I don’t know where or what this “scientist” is teaching, but I hope the students get their money back. It’s a cavalcade of bad logic, bad examples, completely missing the point about ground effect, and a heaping helping of BS. I have high hopes that this isn’t in the US. We have troubles enough.
It’s amazing the things YouTube’s algorithms will decide to throw at you. If you don’t watch it, you just might hatewatch it.
“Darkest Hour” finally opened at a nearby theater. As expected, Gary Oldman knocked it out of the park. I’ve seen lots of people talk smack about the movie, how it besmirches Churchill’s memory, but I thought it was pretty good. I can’t speak to the historical accuracy of it, but I liked it.
What really surprised me was the inclusion of two trailers… one for “15:17 to Paris” and the other for “7 Days in Entebbe.” Both are based on actual events; both are films that seem to cast westerners (American soldiers on leave in “Paris,” Israelies in “Entebbe”) as heroes fighting jhadi & leftist terrorists. Now, trailers often mislead; maybe the actual movies do the modern Hollywood schtick of making the jihadis not villains, the westerners as either dupes or dirtbags, but from here they don’t *look* like that’s what happens. Especially “Paris,” since it – rather unusually – stars three of the actual heroes of the event, playing themselves. Audie Murphy would approve.
I think the author here is probably right:
At some point in the future, be it years, decades, or a century hence, the federal government will seek to ban driving.
At first blush the idea of a ban on driving sounds nuts. But it’s really not so far-fetched. Self driving cars will inevitably -probably not soon, but someday – be much safer on the road than human-driven cars. Robots *shouldn’t* get drunk, distracted or just plain stupid. It will be easy to argue that humans shouldn’t be allowed to drive, since it’s just plain unsafe. And by that point, it will probably be a reasonably popular opinion, held by a good fraction of the voting and non-driving public. hell, right now there are major cities were sizable fractions of the populations don’t drive, don’t own cars, wouldn’t even dream of it, because there are systems in place to transport them easily and quickly to the small, restricted set of destinations that they’ve been trained to accept as the only places worth going.
Science fiction has touched on this. The movie “I, Robot” had self-driving cars that could switch to manual… but it was considered nuts to do so.
And *reality* has already touched on this, sorta. A few years ago a California gun club and a Maryland gun shop made themselves *extremely* unpopular with the firearms-owning community by announcing that they were going to carry a new “smart gun,” the Armatix iP1. This is a pistol that can only be fired if the shooter is wearing a specific electronic wristband. Why did this raise a ruckus? It wasn’t that people were PO’ed that a gun shop was going to carry a really expensive, very complex pistol of potentially dubious reliability in emergency situations, it was due to a quirk in New Jersey law. The “New Jersey Childproof Handgun Law” said that three years from the introduction of a “smart gun,” the *only* pistols that would be legally allowed to be sold in New Jersey would be smart guns. So by introducing the Armatix iP1 in California, New Jersey handgun buyers would soon be forced to buy from a narrow list only really expensive pistols. This would effectively bar handguns from the poor… all based on the idea that electronic guns are safer than purely manual ones. The kerfuffle seemed to eventually blow over, but the problem remains.
The same sort of thing seems likely to happen with robocars at some point. No doubt some city, county or state will pass a law that says that once robocars are proven to be safer than manual cars, after a set period *only* robocars will be sold or allowed on the road. And a *lot* of people will be ok with that. A whole lot of people *now* are perfectly fine with the idea that safety trumps liberty. People will be happy to turn over the drudgery of driving to the robots, happily giving up the freedom that comes from driving wherever the heck you like by your own will… without having Big Brother constantly aware of every detail of your movements. And happily trading convenience for the knowledge that at a moments notice your car could decide to take you not where you want to go, but where some controlling authority wants you to go.
Self driving cars are far too useful of a technology to try to stop. But it’s never too early to tr to figure out what the problems with any new technology will be and to nip them in the bud. As the article suggests, a good approach may be to pre-emptively pass laws that make it illegal to ban manual driving.
If you are old enough, you’ll remember when this actually aired. Somehow, I actually caught this back in the day.
That right there was one of the high points of the 70’s. Yeah.
“The Sun,” a Britainlandistani newspaper of some kind, has an up-to-the-microsecond article with the exciting news of the “Janet” airliners that fly from Las Vegas to Area 51.
