I didn’t hate The Last Jedi. I didn’t love it. It just sorta… exists, I guess. But as time goes on and I think about it more, I can see the political “programming” that went into making it… and how that politics overshadowed any effort at quality storytelling in favor of propaganda, strawmen in favor of characters.
This spoiler and profanity-filled video lays it out succinctly:
Description:
Declassified 28 Aug 1973. Various methods of producing and using nuclear power for military land vehicles and other military equipment were investigated and evaluated. A nuclear-powered mobile energy depot (MED) would move with advancing armies and produce vehicle fuels from materials readily available in the field. This would make mechanized units independent of external fuel supplies for extended periods, and permit them to move quickly and easily to areas impossible for units that depend on the customary fuel supply lines. Many possible MED systems were evaluated on the basis of energy sources, fuel manufacturing (by both conventional and chemonuclear processes), fuel storage and transportation, and fuel utilization in both present-day internal-combustion engines and power units of the future (i.e., fuel cells). The applications of more than a dozen MED systems to vehicular propulsion were studied.
The report can be downloaded directly from HERE.
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If you haven’t already bought a copy of Dennis Jenkins’ “Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013,” you really should. It’s pricey, but it’s also massive (18 pounds/1584 pages)… and the last word on the subject. It is also the last edition of Jenkins’ Shuttle history that he’s planning on producing, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. The Amazon reviews are enlightening: 95% of them are five-star, 5% are 4 star… and precisely none of them are three star or less. That almost never happens.
And here I was, thinking I’d put a lot of effort into the Orville…
A lot of time went into the “spine,” largely because the contours are complex and the details are a bit difficult to suss out. I’ve finally declared victory on that part and have started in on detailing the rim and underside. Barring the unforseen, the underside should be done in the net day or three, with the aft fuselage/shuttlebay being the last section to tackle. And then… well, a bit of a wait until the book comes out in mid January. Until then, after the ship is modeled I’ll start working on a set of diagrams for some general plans.
Every now and then Fingers and Raedthinn arrange themselves in such a way to show off just how big Raedthinn is comparatively.
Work on modeling the thing proceeds. A whole lot of hours were spent yesterday and today making visually minimal progress, but it’s still progress. What is going to cause the delay is not bad news; in fact, it’s good news. In mid January, the book “The World of the Orville” is due to be published. Exactly what’s in it, I don’t know, but it seems to be well-illustrated; there is just possibly the chance that it will drop that vital nugget of information: “The Orville is XYZ meters long.”
“The World of the Orville” is available for pre-order from Amazon. Go ahead and order it from here and I’ll receive a small fraction of a pittance. Heck, go ahead and order a lot of stuff using the Amazon search box up there in the corner; if you start from here I get a small bit of compensation, maybe even enough to buy some cat food. For… the cats. Yeah. The cats.
And because why not:
A few days ago I uploaded in the 2017-12 APR Patron Extras Dropbox folder a scan of an old magazine article on the X-24 lifting body which including this interesting piece of art depicting an X-24 atop a Titan IIIc launch vehicle. There were indeed proposals to launch X-24 derivatives into orbit with Titan IIIs, but they wouldn’t be *exactly* X-24’s. The X-24 was not built as a spacecraft or a re-entry vehicle; it would be uncontrollable outside the atmosphere and would be a molten collection of rubbish on re-entry. Still, the proposed vehicles did look a *lot* like the X-24.
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No, not just the white people vs. black people divide, or the rich vs. poor, right vs. left, sane vs. SJW. No, it goes deeper than that:
Clearly, the gap between “audience” and “critic” has become unbridgable.
Having seen “The Orville,” I gotta agree with the audiences: it’s awesome. Having seen “Last Jedi,” I gotta agree with the audience: it’s meh. I have no doubt that it’s going to make buckets of money, but… it seemed to just sorta sit there and not do anything. And a lot of just just didn’t make any damn sense. Without getting too spoilery, the bulk of the plot revolves around a sublight chase. One side is running flat out on their sublight engines because they can’t jump to hyperdrive; the other side is chasing them and is unable to catch up to them, so it’s sort of a stalemate. Except… the side that’s doing the chasing doesn’t have a problem jumping to hyperdrive. So just jump a ship ahead of them. How hard is that?
And once again… what’s the deal with Phasma? They make a point of having this apparently interesting character with chrome-plated armor… and she’s on screen for about five seconds and does approximately diddly.
Cherenkov radiation is something you are unlikely to experience in the natural world.This visible blue light is the “shock wave” produce when something travels faster than the local speed of light. The speed of light in transparent substances such as glass and water than be substantially lower than it is in a vacuum, so high energy particles can easily be FTL in those media.
Nuclear reactors generate just such high energy particles. And they are often immersed within pools of water for both shielding and cooling. Thus… Cherenkov radiation, and thus this spiffy collection of videos showing just how fast reactors start cranking out the rads upon startup.
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQdS0pbpKo
This sort of thing is unlikely to appear outside of a reactor environment. If you are in space, high energy cosmic rays that penetrate your eyeballs can create tiny flashes of Cherenkov radiation within the vitreous humor, an effect that astronauts have note since the earliest days of spaceflight, something sure to freak the fark out of space tourists. But these are instantaneous phenomena, not steady state ghostly glows. If you do stumble across something out in the wild causing the water, air or glass around it to glow like Dr. Manhattan, you may well have stumbled across something that it would be best to stumble away from.
And as to how good that water shielding is? Your average human would probably look at that Cherenkov radiation and assume that the water ain’t doin’ diddly. But things like electrons *aren’t* photons, and they don’t pass through water as easily as simple light does. This “What If” from XKCD explains it well.