SpaceX: A challenger rises

 awesomeness, news, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Aug 082019
 

Rocket Lab is, it seems, planning on recovering and reusing the first stage of their small Electron launch vehicle. The means of recovery is a lot lower tech than that of the Falcon 9… the Electron will pop a drogue ballute to stabilize, then open a parafoil to slow down and drift in the direction of a recovery ship. Before splashdown it will be air-snatched by a large helicopter then flown to the ship. Should be doable; the small size of the booster makes recovery of the entire first stage via this method practical, while Lockheeds Vulcan is, last I checked, only planning on recovering the engines and avionics.

This is of course no threat to SpaceX, which is going increasingly Bigger And Bigger. Still, it will be good to see yet more space launch systems working towards reusability and truly low cost.

On the other hand: no matter how capable Rocket lab gets with future boosters, their choice of launching from new Zealand will be a limiting factor. New Zealand has been since 1984 a “nuclear free zone,” excluding from its territorial waters any ship powered by nuclear reactors. While this would not necessarily seem to exclude nuclear powered spacecraft… why would  someone with such a payload risk it?

 Posted by at 3:29 am

Manufactured Outrage

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 082019
 

The right is every bit as capable of manufacturing fake outrage as the left. Anybody remember the 1980s, with the “Satanic panic,” people freaking out about Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal, the Proctor & Gamble logo being Satanic imagery? Silly stuff. Today the left has *almost* a monopoly on manufacturing outrage, but the right can still get in a few moments of oddness. Take, for example, the presumably-forthcoming movie “The Hunt.”

Hollywood blockbuster that satirizes killing of ‘deplorables’ causes outrage: ‘Demented and evil’

From everything I’ve seen, the basic plot is one we’ve all seen before: rich people paying to hunt humans on an island somewhere. The twist here, apparently, is that the rich people are coastal liberals paying to hunt down kidnapped flyover country MAGA-types. That’s different, I suppose, but not really all that unbelievable, especially in a day and age when Twitter bans memes about “learn to code” but leaves unsuspended rich leftists calling for the eradication of Trump supporters.

Some right wingers, and even left wingers, are outraged at the idea of Hollywood depicting leftists hunting down Trump supporters, as they suppose that this is an attempt to celebrate that urge. But… I dunno. Granted I haven’t seen the film and I don’t know how it turns out, but from the trailers it certainly looks like the rich lefties are very clearly the *bad* guys,* and it’s very likely that while most if not all Trump supporters wind up dead, so will the lefties. That’s how this plotline always seems to go. In the end, from the looks of it the flyover-country people will be portrayed as the sympathetic characters on the right side of ethics. So, you know, like in reality.

Not only is this particular “The Most Dangerous Game” plotline old and oft-used, so is the depiction of left-wing power being directly dystopian. Only a few years ago the box office and popular culture were dominated by “The Hunger Games.” What was the basic world depicted there? The United States had collapsed some centuries before, and the society that rose in its place was a totalitarian dystopia run from “The Capital.” Most of America was depicted as a bunch of poor working-class “deplorables” toiling their lives away under the domination of the “elites in the capital… who were depicted as the sort of effete, hateful fashion-obsessed weirdos that we see all too often trying to dominate political discourse. The elites in “The Hunger Games” overdressed in ridiculous impractical clothes and slathered themselves with makeup like an entire mega-metropolis desperately trying to live every day like it was Drag Queen Story Hour. They would not sully their hands with dirty evil guns, but they’re more than happy to surround themselves with faceless armed goons to protect them from the jeans and leather wearing country bumpkins who have been barred the use of arms. “The Hunger Games” depicted an America where the left won and imposed its will… and it showed it to be evil and unsustainable. Even Hollywood seems incapable of dreaming up a world when leftist ideology wins and *doesn’t* become truly horrific. See also “Equilibrium” where everyone is forced onto drugs in order to stop “hate crimes.”

So, hold off on the outrage. Granted, “The Hunt” is produced by the same politically subtle folks who gave us “The Purge,” which is based on the idea that the Religious Right takes over the US and promptly sets about convincing the poor to murder each other, somehow profiting from this. So it may well be that they’ll *try* to make “The Hunt” something to ultimately appeal to the murderous lefties who, like the Dayton shooter, are radicalized and set off by the dangerous rhetoric of extremists like Bubbles Cortez. Perhaps it will end with everybody killing everybody else at the hunting resort… but then it pulls back to see that the Real Head Honchos are still fine, send in a repair/cleanup crew, and kidnap some more deplorables for the next set of rich leftie hunters to go murder. But even if so… Hollywood will still be depicting the lefties as the villains, even if in the course of the movie someone cranks out some nonsensical rhetoric about how right wingers are evil because of this or that leftist talking point.