Gosh, that bit of news hasn’t been publicly known since, what, the 1980’s? At least this article comes complete with NSFW photos on the right side…
A Rocketdyne concept for a space station from the late 1950’s. This was a sphere some 60 feet in diameter, with at least three counter-rotating internal centrifuges (think “2001’s” Discovery) to provide between 0.2 and 0.8 of an Earth-normal gravity. This station was to be parked in geosynchronous orbit, 22,400 miles up, and would weigh 250,000 pounds. The crew was to be a rather surprising 50 men. There are enough questions about the design that it can be safely assumed to either not be an entirely serious design, or to have been artistically greatly altered from the engineering concept. It *appears* to be equipped with:
A student film from several years ago. The voiceover talent doing Han is *really* quite good, but the best thing of all is that it finally answers an important question from ANH.
Some months ago I pondered the possibility of launching and landing C-17s’s from aircraft carriers (result: no). But how about corporate jets such as the Gulfstream G650? The takeoff run of the G650 is a bit over a mile, so obviously a standard takeoff run would not be possible. I’m dubious that performance would be improved enough through stripping weight so that the plane could self-launch from the deck of a Nimitz-class carrier. And corporate jets aren’t equipped with either arrester gear nor catapult attachments on a properly strengthened nosegear.
The purpose of my curiosity is a piece of fiction I’ve been noodling around with. The requirement is to be able to fly passengers (as many as possible) to and from an aircraft carrier, non-stop, a distance of at least 3,400 miles, up to 4,700 miles, without inflight refueling. So… how difficult would it be to make the required modifications? Is there a chance in hell that corporate jet landing gear could take the beating a carrier landing would give it? Could such a jet successfully get away with using, repeatedly, the emergency “nets” that aircraft carriers can deploy in the event that the arrester cables don’t work? Can the nose gear be relatively easily modified for the catapult system, or would it have to be completely replaced, with structural reinforcement to the aircraft structure?
And… how long would this take? Assume that bean counters and red-tape aficionado bureaucrats can be defenestrated if they cause a ruckus. The Skunk Works is given the task to modify X number of corporate jets for this role, told to work day and night, waste anything but time, nobody cares if it’s pretty, if the glue is carcinogenic, if the workplace is properly diverse, and to hell with the union. Is this the sort of thing that could be hacked together in days? Weeks?
This being fiction, I can always cheat. Perhaps the responsible parties have already made these modifications and are just keeping the planes in reserve. That would be easiest, and it would fit the story, but I remain curious about the possibilities of a crash program.
Yeah, yeah, I’m no fan of “social media” either, but just as a reminder I have a Facebook page for Aerospace Projects Review. Right now it’s basically playing catchup with the APR blog (which, FYI, typically runs my aerospace projects stuff a day or so before they run on the Unwanted Blog). Honestly I’m at a loss to explain what added value the FB page has over the blog, but it’s there. I suppose if the blogs ever crash, like they’ve done a few times in years past, the Fb page might be the place to check to see if it is indeed a blog crash as opposed to me being dead or on the lam or some such. If the blogs *and* the Fb page go down at the same time… unless there’s some system wide attack on the internet, then chances are that either I’ve been specifically targeted, or I’ve finally given up all this stuff and have shut everything down and joined a cult or something.
https://www.facebook.com/Aerospace-Projects-Review-159434240833823/
If’n yer big in social media and what to share the APR Fb page… hey, great.
And now it can be seen:
The article discusses the USAFs numerous attempts to kill the A-10. Realistically, it’s days are numbered. yes, it would be awesoem to have more. Even more yes, it would be great for the Army and Marine Corps to ahve a bunch of their own. But the newest A-10 is decades old, the production lines and tooling are long gone. There won’t be any more. Spare parts are dwindling, expertise is going away.
The A-10 needs a replacement, but sadly nothing quite like the A-10 is in the offing. Hilariously, there are those who think the F-35 will do the job. More likely, the actual job of the A-10 of getting down in the weeds will be done by drones. An A-10 can get in low and slow and take a beating; an F-35 probably can’t really get low and slow, and it certainly can’t take a beating. A drone can get low and slow, and who cares if it gets blown out of the sky… it’s a drone.
It would be great if a direct replacement could be manufactured. it might even look like the A-10. But due to the fact that any new aircraft is necessarily going to be designed from the ground up with all-new components, it won’t *be* an A-10.
What would be great is if the US Army told the USAF to go piss up a rope, and the Army embarks on the development of a fixed-wing ground support platform of their own, perhaps in cahoots with the Marines. A modern “A-10” with the same or better capabilities, using modern materials (but still metals rather than composites, since metals are more flak-tolerant), modern electronics, modern engines. Heck, design it to be “optionally manned,” with a two-man version flying in the midst of a swarm of unmanned hunter-killers.