And, of course, the "out of detent" detail has that verite of something that had actually been tried, not just dreamed about or simulated. It has that reek of versimilatude that comes from most real-world engineering solutions.
I can't possibly agree more. This is one thing I have to constantly bring up to management, and to non-engineers acting in engineering roles. The saying goes: "Every project has two stages -- too early to tell, and too late to do anything about it." What it means is that when you sit down to do the paper designs at the beginning of a project, you really only know a very little bit of what you need to do to solve the whole problem. You can even have a 200-page statement of the problem, and you'll still discover things as you go. And so the art of engineering management is knowing how to progressively constrain the design components as you go and allow yourself maximum flexibility to account for these late-stage discoveries while still allowing the design to progress toward completion on schedule.
The ACA solution to the DAP problem is exactly the kind of thing that happens when you actually execute a design -- not merely dream it up for public consumption. This really does provide evidence that the LM was a working design, not merely a paper cover story.
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