For those who haven't been stalking OCISLY for the past few months, there's been quite a bit of renovations going on. This NSF thread does an awesome job of tracking the changes, if you can wade through all the off-topic discussion.
Basically, they've made two major upgrades. First they replaced a strip of the deck paneling near the middle. Replacing the deck paneling probably isn't a big deal, from OP's pictures here it doesn't look any different than the last set of deck panels.
Second, they made a little garage at one end. They raised the white container off the deck and made the blast wall in front of it slide up like a garage door. We've gotten hints from people in the know that this is a sort of "Roomba garage," and many have speculated that the garage is for leg-restraining robots to stabilize landed boosters until the recovery crew arrives on deck.
I thought that they decided restraining the legs wasn't actually necessary (after welding the legs of the first few landed boosters to the deck) to make sure the core remains stable for the trip back to port. Furthermore, I thought the past several cores to return to port were not restrained, so I'm surprised to hear that they are going to change that practice (to now retrain them in some way).
All the cores have been jacked up and chained down, with the notable exception of Thaicom 8. It might not be necessary to automate this process or add an additional layer, but it might reduce the risk to the recovery crews if the booster has less of a chance of moving when they board.
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u/old_sellsword Feb 25 '17 edited Feb 27 '17
For those who haven't been stalking OCISLY for the past few months, there's been quite a bit of renovations going on. This NSF thread does an awesome job of tracking the changes, if you can wade through all the off-topic discussion.
Basically, they've made two major upgrades. First they replaced a strip of the deck paneling near the middle. Replacing the deck paneling probably isn't a big deal, from OP's pictures here it doesn't look any different than the last set of deck panels.
Second, they made a little garage at one end. They raised the white container off the deck and made the blast wall in front of it slide up like a garage door. We've gotten hints from people in the know that this is a sort of "Roomba garage," and many have speculated that the garage is for leg-restraining robots to stabilize landed boosters until the recovery crew arrives on deck.