Maintenance and Damage in a civilian ship to aid the story

[Lycanorukke]

On tools you can always just say something like: "As you try to remove the last two bolts you find your wrench is too big to fit in the space..."

As with anything - the people who design it are never the ones who have to maintain/repair it. Spend 3 days to disassemble $20,000 of expensive equipment weighing half a ton to replace a 10c fuse.

And then of course there is the fun with imported parts...."This damn thing has 3/8ths bolts, the best I can do is a 10mm and of course it doesn't fit."

And even worse - fake/refurbished/cheap copy parts. "Sure, this parts brand new! Dont you worry about the certification tag...we're all friends here"

 

[Dragoner]

LMAO :rofl:


Huh? A hammer AND vice grips - thought those were the proper tools for removing a 35mm bolt?
(All the stuff that gets hammered into submission to give space for the grips, well, that's another story...)

Do what real mechanical engineers do...


... use a cold chisel!


j/k, I'd hammer a smaller size socket on the bolt head and hit it with an impact.

 

[Dragoner]

And then of course there is the fun with imported parts...."This damn thing has 3/8ths bolts, the best I can do is a 10mm and of course it doesn't fit."

That is why you have a tap and die set, so you can run the die with the proper thread pitch down some foreign bolt you have to use; the worst is to find that you can't get the proper grade.

 

[BytePro]

Hehe - there was no cold chisel or drill in the 5 gallon bucket!

I know a mechanic who gets bolts and nuts free (cars and trucks) - including corroded, rusted and stripped - with just a freaking needle nose! (Seriously - no wrenches, sockets, reverse drill bits, blow torches, vice grips, etc. - and without gloves!)

Enoki, yeah the o-rings on a backhoe are a real PITA. Helped a friend last year, what a mess. We didn't use any custom tools, but it took the two of us a good 4 hours or so - and fluid everywhere when the first try leaked and a board got forgotten and wedged under a piston...

 

[SpaceBadger]

If it is complex do you have the manual and drawings? Answer on some small Far Trader is probably NO! Without these you are likely to find it really, really hard to put the now disassembled hundred plus little bits back in the proper place even if you are fairly skilled. Raise the difficulty by one or two levels.

The manual and drawings should be included standard with any new parts or replacements, and a new ship should have them for every component on-board. The storage space for these in the far future equivalent of PDFs is trivial.

BUT when you have an old ship with lots of non-original equipment and modifications, that is where you run into trouble. If new components were bought as new from a reputable dealer, you should have received a new datastick/thumbdrive/whatever w all the necessary manuals and drawings, but what if those got dropped into a drawer in the engineering compartment, or even copied to the ship's computer but not in the place where they should be, and now you can't find them?

Or if you got some of your new parts by scavenging in junk yards, and they didn't come with any manuals - same situation, but worse, because no matter how much time you spend searching your ship's computer they are simply not there to be found.

Or as with current farm equipment - the dealer has the manuals, but the buyer doesn't get them without paying extra. I guess I may be optimistic to assumer that would change in the far future...

 

[Fritz_Brown]

The manual and drawings should be included standard with any new parts or replacements, and a new ship should have them for every component on-board. The storage space for these in the far future equivalent of PDFs is trivial.

Trivial or not, nothing seems to come with a manual anymore. And, the ones that *do* come with a manual simply tell you - in obscure techese - what the buttons do, not how to pull it apart and put it back together. And, aftermarket how-tos seem to all be on youTube now, instead of something I can print and have in the garage. (If I could work on my lawnmower/car/whatever in the living room, it wouldn't be a problem..... )

 

[Limburger59]

The manual and drawings should be included standard with any new parts or replacements, and a new ship should have them for every component on-board. The storage space for these in the far future equivalent of PDFs is trivial.

BUT when you have an old ship with lots of non-original equipment and modifications, that is where you run into trouble. If new components were bought as new from a reputable dealer, you should have received a new datastick/thumbdrive/whatever w all the necessary manuals and drawings, but what if those got dropped into a drawer in the engineering compartment, or even copied to the ship's computer but not in the place where they should be, and now you can't find them?

