Plans for an offshore air defense platform?

January 18, 2006 3:51 PM

I'm interested in writing a story set on a texas tower, an off-shore air defense platform used in the mid 50s to early 60s. However, I need an idea of how it was set up inside and I don't know how to get a map/plan/schematic of the tower. I don't every little detail about it, just how the space was set up and so forth.
posted by clockworkjoe to law & government (5 comments total)

I think it was in Stephen King's "On Writing" that he mentioned that he never let ignorance stop him from writing in-depth about a topic in a novel (from memory, the example he used was the inner workings of a particular police department). If you think about it, the details will only ring true or false to the relatively few people who also know what the inside of one of these towers looks like. Beyond that, unless there's a good reason to kill lots of hours trying to run down esoteric details (and it may be that one of the other MeFites can shortcut that process a great deal), the majority of your audience is probably going to be less interested in whether or not the bathroom facilities were on the top level of the tower or not, as they will be in what happens to the person or people in the story.
posted by planetthoughtful at 4:06 PM on January 18, 2006

I think it's a cool setting for a story. I know there are a lot of sites dedicated to oil platforms, perhaps you could find an engineer on one of those sites who could point you in the right direction.
posted by soiled cowboy at 5:54 PM on January 18, 2006

you could try writing to this fellow.
posted by nj_subgenius at 7:07 PM on January 18, 2006

Neat place. Some diving from your link turned up this.
posted by fleacircus at 12:38 AM on January 19, 2006

There's a documentary that runs on Discovery in the UK - in a series called Great Disasters or some such - on the Texas Towers which features interviews, footage, inserts of maps, etc.
posted by A189Nut at 4:36 AM on January 19, 2006