Winter has finally grown cold enough that the garage has dropped substantially below freezing, but bottled water is still liquid. Water can remain liquid far below its freezing point if it is pure enough; by not having a nucleation point for the freezing process to start on, undisturbed water can get to something like 40 below before it will freeze. But if supercooled water is agitated, the process can begin. Behold the utter excitement of life in my garage:
Yeah, yeah, vertical video. Learn to live with disappointment, it’s not like going landscape would have bought this anything.
For nothing more than trimming videos for YouTube and splicing bits together. Since I’ve little enough interest in devoting a lot of time to becoming a famous YouTuber, all I need is something pretty basic. Open to suggestions.
SpaceX has been trying to launch Starship serial number 9 for a few days now, with the efforts being held up by FAA regulatory approval. This is of course bad… the only thing worse for a world-changing advance in technology than getting the engineering wrong is to have either incompetent or malignant government bureaucrats involved.
Still… while SN9 is awaiting launch, SN10 has been moved to the pad. Behold:
Someday – probably not during this Presidential Administration, but perhaps during the administration of President Cruz, with NASA overseen by VP Shapiro – we might see whole rows of these things lined up ready to go, some sitting on Superheavies to lob large payloads into orbit, some sitting by themselves for long range suborbital flights or even, just barely, SSTO quick reaction flights. Some will be in NASA colors, some in USSF markings; there will be FedEx and UPS vehicles for intercontinental package transport and for transport to LEO, GEO and the Lunar bases. Maybe even one in Space Force One colors to take the President to visit American bases, cities and industrial exploitation facilities on the Moon and Lagrange points.
Sigh. It’s sad to think that in many ways the 1970’s were more forward thinking than today. Solar Power Satellites the size of Manhattan, space colonies the size of small states. Today… apart from SpaceX, about the most you can hope for is ever more social media. Until, of course, you get deplatformed.
Below is a piece of NASA-Ames art depicting the interior of an Island 3 colony. The full size version is downloadable HERE. This was intended to be a cylinder 5 miles or so in diameter by 20 long, rotating along the long axis to generate “gravity.” In this design, fully one third of the “land area” was given over to windows that would bring in sunlight via mirrors. Other notions included mounting strips of very powerful artificial light on the “ground” facing up to light the other side (this was the Babylon 5 approach), mounting strips of artificial light along the central axis pointing outwards, having external parabolic mirror beam sunlight through the central axis and reflected or diffused outwards. In order for an island 3 habitat like this to be dynamically stable, you’d need two of them, side by side, rigidly linked at the hubs. This would counter the torque and prevent the cylinders from converting rotation around the long axis into end-over-end tumbling, which is the natural response of something like this (experiment: try to spin a pencils around the long axis. You will inevitably end up with it tumbling)
The NASA art below shows an exterior view of a complete colony.The habitats would need to be pretty close to the same mass, but otherwise their interiors could be very different… one could replicate, say, farmland and meadows and such with small towns scattered about; the other could have forests and large cities. One could be in winter, the other in summer. The full-rez is downloadable HERE.
There is a ring of “cans” around the end of each habitat. These are the agricultural units for the habitat; each independently spin around their own axis, generating the level of artificial G appropriate to grow wheat or corn or weed or hay or whatever is needed. Being smaller in radius, Coriolis effects would be substantially more noticeable; but as plants don’t care, and the job of agriculture will probably be done by robots, it doesn’t matter much. Each farm would be pretty well closed off from the others, so if some sort of blight were to pop up, chances are good it could be contained.
A few years ago I had a notion for a book – half technical descriptions, half manifesto/screed – about megaprojects. A description of not only what mankind could do given time and energy, but what mankind *should* do in time. As with a lot of things, this books got squashed by the realization that its already been done (gosh, thanksIsaac Arthur), but I still kinda want to 3D CAD model one of these things. I’ve not thought about that book in some years… got a hundred pages into it, I think. Shrug.
Babylon 5 showed up on HBOMax today. I took a look at a few bits and pieces… “Severed Dreams” and “Sleeping In Light” to be precise – and can confirm that it looks great. It’s back to the original aspect ratio; it looks like some sort of processing was done to it so that it looks better than DVD quality, though clearly not super-duper upscaling. If anyone knows how long it’ll be on HBOMax, let me know. it would be nice if it’ll be there for a few years, but it’s hard to tell.