Or if you got some of your new parts by scavenging in junk yards, and they didn't come with any manuals - same situation, but worse, because no matter how much time you spend searching your ship's computer they are simply not there to be found.

Or as with current farm equipment - the dealer has the manuals, but the buyer doesn't get them without paying extra. I guess I may be optimistic to assumer that would change in the far future...

Hey, I finally found the service manual thumbdrive but it is written in Vargr. Anybody on board read Vargr? I tried to get the computer to translate it and it keeps on redirecting me to a Vargr ⌧ site.

 

[SpaceBadger]

Hey, I finally found the service manual thumbdrive but it is written in Vargr. Anybody on board read Vargr? I tried to get the computer to translate it and it keeps on redirecting me to a Vargr ⌧ site.

:rofl:
:rofl:
:rofl:

 

[SpaceBadger]

Trivial or not, nothing seems to come with a manual anymore. And, the ones that *do* come with a manual simply tell you - in obscure techese - what the buttons do, not how to pull it apart and put it back together.

OK, maybe I was being a bit over-optimistic in thinking that the way things should be done is the way they actually would be done in the far future...

Tractor and farm machinery tech manuals (different from the operations manuals) generally show decent exploded diagrams and some instruction on how to take stuff apart, service, and put back together. BUT as someone noted up-thread, at least for JD equipment it is often obvious that whoever designed this stuff never had to service it or take it apart or put it back together - some places are near impossible to get a wrench into and it is like a puzzle: to get a wrench in here, I need to remove that, but to remove that, I first need to remove that other thing, but to get a wrench in there to remove that other thing, I really need to get the first thing out of the way - they must use some very specialized tools at the factory where they put these things together!

And, aftermarket how-tos seem to all be on youTube now, instead of something I can print and have in the garage. (If I could work on my lawnmower/car/whatever in the living room, it wouldn't be a problem..... )

Cheap laptop or netbook FTW!!! Just carry it out to the garage and find a place to set it up...

 

[BytePro]

Hey - that's not the service manual! That's my, er, xenomed correspondence course notes - give it back!

The consumer world is a lot different from the industrial and military domains. In the industrial facilities I work with printed manuals come with everything. Further, they get manually copied, bound, labelled and shelved near operational areas.

I, of course, just DL them off the net to my iDevices while onsite.

 

[SanDragon]

Your service manual is in electronic form and your electronics...

have no power.

MWUHAHAHAHAHAA!!!

 

[atpollard]

Your service manual is in electronic form and your electronics...

have no power.

MWUHAHAHAHAHAA!!!

I get that all the time. Whenever my internet connection goes down, the ISP's phone tree tells me to log onto their website for technical assistance. o:

 

[Enoki]

Do what real mechanical engineers do...


... use a cold chisel!


j/k, I'd hammer a smaller size socket on the bolt head and hit it with an impact.

Nah! More POWER! You get out the pneumatic die grinder and some cut off wheels and VWeeeerrrrp! slice those puppies right on off.... "AH! We can go git us some new ones down at the hardware store!" Said while FTL....

 

[Enoki]

The manual and drawings should be included standard with any new parts or replacements, and a new ship should have them for every component on-board. The storage space for these in the far future equivalent of PDFs is trivial.

BUT when you have an old ship with lots of non-original equipment and modifications, that is where you run into trouble. If new components were bought as new from a reputable dealer, you should have received a new datastick/thumbdrive/whatever w all the necessary manuals and drawings, but what if those got dropped into a drawer in the engineering compartment, or even copied to the ship's computer but not in the place where they should be, and now you can't find them?

Or if you got some of your new parts by scavenging in junk yards, and they didn't come with any manuals - same situation, but worse, because no matter how much time you spend searching your ship's computer they are simply not there to be found.

Or as with current farm equipment - the dealer has the manuals, but the buyer doesn't get them without paying extra. I guess I may be optimistic to assumer that would change in the far future...

Worse, the one you have that is supposed to go with the equipment you have is NOT the manual for that particular model and modification but an earlier discontinued one and the manual wasn't updated!.. :nonono:

 

[navanod]

The manual and drawings should be included standard with any new parts or replacements, and a new ship should have them for every component on-board. The storage space for these in the far future equivalent of PDFs is trivial.

