Continuing…
In 1985 Rockwell considered the possibility of a 150-ton payload reusable SSTO. Possible missions for it included lunar logistics, space based weaponry and solar power satellite launch. There were, however, no actual paid-for programs needing the capability enough to justify the development cost.
I vaguely recall seeing a diagram of this design somewhere, long ago. An article in “Spaceflight,” perhaps?
Pop quiz, hotshots: let’s say you’re a collector of aerospace history documentation. And for reasons that seem good at the time, you start stuffing it into boxes 15 by 12 by 10 inches, averaging thirty to forty pounds per box.
How many boxes before you say, “that’s a good collection,” how many till “whoa, that’s a lot,” and how many till “you have a problem?”
Not quite sure what you’d do with this.
Not something I can really see spending $200 on, but three cheers for capitalism. Capitalism: bring you stuff you don;t need, and giving you a world better than you could have imagined.
Read this and ponder the future of the English race.
What appears to have happened is a 19-year-old tried to be friendly with a 17-year-old girl, it was misinterpreted, she *massively* over-reacted, and now she’s trying to destroy him. Even if her description of what physically happened is accurate – he walked up to her twice and touched her arm and side for a few seconds – her description of basically going into long-term emotional meltdown over it seems like either she is mentally ill or the product of a system that has gone overboard to train girls to live in perpetual fear, to assume that every male they meet is a vile, violent monster, that the most innocent touch is simple pretext for kidnapping and assault and murder.
The guy seems to be painfully shy, perhaps Aspergery. He had to look up “how to make a friend” online. A longer article is HERE. I shudder to imagine how much trouble I would have gotten in had I grown up in such a dystopian legal system.
You want “incels?” This is how you get incels. Any boy going to that girls school would be well advised to avoid her like the plague, and could hardly be blamed if they decided that PlayStation and XBox were better uses of their time than dating. And some people wonder why there’s a declining birth rate in the West.
“Star Trek” and “Star Wars” get fan films galore. “2001: A Space odyssey?” Not so much. This one is worth the watch; it’s simple, well-made, and ignores the events of “2010.”
Whoa. Not so long ago the DoD woulda *killed* to have the sort of capability now available to skilled amateurs.
Amazing the pictures you can take from your own backyard – like Alberto did in Italy. Just need skill & a telescope! pic.twitter.com/5o5R9Emvia
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) October 10, 2019
As previously mentioned, I have a *lot* of National Geographics. I’d once hoped to have a complete collection, but now it is time for them to go. My collection is pretty complete back into the 1960’s, with scattered issues back to the 40’s. Since 2010 or so the collection is pretty scattered.
Rather than trying to sell the issues individually, I’m boxing them into lots by year. On ebay, issues from the seventies seem to be priced anywhere from a buck each to five or even more bucks each… so… call it a$12 for a years worth of Nat Geos, plus postage. A years worth of these magazines weighs about 10.5 pounds. Media mail would run $8, so $20 for a single year. Four years would fit in a larger box for $24 postage… call it $70 total for four years.
If interested in a year or more’s National Geographics, send me an email letting me know which. 
As mentioned a few days ago, “Primal” is a new animated series on Adult Swim depicting the adventures of a “cave man” and his Allosaurus-like dinosaur compadre. AS is running a new episode every night this week. I’m not certain if more episodes have been made (only five seem to be acknowledged), but they damn well better make enough episodes of this to rival “The Simpsons.”
Anyway, as previously mentioned Primal stomps on scientific accuracy by having dinosaurs from all eras alongside humans (or near-humans) and mammoths and whatnot. Given that it’s a good show, I can just shrug it off and enjoy the show for what it is. But tonights episode, “Terror Under the Blood Moon,” was different. It introduced bats substantially more massive than humans and a spider the size of a sauropod that shoots web-silk from its mouth. These are creatures that not only never existed, they never *could* have existed. So… the nerd-module activated and came to a conclusion: this isn’t Earth. This isn’t the past. And it’s not just the future… it’s a specific one. It’s George R.R. Martin’s “Thousand Worlds” universe. More specifically, it’s a world that has been terraformed by Haviland Tuf and his “seedship,” the planet given genetically created critters and monsters. The seedship had, in Martins “Tuf Voyaging,” demonstrated a capability to create a range of monsters including Tyrannosaurs, along with critters from many alien worlds and beasts of wholly new designs. It would be simplicity itself for Tuf to populate a world with critters like those in “Primal.”
Will it be revealed in some future episode that the adventures of Spear and Fang are being observed from deep space by a bald fat Aspergery guy surrounded by an army of cats? Doubtful. But it’d be a hoot if it was.
Don’t you feel safer already?
A number of people have told me to try self-publishing my books on Amazon. Stories like this one just add to the pile of “why bother” reasons:
According to section 7.13 of Amazon’s Creative Acceptance Policies, which was updated in the wake of the Dayton and El Paso terror attacks, ads featuring weapons are prohibited in order “to protect our customers from uncomfortable or shocking experiences.”
Curiously, while Amazon explicitly prohibits “images of firearms demonstrated as firing or having been recently used (for example, bullets visibly exiting the weapon, smoke or other residue shown around the barrel),” it allows for “non-violent depictions of non-realistic firearms that are fantasy weapons, including fantasy/sci-fi firearms such as ray-guns and phasers.”
Of course, a more immediate road block for me self publishing is that I have absolutely zero talent or skill in the areas of graphic design or painting or anything relevant to the task of creating a good book cover. Shootin’ irons going kerblam wouldn’t really fit on a “Zaneverse” cover, but they’d be all kinds of appropriate for “War With The Deep Ones,” what with it being a war and all…
But then some power mad SJW scoldmonster would find – or invent – some rule that takes a giant ump on my work. Feh.