The further and continuing adventures of the girl who sat in the back of your homeroom, reading and daydreaming.
Friday, June 08, 2012
Something New At I Work On A Starship
A little vignette, with photo illustrations: a visit to one of Lupine's main radar units. Which was not working. Because mo-rons can't find light switches and go flipping breakers at random instead. Yeah, that's smart.
Or because they DO flip the light switches. Worked in the NOC of a now-defunct midwestern telecom back in the '90s. Every Friday night a certain well-known shipping company would lose their ATM T3 at company headquarters. No LMI. I'd wait for the trouble call, and explain that they'd have to go into the server room and turn the lights back on. Because every Friday night, the last guy out killed the lights. And the freaking morons had the rack plugged into a switched outlet. Couldn't convince 'em to put it on a dedicated (or at least unswitched) circuit.
I'll go you one better. A USNS vessel, some 600 feet long. The panel supplying power for the TACAN beacon also supplied power to the bridge consoles (in a different compartment, and of course it wasn't marked). One of my techs goes to perform some planned maintenance on the beacon, and inadvertently shuts down power to the bridge. They got After Steering (kind of an emergency backup bridge) up and running - not a trivial exercise - long before my tech, unaware of the hub-bub, brought the beacon back up and unknowingly restored power to the bridge as well. A month later, same circus. Figured it out the second time, the fix had to wait for our next yard period.
Oh and this part made me laugh almost out of my seat:
"Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right."
So, so true.
Corrective factors are everywhere. Hell more goes into finding the right method to rescale "good enough" data than getting "pristine data".
Mostly because the latter is as rare as unicorn beaks and about as expensive.
"IF KEY/TAG IS ABSENT, TECHS ARE WORKING ALOFT" is the actual legend. Visible if you take the key out, usually there's a big tag marked "SAFETY KEY" hiding it.
Also, despite a fan and duct, the mast/radome is thermally stagnant; it was over 100 F at the radome end. Fun! (So glad I had the optional hydration kit installed in my helmet.)
At the risk of picking nits on an otherwise neat story... "Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read albles off the scribed marks..." "Albles"?
Otherwise... A few weeks ago some article, on Wired.com I think, made an offhand reference to how SF "is supposed to be about great engineering or scientific projects." (Bill Quick quoted it on Daily Pundit.) I object, based partially on Heinlein's tenet that SF is about people. What makes this a story worth reading is you and (incidentally) Dr. Schmid. Otherwise, sidebar in Popular Mechanics. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Typo, "angles." I thought I'd got all the obvious misspellings.
These yarns are supposed to be about people -- but also the actual nuts-and-bolts of a big starship, the nuts-and-bolts of a real society. A lot of SF just glosses it over; it's all Big Picture stuff about the Movers and Shakers. I dunno about that kind of thing; I don't know any of those type people. I'm not gong to try to write about them. Dr. Schmid, I know, to the extent that anyone does.
FWIW, we do not mention that "Bill" person's name here.
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Or because they DO flip the light switches. Worked in the NOC of a now-defunct midwestern telecom back in the '90s. Every Friday night a certain well-known shipping company would lose their ATM T3 at company headquarters. No LMI. I'd wait for the trouble call, and explain that they'd have to go into the server room and turn the lights back on. Because every Friday night, the last guy out killed the lights. And the freaking morons had the rack plugged into a switched outlet. Couldn't convince 'em to put it on a dedicated (or at least unswitched) circuit.
ReplyDeleteEvery effin' Friday night...
I'll go you one better. A USNS vessel, some 600 feet long. The panel supplying power for the TACAN beacon also supplied power to the bridge consoles (in a different compartment, and of course it wasn't marked). One of my techs goes to perform some planned maintenance on the beacon, and inadvertently shuts down power to the bridge.
ReplyDeleteThey got After Steering (kind of an emergency backup bridge) up and running - not a trivial exercise - long before my tech, unaware of the hub-bub, brought the beacon back up and unknowingly restored power to the bridge as well. A month later, same circus. Figured it out the second time, the fix had to wait for our next yard period.
Nothin' like unexpected Free Ice Cream of a Saturday morning.
ReplyDeleteWoo, great little story.
ReplyDeleteOh and this part made me laugh almost out of my seat:
"Eventually, we got it rereferenced -- it makes my skin crawl to hear the 2/O muse about "dialing in a fudge factor," but Navs boffins (which is how Dr. Schmid came up) are not like you and me: he's talking about a least-practical-increment slippage and, as usual, he was right."
So, so true.
Corrective factors are everywhere. Hell more goes into finding the right method to rescale "good enough" data than getting "pristine data".
Mostly because the latter is as rare as unicorn beaks and about as expensive.
"There are technicians working aloft. Do not rotate or radiate any electronic equipment."
ReplyDeleteNice story.
"IF KEY/TAG IS ABSENT, TECHS ARE WORKING ALOFT" is the actual legend. Visible if you take the key out, usually there's a big tag marked "SAFETY KEY" hiding it.
ReplyDeleteAlso, despite a fan and duct, the mast/radome is thermally stagnant; it was over 100 F at the radome end. Fun! (So glad I had the optional hydration kit installed in my helmet.)
At the risk of picking nits on an otherwise neat story...
ReplyDelete"Dr. Schmid tried various things, I carefully read albles off the scribed marks..."
"Albles"?
Otherwise...
A few weeks ago some article, on Wired.com I think, made an offhand reference to how SF "is supposed to be about great engineering or scientific projects." (Bill Quick quoted it on Daily Pundit.) I object, based partially on Heinlein's tenet that SF is about people. What makes this a story worth reading is you and (incidentally) Dr. Schmid.
Otherwise, sidebar in Popular Mechanics.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...
Typo, "angles." I thought I'd got all the obvious misspellings.
ReplyDeleteThese yarns are supposed to be about people -- but also the actual nuts-and-bolts of a big starship, the nuts-and-bolts of a real society. A lot of SF just glosses it over; it's all Big Picture stuff about the Movers and Shakers. I dunno about that kind of thing; I don't know any of those type people. I'm not gong to try to write about them. Dr. Schmid, I know, to the extent that anyone does.
FWIW, we do not mention that "Bill" person's name here.