BUT when you have an old ship with lots of non-original equipment and modifications, that is where you run into trouble. If new components were bought as new from a reputable dealer, you should have received a new datastick/thumbdrive/whatever w all the necessary manuals and drawings, but what if those got dropped into a drawer in the engineering compartment, or even copied to the ship's computer but not in the place where they should be, and now you can't find them?

Or if you got some of your new parts by scavenging in junk yards, and they didn't come with any manuals - same situation, but worse, because no matter how much time you spend searching your ship's computer they are simply not there to be found.

Or as with current farm equipment - the dealer has the manuals, but the buyer doesn't get them without paying extra. I guess I may be optimistic to assumer that would change in the far future...

After spending a little time trying to recover some data off of a very old windows drive, another thought just occured to me. With regard to old/salvaged/scrap parts, what about the drivers and software to go along with it? For instance, you find a gently used primary fuel injection pump for your jump drive (that will work with some modifications), but the computer refuses to recognize the device when it is plugged in. After some scrounging around, the players find some software from an earlier/later model that will work, only to discover that that particular version of software was replaced because of an error that tried to run the pump at 4x or 1/4x the required speed under somewhat unusual circumstances.

 

[Dragoner]

Nah! More POWER! You get out the pneumatic die grinder and some cut off wheels and VWeeeerrrrp! slice those puppies right on off.... "AH! We can go git us some new ones down at the hardware store!" Said while FTL....

Actually that is the magic of making the socket fit, put a couple of notches in it with a die grinder.

I have a 3/4" impact I call marge, good for king nuts, crush sleeves, etc. .

 

[BytePro]

After spending a little time trying to recover some data off of a very old windows drive, another thought just occured to me. With regard to old/salvaged/scrap parts, what about the drivers and software to go along with it?

And the other way around - you have old software/interfaces that have to be updated for new replacement parts...

Had a touch panel computer go out in a plant last year. $6k+ and 6 to 8 week lead time for a replacement. And then... in order to be compatible with the plant wide SCADA system, the software has to be upgraded. Same vender sells both, of course. And the upgrade licenses are less than $20k. Of course, some control software may need modification to work with it - and the rest of the control panel computers (other 6) will need to be updated as well... ('easily' doable in a man week or so... probably).

[My solution was to replace the wimpy $6k+ control panel with an iPad and wireless router buy-able 24x7 from a local grocery store. Another hour's labor and $150 license and they're up and running. ]

 

[Fritz_Brown]

With regard to old/salvaged/scrap parts, what about the drivers and software to go along with it? For instance, you find a gently used primary fuel injection pump for your jump drive (that will work with some modifications), but the computer refuses to recognize the device when it is plugged in. After some scrounging around, the players find some software from an earlier/later model that will work, only to discover that that particular version of software was replaced because of an error that tried to run the pump at 4x or 1/4x the required speed under somewhat unusual circumstances.

This is why the computers are so frickin' big in the OTU. They have to have really old hardware to be backward-compatible with everything. (I have dealt with this before in my job - having to do everything in the harder fashion because someone is stuck with obsolete hardware or a software setup.)

Actually, here's a good story:
We had a piece of software delivered for a test event (testing a whole system of systems, of which this was a minor part). We dragged a moderately new computer out of some other system to install it. It installed, but it wouldn't run. After some banging on it, we called the organization responsible - they couldn't figure it out either. Until we got down to hardware. They informed us the machine we had it on was too new - it had to be a Pentium 4 machine! They had programmed to some obscure math function on that chip that no one ever used and had not been carried forward. So, to install that system "in the field" we were going to have to come up with an old system that still worked at every site. :nonono:
We did not give that system a passing grade.

 

[BytePro]

Yeah, have run emulators and dummied clock timings to get software 'hardcoded' for legacy hardware to get work... Murphy's Laws of Software Capitalism state the more expensive the software, the harder to make it work with the latest available equipment.

 

[Enoki]

Or, as this site proves things don't always translate well...

http://www.engrish.com/

Your system was made by the Vilani and the manual translated frmo Vilani to Vargr to Sylean to Ganglic so it says next connex blue thing to red thing but you only have orange, bare metal, green, and yellow parts....

o: