something labeled as such, you're supposed to know what it means, and why it's being pointed out.
And down at 135'-7", where the bottom of the unretracted Right Side Seal Panel meets the Main Floor of the PCR, it swings through that arc of rotation you now know all about, and as it does so, the Orbiter, with its bulging OMS Pod, is sitting right there, and we do not wish to hit it as we rotate our RSS back and away from it during demate operations (and of course the reverse is exactly the same too, when we're closing in on it during mating operations).
And the drawings we've been using so far to show you the particulars of the two Side Seal Panel arcs of rotation have been pretty low-resolution, but we've been forced into using them because they're large enough in scope of what's shown to include the Hinge Column into the image, and of course it's the Hinge Column that defines the center of the arcs of rotation, which therefore also defines the precise shapes of the arcs of rotation, and yeah, you needed that (ok, not you, you're such a smarty, somebody else then) to help you understand the overarching sense of the thing, but not anymore, so now we can dispense with the low-res images that include the Hinge Column, and go looking around in our drawing packages for something a little more high-res, and yes, there's a few things in there, but none of them are ideal, and all of them are crummy to one degree or another in a wide variety of differing ways, so I finally went after one of the Pad A mechanical drawings in 79K04400 (And yes, there's a LOT of stuff in 79K04400 that's vastly superior to anything else in any of the other drawing packages, and it's a damn good thing we latched on to it, eh?), but it needs help too, so...
I went ahead and just hatcheted the hell out of it, removing the inflatable seals and tearing out all of the confusing snarl of floor steel, dimension lines, and notes it was showing in this area (which we can clearly see via the photograph up at the top of the page, was done in the real world too, leaving a large open area behind the Side Seal Panel, where our ironworker is sitting, where there used to be a flip-up platform attached to a lot of perimeter floor steel that's no longer there), but that wasn't enough, because the rendering in the drawing is for the LEFT side of the Orbiter, so I had to flip it mirror-image left-to-right to get what we're looking for over on the RIGHT side of the Orbiter, and then I took our original Arc of Rotation for the Right Side Seal Panel from A-25 and pasted it down (correctly rescaled and correctly aligned, centered, and located, natch) into the hatcheted and flipped version of 79K04400 M-47 and further noted up the drawing to let you know what the hell you're looking at over here, and after all that was done, you get an altered M-47 showing you how that corner of the unretracted Right Side Seal Panel just BARELY misses the OMS Pod as it swings grandly away (or toward, it's all the same) with the rotation of the RSS.
So.
Come to find out, that Side Seal Panel over there on the right side doesn't really need to be retracted around out of the way to permit clearance for the Orbiter during mate/demate operations after all.
But it took them forever to come to that realization for themselves, disable/remove the flip-ups at its top and bottom, and just leave it sit, unmoving, as-is, torque tube, bearings, mounting brackets, 3,500 foot-pound actuator, and all. Lotta goddamned time and money poured down a hole never to be seen again with that one.
And yes, it really is a near thing over there as the Side Seal Panel sweeps around past that OMS Pod, but everything else out here tells us that they're fine and dandy working to much closer tolerances than that, and...
...I often wonder what it was that drove the decision to design the whole Orbiter right-side face of the RSS in front of the PCR to be mobile, when it turns out they didn't have to.
I'm sure there's a story there somewhere, and I'm equally sure it's a good one, but it would appear as if it's lost forever, and that kind of stuff saddens me no end.
It's just......... gone.
Ok, let's wrap this already over-long thing up with my closing account of what went on up at the Antenna Access Platform with the Monorail Transfer Doors, which I promised you I'd finish off, so ok, let's finish it off.
S-267B. Again.
And immediately the abject crummyness of these PRC/BRPH drawings elbows its way to the fore, shoving everything else off the stage, and...
Ok, hang on a minute.
I've been beating on the quality of these 79K24048 drawings pretty hard, identifying them constantly as "PRC/BRPH drawings" as I do so, but that's not quite enough information about this stuff.
