On 12 Aug 2014 at 14:29, Bruce Johnson wrote:

> What that says to me is that either the original developers of the
> stuff were criminally incompetent at documenting their process,
> successful production-scale synthesis was entirely due to one line
> technician named 'Bubba' who claimed his high success rate was due
> to whanging on the production vessel with a baseball bat in just the
> right spot exactly  17.5 minutes into the reaction, or (more likely)
> all of their lab notebooks are carefully packed away in crate
> OR65-91-887/A in Warehouse 51...next to the Ark of the Covenant :-)

More likely, it's a case of their documebntation having the *very*
common problem of not bothering to state things that were "obvious"
or that "everyone knows".

All too often, those things are only obvious to folks who went thru
the same schools or training. And to someone from a different
background, they aren't remotely obvious.

George O. Smith's "Venus Equilateral" stories delve into that several
times. The most blatant is a couple of guys trying to  get an ancient
Martian gizmo working. They actually have the service manual for it
(and Martian is well enough known that they can read it).

But the manual never says what the gizmo is *for*. I'll note that the
Service and even technical manuals for my old TRS-80 computers have
that same flaw.

And it assumes knowledge that Our Heros don't have.

Much fun ensues.

Classified projects are even more prone than usual to this sort of
thing. The WWII development of radar has a classic example that only
showed up because the US was sharing things with the UK,

The US invented the magnetron tbe (you've got one in your microwave).

The Brits couldn't manage to make a working unit from the info the
Yanks sent over. The Yanks sent over working tubes. They worked. Then
the Brits disassembled them (they were bolted together) to make sure
that parts matched. They did. But upon reassembly they didn't work.

They sent their parts to the Yanks, who put them togethjer and got a
working unit. Which upon being sent back, worked until disassembled.

Finally they sent some folks from the US group over.

"Everyone knew" (on the US team) that you tightened the bolts really,
*really* tight so as to prevent leaks if the tube got justled around.

The extra torquing changed the shape of the resonant cavity *just
enough* for the tube to work...

If you are a closed group and *not* sharing your processes with
outsiders, you may never realize that you are leaving out critical
steps. Because "everybody knows".

Recovering from the Long Night was likely slowed by that sort of
thing. Having documentation could make you take longer to recover
tech than starting from scratch might.

At least with "normal" spread of tech between worlds, it'll show up
fairly fast and get hashed out (and hopefuully result in the missing
data getting added to the docs).

On the other hand it's also not unlikely that the fixes will get
propogated by means of training, in which case they'll stay missing
from the manuals.

ObTrav: Your old ship has passed thru many hands as it slowly
"drifted" across several sectors as various folks ran their own trade
patterns.

It's time for annual maintenance. And the yard has never seen this
model of ship before. No problem, you've got complete docs and
specs...

--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com