Aug 032015
Jul 282015
One of the last, if not the last, chapters in my Nuclear Pulse Propulsion book will be on NPP in popular culture. Mostly, of course, this means nuclear pulse spacecraft in science fiction… short stories, novels, TV, movies. These vehicles will get layout diagrams just like the non-fiction concepts.
With designs that are complex or difficult to really work out – which covers just about all fictional designs – I’ve found that it is a whole lot easier to build the vehicle as a 3D CAD model and then convert that into a 2D diagram. A bonus of doing it this way is that perspective views are also possible. So because why not, here are some of the fictional NPP’s that will appear in the book, along with the current status list for NPP diagrams (green means the diagram is done, yellow means it’s in progress, red means I haven’t started or haven’t gone beyond preliminary scribble). Some of the fictional designs, such as the “Orion Shall Rise” and the Tycho were drawn in 2D right from the get-go. Currently being pieced together is the Archangel Michael. It is a bit different from the usual depiction in a number of ways, most obvious being the straight shock absorbers. I understand the reasoning behind those designs that use angled and pivoting shocks to allow the pusher “dome” to swing with respect to the rest of the ship… but I still don’t agree that that’s a good engineering solution. Once you get the dome swinging, getting it to *stop* is going to be a friggen nightmare, especially if the ship remains under thrust. The dynamics of a spring system like this with that many degrees of freedom would be massively complex, never mind the actual mechanics. Oh well. Anyway, my “Michael” is still far from finished. The interior is only roughly sketched out, armament is currently rough and incomplete and secondary payloads need a lot of work.
In the final book, these fictional designs will get not only orthogonal views, but also to greater or lesser degrees “rationalization.” Some designs I can’t honestly make any real sense of, and thus they’ll get the bare bones. Some I can dream up a fair bit of (essentially fan fiction) explanation for, so they’ll get further detail work.
Jul 222015
I have finished the next Pax Orionis story (to the first draft level, at any rate).”Deadliest Catch” – which will almost certainly be re-titled, for legal reasons if nothing else – is a bit shorter than “The Cuban War,” and tells a far smaller story. One incident from the Great War of 1984. It is written in the form of a magazine article interviewing one of the participants 10 years later, and probably needs to be tightened up a *lot.* But I think it’s potentially entertaining.
As previously mentioned, I’ll send a PDF of this to the first three commenters who want to read it, with the understanding that:
The only requirements will be that the readers do *not* share it further, but *do* share via email any critiques or suggestions they have… and that they post comments on the blog giving their general impressions. “This sucks” or “this is great” are both fine, so long as they are the honest assessment. No spoilers!
So… if you’d like to read “Deadliest Catch” and give me your honest feedback, leave a comment below.
UPDATE: Three commenters spoke up and have been emailed a copy of “Deadliest Catch.” So now we wait…
Jul 142015
I have a number of ideas for different tales to go into Pax Orionis, including standard third person narratives, bits of memoirs, articles, interviews, technical descriptions, etc. Some of them I’ve started poking away at. Because why not, below are the opening paragraphs of four such yarns. Some I have little more than what’s here, others are good long chunks. None are done. The titles are just placeholders for the moment,
Jul 082015
I haven’t had an opportunity to really dig into this, but Boeing just patented a jet engine powered not by hydrocarbon fuel combustion but by small nuclear explosions. Basically an Orion (via laser-driven inertial confinement compression of tiny fusion fuel pellets) in a jet, stuck on a passenger plane.
Neato.
The US Patent Office page on this.
THIS should link directly to the PDF of the patent.
Sigh. Every single time I think I’ve got a handle on “this is everything in the world of NPP, I can finally finish the book,” they suck me back in
Jul 042015
Here is the first completed chunk of Pax Orionis. The irony is that I’m not sure that if I finish the work I’ll include this. What we have here is a history of the Cuban War that is the point of divergence from history as we know it to the history that results in Orion battleships fighting a massive nuclear war. The final book might not include this for the reason that it’s a big chunk of exposition that might not be needed… a book on World War II might not have a complete chapter laying out the history of World War I, but would instead just touch on bits and pieces of it. But, what the heck. I figured some of y’all might find it interesting, and some others might like to tear it apart and tell me where I’m dead wrong.