Now, consider this. A plot point in Season One is the election for Earth Alliance President. In the end, Luis Santiago wins the vote as President, and brings along Vice President Clark. By the end of Season One, Santiago is dead in an explosion of the transport vessel Earthforce One, and Clark is President. Clark does such a piss-poor job – screws with the economy, institutes departments devoted to deplatforming/depersoning people and squashing the views of those who disagree, gets the government into bed with badguys, creates a surveillance state that will punish you for wrongthink (literally, what with the Psi Corps), mandates political/ideological tests – that humanity splits apart and a civil war breaks out. On one side, Big Government, with all the power; on the other side, the people who just want to be left alone with their freedoms and their guns and their low taxes. Hijinks ensue, many die. Turns out Clark, under the influence of shadowy manipulators from far away, set up Santiagos assassination with a bomb.
One wonders if President Biden has a scheduled stop at a transfer station near a place called Io…
I’ve found that archives going from pure-paper to digital to be as much a curse as a blessing. Sure, the stuff that gets scanned and placed into publicly accessible archives? Great. But… often enough, archives that scan their stuff often decide that once the original is digitized they have no further use for the original… and it gets thrown away or outright destroyed. that wouldn’t be *too* bad if the scans were good. but too often they’re not. All too often the scans are *crap.* For example, some years back NASA scanned in the files of a deceased engineer. *Lots* of great stuff was scanned and made available. A lot of what the guy had were large format diagrams of hypersonic aircraft… X-24C derivatives, hypersonic research aircraft, HSTs, that sort of thing. What actually got scanned: just the data block. The on-hand scanner was good for letter size, so rather than going to the bother of scanning the large format sheet in chunks, or taking it somewhere than had a large format scanner, whoever did the scanning just scanned, essentially, the title of the thing. And then what? NASA destroyed the originals. You can see the titles, you can see perhaps a piece of a tail or a wingtip… and in all probability that’s all you will *ever* see, because they just couldn’t be bothered.
Recently the “AF FOIA Reading Room” appeared. I’ve found a *few* things of interest on it, one being a summary of the F-108 and B-70 programs. It’s reasonably well illustrated, which is a bonus. Should be great, right? Prepare to be disappointed. Here is the quality of the digitized document… 2-bit black and white at low resolution:
That’s friggen’ craptacular. 2-bit is always the mark of not-giving-a-damn, but to do that with old, clearly time-darkened paper is a crime against humanity. The only way to hope to make anything halfway decent from it is to go through it and manually clean it up. The secondary approach of letting the computer try gives results that are just plain disappointing:
It is *somewhat* clearer. But a whole lot of data is simply lost and unrecoverable, even with manual, skilled and talented cleanup. The “Enhance” button only does so much.
So if *you* have interesting aerospace diagrams and documents, *please* don’t do this. The minimum for text and diagrams is 300 dpi, grayscale, saved in a lossless format such as PNG or TIF. If the diagrams are the slightest bit faded, or if there is anything remotely colorful, scan in full color. Photos and art… full color and consider scanning at 600 or even 1200 dpi. Sure, the file sizes are way bigger. But storage space is vastly cheaper and more abundant than it was just a few years ago. And there are people, AHEM, who will scan this sort of thing for you, just to make sure it’s preserved.
Whatever you think of Trump starting his own party – more on that momentarily – the fact that he’s taking a name formerly used by a bunch of socialists? Friggen’ awesome. “We’re reclaiming the name,” or some such. The original “Patriot Party” was started in the 1960’s to push socialist policies… about as far from patriotic as you can get.
But to the larger point, a take-it-for-what-it’s-worth poll:
*If* the poll is accurate, and if the numbers actually held once the “Patriot Party” got up to speed, the poll suggests that in the 2024 Presidential election, the Republican candidate would get 17% of the vote, the Democrat 46%, the Patriot 23% and “other” 14%. That seem monumentally hand-wavy to me… President Harris will doubtless be quite unpopular by 2024, the Republicans might actually get their act together, the Patriot might be Jessie Ventura for all I know. Still: if a third party is formed specifically to target conservatives, this will entrench Democrats as the ultimate power in the universe, even if the Reps and the Pats combined get more than half the total votes.
On the other hand, if the Patriot Party truly does become that popular – a prospect I find dubious, but I suppose possible given how gormless so many of the Republics are these days – then the Reps would be well advised to suck up to the Pats. Come up with candidates for office that both parties can get behind.
Yeah. That’ll happen. Maybe when the stars are right.
