The next set of stuff… including diagrams being worked for the Pax Orionis Patreon. The Spacecraft diagrams have taken a *lot* longer than expected.
Sep 092015
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Sep 082015
Is it just me, or does the Disqus commenting system look different now?
UPATE: Hmmm. For some reason, Disqus commenting got turned off. *I* didn’t do that. Hmmmph.
Sep 082015
The Pax Orionis Patreon is now online. It’s a little bare, but it at least seems to be up and running. The first piece of fiction and a tech diagram will be ready in a few days, so the first patrons will be kinda guinea pigs. With this system, patrons get charged when new stuff is made available, rather than on a strict monthly schedule.
So if’n you’ve got a hankering for stories about an alternate history with extra nuclear wars and spacelanes filled with atom bomb powered spacecraft, I got ya covered.
Sep 082015
Huh.
Meet ‘Mark’, the crazy genius who designed an aeroplane while drunk
Mark, a mechanical engineering student at Michigan Tech, got blitzed, designed an airplane, then woke up with no recollection of it.
Granted, it’s of course not a complete design, but instead sketches and a bunch of math. But damn, those sketches are a lot better than some I’ve seen come out of *sober* *professional* aircraft designers. The aircraft is a wing-in-ground effect plane, designed to skim just above the surface of the water; the air compressed between the wing and the waters surface creates more lift than if the aircraft was slightly higher, flying out of ground effect. WIG craft are dandy ways of gaining fuel efficiency for relatively slow transport planes, so long as you’re cool with a bumpy ride. Which, if you’re wasted, you probably are.
The story sounds like a fun adventure in Asperger’s Syndrome; “Mark” plunged into design work with a passion and yammered at his roommates, going through all the math in detail while they laughed. That sort of commitment to cause in the face of derision is a common feature of Aspergers. But the blackout drunk aspect of the story makes it a bit different from usual.
The real question now is: is Mark a better designer sober… or drunk? There is of course precedent.
Compare and Contrast
blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., Meh., news, politics, religion, ಠ_ಠ
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Sep 082015
Two wholly separate, yet somehow similar, news stories:
Kim Davis Freed From Jail in Kentucky Gay Marriage Dispute
And…
Muslim flight attendant suspended for refusing to serve alcohol, files discrimination complaint: advocacy group
Basically, both boil down to “I don’t want to do my job because my interpretation of my religion says not to. And any attempt to either make me do my job, or punish me for not doing my job, is discrimination. Help, help I’m being oppressed. Come and see the oppression inherent in the system.”
It’ll be interesting to see how many people who cheer Kim Davis *also* cheer Charee Stanley. Somehow… I suspect there won’t be a whole lot of overlap.
A few hours ago I watched live CNN as a rally formed around the release of Davis. While I thought jailing her was at best monumentally silly, I was rather more disturbed by the ridiculous rhetoric used by the likes of Mike Huckabee. I become further convinced than I already was that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that *craves* martyrdom, that sees being oppressed as the highest display of worth. And since, let’s face it, they’re *not* being oppressed (certainly not any form of oppression that anyone burned at the stake or shunned by their family or beheaded or sold into slavery would recognize as oppression), they need to invent oppression in order to feel holy.
Sep 082015
A few days ago I bemoaned the way in which the makers of “The Making of Stanley Kubricks 2001” picked the gimmicky nature of the book layout format over the actual contents of the book. Well, seems the Monty Python folks also have a yen to go gimmicky with a 40th edition special edition Blu-Ray of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail…” but here it looks like that actually *adds* to the awesomeness of the product rather than taking away from it.
I mean, who *wouldn’t* want a cow-flinging catapult?
Sep 082015
The image quality is admittedly terrible (being a scan of a print of a microfilm), but this might be of interest… a piece of NASA art circa 1963 depicting the Saturn V with an S-N third stage rather than an S-IVb third stage. The S-N was not a fixed design, but varied over the years; here, it was a fairly stubby stage ten meters in diameter, same as the S-IC and S-II stage. The S-N would vary in diameter and length from design to design, but one common element was the use of a single NERVA solid-core nuclear thermal rocket engine. As shown here, the distance from the nuclear rocket to the Apollo capsule up front just isn’t terribly far; consequently, this depicted a design with extraordinary levels of shielding, or depicted an unmanned Apollo (but then, why the abort tower), or it was just artistic license.
Sep 072015
Black-and-white copy of a piece of artwork depicting two Boeing Model 733 SST concepts. Circa 1963 or so.
A high-rez version of this has been posted to the APR Patreon Dropbox “2015-09 APR Extras” folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons.
Sep 072015
The three-and-a-half-decade-gone ten-year-old in me wants this *so* bad…
It’s kinda on the pricey side at $130.00. But it does look *reasonably* accurate; a bit of work and this could probably be made into an attractive replica that actually functions.
Sep 062015
Yikes:
Canon develops APS-H-size CMOS sensor with approximately 250 megapixels, the world’s highest pixel count for its size
Canon Inc. announced today that it has developed an APS-H-size (approx. 29.2 x 20.2 mm) CMOS sensor incorporating approximately 250 million pixels (19,580 x 12,600 pixels), the world’s highest number of pixels1 for a CMOS sensor smaller than the size of a 35 mm full-frame sensor.
When installed in a camera, the newly developed sensor was able to capture images enabling the distinguishing of lettering on the side of an airplane flying at a distance of approximately 18 km from the shooting location.
I’d imagine that a limit on the utility of the system would be the optics. I know dialing in focus for long-distance shots is troublesome enough with my creaky old camera now… I shudder to imagine the utter failure of getting precise focus for a 250 megapixel sensor.