Re:Discovery's Teardrop
by VLM on Monday May 26, 2014 @09:24AM
(#7799628)
The number on the surface of a new tile is more or less the filename of a CNC gcode program that can create a new tile to a precision quite a bit higher than you can see visually... You can read a tangentially related discussion of this here.
There's at least 20K HSRI "model numbers" and over the years probably many more as revisions were made, they made lots of Q+A test pieces and there were many revisions and lots of repairs and there's a lot more than just black HRSI tiles, I'd estimate somewhere in the realm of "way more than 10M tiles" were made over the years. The hotter they get the smaller and thicker they have to be, something about differential thermal expansion stresses or something.
The TPS as a whole was quite a technological accomplishment.
http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum14/HTML/000534.html
There's at least 20K HSRI "model numbers" and over the years probably many more as revisions were made, they made lots of Q+A test pieces and there were many revisions and lots of repairs and there's a lot more than just black HRSI tiles, I'd estimate somewhere in the realm of "way more than 10M tiles" were made over the years. The hotter they get the smaller and thicker they have to be, something about differential thermal expansion stresses or something.
The TPS as a whole was quite a technological accomplishment.