Your comment reminded me of an article about another massive manual-engineering feat: the F1 engines powering the Saturn V rocket. Just the amount of hand-welding alone is phenomenal.
That article has such Asimov's Foundation vibes. Maybe it's just me. The amount of effort going into refurbishing old technology instead of designing something new reminds me of that decrepit old Empire that's reliant on technology designed and built thousands of years ago and all the knowledge being lost.
It’s weird for sure. The number of important things that people don’t understand is always surprising although it’s very common.
Early in my career I had an “Asimov moment” firsthand - I was an intern working on a project to instrument an industrial facility with better sensors, etc. The whole place was dependent on a 100 year old machine that just did its thing every day with only minor maintenance and repairs. (I think the power source has been swapped out a few times) The manufacturer was long defunct and the plan was to keep the thing running indefinitely. Pretty sure it’s still there!
There is a great chapter on the F1's engineering and development in 'Apollo: Race To The Moon', Murray and Cox. The whole book focuses on the engineering and management challenges involved in putting a man on the moon and returning him safely in one decade.
One of the consequences of this was that there were many parts on the 747 that were fundamentally the same part but had different part numbers (think physical copy/paste). Boeing had a huge effort turn of the century to rationalize those types of situations.
My son is interning with an aviation parts supplier. He's had to deal with a few of those older drawings while developing custom jigs. They are amazing pieces of skill and fine detail.
The whole thing was designed on paper, with hordes of draftsmen drawing every single section, detail, etc.
I’m always impressed at how complex things could be with no CAD