Thirteenth in the series. Read after the break…
Jul 072019
Jul 072019
Turned on the tube for some background noise only to find some UFO show. They were cranking out the same nonsense about how the United States was able to advance technology thanks to reverse engineering the flying saucer that crashed in Roswell in 1947. Their leadoff claim was that stealth technology came out of nowhere in the 1980’s. Of course, in the real world stealth technology was developed over decades; even as classified as it is, the evolution of the designs and technologies can be seen (for example the 1961 Boeing “Quiet Bird” stealth concept).
But there’s one thing that seems like it should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. OK, so let’s say an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947. Right now as I write this in the early 21st century, we have *nothing* like the technology needed to build and operate FTL scout ships of our own. Such a device would be far in advance of what we have in 2019, never mind 1947. Still, the technology we *do* have in 2019 would seem fantastically advanced in 1947. Tech such as a smart phone – the microchips within it would be astonishingly advanced in 1947. So… let’s say you dropped a supply of 2019 advanced tech in 1947 and told the boys at Wright-Pat “have at it.” Would they have the first clue *how* to reverse engineer a smart phone? Is there anything in one of those things that they would have the ability to understand in order to use them to invent transisters or lasers or whatever the frak these UFO nuts think we reverse engineered?
I doubt it. The technology did not exist in 1947 to allow the best minds on the planet to even analyze modern technology, never mind reverse engineer it. And we’re supposed to believe that these same mooks somehow figured out how to analyze a computer that would have been at home onboard the Starship Enterprise?
We will soon see commercial devices that use graphene sheets in their construction… batteries, capacitors, display screens using single-molecule-thick sheets of this special form of carbon. 1947 would have been damned lucky to even *detect* the microscopically thin layer of carbon, and even if they did, they would not understand what form it took, and would certainly be unable to duplicate it.
A lot of modern technology is so fabulouly microscopic that the simple act of trying to measure it will destroy it. Why should alien technology centuries in advance of *now* be any different? Hell, for all I know the 2060 equivalent of the smart phone – assuming there’s still a handheld variant, and they’re not all just nanowires that are grown directly into your cerebral cortex – will be a rectangular slab of quartz 1 centimeter by 4 by 9. It will appear to be a simple perfect rectangular solid. Every form of analysis we have today will show that it it composed of nothing but pure SiO4, and yet it can do amazing things and seems to have an inexhaustible power supply. We in 2019 simply would not have the technology to understand that what makes it work is the differential gravity wave displacement process that uses slightly greasy solar atoms guided by a detrion-based dark matter tachyon beam to preferentially quoodwrangle the individual silicon atoms into specific spacetime sub-domains while simultaneous quantum entangling all of the oxygen atoms to a single synthetic offsite master atom. How would we expect people who think that mechanical watches are the bees knees to figure that crap out? How the frak would they take that sort of technology and derive *transistors* from it?
Gah.
Jul 072019
I posted a slightly earlier version of this back in 2013. While these may be originally spacecraft-specific, they apply not only to other areas of aerospace engineering, but to all areas of life. The canonical list is kept HERE.
When I think of philosophies to live by, I come up with something a lot like these.
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
2. To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong .
3. Design is an iterative process. The necessary number of iterations is one more than the number you have currently done. This is true at any point in time.
4. Your best design efforts will inevitably wind up being useless in the final design. Learn to live with the disappointment.
5. (Miller’s Law) Three points determine a curve.
6. (Mar’s Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
7. At the start of any design effort, the person who most wants to be team leader is least likely to be capable of it.
8. In nature, the optimum is almost always in the middle somewhere. Distrust assertions that the optimum is at an extreme point.
9. Not having all the information you need is never a satisfactory excuse for not starting the analysis.
10. When in doubt, estimate. In an emergency, guess. But be sure to go back and clean up the mess when the real numbers come along.
11. Sometimes, the fastest way to get to the end is to throw everything out and start over.
12. There is never a single right solution. There are always multiple wrong ones, though.
13. Design is based on requirements. There’s no justification for designing something one bit “better” than the requirements dictate.
14. (Edison’s Law) “Better” is the enemy of “good”.
15. (Shea’s Law) The ability to improve a design occurs primarily at the interfaces. This is also the prime location for screwing it up.
16. The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
17. The fact that an analysis appears in print has no relationship to the likelihood of its being correct.
18. Past experience is excellent for providing a reality check. Too much reality can doom an otherwise worthwhile design, though.