In truth, everything I ever crossed paths with that belonged to BRPH (Briel Rhame Poynter and Houser, who are still around, still making stuff), and in particular their engineering and the personnel who were on-site to prosecute and effect that engineering, was sterling in every aspect. Just crackerjack stuff and crackerjack people making that stuff happen, structural, mechanical, and electrical.
But when you look down at the title blocks on these 79K24048 drawings, you can clearly see that PRC (Planning Research Corporation, who appear now, thankfully, to be gone) has elbowed their way to the head of the line, and it's always "PRC/BRPH", and it's never "BRPH/PRC" and my gut feeling is that all of the crummy stuff I had to deal with out there at Pad B was concocted up by the PRC head of this two-headed monster.
I don't actually know that, but my gut feeling is telling me that's how it was done. And clearly, it was mandated with insufficient budget and time by somebody in the moneyguy side of the house to permit the creation of proper structural drawings, and instead, it just kind of got slapped at, grabbing as much existing stuff as they could, from RS&H or whoever or whatever else might have originally made it, washing it off, slapping their own name on it, doctoring it up without any kind of explanation, going at a dead run as they did so, hitting the high spots as they went, and leaving the rest untouched, and...
...there was an awful lot there to not like...
...drawings, corporate culture, people, you name it.
So anyway...
...you see any Monorail Transfer Doors on this thing anywhere?
...you see any curtain wall on this thing anywhere?
Me neither.
Sigh.
But this is the drawing we must use, to close the Tale of the Monorail Transfer Doors for once and for all, so...
Wait a minute, I've just this right-now made a discovery, chasing down that damnable flip-up they welded down, on the Antenna Access Platform, and dammit, we're gonna have to take yet ANOTHER loop out into the deep weeds, and it's off to the races we go...
By now, you're more than familiar enough with the lay of the land, down at the 135'-7" level, with Version the First, Version the Second, and Version the Third.
All well and good.
And now, more years into this stuff than I'd care to admit, I stumble upon, in the very selfsame drawings I've been using the whole time, going all the way back to 1980 fer chrissakes, Version the ZEROTH. I can only hope that subsequent to today's startling discovery, the future is not hiding a Version the Minus Oneth up its sleeve, but I fear... no. Not gonna go there. Nopety nope nope on that one.
What we now have, makes for, as of right this minute, FOUR separate incarnations of things along the Orbiter Mold Line areas, and holy shit is this stuff ever getting complicated!
Any one version of this crap, all by itself, is more than complicated enough to deny all but the most intrepid, any kind of sensible gut-level understanding, and now here we find ourselves with a fucking club sandwich of 'em, and...
And it's very likely going to invalidate some of what I've told you already in the preceding two-hundred some odd thousand words this thing has run to, and right now, no, I'm not going to go chasing that stuff down, and instead I'm just gonna pitch into Version the Zeroth, and leave the rest of that expected cleanup work for some other time. Feel free to hate me for it, if you want. It's ok. Fine and dandy, in fact.
Behold! Version the Zeroth!
And of course, I catch myself in a miss this egregious immediately after ragging on PRC for poor quality, and...
...serves me right.
Anyway, back in the dim mists of Space Shuttle Ur-time, back when they really weren't all so very sure about every last bit of it...
Down to the last little fine-grained details...
They must have figured that, if the RSS didn't really go exactly where they wanted it to go, then they better have themselves a little built-in margin. Ditto the Orbiter. It too is mobile. It too rolls. It too has the capacity to not go quite exactly where they wanted it to go. For which a little built-in adjustment on the RSS might become necessary.
A little built-in adjustment capability in the areas where the Inflatable Seals were going to be actually touching that egg-shell-covered outer surface of the Orbiter, just in case their Orbiter or their four-million-pound high-rise hotel-on-wheels somehow wound up...
Where they neither expected it, nor wanted it...
...to be.
And so they cooked up a whack system of adjustable strongbacks that would carry the Inflatable Seals, and give them the margin, give them the adjustment, that they thought they might need...