 Posted by at 12:06 am

SPECTRE Bird One Booklet of General Plans

 blather, drawings, Hmm..., rockets, science fiction  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

I’m putting the finishing touches on this one. My hope, if I go into production with a number of these BoGPs, is to release at least two at a time: saves on shipping costs. But the “SPECTRE” BoGP will be a test case of sorts. If it is popular, more will come. If it tanks… well…

I’m still tinkering with the diagrams, but you can see below what I’m planing on including. Along with the diagrams will be a mess of explanatory text. Some will be on the diagrams themselves, as you can see; others will be on a separate cover page. For the science fiction designs, the intent is to describe the vehicle as if it was real, with an in-universe  description. Sometimes from the people or organizations involved (which will be the case for SSV), and sometimes from the viewpoint of outsiders trying to describe them (such as is the case with the SPECTRE vehicle). Consequently, there will be more than just the dry statistics of length and weight, but also history and analysis from someone who may or may not understand the thing, and may or may not *like* the thing, and who may or may not be the sort of person you’d *want* to understand the thing.

For the SPECTRE, I have about three pages of text. To me it seems god, but I’ve been wrong about this sort of thing before. So I’m looking for three (3) people willing to give the cover pages (*just* the cover pages, not the mess-o-diagrams) a look, and then review in the comments section below what they think. Undoubtedly there’ll be spelling and grammatical errors, but what I’m interested in is… was it worth reading? Did it keep you interested? Make you more interested in the full booklet? Basically… was it good?

If you are interested, leave a comment expressing interest below, and if you’re one of the first three to do so I’ll send along a PDF of the cover page. This:

But not yet this:

Thanks.

Note: the in-universe text will be for different universes. The SPECTRE Bird vehicle isn’t from the same reality as the War Rocket Ajax or the Helicarrier or the Messiah. It might be interesting to try to create a Grand Unified Theory of Fiction slapping everything into the same continuity but… nah.

 

 Posted by at 5:50 pm

In/Out-group bias

 blather, Forward!, Hmm..., politics  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

It is a natural result of a billion years of evolution: people prefer “their own kind” over what they perceive to be “the other.” This is not a value judgement, simply a statement of fact. It can be seen in virtually all areas of life; in fully integrated schools, kids will tend to ethnically self-segregate in who they sit with at lunch; adults will self-segregate in where they choose to live or who they choose to hang out with.

But there are some differences in rates of preferences. And according to some surveys a few years ago, in the US, there is one group that confounds this generality: “white liberals.” They are the only ones who actually have a pro-out-group bias. In other words… they are to some degree “self hating” and suffer from the psychological condition of “white guilt.” This would go far towards explaining a lot of recent left-wing media coverage of politics: they have a natural bias towards assuming that whites are naturally evil. An interesting summary of the findings on this this and related matters is HERE (and HERE).

One might assume, at least based on the media, that white conservatives would be the polar opposite: pasty-faced Republicans should be just massive racists, with a distinct and invincible preference for Their Own Kind. But that turns out to be in error. Whether Liberal, Moderate or Conservative, whites seem to generally have a lower in-group preference than other ethnic groups of the same politics.

According to this, conservatives as a whole – except for conservative Asians, have a lower in-group bias than liberals…and much less so than moderates. This is a head-scratcher of a result, honestly.

The true validity of this data can of course be questioned; polling and statistics are hardly bulletproof. But it does go far towards explaining a lot of what’s going on these days.

EDIT: Case in point. Take a look at this tweet from a Hollywood actress and try to imagine anyone *other* than a white liberal saying the same sort of thing about themselves and their ethnicity. It is a phenomenon and a psychological disorder virtually unique to that one group.

 

 Posted by at 10:05 am

So I’m kinda canonical in the MCU

 art, blather, history, science fiction  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

More than five years ago I provided some blueprints to the art team making “Agents of SHIELD.” They were to be used as set dressing; as often happens, the scene they appeared in was greatly truncated, and the stuff that would have been recognizably “mine” were largely unseen. Oh, well. But even more unseen was a detail that I don’t imagine has been noticed in the intervening years since the show was broadcast.

In the course of the AoS episode “Seeds,” Our Heroes visited a SHIELD training facility. Visible there was a “Wall of Valor” commemorating all SHIELD agents who died in the line of duty from 1941 to 2015. As a bit of a reward for providing some blueprints, my name was added to the wall. An “Agent S. Lowther” died somewhere between 1991 and 2015. So I’m in the MCU… I’m just dead. Given the position of the name, it seems likely that Agent Lowther bought the farm sometime in the early 21st century; this works, as I would have been in my early 30’s.

There are a few shots online that show the wall close enough to make out some names, but *of* *course,* my name is *just* obscured by the bottom bit of jacket here. If anyone has the Blu Ray of season one (was it released in 4K?) and can see if a frame or two later that name is shown and legible, I’d be interested in seeing it. Because… well, that was probably the one time my name will be on TV, so…

 Posted by at 3:19 am

Is there an arachnidologist in the house?

 AARRRGH, critters, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 072019
 

My house seems to have been invaded by these rather sizable exoskeltal nightmare-inducing terrors. Found three of them in my bathroom in a one-day period, including one that jumped out of the friggen’ sink drain. MMmmmllleeeeaaaaccchhh.

So are these one-inch hair-bearing eight legged freaks harmless little skeeter-eaters, or are they more akin to Hobo/Brown Recluse horrors?

