When it comes to aircraft diagrams, I’m all set. But ships are outside of my, ahem, wheelhouse. Nevertheless, I’m looking for accurate side-view diagrams of *big*ships, such as the Nimitz-class carrier and the largest oil tankers and container ships. Who can hook a brother up?
UPDATE:
Not perfect, but “shipbucket.com” falls securely into the “good enough” category for what I need for most of what I’m looking for.
A blog reader called my attention to this:
Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear.
And so on and so forth. The point of contention was this:
western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)
It was pointed out that this could just as easily have been “WIRED” or indeed any of a whole range of other descriptors such as “1st world” or “non-sh!tholes,” etc. But with the current fetish for denigrating western civilization, it’s perhaps unsurprising that less than subtle insults are being inserted even into scientific papers.
But a thought occurs. Rather than being an offenditarian and getting tweaked, I say we run with it. Consider:
1: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)” is indeed a rarity on the world stage. Thus technically being a civilized westerner is indeed “weird” compared to the rest of the world which would happily enslave and slaughter their neighbors while worshipping rocks and disdaining science in favor of witch doctory.
2: Anyone devoted to diversity had damned well better accept and celebrate the weird minorities. Therefore anyone who is opposed to western civilization is anti-weird, and thus a fascist and deserves to be punched, milkshaked, deplatformed, debanked, depersoned, driven from society.
The slogans write themselves:
Keep America WEIRD
Make America WEIRD Again
America: WEIRD It Or Leave It
Build the WEIRD
…
I *might* suggest a minor modification: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic and scientific (WEIRD AS).”
A scan of a vintage photo of the cockpit of one of the North American XB-70 bombers. It looks like it’s probably during assembly.
I have uploaded the full resolution scan (12X9.3 at 300dpi) of the photo to the 2019-07 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to $4 and up subscribers to the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Three possibilities, comparing the initial relatively dinky (dainty at less than 12 km in length) initial NASA SPS concept to Manhattan island (in a simple line drawing), to San Francisco and to the the regions around Manhattan. What looks best?
UPDATE: pretty universally the far right option was the most popular one (insert political joke HERE). A suggestion was made to rotate the SPS to align it with the island, which I’ve done below and… meh. It doesn’t really do it for me. I’ve blown up the thickness of the dimension lines. The somewhat faint ellipse at far right in the new image below is the receiver array at 45 degrees latitude. Clearly it is just about as big as the SPS itself, which at first blush might make one wonder “why go to the bother, then?” But there are a few points:
1) Size is determined by the dispersion of the microwave beam coming from a 1-km diameter emitter array in geosynchronous, *not* on the max power density it could handle. So you could potentially have a couple SPS’s beaming down to a single array.
2) Unlike a PV array the microwave receiver lets the bulk of regular light come through. it could be roughly as dense as chickenwire, meaning that you could suspend the net-like receiver over crop land, park land or water.
3) The receiver, like the SPS, works 24 hours, day and night, good weather and bad, with no need to track the sun. A ground-based PV array with the same footprint would cost a lot more than the receiver and produce much less total energy averaged out over the year.
Not a whole lot of detail here, but the story is that Netflix will in a few years have an anime-style show set in the “world of Norse mythology.” That *could* be incredibly awesome, but this being Hollywood, I can already feel the cringe.
It’s unknown whether the main characters will be the Norse gods or, potentially, just regular schmoes. It could even be set in any time period from “ancient” to “far future,” because “world of the Norse gods” could just as easily be “today.” Heck, it could be a “Seinfeld” style sitcom where every now and then someone drops a reference to some god or other. Other possibilities:
1) Set more or less today, featuring a military/X-files type organization dealing with a rising tide of weirdness that they slowly come to realize is the forthcoming of Ragnarok.
2) Set more or less today, starring a US Army soldier killed in Afghanistan fighting Surt worshipers who is modestly surprised to find himself waking up in Asgard assigned to Valhalla with the Einherjar to fight and train and die every day, resurrect at evening and partying every night (could be an adjunct to #1)
3) Vikings in the Viking age, out doing Viking stuff, with semi-random supernatural weirdness
4) Tales of the Norse gods themselves, in ancient times
5) Tales of the Norse gods *since* ancient times. Thor in the Old West. Loki at the Stonewall riots
6) Space adventurers in the future, occasionally interacting with beings of Norse myths out among the stars
Many possibilities. But this being Hollywood, one thing seems likely: Thor, who was described quite explicitly as being a redhead, will be a victim of the Gingeradication (Redheadmageddon? Gingenocide? Gingereplacement?).
It’s interesting to watch how different locations deal with domestic terrorism In Portland, Oregon, Antifa essentially has free reign to do what they like and harm whom they wish; the mayor is on their side – or is at least cowed by them – and makes sure the cops give them a pass. But over the past few days the news here in Utah has covered a somewhat similar protest In Salt Lake City where the mayor (Jackie Biskupski… remember, she’s not just a Democract, she’s a *gay* Democrat) wasn’t having it. The response by the cops was less “let them do what they want” and more “Oy, what’s all this then?”
The source of the trouble is a little hard to suss out. In short, an “inland port” is in the early stages of being built in an undeveloped area of Salt Lake County. What’s controversial about that? Nothing that I can see, but then, this is Current Year and there are people who freakin’ *live* to find things to be offended by. Consequently, a place to unload cargo is now, somehow, racist. And so a pack of feral hipstery Antifa-wannabees came out and “occupied” the Chamber of Commerce. In true Klantifa fashion, they used violence to try to shut down the news media, attakign a few cameramen. The local government let them protest and bang their drums and make a nuisance of themselves for a while until they started getting rowdy, then the local PD said “enough” and cleaned them out.