19. The odds are greatly against you being immensely smarter than everyone else in the field. If your analysis says your terminal velocity is twice the speed of light, you may have invented warp drive, but the chances are a lot better that you’ve screwed up.
20. A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately.
21. (Larrabee’s Law) Half of everything you hear in a classroom is crap. Education is figuring out which half is which.
22. When in doubt, document. (Documentation requirements will reach a maximum shortly after the termination of a program.)
23. The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
24. It’s called a “Work Breakdown Structure” because the Work remaining will grow until you have a Breakdown, unless you enforce some Structure on it.
25. (Bowden’s Law) Following a testing failure, it’s always possible to refine the analysis to show that you really had negative margins all along.
26. (Montemerlo’s Law) Don’t do nuthin’ dumb.
27. (Varsi’s Law) Schedules only move in one direction.
28. (Ranger’s Law) There ain’t no such thing as a free launch.
29. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.
30. (von Tiesenhausen’s Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist’s concept.
31. (Mo’s Law of Evolutionary Development) You can’t get to the moon by climbing successively taller trees.
32. (Atkin’s Law of Demonstrations) When the hardware is working perfectly, the really important visitors don’t show up.
33. (Patton’s Law of Program Planning) A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
34. (Roosevelt’s Law of Task Planning) Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
35. (de Saint-Exupery’s Law of Design) A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
36. Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.
37. (Henshaw’s Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.
38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.
39. Any exploration program which “just happens” to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.
39. (alternate formulation) The three keys to keeping a new human space program affordable and on schedule:
1) No new launch vehicles.
2) No new launch vehicles.
3) Whatever you do, don’t develop any new launch vehicles.
40. (McBryan’s Law) You can’t make it better until you make it work.
41. There’s never enough time to do it right, but somehow, there’s always enough time to do it over.
42. Space is a completely unforgiving environment. If you screw up the engineering, somebody dies (and there’s no partial credit because most of the analysis was right…)
Jul 072019
And I’m a little surprised at the lack of interest in some of them:
Aerospace Vehicle Design Vol II Spacecraft Design by K. D. Wood, 1964
This one is real hard to come by, usually sells for well over $100. Only one bid, $19.99. This one ends in a few hours.
Three early “Space” books for kids: Fletcher Pratt, Jack Coggins, Lester Del Rey
Sure, they’re a little rough, but they’re old kids books, awesome in their massively over-optimistic way, and terribly low price. This one ends in a few hours.
Proceedings of the Shuttle-Based Cometary Science Workshop, 1976 NASA
This one ends in a few hours.
And this one:
XIIIth International Astronautical Congress Varna 1962, II (pp 483-1026)
This book of conference proceedings has papers on the Aerojet Sea Dragon, a general Electic “Direct” Apollo design and a nuclear-powered TV satellite. It’s already made the rounds on ebay once, no bidders. Huh.
And there’s other stuff.
Jul 072019
The subject of the financially disastrous S.S. Statendam cruise to witness the launch of Apollo 17 has been raised hereabouts before. It’s famous among a relatively small number of people, and forgotten by the public.
Turns out someone made a documentary about the cruise, using footage filmed on board… clips of speakers, bits of interviews, discussions, etc. There are some *really* interesting people (Krafft Ehricke, Carl Sagan, Hugh Downs, Issac Asimov, etc.) saying some *really* interesting things here… and a lot of it is damned depressing. This was the last Apollo flight, and they all knew it; but what the future of manned spaceflight really held they didn’t really know. Some were optimistic, a lot were pessimistic. And the pessimists gave their reasons for why things were going to stagnate… and they were pretty much right. Feh.
Sadly, it seems that this documentary, about half an hour in length, lost its second half hour somewhere. Maybe someone has it stored away somewhere…
Jul 072019
You can weld two electric bicycles together to make an off-road wheelchair for a paralyzed person. The idea is pretty simple (“weld two bikes together”), but the bikes themselves are the result of a whole lot of careful engineering, going back well beyond the bikes themselves to the materials and technologies that went into them. And after a test run they found things to improve; testing and incremental improvement are inherent to the scientific and engineering processes.
You can spot a number of areas where improvement can be called for, from a need for better rear-wheel shocks to a better ingress/egress system, to perhaps something like an Ackermann steering system, to perhaps the need for different wheel spokes to deal with side loads that a bike wouldn’t have to worry about. The power system can always (*ALWAYS*) be improved. The seat looks kinda traumatizing. It should probably have retention systems. A roll bar? Lighten the connecting structure via optimized design and lighter materials (titanium or carbon fiber). Some way to collapse the structure for storage on the back of a van, say. But for a prototype, not too shabby. Lift fans. I SAID LIFT FANS.