It is available in two formats… a PDF which you can DOWNLOAD RIGHT HERE, formatted for good old 8.5X11, and a Kindle epub version available at Amazon. The PDF is free; the Kindle version is the cheapest price available… 99 cents. If that seems like too much for an admittedly dry short story, don’t worry… I only get 35 cents of that.
If you read this and like it, feel free to toss a few nickles into the tip jar (notice how I haven’t put out a US Aerospace Projects since April? Yeah, pretty much this is why). And feel free to tell anybody you want that this literary masterpiece, or literary abomination, is available here. Constructive criticism – especially on factual matters, of which there are a number here I just handwaved – is appreciated.
The Cuban War.pdf
If you don’t see the standard Amazon ad-box thing for “The Cuban War” immediately above this… it’s probably a browser issue. So, try HERE as another link.
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LEGAL NOTICE:
I have, hopefully, much more coming. It is possible, though exceedingly unlikely, that it might be publishable in some form or another. And while I have a lot of ideas and plans for what’s going to happen, story-wise, I don’t plan on just giving it all away. So feel free to comment your ideas and suggestions below, but be advised that I may well already have thought the same thing. So if you don’t want to see *your* idea show up in *my* book… well, don’t post it.
This sort of thing happened 20 or so years ago with “Babylon 5.” The creator, J Michael Straczynski, used to hang out on the B-5 Usenet groups. And that was awesome. but he eventually had to bail because people were posting speculations about things that wouldn’t be seen for another year or three, and he could get in trouble if someone had posted an idea that wound up on screen, even if the idea was created entirely independently.
Jun 292015
I’ve been pecking away at various aspects of Pax Orionis lately. Most of my writing has been involved with various aspects of the history leading up to The War. I could have started with the war first, and backfilled the history after, but it seems to me better to start at the beginning, work through the course of events leading to the war, and then staging the war with the world that the history gives.
Since the US fights the war with Orion ships, I figure it’s a good idea to figure out how many ships the US has, of what type, and what their capabilities are. Below is a very preliminary chart of the ships of the USSF and NASA in chronological and to scale. Names and numbers will likely change; the designs are currently in flux. The double vertical line at the right indicates the war, so the two craft introduced after that are post-war designs.
Jun 272015
For APR Patrons, here’s what you now have available:
Documents: 2 General Electric reports on nuclear turbojets, *packed* with diagrams
Document: Mercury/Redstone booster recovery
Large diagram: 2 this time… “Long Tank Delta” space launch rocket and “Honest John” battlefield nuclear missile
CAD diagram: Convair “FISH,” 1958 configuration
If you’d like to access these and many others, or if you’d simply like to help the cause of recovering and making available forgotten aerospace ephemera such as this, please check out the APR Patreon page.
Jun 212015
Today I finished the first really rough draft of the “Cuba” portion of Pax Orionis. It is currently one heck of a mess… part dry laying out of facts (this city gets hit with this, that city loses so many, things happen at this time, blah, blah, blah) and part Some Guy Describing What Happened. A whole lot of editing is needed, but it currently stands at over 9,000 words. Not much… but at 300 words per novel-page, that’s about 30 pages. And that’s at least ten percent of a good-sized novel right there. So… maybe this might be doable after all.
Since I have no delusions about finding a publisher for this, what I’ll probably do when it’s all edited is just post the thing in PDF form free for the downloading. And put the tip jar next to it. And put a link to an Amazon Kindle version next to that, at the cheapest price that Amazon allows (fifty cents, I think?). And see how it goes from there.
Jun 142015
Here is the *start* of the bit of the project I’ve been occasionally poking away at… a bit of back story. How to get from the history we know, where Project Orion was cancelled and the USSR peacefully imploded, to an alternate history where Orion progressed and WWIII broke out in 1984? There is but one major world event that could have changed the course of things… and the historical fact seems to be that if one anonymous sailor threw left rather than right, big things could have changed almost immediately.
Of course, a whole lot of the history in this section is just straight out of *our* history.
What’s below in text is about a third of this part of the history that I’ve written, and it’ll probably wind up being about one-fifth once I’m done with it. I’d appreciate input.
If by some unlikely chance you think it’s awesome and are dying to read more… I’m bribable.