Something little known is that the US Navy ran trials of operating a C-130 from an aircraft carrier (the Forrestal). For reasons that seem good to me, I’m pondering the question of whether a C-17 could operate from a modern carrier such as the Nimitz or the Ford.On the surface it looks like no, since the stated takeoff run is about three times the length of the Ford or Nimitz… but with reduced cargo?
Alternatively; what aircraft capable of substantial payloads (mostly passengers) could operate from a modern carrier, while flying at least 2,500 miles?
Yeah, the purpose is fiction. The situation is an emergency, something that has to be slapped together in at most a few days, so it’s not a call for major modifications or a new design.
Unsurprisingly, the people who dressed the sets added a bunch of “easter eggs,” giving shout-outs to the original series. And in principle that can be cool… but come on, have a little craftsmanship.
First up, Captain Georgiou had a set of books on a shelf. You can’t see them closely enough on the show to make out the titles, but they are actually the titles to some TOS episodes. That’s kinda nifty. But take a closer look:
Have you ever wondered why there are so many dashcam videos out of Russia showing spectacular car crashes? The usual explanations include bad roads and booze, but I think I’ve discovered the real problem: bears. Bears on the roads. Bears in vehicles.
NATO better watch out. When Russia invades Lithuania, Poland and Portugal to protect the local ethnic Russians, they’re going to show up with bear cavalry.
This… this struck many a nerve. Back in my aerospace engineering days, I had a *lot* of meetings that went more or less like this.
The end result, both in the video and in reality, is for the engineer to just give up and say “yeah, sure, I can do the crazy incomprehensible thing you think you want.” Work from that point forward then becomes an effort not to produce the impossible thing, but to plan out in advance how you’re going to blame who for what.
There were times when I was told to design a component that would only be physically possible in a reality with four physical dimensions. There were *many* times when I had to actually invent something (not just design, but invent, as in come up with a new propellant combination and propellant geometry that had apparently never been tried before, with all the tests and undoubtedly failures and revisions that would require) and I had to tell management in advance how much it would cost and how many man hours it would take, to within a few percent accuracy. There were times when I was told to replace an electrical conductor with a non-conductor, but to make sure that it maintained its conductance. Told to make a rocket motor that performed as well as a standard one, weighed the same, cost the same, but didn’t have a hot exhaust plume. And so on. And every time I made an objection I was told I was being “negative” or was told “that’s your job” or “make it work.”
This also works as an allegory for “a rational man among the social justice warriors.”
Another rare piece of early Dyna Soar color art. This one shows the Dyna Soar heading to space atop the centaur upper stage of an Atlas booster. And if you think you are seeing corrugations on the back of the spaceplane, you are correct. At this stage in the design process the Dyna Soar *did* have some fairly massive, un-aerodynamic corrugations, and for the same reason why the SR-71 has corrugations on the wing: to allow for thermal expansion. Why exactly the Boeing Dyna Soar corrugations run crossways to the airflow, I’m a little unclear on. Terrible aerodynamics, but I imagine that’s just the way the structure wanted to flex.
The corrugations rarely appear on the usually simple diagrams you see of early Dyna Soar configurations, but they were there on full-scale mockups.
So the media is currently ulcerating over Trump suggesting that he’d like to see NFL owners fire players who decide to disrespect the US flag & anthem before games. Here’s the thing:
1: It’s the players right to disrespect the flag, the anthem, the US.
2: It’s any citizens right to say that he’d like to see these people fired.
3: It’s the team owners right to keep them or fire them
4: And it’s the fans right to stop spending time and money on games with players who are over-paid rude jackholes.
The NFL gets neither my time nor my money, so the NFL doesn’t care what my opinion is. But when you have an audible fraction of the people in attendance in the stadium *booing* the players behavior, the NFL should probably take some notice. And if you’re one of those fans who watches and/or attends and you’re booing? Stop watching, stop attending. Pretty simple free market stuff.
A few decades ago, professional athletes didn’t get paid diddly squat. Now they get paid more than most CEO’s, certainly more that the vast majority of the STEM majors, cops and soldiers who actually make life not only better but *possible.* They now seem to be an entitled class of dimwitted self-important boobs, paid stupid sums of money to do something fundamentally unimportant. And given how dependent upon politics the NFL is for a large fraction of their vast profits (sweetheart tax deals, getting the military to expend time and treasure for flyovers and the like), you’d think that something the NFL would want their players to be is *non* political, at least on the field.
So if you are a fan who is offended that a lot of the players are disrespecting your country because they are upset that even though black criminals are shot by the police at a lower rate than white criminals, they want that ratio to be tilted even further (that might not be what they *say* their reasons are, but that’s what it comes down to), then there is a simple solution: turn the game off. Stay home. Imagine how much more time and money you’ll have if you’re now going to a stadium to spend several hours watching tattooed millionaires play eleven *minutes* of sportsball and get paid more in that time than you will all year.
If stadiums emptied and the TVs were turned to something else (heck, if you are a “football family,” maybe y’all could play Monopoly or something instead), perhaps the rather obscene amount of money being squandered on this ridiculous pastime could finally be put to some better use. What better uses? Hmmm. Let me think…
Yes, I’ve posted these before. But I feel it’s important for everyone to maintain a proper level of understanding of the encabulator, the turbo-encabulator and the retro-encabulator.
And of course once you have an encabulator, you’ll need to diagnose it from time to time:
There have of course been advances in the field of encabulators, such as the micro-encabulator:
And the retroprototurboencabulator:
OK, the Encabulator is never going to not be funny. But the thing I noticed: in all the variants of it produced over the years, there hasn’t been a whole lot of actual variation. Where are the *all* *new*scripts?
Argh. Facebook is not my favorite thing. But, apparently, it’s where all the cool kids hang out, so the Aerospace Projects Review Facebook page that I cobbled together years ago, I’ve started posting things in again.
One of the weird things about Facebook is that you (apparently) can’t see a page unless you are signed in to Facebook, and if you are signed in, your own Facebook page when displayed to you has a bunch of editing features plastered all over it. Mine does, at any rate. So I can’t see what my own APR Facebook page looks like to other folks. Meh. So I don’t know if it looks ok or not. Anyone wants to wander by and let me know, that’d be great.
Not being Catholic, I have no dog in this fight. Still, it’s always entertaining when religious leaders tell other religious leaders they’re wrong. Wacky hijinks often ensue.