I’ve recently been reminded of Project Thor, the notion of dropping telephone poles of tungsten from orbit as kinetic weapons. Often, people who don’t know better declare that such things would have the power of nuclear bombs; this is only true if you assume *really* *small* nukes. Do the math, people; the equations for calculating mass from density and dimensions of a cylinder ain’t that hard, and plugging said mass into a kinetic energy equation assuming some fraction of orbital velocity ain’t that hard either.
Anyway, the thought of Thor got me thinking to the one time I can immediately recall seeing the system used in a movie:
Here, a single kinetic weapon is dropped on metropolitan London, and the entire city is utterly destroyed. The power of the weapon is ludicrous, being quite a few orders of magnitude greater than anything a reasonable Thor could do. Sigh, that’s Hollywood.
But what interested me was the comments section. There is a discussion there about whether losing London would utterly destroy Britain, or whether the nation would recover; a secondary discussion about rebuilding the city. Now, never mind the ludicrousness of the silly weapon system employed. Just assume that, somehow, London kerploded as shown here. A subterranean Tsar bomb, an asteroid impact, Harry Potter has a brain fart, a glitch in the matrix, whatever. London is utterly blendered; everyone and everything within a couple kilometers is not just reduced to rubble, but the soil and bedrock have hopped up and down. The Thames no longer has a well established riverbed; the terrain itself is randomized. The Underground is aboveground. The millions dead don’t need burying; they’re already buried.
Assuming that the effects were reasonably localized – no fallout, other explosions, sudden outbreak of thermonuclear war, monsters from the abyss spilling out of cracks int he Earth, etc. – would this utterly trash Britain? Ten million-ish dead… that’s bad news. But as several YouTube commenters point out, London is no longer an English city; most of those dead would not be English (whether you consider “English” to be ethnic, cultural or legal). London is responsible for a whole lot of the British economy, but it’s sorta the “fake” economy of financial stuff, not growing stuff or making stuff. Presumably the bulk of British government types would be included in the lost, along with the Royals; this would be as much “opportunity” as “tragedy.”
Discounting the effect of other nations moving in, either to stabilize or to take over, what would be the likely immediate outcome to wider British society? Would Scotland at last say “see ya” and bug out? Would the remaining Brits decide that now’s the time to restore Britain and eject the “grooming gangs” and their enablers? Would English ethnonationalism rise as a way to bring the people (well, most of them) together to recover, or would they sink into a morass of malaise and infighting? And would they bother trying to rebuild London? London has been trashed before… fires, plagues, the Blitz. But in those incidents, the *ground* remained for new stuff to be built atop the old stuff. But here? Big blocks of bedrock pointing skywards, a mile-wide swamp where there was once a river, a billion tons of building materials mixed almost randomly amidst boulders and gravel and dirt.
Just a thought. If someone were to take a model of the CVN-65 USS Enterprise nuclear powered aircraft carrier and modify it with the Douglas “Ithacus Jr.” rocket transport as in the concept art below, what should go along with it? The art depicts the Enterprise modified with a bow extension, two movable “VABs,” and two of the rocket transports (an aft extension is implied but not visible). The flight deck is shown as deserted, which is reasonable under the circumstances… with those VABs, most of the flight deck would be unavailable for takeoffs and landings. Only the angled deck would seem to provide some functionality there.
The concept dates from 1964. If a model was made, it would probably tend to represent a time frame from the mid 1970’s onwards. What should be on the deck in that case, to help dress it up (it seems like it’d be kinda bland without some other things populating the deck)? A few things seem reasonable:
With all the burning last year, I missed this story. The next time you hear or read on one of those Antifa goons torching a place, and some oxygen thief defends their actions because “arson isn’t violence” or “it’s just stuff” or some such vacuous drivel, hit them with this story:
Now, the defender-of-arson will likely point out “but there was a funding effort and he got a lot of money” or “he probably had insurance” or some such nonsense. Never mind the emotional distress of having *your* *stuff* destroyed, there is also this:
Ron had spent 20 years breeding a super-bee that was able to survive attacks from a killer mite that destroyed millions of bees across the world.
The arsonists didn’t just take away a hobby or a source of income… they endangered the very existence of bees. And without bees, a lot of other species will suffer -including humans – due to bees being important pollinators. The arsonists can fairly be faulted for a mass attack on the environment, attempted (perhaps eventually successful) extermination of whole species, and genocide against large swaths of mankind.
No fundamental difference between these arsonists and those who burned Uncle Hugo’s science fiction bookstore… or anywhere else. That’s why I stand foursquare with those calling for the identification, arrest and charging with insurrection/domestic terrorism all those who set fires within the Capitol building earlier this month.