Now.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, I invite you to imagine what an alternate version of this would be. A version based on the same idea, “how to give off-road mobility to someone with no use of their legs,” but tackled not with modern western science, tech and engineering, but with “other ways of knowing.” I want to see one of these things as built within a system that empowers traditional and indigenous knowledges. I said I want to *see* one, not ride in one. Without even having anythign specific in mind, I can already imagine the tetanus and splinters, the structural failures and infections that would come with a non-STEM off-road wheel chair. Use vines to strap a paraplegic to a donkey, perhaps? Ill-trained carrier-gorillas? A hastily assembled travois lashed to a pig? Hodor?
Jul 072019
Some years ago the “Waterseer” hit the interwebs. It purported to be a design for a mechanism that would suck in air and pipe it to an underground cistern, the cool walls of which would condense the water out and send the now-dry air back up and out. The ideas was that it would be a “free water from the air” device for poor people in the crappier parts of the world. It was based on *terrible* science, to the point where it just wouldn’t work. Thunderf00t did a few videos thoroughly debunking the idea. He also debunked similar things like the “Fontus,” a small dehumidifier that was based on impossibly optimistic efficiencies (well over 100%) to make a device the size of a small drinking bottle with a few square inches of PV cells that would produce a meaningful volume of drinkable water from the air. Since then, Fontus has gone belly-up… but Waterseer continues.
But it doesn’t continue in its original form. As originally proposed, it was a purely mechanical system, using wind power to blow air through the system. Now it requires electricity, and a fair amount of it. It operates more like a dehumidifier now. And as the new Thunderf00t video below shows, it’s actually an off-the-shelf dehumidifier. One you can get from WalMart for $200, but Waterseer put it in a new plastic cylinder, re-branded it, and charges almost $1400 for it. So now, instead of being free water from the air, it now needs to be plugged into an electrical grid, producing water for about 50 times the cost of municipal tap water. The video includes an interview with a satisfied customer who is using the system to water his commercial lettuce garden. According to Thunderf00ts math, the guy will pay $4 just in electricity (never mind amortizing the cost of the machines) for each head of lettuce that he’ll try to sell for about 35 cents.
Like a lot of Thunderf00ts more recent videos, this one is loaded with a hell of a lot of extraneous rehash, redundancy and self-congratulations. So you can safely skip ahead to about the 23 minute mark and get straight to the point.
Jul 062019
Twelfth in the series. Read after the break…
Jul 062019
A sketch of the 1980s/90s SP-100 space-based nuclear reactor, designed to provide 100 kilowatts of electrical power continuously for years on end. It would have been just the thing for applications where solar panels would not have been practical, such as deep space probes or military systems that need to be somewhat maneuverable. One might thing that replacing vast PV arrays with a small reactor would have made the satellites less visible… and on radar and likely visible light, that’s probably true. but that reactor and its radiators would have been quite visible in infra-red, apparent to any IR sensor pointed int its general direction. The sketch below shows not only the tests and progress that had been done on the SP-100, but also a conceptual payload of an undefined sort. It seems to be festooned with sensors.
Jul 062019
I thought *sure* that some years ago I posted something about theiPad-like “newspad” from “2001,” describing how it very clearly predicted not only the pad itself but also the internet as a whole. But a search of the blog did not turn up what I thought it would; the closest was this bit from 2015 describing an article displayed on a Newspad.
Some more archive finds have provided more insight into the world of “2001:”
Did Stanley Kubrick invent the iPad?
