"...I find myself suspicious as well, Comrade Commissar... you see, in binder 23-49C I have here archived my back copies of technical drawings for earlier, rejected versions of the gyro. [thumping noises, very large book is pulled down from very high shelf]PeZook wrote:"Ready for test!", the technician exclaimed. Power was applied to the Vostok capsule's gyroscopes, which began to spin up. Suddenly, with a screech of metal and a rather loud bang, two out of three gyros failed explosively. Pieces of expensive machinery scattered all around the test setup, massacring not just themselves but also cockpit instrumentation of the prototypes.
"Cancel the test! Cancel the test!", yelled Syrgy Pavylyvych. What could have gone wrong? What could have gone wrong?!
Later on, investigation would reveal a rather basic arithmetic mistake in a crucial technical specification for the two gyros. A specification bearin Syrgy Pavylyvych's signature under it.
"Here, this was the first version we considered, page forty...six, I believe, yes. You see the problem with these screw hole patterns; they intersect. A machinist on his lunch break happened to be walking past the desk and caught it straight away. So we went to the one on the next side of this divider, again, page forty-two, four, six... you see the same part, tolerances relaxed a little on the flanges here and here, screw holes re-aligned of course. Then there were some unrelated problems, you see that page forty-six is identical in this version to the last. This was the version we finally cut some metal on early last year, hammered together a test stand and did a low-speed test to see if it worked. Acceptable, but the vibration problem- not good. So we went to version four, fixed some of the difficulties- had to tighten the tolerances up again, a few things. Page forty-six was changed again for version five, the one which just failed.
"Now, here is what I find suspicious, comrade Commissar. You see that in all versions of the blueprints, this measurement is the same, for obvious reasons, yes? So why is it different in the version that went to the machine shop? That was supposed to be identical to the copy before us.
The commissar glowered. "And yet, you signed the copy which went to the machine shop, with the erroneous figure, and we are set back months you say."
"Yes. But I'd just- well. I forget, let's see, I kept a diary, binder 1-35E... here. Let's see. 2:15 to 2:30, discussion with project lead for gyros, now I remember. We were talking about the changes from the fourth to the 'final' fifth design. I could swear I had those blueprints in front of me, comrade, and then just after that, he dropped off the machinists' final version, and I signed off. I cannot prove I would have noticed the error here, but I am morally certain it wasn't there when I signed the document."
Omega's bushy eyebrow raised, in a truly impressive display of incredulity. "So you claim it was changed on you?"
"I don't know what is going on here. Maybe I did sign off on the mistake, maybe I didn't. But... something is not right here. I hope we don't have a spy."
__________________
Now we see why Syrgy has become such a compulsive documenter! There is no tape like red tape, da?
Can von Evilstein shoot himself or something? After, of course, hobbling Pavylyvych with a pickaxe?
"
- PeZook
