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Dual Keel Space Station Art: Part Two

 art, history, Patreon, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Aug 032016
 

A while ago I was asked by another aerospace historian if I had any artwork of the “Dual Keel” version of the Space Station design from the mid/late 1980s. This was a predecessor to the International Space Station (the “Russians” being the “Soviets” at the time) and was to be used not just as an orbiting shack for some basic research, but also as an assembly area for manned missions to the moon and Mars. Turns out I had a fair amount of Dual Keel art. As is the way of things, a lot of that art is moderately poor… scanned from dusty slides, in many cases. Still, it’s what I had. It dawned on me that others might be interested in it, so I put all the images into the same size and format (standard 8.5X11) and made a PDF out of it, seventy some pages. I have uploaded Part Two to the “APR Extras” Dropbox site into the “2016-08 APR Extras” folder. This is accessible to all APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above (if you are such a patron and don’t have access, send me a message via Patreon, I’ll get you fixed up). Part One was uploaded to the “2016-07 APR Extras” Dropbox folder last month.

dualkeelad2

 Posted by at 9:25 pm

Truax’s Steam Rocket to soar again… over the Snake River Canyon

 awesomeness, Crazy, history, news, rockets, ಠ_ಠ  5 Responses »
Aug 032016
 

Apparently, come September a brand-new Skycycle will attempt to launch across the Snake River Canyon. Read about it here:

Return to Snake River: A new generation prepares to complete Evel Knievel’s greatest feat

Everybody remembers Evel Knievel; relatively few remember Bob Truax, the rocket engineer who designed and built the Skycycle.  Fortunately the article does talk about two generations of Truax, including Bob Truax’s son who built the new Skycycle that will be used in the new attempt.

 

This is scheduled for September 17 near Twin Falls, Idaho. Hmmm. That’s only about 2 hours from here, easy enough for me to drive up to. Except: the launch site is on private property and you have to buy a ticket. That’s fine, of course – but the tickets cost $1,000. A bit out of my pay grade, sadly.

evelspirit

 Posted by at 8:13 pm

Well, *duh*

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, ಠ_ಠ  10 Responses »
Aug 022016
 

Dutchman flies to China to see online girlfriend, lives in airport for 10 days waiting for her to show

Well, that was dumb. The title pretty much says it: he flew to China to surprise his internet girlfriend, and she never showed up. The obvious conclusion to draw is that she doesn’t actually exist (“catfishing”) and was just someone’s joke or scam to string the guy along for some reason, but apparently she’s at least *kinda* for real. The story goes that they’d agreed to meet up after a year of online dating, but he couldn’t wait; he sent her a photo of his flight information, but she didn’t know what it meant. And even better:

She says that she was unable to meet Cirk when he arrived in Changsha because she was out of town, undergoing cosmetic surgery in Zhengzhou, Henan province

Good plan, dude. It seems like these Surprise Romantic Gestures only work in the movies.

Heck, he might have lucked out here. “Cosmetic surgery” covers a *lot* of ground. Maye she was getting a boob job. Maybe “she” was getting bits lopped off (you know what I mean). Who friggen’ knows.

And here’s the one bit of wisdom I can really impart. The guy in the story is not photographed at his best, but he looks *awful.* He looks like a cross between a modern-day meth head, a 1980’s AIDS sufferer and a 1940’s death camp survivor. I doubt he got there in just 10 days. Now, I’m certainly no expert on what women want, but in general it seems like “scrawny tweaker” is not high on the list. The photo of the Chinese woman in the article has her face blurred, but she otherwise appears to be Standard Hot Asian Chick. And here’s my wisdom: unless you’ve got buckets of cash on open display, if you are not a good looking guy, that chick on the other end of the internet Does Not Exist.

At this point I’m willing to entertain the idea that there are *no* women on the internet. Anyone who claims to be a women, especially if “she” seems to be interested in you, is actually a 40-year old fat guy living in his mom’s basement.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 2:35 pm

Enterprise Restoration

 art, awesomeness, history, models, science fiction, spacecraft  5 Responses »
Aug 012016
 

This video shows the effort the National Air & Space Museum went to to restore the original USS Enterprise model. Damn if that doesn’t look like one hell of a job!

 

Tucked away inside the video were brief glimpses of some CAD diagrams of the Enterprise used for determining the paint scheme. I’d *love* to see these in full!

ncc1701color

 Posted by at 5:09 pm

Turkey

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Gah., history, Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, ಠ_ಠ  9 Responses »
Aug 012016
 

I’m sure Putin is rubbing his hand in giddy expectation over this…

Reports Turkish troops have sealed off Incirlik US/NATO nuclear air base

It’s sad that a NATO nation is falling into outright dictatorship. But as we’re on the one century mark from World War One, *perhaps* opportunities are arising to fix some of the geopolitical mistakes of that war. At the end of WWI, the victorious European allies chopped up the former Ottoman Empire (and other areas of the Middle East) into a ridiculous hodge-podge of borders that cut existing political/religious/ethnic groups apart and stuck the chunks together with other groups that hated each other. Perhaps weh  all is said and done, Turkish Kurdistan can be set free to join up with Iraqi Kurdistan. And Constantinople can finally revert to Greece. That’ll be fun.

 Posted by at 12:05 am

Wire Recorders

 art, awesomeness, history, science, youtube  4 Responses »
Jul 312016
 

If you read enough sci-fi from the late 40’s/early 50’s, you’ll come across references to technologies then in use but which have since vanished. One such technology is the “Wire Recorder,” a way of recording sound magnetically. The basics of the technology are roughly the same as used on tape recorders, but instead of a tape of plastic film covered in iron oxide, the wire recorders used actual stainless steel wire.

The video below describes the technology and history of wire recorders and shows one in operation. The wire recorders actually worked pretty well, but they fell before the might of tape recorders. Why? Two basic reasons. First, magnetic tape recorders were capable of producing far better sound. Second, an hour of wire was nearly a mile and a half of wire. There is a sequence in the video showing  the results of something going wrong during rewinding and, man, you do *not* want to have to try to straighten out that mess.

 Posted by at 11:29 am
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