...just in case.
And the adjustable strongbacks were on everything.
The entirety of the perimeter which defined that which is in the cleanroom environment of the PCR, and that which is not, sixty-foot straight-shot runs of Side Seal Panel, included.
The weren't taking any chances with this stuff.
None.
And that whack system of adjustable strongbacks turned out to be a little more than they needed, once they got comfortable with how their Orbiter and their high-rise hotel rolled, after they got built, never-been-done-before, over on Pad A.
And come to find, they rolled very nice. And they went right where they wanted them to. And once they were there, they stayed there. Rock-solid. Every time. (Actually, that's not altogether true with regards to the Orbiter, but they found out that they could back away and repark the MLP on its Mount Mechanisms if they had originally set it down a little bit misaligned, and I've even got a picture of that, and we'll get to see it, but for now we'll leave well enough alone, ok?)
And so they removed the whack system of Inflatable Seals Strongbacks and replaced it with much easer much simpler more reliable stuff that wasn't made out of a zillion fussy niggly too-prone-to-failure parts, and that happened sufficiently before Mister James MacLaren showed up on Pad B to permit them to, without a word being said, anywhere, erase every last bit of it from the 79K14110 drawings that Mister James MacLaren found himself puzzling over one fine St. Patrick's Day morning in 1980, and it never came up in conversation with any person, at any time, and now here we are, far-flung forward into the future, and it's the middle of the second-to-last month of the year 2022, and the dumb sonofabitch is only just now discovering this stuff!
I'll do better next time, I promise.
And since we're here, let's get a look at this thing.
It's quite fascinating.
And very complicated. Way more complicated than I had any notion of.
We've already seen it (well... maybe you saw it, but I sure didn't, even when I was staring right at it for the literal hours it took to mark it up a couple of different ways to let you see how the flip-ups at 135' had to be pulled up and out of the way to let the Side Seal Panels retract inwards for clearance during mate/demate operations) back on Page Orbiter Mold Line Grating Panels 135 but that's not a Good Drawing (yeah, that's it, and the dog ate my homework, too), so we can all be forgiven if we failed to take note of the full implications of what's being shown there, and in the interests of full disclosure, up until now, I thought it was some kind of Version the Third which had been after-the-fact, incorporated into those original 79K0440 drawings for Pad A, but nope, wrong again, MacLaren. A cautionary tale which we must all keep in mind as we allow our very fallible James MacLaren to continue leading us through this wilderness, ok?
And of course that's one of the main reasons I'm including within this thing, so much reference material in the form of drawings, specifications, pdf files, photographs, you-name-it. It's because I know I'm not gonna get it exactly, precisely, perfectly right, every single time, and with all the included reference material in this thing, you become able to see for yourself. You can check me. And anything less than that would be dishonest, and no, we're not gonna be taking that road thank you very much, and whatever accuracy hits I take will be the accuracy hits I take, and we want this thing to be right, or otherwise, what's the fucking point, anyway? Let the sociopaths and the narcissists have all that Planet Me garbage. I don't want the motherfucker. I do not like Planet Me. Such a cold dark little world it is. Fuckem.
Here's the original, so you can see what I had to work with, before I started in with the enhancements and marking things up for you.
And here's the enhanced one you actually saw, with the lines noticeably sharpened and hardened, with additional lost detail very carefully placed back into it over on the left-side plan view, before I started in with the alterations and the coloring-up and labeling of things.
So I'm going to mark it (the enhanced one) up again, so we can get an idea of what's going on here (and keep in mind that similar things are "going on" up at the Antenna Access Platform, and even on the Side Seal Panels, too) but we're not going to be hitting this stuff unnecessarily hard, ok? After all, for the purposes of how the Pad was actually used, operationally, and for the purposes of my telling you the story of things as they occurred when I was out there to witness it on Pad B, none of this ever happened, anyway.
