Sep 142017
 

Or, more specifically, I just realized why I loved one minor detail about “The Orville:” the viewscreen. It’s FRIGGEN’ HUGE. The viewscreen on the bridge of Star Trek vessels has always been disturbingly small, which has never made any sense.

It’s unclear whether the viewscreen here is a projection or a window. External shots show a bright white glow covering the region that would be the viewscreen, but there are also clearly visible windows that show the interior normally-lit.

It’s never too early to start getting all nit-picky tech-nerd about these things…

 Posted by at 9:46 pm
Sep 142017
 

It’s nice to see an aerospace company that doesn’t try to hide it’s failures. This video has just been put out by SpaceX showing a number of their early landing fails; many are really quite interesting (an spectacular). Since a wise person (or company) learns from its failures, shortcomings, screwups and disasters, keeping a records and actively remembering this sort of thing is important.

And note just how many complete vehicle failures there were is such a relatively short period of time… and try to imagine a NASA program surviving even a third of that, never mind flying again quite so soon.

 Posted by at 10:32 am
Sep 102017
 

In retrospect, I think that the negative reviews a few days ago worked for the best here. Up until I read the reviews, I assumed that  “Orville” would be a parody, not and actual Trek-like show with added humor. Had I gone into the show cold with that misunderstanding, I’m sure that I would also have been annoyed. But since that incorrect illusion no longer held I was able to appreciate the show for what it was. And what it was was… pretty good, actually.

Orville is clearly not meant to be hard-hitting sci-fi… and that’s a bit of a refreshing change. It’s not gritty or grimdark; the world of the Orville is, at least so far, a pretty upbeat place. The production design clearly hearkens back to Star Trek: The Next Generation, but as far as the tone of the show I got a lot more of Star Trek: The Original Series. The characters are occasionally interesting and actually seem *happy* to be doing what they’re doing. Compare that to TNG, Voyager and Enterprise, where the characters were either crashingly dull or jerks, there out of a sense of duty or some goofball socialistic ideology that means that they are merely cogs in the machine (DS9 actually had interesting characters, but it was a show loaded with grim and gritty). While Seth MacFarlane is no Bill Shatner, I see a lot more of Kirk in his Captain Mercer that, say, Picard or Sisko.

Of course, all this could change in future episodes.

I was impressed with the visual effects, especially the spacecraft scenes. If the show makes it, I can see a whole lot of people making models of the ships from the show.

So, based on a grand total of one episode, I liked it. Clearly, though, the professional critics didn’t… it’s sitting at 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. Perhaps the next two episodes – the critics saw the first three – stink. or perhaps my tastes don’t closely align with professional critics. Hmmm.

UPDATE: Hmmmm….

 Posted by at 9:13 pm
Sep 102017
 

Recently on ebay were a set of 8X10 glossies, vintage Convair artwork depicting early spacecraft and launch vehicle concepts. I had my bid in… and was sniped in the last few seconds. Oh well. Anyway, one of the more interesting images was this one of the Convair “Helios” developed by or for Krafft Ehricke… a chemical rocket first stage equipped with wings for glide recovering and a nuclear powered second stage with a “tractor” arrangement to separate the nuclear engine from the payload – essentially a small manned laboratory to land on the moon. The second stage would unreel something like half a miles worth of cabling and drag the payload along behind it, relying on distance rather than physical radiation shielding. The second stage would take the payload all the way to the lunar surface, gently lowering it down at the end of the cables, then land Way Over There Somewhere. A modern design would, I would hope, include electrical cables and would serve as a power generator.

A middling-resolution scan of the same image was posted back in January. One day I shall get a clean high-rez version. If that day is a particularly glorious day, it will come not only with the other images created for the Helios project… but they’ll also be in color.

 Posted by at 1:03 am
Sep 082017
 

Processed images from the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter. This Flickr account has some damn fine images at some damn fine resolution.

 

And then there’s this video composited from various images… with the ABSOLUTELY PERFECT music to go with it.

A little while ago I posted about some “2001” bluray screenshots and someone suggested that the movie needed to be redone with all-new visual effects; i argued that the only bits in the movie that could really benefit might be replacing the rather bland matte paintings of Earth. After seeing this, I can see how updating Jupiter could be *spectacular.*

 Posted by at 12:40 am
Aug 272017
 

There are several websites that have collections of Blu-Ray screencaps from various movies. But “2001” has somehow failed to be the number-one screengrabbed movie. Finally, though, one of the sites has made a bajillion screencaps from the “2001” Blu-Ray and posted them. Behold your new background screens!

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

 

Now I need to start whining about the lack of a thousand “2001” 4K screencaps…

 Posted by at 11:23 am
Aug 252017
 

Hmmm…

It’s claimed to be a functional space suit, good for a vacuum.  It’s less of a true space suit than a survival suit, like the suits the Mercury astronauts wore: good enough to keep you alive in case the spacecraft loses pressure, but not very flexible. Not something you’d want to go outside the ship and do repairs and fight Martians in. I guess we’ll see…

 

 Posted by at 10:28 am
Aug 192017
 

In the 1960’s, sending space probes to Mars was a crapshoot; both the US and USSR lost very expensive spacecraft. This was due to one simple fact: spaceflight is hard. But in 1965, JPL engineer (John Casani) jokingly told a reporter that the problem was the Great Galactic Ghoul, a Mars-based monster that kept eating spacecraft. A few years later when Mariner 7 seemingly disappeared, a JPL artist (G. W. Burton) painted the Ghoul chomping down on the probe.

I’ve posted the full-rez scan (from an 8X10 B&W glossy) to the 2017-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder for APR Patrons ($4 and up level).

 Posted by at 11:23 pm