 Posted by at 12:39 am

Some things are coming into focus

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 062019
 

A couple days ago I wondered – somewhat sarcastically – if the coverage of the Dayton and El Paso mass shootings would be covered differently in the press. And a few days have passed and it is clear that there is a *massive* discontinuity. In El Paso, the shooters politics are front and center; anyone who shares *any* of his political beliefs is by extension a monster. And in Dayton, the shooters politics are covered sparingly, if at all, and I’m sure as hell not seeing a lot of attempts to claim that anyone sharing his politics is culpable.

One might argue that since the El Paso shooter killed 22 and the Dayton shooter killed 9, the Dayton shooter was a “lesser” villain. But the El Paso shooter was *done* at 22; he’d left the scene. The Dayton shooter was shot dead by the cops inside of thirty seconds. he was still busy killing, and had much killing left to do. The last I heard (this could now be inaccurate), he’d fired more than 40 rounds; thus, roughly one death per four shots. But he had 250 rounds of ammo left. Left to himself, his initial kill ratio means that he could have killed anther 250/4 people… more than sixty further deaths. Simple math attributes around seventy total dead to the Dayton shooter, more than three times the El Paso total. Of course such things cannot be considered truly valid, but it does indicate that the Dayton killer was no less evil than the El Paso killer. So why is that incident, and the politics of the man behind it, seemignly of no interest to the press?

There’s a reason.

  1. He was a self-avowed leftist.
  2. He was a Socialist.
  3. He supported Breadline Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
  4. He was opposed to the 2nd Amendment, and in favor of gun control (shades of Dorner).
  5. He supported the domestic terrorists in Antifa.
  6. He hated Trump & ICE.

Obviously – at least to people whose brains have not been consumed by and twisted up with hateful ideologies – the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist does not excuse the El Paso killer. They’re both monsters. But it is pretty clear that the fact that the Dayton killer was a leftist is being downplayed to downright ignored by much of the media. If Bernie or Warren were to show up in Dayton, would there b the outrage that Trump is getting for going to El Paso? trump is catching hell for referring to the invasion of central Americans as an “invasion,” with claims that his choice of words is responsible for hate crimes. Is AOC going to be held to the same standard for going on about “concentration camps?” Is the collective guilt by association being heaped upon the right going to be heaped upon the left?

 

 

 Posted by at 11:53 pm

This just seems to be a terrible design

 blather, Crazy, Hmm..., Meh., science, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Aug 062019
 

The one where Thunderf00t tears apart the “Energy Vault.”

If, like me, you were unaware of the “Energy Vault” prior to this, here’s the short form: it’s a “battery” for the storage of excess power from weather-based power systems like wind and solar. It takes excess power generated when it’s sunny/windy, and uses that power to lift heavy “bricks” of concrete up to 100 meters from the ground to a stack; when power is needed, it reverses the process, turning the gravitational potential energy of the massive bricks into electricity in much the same way that regenerative braking systems in electric cars  can charge up batteries when going downhill. it’s not bad physics. Everything here is perfectly possible. It’s just not a good design:

  1. It takes bricks from one stack and raises/lowers them to another stack. Which means it almost never raises/lowers them the full 100 meters, wasting a good fraction of the potential energy that can be collected
  2. It requires a cable-based crane system to maneuver multi-ton bricks (that may be dangling from 100 feet of cable in windy conditions) to positions with tolerances measured in at most millimeters
  3. Multi-ton bricks of concrete are expensive and, when dangling from a hundred meters of cable, reletively easily damaged

The biggest problem here is that this is a problem that has already been solved. Want to use gravitational potential energy to store excess electricity? Great! PUMP WATER UPHILL.

You don’t need to locate your “battery” right next to the wind farm. It just needs to be hooked into the grid. So… driving across the US, the two biggest regions I’ve directly seen for wind generation are in Iowa and Wyoming. Now, Iowa is flat. So you would need to build a series of water towers, with enclosed subsurface water tanks below them; nothing here is new. There are a *vast* number of municipal water towers in the US; these are essentially catalog items at this point. Granted getting them a hundred meters tall might be a bit tricky, but if you build them in joined clusters, they’ll be good and strong, resistant to storms. So you could have something like a forest of supports, holding aloft a cluster of tanks covering several acres.

But in Wyoming, the wind farms are located within just a few miles of *mountains.* In this case, you could simply build a few vast cisterns thousands of feet above similarly sized cisterns at the base of the mountains, with high pressure pipes, pumps and turbines. Easy. Works all-weather for decades on end.

The “Energy Vault” appears to me to be someone trying to show how clever they are, rather than how practical they are.

 

 Posted by at 5:34 pm

I would watch the hell out of this series

 art, awesomeness, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Aug 062019
 

But it’s not a series, rather some sort of video game for mobile devices.  If Amazon or Netflix or even the SciFi channel were to make a proper multi-season series out of it with the same quality and seriousness as “The Expanse,” I would be all over it. But as a game for telephones? Meh.

Still: watch it. It’s freakin gorgeous. And how often does anyone use a voiceover from President Reagan to extol the virtues of space exploration in a science fiction setting? I belive it’s from his post-Challenger address to the nation.

 

 Posted by at 1:54 am
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