The subject of the articles headline has been bandied about since 2011. But what’s of interest right here are the headlines that were written for the Newspad, specifically for the New York Times. Of course they didn’t appear on screen, so they are of arguably “canonicity,” but they’re interesting nonetheless:
- 1000TH BABY BORN AT SOUTH POLE CITY
- LAST WORLD WAR I VETERAN DIES IN LONDON
- AIRLINER FEARED LOST OVER ATLANTIC; 2304 ON BOARD
- WORLD POPULATION PASSES 6 BILLION MARK: EVEN SPLIT NORTH AND SOUTH OF EQUATOR
- LAST GRIZZLY BEAR DIES IN CINCINNATI ZOO: SPECIES NOW EXTINCT – TENTH THIS YEAR
- DEEP-SPACE SURVEY ENROUTE: FLIGHT REPORTED NORMAL IN ALL RESPECTS
- AQUANAUT RECORD NOW HELD BY BRAZIL: SUBMARINE SURVEY TEAM DOWN FOUR YEARS
- FUNCTIONING EARTH SATELLITES NOW NUMBER 3700: MAJORITY LINK WEATH AND COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS
- MOVE GAINS MOMENTUM IN WESTERN STATES FOR RETURN TO 4-PARTY SYSTEM
- GARZANTI DIES IN ROME: FAMOUS DETECTIVE CREDITED WITH FINAL DESTRUCTION OF MAFIA IN 1971
- DAWN OF MAN PUSHED BACK TO 5,000,000 YEAR MARK
- GRAND CANYON BRIDGE OPENED BY PRESIDENT: LAST LINK IN ARGENTINA-ALASKA ELECTRONIC HIGHWAY SYSTEM
- LANGUAGE BARRIER NOW NIL FOR 75% OF EARTH’S PEOPLES
- FOURTEEN WESTERNS UP FOR NEXT TV LINE-UP
- RESEARCH EXPENDITURES GREATER THAN PRODUCTION COSTS FOR SIX KEY INDUSTRIES
- TRIPLE ALLOCATION ANTICIPATION FOR GRAVITY-CONTROL PROJECT AT USC
- MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN ESP RESEARCH AT DUKE. PLANS FOR PRACTICAL APPLICATION LIKELY TO BE IMPLEMENTED WITHIN DECADE
- BOOK REVIEW: “THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: RISE AND FALL OF A DRAGON: BY KEITH ROGERS
- ART: PABLO PICASSO, PAINTING’S MOST INCREDIBLE SUCCESS STORY
- THEATER: THE BARRYMORES, FORGOTTEN LEGEND
- MEDICINE: HOW MUCH FURTHER THE AGE LIMIT? ARE 125 YEARS ENOUGH?
- GARDENING: WATCH THE PH FACTOR. ACIDITY MORE CRITICAL IN HYDROPONICS THAN IN SOIL
- NEW TRAFFIC COMMISSIONER FOR NEW YORK CITY. MAYOR PROMISES RESULTS. CITIZENS’ COMMITTEE REPORTEDLY PESSIMISTIC
- FINANCIAL: BUYING POWER OF DOLLAR UP. FIRST IMPROVEMENT IN SEVENTEEN MONTHS. EASING ON CREDIT SEEN.
- SPORTS: AUSTRALIANS LIKELY VICTORS TENNIS
Some comments:
1: South Pole City is clearly a well-established facility in 2001.
2: This means the last WWI veterans were probably under 100 years of age when they died.
3: Previously discussed.
4: Population reached 6 billion in 1999, but it was nowhere near an even split between north & south hemispheres. Something must have happened to drive a whole lot of people south without actually killing a whole lot of people.
5: Apparently the environment of 2001 has gone to hell such that the grizzlies have died out. Perhaps that’s why so many people have fled the northern hemisphere? From the viewpoint of the mid-sixties when these were written, the environment sucked, and would continue to suck for quite a number more years.
8: Way more satellites than real 2001. Not surprising.
9: Huh. One wonders what those 4 parties are, and whether they want a return to 4 from, say, 2 or from 6.
12: What’s an “electronic highway?” In real-world usage it might refer to the internet, but here it’s clearly an actual highway. Perhaps an electrified roadway for long-range self-driving electric cars?
13: Presumably HAL-1000 translation programs?
14: 14 westerns on American TV in 2001 would indicate a major shift in cultural priorities. In the real world westerns had pretty much vanished by the end of the 70’s. Perhaps there’s a link between the “cowboy ethic” and “frontier stories” with having an *actual* frontier…
15: And that’s why technology has advanced so far.
16: Umm… wha-what? Gravity control?
17: Clarke was obsessed with ESP. It has of course turned out to be rubbish. One wonders if a later article would be about how Duke got scammed.
18: This might indicate that China got real big and powerful in the late 20th century, but then collapsed. Perhaps that’s where much of the southern hemisphere population boom came from… hundreds of millions of Chinese immigrants into, say, sub-Saharan Africa. That would be fun to explore.
20: Apparently Drew went nowhere.
22: Hydroponic gardening is a big deal. Again, the environment seems to have gone down the crapper.
Discuss!