So here's 79K04400 M-32 once again, but this time you get to see the marvels and the complexities of the Strongback system which carried the Inflatable Seals, complete with all of the details called out, including pneumatics lines, air motors, screw-jack actuators, teflon pads, cantilevered PCR Main Floor deckplates, and all the ancillary junkus that perforce goes along with such a thing, to make it go.
Note that the Inflatable Seals this whole rigamaroo is carrying are not the same ones we've been dealing with from day one in our blissful ignorance of this thing.
These Ur-seals have a Sponge Facing, which was what came in direct contact with the Orbiter, and at some fairly early point in things it was determined that this was suboptimal (or perhaps even complete garbage) and the requirement for it was dropped. I do not know if these things even got built, although their existence all over the place in 79K04400 gives me to believe they were actually furnished and installed, and then, once they were up there, and they started using them (most likely with the pathfinder Orbiter mock-up Enterprise, which we have a picture of sitting at Pad A before the OMS Pod Heated Purge covers came along and dictated the removal of all of this stuff from not only the PCR Main Floor level, but also, I'm guessing, the rest of it too, once they realized that this whole system was no damn good, real-world), they were found to be... less than fully wonderful, and snatched off the tower and replaced, posthaste.
Here's drawing with the callout for the original, Version the Zeroth, seal, 79K04400 sheet M-33.
And M-33 is a rare example of an RS&H drawing that leaves much to be desired, which just goes to show that it can happen to the best of 'em. Nowhere, on this drawing, or any of the rest of the original Pad A drawings, have I been able to find any details as to the particulars of these Inflatable Seals. What were they made out of? Herculite? Nylon? Burlap? Who knows? What was the sponge facing made out of? (No, you're not allowed to just say "sponge" and I know you already know that after having read this far, because you then run the risk of having a cheap-shot low-rent contractor shrugging their shoulders and just going down to the local grocery store and getting a couple of cases of the cheapest kitchen sponges they can lay hands on and... no. No, we're not going to do it that way. Not allowed. Not yours.) What's the inflated dimension of the seal, from the strongback toward the orbiter? Don't say.
The odds are fair to partly excellent that all this missing information, and more, is on its own little three-sheet Baby 79K Drawing Package, (there were zillions of them, all sizes, all the way down to single-page ones, for no end of different stuff, because... NASA) complete with its own specs, for just the seals and nothing else, but then again, maybe not. Might be buried somewhere in the 79K04400 specs, too, and yes, that kind of stuff was always no end of jolly fun to chase down and account for while the people over on the NASA side of the house kept their mouths strictly and firmly shut about any of it, hoping you'd miss it, and then they'd get to look good and receive Big Brownie Points by "catching" the contractor trying to "cheat" them, and... feh.
And you have to wonder what happens to that "sponge" after it's been out in the weather for a while. Florida weather. Rains like hell all the damn time, interspersed with a sun so strong that it literally causes plastic (which is supposed to be forever, but down here it's not) to lose its color, start cracking, and eventually crumble away to nothing at all. I can very easily see the sponge (even though it was no doubt special-called-out to prevent this sort of thing from happening, but exposed stuff out on the pads would age, alarmingly fast, and lose some or all of its brand-new-condition characteristics) absorbing rainwater like all good sponges do, getting heavy, pulling the loose floppy uninflated seal straight down, and then, when they go to inflate it with the Orbiter sitting right there, it would want to hang up in weird ways in weird places, and here's Joe Technician attempting to fish down in there with a... who knows, trying to pull the wrong-folded sponge side of the seal back up where it belongs, leaning waaay too far out over things, without poking a hole in the eggshell-delicate Thermal Protection System Tiles that cover the Orbiter or falling to his death through the just-barely-wide-enough gap between sensible steel on the tower and the Orbiter's body, and...
My guess is that this one got ugly at least once, and perhaps every goddamned time, and finally somebody said, "Ok, that's it, that's enough, get this crap out of here," and that was the end of that.
