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All I know is that everything is electrically bonded to everything else. The use a milliohmeter to check the resistance when installing anything.

That helps, do you know if the RCC is also very low resistance and is also so meticulously electrically bonded to everything else? Not knowing much of the details, and assuming some pretty wild electrical-physics could be occurring at mach 20...

a couple of scenarios I'm thinking of are something on the order of the process where an incandescent light bulb burns out, all it takes is for the filament to develop a slight weakness at one point, this causes the resistance at that point to go up, which generates more heat at that point, causing accelerated damage, resistance goes up and so on... till it burns out (the foam-cracked leading edge being the filament, and many Amps flowing thru the RCC, coming from 18,000 mph of V x B current).

Another scenario is the Tacoma Narrows bridge but in electrical not mechanical resonance, and instead of being powered by a steady wind, being powered by the shuttle's enormous velocity; the frequency being on the order on many MHz and possibly generating large heat-generating peak currents. One possible indication of these kinds of weirdness-es is that they require a signifcant amount of power to drive them, so these things would cause increased drag on the damaged side of the wing.

My basic point being, such huge amounts of energy are capable of driving a large number of errant behaviours, which all need to be controlled, but for example, what happens to the simulations when the assumption of a perfectly conductive leading-edge is no longer true?