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To: TigerLikesRooster

Back in the mid-’80s, I had a tour of a new munitions plant which manufactured 155mm artillery shells and cluster bomblets. It was probably 90% robotic or otherwise automated, from the production lines to the storage bunkers - including the transport shuttles that moved completed explosives into storage. Even then, it looked like a sci-fi movie set. There were relatively few people on-site to run the machines, all of whom worked behind blast barriers and viewed everything by CCTV.


13 posted on 01/01/2018 7:31:47 PM PST by Charles Martel (Progressives are the crab grass in the lawn of life.)
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To: Charles Martel
“Back in the mid-’80s, I had a tour of a new munitions plant which manufactured 155mm artillery shells and cluster bomblets. It was probably 90% robotic or otherwise automated, from the production lines to the storage bunkers - including the transport shuttles that moved completed explosives into storage. Even then, it looked like a sci-fi movie set. There were relatively few people on-site to run the machines, all of whom worked behind blast barriers and viewed everything by CCTV.”

About 10 years ago, I spent a couple of days at a privately operated munitions manufacturing facility located on a federal government property. It was a time capsule from WWII in terms of the facility infrastructure but fully modernized with automated equipment.

It was really a bunker within a bunker for explosion containment. The building itself, the outer bunker, was long and narrow. Feedstocks went in one end and product out the other. Within the building was a line of individual bunker rooms, small and massively built. Each room did their steps then passed its material forward to the next room.

What got me though is that each room was setup to completely and automatically flood floor to ceiling in less than one minute. Prior to 100% automation sometime after WWII, there would have been a few workers in each room doing their tasks. They had only seconds to escape before being locked in when the room was flooded.

30 posted on 01/02/2018 12:56:47 AM PST by Hootowl99
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