[alexawarrior]

“I would assume a company like Raytheon has all their processes documented and can quickly spin up a new manufacturing line for a legacy product.”

As someone who has worked in this field, I almost spewed coffee out my nose. Thanks for the chuckles.

[LeifCarrotson]

Same.

I got a call literally last week Tuesday because one of the usual operators had left his position at one of the top 5 US aerospace and defense contractors (other than Raytheon), and they didn't know how to reset the sequence for the machine my employer had built for them less than 10 years ago.

Sure, any controls engineer worth their Ethernet cable would be able to read the PLC code and reverse-engineer it, but the user manual for that machine is about 8 pages of mostly boilerplate and would take an intern about 15 minutes to generate. It would take 50 times as many pages and 500 times as much effort to generate a proper user manual that would guarantee the next operator can read the manuals and fully understand what needs to happen to make good parts.

[baseballdork]

Oh c'mon. I worked at RMS in Tucson. We had tons of this. Hell, in one lab we found test procedures for the Phoenix missile for our HWIL, which hasn't had a Phoenix in there for decades.

[jki275]

Agreed, it's a silly notion based in no facts whatsoever.

Also, if the government isn't paying for it anymore, there's no reason to put overhead money towards keeping those manufacturing lines open anymore.