Meat on the bones
- Mischa
- LUT model
Yes, I still exist. And the LUT thrives slowly, but steadily. So after two swing arms I felt like something else.
More meat on the skeleton.
Salt in the soup.
So I decided to finalize the upper 3 floors - i.e. to give them the guts that the NASA engineers used to give them with a mild hand.
Level 320 - 360
We look to the east, the hazy salt smell of the young morning in the nose (yo. I am just on vacation, in Sanremo. Pirate town on the Ligurian coast, within striking distance of the fashionable Cote Azure, which we will visit afterwards, to finally enjoy the evening sun at Lillet Wildberry in a Provençal castle somewhere near Avignon ... where did I stop? Oh yes, the LUT)
The top floor houses the lift house, to the left you can see the chicken ladder up to the Hammerhead Crane. A windy spot with a dizzying view, later wind screens were installed, but that was already the time of the wimps and the general decline.
Level 320 - 360
A structure which I am proud of hangs here barely visible from the bottom of Level 360 or the roof of Level 340 - it's the antenna of the LUT. I knew it was there somewhere, but its appearance and position were only apparent after very intensive research. You can see it here below the lift house to the left where the diagonal struts of the level below meet (yo. The discreet 4 vertical dashes. Actually the antenna is V-shaped, and on each arm there were 4 vertical struts).
The still missing damper arm gives the view at Level 340 to a highly mysterious further structure. I could only see it on one single picture of my thousands of LUT shots (zoomed out here):
Mysterious structure at Level 340
Apparently it is a cooling unit for the adjacent valve complex of the sprinkler irrigation. But nothing precise is known. The martial part above it outside in the eagle's nest is not a laser gun, but one of the many video cameras ...
Camera platform with video camera
... pointing at the VAB as clearly visible here. By the way, this viewing angle is unique. There is not a single shot of the LUT on the launch pad where the VAB would be visible.
Real world comparison
Again time for the educational so valuable comparison with the real world. To find the identical angle is completely hopeless, because even on my computer Rhino reacts rather stubbornly to pan and rotate attempts in view of the millions of polygons. But to the experienced eye a certain resemblance to the original already reveals itself.
For the near future I want to finish the levels 300 and 280 (partly already done, as you can see on the real world comparison) and construct the Service Arm #8 as well as the damper arm and hammerhead crane, and then - yo. Finally the knife is sharpened again and the top 5 floors of the LUT are plucked together. As a test whether the thing is even build-able, at least in principle
Ok, I received questions where the hell the structures are that I'm talking about ;) .
Antenna hanging from the ceiling of Level 340
Above you see the antenna hanging from the ceiling of Level 340. It is easily recognizable at the first picture of this blog entry when you know where to look.
Mysterious structure at Level 340
And here's the cooling unit (at least it looks like a fan, and is reminiscent of the crawler's water cooling radiators).
Level 340 reference 79K-00403 Sheet 37
And this is how the reference looks like. Plenty of room for interpretation.
Addendum 2019
This blog entry stems from 2015 and is outdated. While it is correct that the antenna was at Level 340 in 1971, it's original location also 1969 during the launch of Apollo 11 was on Level 200. Ironically, it is visible in the real world comparison picture:
Correct location of the antenna in 1969 at Level 200 (Apollo 11)
Also, the mystery of the structure at Level 340 has been solved - it's a valve panel, not a radiator.