And we haven't even brought up the joys of the pneumatic system that moved all the different the strongbacks in and out via the use of air motors and screw-jacks, complete with a plumbing setup that would curl your hair and which comprised such a welter of lines and fittings and valves and switches and read-out gauges and indicator lights, and... the miracle is that the thing ever worked at all, and for all we know, maybe it never did.
I dunno.
Here it is here, on 79K04400 sheet M-48 without comment.
You figure it out.
I'm a structural guy, not a mechanical guy. And I'm not an electrical guy, either. I ain't touching the damn thing.
I will however, comment upon M-48 to the extent that it was this very drawing that kicked off my most recent voyage of discovery which ended with me finding this whole system of Adjustable Strongbacks and the different Inflatable Seals which they carried. I was looking at the Antenna Access Platform part of M-48, having come upon it while attempting to chase down the Tale of the Monorail Transfer Doors and the welding which froze them in place forever, shut tight, and that damnable word strongback kept popping up (I'll let you count how many times it shows up on that drawing), and at first I presumed it was yet another example of how things constantly get renamed all the time, and I figured it had something to do with the flip-up platforms and maybe the floor steel, but the more I looked at it, the less sense it made, and that annoyed me, and when I get annoyed, I always start digging deeper, and then, all of a sudden, while following the detail callouts to the other drawings, it struck me, those "strongbacks" were a whole different thing, and in a flash, the lights came on, understanding started to flow in, and I realized, "Oh shit, now I've got a whole new system to add to the narrative, complete with marked-up drawings, and... gah.
It's been a slog, but now it's behind me, and I can breathe easy once again, and the Nice People who are reading this thing will not be left in the dark about it, and will now have another whole chapter to add to their understanding of the history of this thing, and slog or no, that feels good.
And as your reward for hanging in there with me through all 40 years of wandering through the desert, I'm going to toss in a couple of more 79K04400 Pad A drawings for you to admire, so you can see for yourself, the amazing and confounding details of this strongbacks-and-actuators stuff that they originally came up with but, thankfully, did not keep.
Down at the PCR Main Floor, we have M-47, and it's the selfsame drawing I used farther up on this page to show you the high-resolution view of that Arc of Rotation the Side Seal Panel follows past the Right OMS Pod as it just barely misses it, and this is the original version of the drawing, without having been beat to hell by yours truly including massive detail erasures and mirror-image flipping it around horizontally, and it gives you a pretty good look at how those Actuators were set up in pairs to push the Strongbacks side-to-side and front-to-back, and I can only imagine the fun those techs had with this stuff, trying not to bash one strongback into another adjacent one, by using a kludged-up monstrosity like this thing.
Up at the Antenna Access Platform on M-46, things were very similar, but they did not have the additional complication of the very-complex shape of the Orbiter's Rudder/Tail/Vertical Stabilizer, sticking out between the two bulges of the OMS Pods, and so they dispensed with the Actuators over toward the Orbiter's centerline, since they were unneeded.
Now. About that Antenna Access Platform...
About those Monorail Transfer Doors...
Can we please wrap this thing up? Pretty please? With cream and sugar?
Very well then, back to 79K24048 sheet S-267B we go. Yet again. A drawing that I do not like, but which, in similar manner as a moth being drawn irresistibly to a flame, I find myself being drawn back to against my will, again and again and again.
None of what I'm about to show you made any sense at the time.
None of what I'm about to show you was explained to the least atom of a degree at the time.
A very large and very difficult installation, going all the way back in time to the original fabrication and erection of the Primary Framing, the very bones of the Rotating Service Structure, and then moving forward from there to include the subsequent fabrication and installation of a remarkably difficult pair of large and exceedingly-complex doors, an entire (and absolutely critical for pre-launch servicing and checkout) platform level, embedded within what demanded a curtain wall to hold it all up, which any fool knows is vastly less sound, structurally, and which is never something you want to be making platform levels out of unless dire need forces it on you, and...
Negated.
The whole thing.
Rendered as unto never again being able to do that which all the very significant design, fabrication, erection, and functional testing was originally, at no small cost in money and time, mandated to allow it to do.