Some news coverage is here. Watch the video, it’s interesting… especially Budget Hermione Grainger, somehow the organizer of this little shindig, explaining how they’re all innocence and light. It’s clearly a foreign conspiracy, likely the Queen trying to sow dissent so that her forces can reclaim the Colonies for the Crown. But of great importance is that the local government, including the Governor of the state of Utah, aren’t shying away from the truth:
“Borderline terrorism,” Gov. Herbert called the protest.
In contrast, check out this video from the always mellow and entirely safe for work Razorfist, describing and showing some of the more egregious nonsense the Portland government did in allowing Klantifa to run wild in their streets:
It turns out that a fair number of the 3D “assets” from Babylon 5 have survived. The guy who has them has taken the unmodified mid-nineties CAD models and replicated some of the original shots, but rendered with modern processors at high def resolution. Even though the models themselves are perhaps rather simple and clunky by modern standards… they still look damn good, especially in motion.
If Warner Brothers wanted to make a small pile of money, it’s clear that a Blu Ray release of B5 is at least conceivable.
I’m in the final stages of US Launch Vehicles Projects #06, with a special focus on launch vehicles for the Solar Power Satellite program. Included there is a plan view of the initial NASA SPS, with Manhattan island for a scale reference. Why Manhattan? Because the SPS satellites were approximately the size of Manhattan, and thus Manhattan was used in schematics and art of the time to illustrate the scale of the program. But… who actually thinks in terms of Manhattan island as a unit of distance measure? Tell me that “such-and-such is the size of Manhattan,” it’ll mean nothing to me, as I’m sure it means nothing to the vast majority of people.
So… since this issue will arise again in future projects I’m working on, what alternatives to Manhattan are there to serve as scale references for structures twenty kilometers long?
Jim Bede was a prolific designer of what he hoped would be low-cost “kit” airplanes that would make aviation available to regular folks. But due to designs with an unfortunate habit of crashing and a lot of business difficulty, his designs are pretty rare in the air. His most famous design is doubtless the BD-5, a tiny single-seat high performance pusher design. The BD-5J replaced the pusher prop and piston engine with a small turbojet, and was made famous in the opening sequence of the James Bond movie “Octopussy.”
Like a lot of aircraft designers, Bede tried his hand at other things. In 1981 he designed the “Bede Car,” an automobile with a ducted pusher propeller. The performance claims were pretty spectacular… 120 miles per gallon with a respectable top speed of over 100 miles per hour.
It clearly looks cool. And ground vehicles with propellers certainly work; the Russians have been building “aerosani” fitted with skis rather than wheels for operation on vast tracks of snow and ice for more than a century. There was also the 1932 Helicron, a prototype car with a propeller at the front. it worked, but is certainly a terrifying concept as anything you might hit (other cars, pedestrians, deer, etc.) will get chopped to bits.
But the problem with the Bede Car was that it just didn’t work as advertised. The fuel economy was apparently estimated based purely on engine performance, without taking into account the effects of the drag of the actual car and performance losses due to the terribly non-optimized inlets. Worse, at low speed you’re basically taxiing, and that’s not a good way to handle low speed. Vehicles powered by propellers have an advantage in that the wheels and tires are not subjected to the same stresses they would be if the wheels were hooked up to a drive train. But the down side is that you don;t have the mechanical advantage of the wheels shoving against the road. So propeller cars *suck* are going up hill, especially at low speed. If you want to simply drive over speed bumps in a parking lot, you’ll have to go full throttle and hit them at speed, or you’re SOL. Even at low speed, you will be putting out substantial thrust, making you something of a hazard to anyone behind you. Acceleration is likely to kinda stink.
Consequently, the Bede Car vanished. The prototype itself seems to be missing.
All that said, I do wonder about the possibility of a modern version. The performance issues of low speed and up hill are not going to go away just because you use new carbon fiber structures; these issues are inherent to the concept. So, how to deal with them? One seemingly simple solution: use electric motors to directly power the wheels at low speed and while going up hill. The motors would only need to be sized fr low speed, perhaps up to 40 miles per hour or so. And since you already have an electrical drive system, use an electric motor to drive the prop as well.
Propeller cars clearly don’t like being *heavy* cars. So until battery technology improves energy per mass by a factor of five or ten, provide electrical power with a relatively small bank of batteries. These should of course be plug-in. But for long distance trips – and obviously a vehicle like this will be best when it’s going fast on a straight road such as an interstate – use a chemically fueled generator. Since this is derived from airplane tech, why not use a small turboshaft engine? This little turbojet could be incredibly efficient since it would be used solely to drive the generator, and would run at only one speed – the optimum speed for maximum performance. Noise would be the worst problem; tiny turbojets spin at hundreds of thousands of brain-melting RPM. But a turboshaft engine would allow the drive to fill the tank with a wide range of flammable liquid fuels.
Modern design tools should make the inlet and propulsion system more efficient.
Safety features such as a rear bumper would seem to be called for.
At sunset yesterday (seems like today… but then, it’s 4:52 AM and I’m still nowhere near ready for sleep) a storm blew through, leaving behind a fairly impressive rainbow and some interesting clouds. Consequently… lo and behold, panoramic photos.