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.
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.
I’m in the process of setting up a Patreon for Pax Orionis. It’s not yet public; still scribbling on it. As previously mentioned, it’s not a “monthly” thing, but instead a “creation” thing… patrons only get charged when I actually produce a new creation.
Still a little uncertain about a few things. There are currently only two reward levels:
$1.00 per creation: “One dollar per release gets you – as you might expect – the latest piece of Pax Orionis fiction in PDF and EPUB formats.”
$2.00 per creation: “Two dollars per release gets you not only the latest piece of the story but also a Technical Data Sheet… a diagram of some piece of technology (a spacecraft,a weapons system, a launch vehicle, a military aircraft, etc.) relevant to the world of Pax Orionis.”
Sound fair? Comments? Critiques? Ideas for further reward levels?
One idea that was floated was for a patron to pay something extra to include the patrons name in the story somewhere as a character. While I’m not opposed to the idea, I’m not sure how to do it in the context of Patreon, which is a continual subscription system.
The idea was floated a few days ago of trying to do Pax Orionis via Patreon; it seemed to go over like a tungsten balloon. Oh, well. I suggested that something I’d include at certain levels of patronage would be diagrams of PO-related technological goodies, along with data and description. As examples… something like these, which are designs specifically for Pax Orionis. Obviously they incorporate real-world design elements, but what are depicted are vehicles from the PO timeline.
I continue to tinker with the CAD diagrams for “Nuclear Pulse Propulsion,” as well as creating new ones. I decided to see what the diagrams for the 10-Meter design for the USAF would look like in a larger format… in this case, two sheets 40 inches by 10, at 1/96 scale. A fair bit of formatting needed as yet, but on the whole I think they look pretty good.
Anyone interested? I’m thinking a combination of prints (folded into a book or rolled) and cyanotype blueprints on vellum. If this idea is popular (I’m going to take at least this design to print, just for myself), I’d do something similar for the 10-meter NASA vehicle, the 20-meter NASA vehicle and the 86-foot 4,000 “battleship.”
Today I picked up four large format scans from a local print shop. All were scanned in full color at 300 DPI; the B-52 diagram was so large that I had to reduce it in size a bit – from 300 to 250 DPI – to make it work in most of my image processing programs. Still… with an original 110 inches long, scaling down a bit really isn’t much of a loss.
First: a Boeing model shop diagram of a B-52B display model at 1/40 scale. Model shop diagrams are often the best bets for clear, accurate aircraft diagrams.
Second, an old Boeing diagram of the Model 80 trimotor:
Then the USAF “supersonic escape capsule” which sure looks a lot like Fat Man:
And then a Rocketdyne diagram of the Atlas booster rocket engine:
These will likely be offered up to APR Patreon Patrons. If you want in on that, and to help out on the effort to procure these things (trust me, they’re *not* cheap!), please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
This seems to be a joint venture between the Chinese and TerraPower, a Bellevue, Washington company. While it’s good to see an American company building a new reactor, two things come to mind:
1) It would be better if the development was being done here in the US, for the benefit of the American electrical grid, American construction workers, American nuclear engineers and the American economy
2) This would be the same China that’s trying to gobble up the South China Sea *and* recently gave the world this (note: filmed by an American millenial, with the sort of limited vocabulary we’ve come to expect from American millenials educated in the Department of Educations best style… so, y’know, NSFW):
With the recent explosion in China, it’s worth reflecting on vaguely similar explosions in the US.
Most famous is perhaps the PEPCON explosion in Henderson, Nevada, in 1988. This was a fire at an ammonium perchlorate production facility; the AP – a solid salt that is used as an oxidizer in solid rocket motors from ICBMs to the Shuttle boosters – was stored rather densely packed in barrels made from plastic and aluminum – which are used as rocket *fuel.* Added excitement came from the fact that this rocket propellant manufacturing plant was built directly on top of a 16-inch high-pressure natural gas pipeline feeding into Las Vegas. The yield of the explosions has been estimated in the area of one kiloton. When PEPCON blew up, it took out the plants ability to produce ammonium perchlorate. This was bad, due to the strategic value of the stuff; fortunately, there were at the time two major manufacturers of AP at the time, the other being Kerr-McGee. But due to what can only be considered bad planning, the Kerr-McGee plant was only 1.5 miles from the PEPCON plant and also received some damage.
Another exciting blast was a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. While nowhere near as energetic as the PEPCON blast, this one had the benefit of happening in 2013, well into the era of cell phone video cameras. Also well into the era of people not having a whole hell of a lot of common sense.
Of course, these all pale compared to the Texas City explosion of 1947, where 2,100,000 kilos of ammonium nitrate fertilizer detonated on the cargo ship SS Grandcamp. One of the ships damaged in the blast was the SS High Flyer, which had an additional 872,000 kilos of ammonium nitrate; after 15 hours of onboard fires, this, too, detonated, tossing the ships propeller a mile inland. Some 580+ people were killed at Texas City.
Of course, not every explosion is unintentional. Back when the US had a spine and was developing and testing nukes, the military would from time to time set of monumental chemical explosions in order to do some calibration testing and the like. One such as the “Sailor Hat” test in 1965, where 500 tons of high explosives were detonated on the shore of Kaho’olawe Island, Hawaii, trashing several nearby ships.
Three articles… one from August 6, 1945 announcing the atom bombing of Hiroshima; one from August 9, describing the bombing of Nagasaki; and one from August 14, announcing that the Japanese had surrendered.