And it was the fucking Air Force (who were deeply in cahoots with the the NRO, the NSA, the DIA, the CIA, and The Devil Himself), that mandated it, back in the uttermost very beginning of things when none of this existed yet, and massive piles of money were first being gathered together and organized into discrete blocks of cash, and no, not one person who was associated with any of this stuff in any way over the course of its entire miserable existence ever did like them, or like how they did business, and nobody ever had so much as a single kind word for them at any point along the way, and everybody seems to all have come to the same conclusion about things, and that conclusion was that they did it just as an exercise of power, just as a demonstration that they could, and would, dictate terms, and...
What a bunch of goddamned horseshit it all turned out to be in the end, and nobody (Air Force) ever apologized, offered any compensation, offered any explanation, kiss-my-ass, go-to-hell, nothing.
The high-handedness of this whole rotten affair was enough to take your breath away. It was breathtaking.
Dead Silent after the fact.
Forty literal years it took me to ferret all this out, and track down the culpable parties.
All for nothing.
And people wonder why you tend to grow very cynical if you do this stuff long enough.
You wind up seeing things if you do this stuff long enough.
And some of what you see is pretty harsh.
Untrustworthy and dishonorable fuckwits exercising power over people who have been maneuvered against their will into positions where they cannot resist, for the sheer malicious joy of being able to do so.
Yeah, it's been forty fucking years and I'm STILL pissed off about it.
Oh well, sucks to be me, I guess.
Ok. We've been here before. Back on Page 31.
You are presumed to have already read and understood all of that. I shall not repeat it. It's too involved to recapitulate and repeat all of it again. Too complicated. Too long. And if you're unsure, then go back. Go back and read it. It's quite the Tangled Tale. And just as fascinating as hell, too.
And the denouement, which we have at long last reached with our acquisition of the 79K24048 drawings which instruct us to effect it, turns out to be pretty straightforward, conceptually. Pretty simple, in concept. Keeping in mind that we're using really cruddy drawings to do it with and the simple act of just reading the damn things adds a level of excitement to it that might not be too desirable. And of course also keeping in mind the Dead Silence which surrounded this whole fiasco, and the spectacular nonexistence of any information as to... why?
Back, yet again, to S-267B, marked up to show you the very casual (and wholly-unspecified particulars for the welds themselves) instructions to weld the Monorail Transfer Doors (which, impossibly, are completely invisible, and never show up on the drawing anywhere) shut by laying weld along that part of the Antenna Access Platform where the "ledge" came out from the bottom of the doors, and further immobilize the Right Side Seal Panel by welding down (again, zero specifics for the weld itself) the flip-up above it, on the Antenna Access Platform.
Look closer at this abomination, and you can see where they're very sneakily instructing us to remove the actuators for those (invisible! never shown) Doors, via detail callouts 'C' and 'B' which take us back one page to sheet S-267A (complete with it's own horseshit mistakes in the nomenclature for the detail callouts), including the completely bizarre usage of a drawn-in, very small, three-dimensionally-rendered recess in the Door on detail callout 'C'! And yes, that's exactly what you're seeing there. That little rectangle at the end of the arrow coming from the detail 'C' callout, which specifically states, "add closure plate" floats above the deckplates of the Antenna Access Platform as if in a dream, attached to nothing, shown being part of nothing, and seems perfectly happy to keep right on floating there, till the end of time.
Madness!
And it was a bastard to bid this kind of crap (this isn't going to be the only example, oh no, there's plenty more to come).
"What are we doing here?"
"I have no idea."
"What's this supposed to be showing us here?"
"I have no idea."
"How the hell are we supposed to bid this crap?"
"I have no idea. But it's pretty small. I hope. Maybe toss a few hundred or a thousand in material cost at it, throw a few ironworker hours at it, hit it with the usual PT&I and G&A costs, roll it in to the rest of our bid package, and we'll figure it out when we find out we're low bidder, we got the job, and we'll actually have to build it. Whatever the hell it is."
And that's how it was done!!!
Madness!
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