Booklet of General Plans: Space Station V

 art, drawings, history, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 262019
 

A while back I created twenty copies of a preliminary draft of a “Booklet of General Plans” of the Space Station V from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Eight were sent out, leaving twelve that I am making available. These twelve are the last of the only print run of this edition there will ever be. If these all sell out, and if the feedback is promising, it is my hope to eventually, someday, refine these and add considerably more data. Additionally I hope to produce a regular print run not only of the SSV BoGP, but also other sci-fi vehicles (“Deep Impacts” Messiah being near the top of the list; SPECTRE Bird One; perhaps branching out to the likes of Clavius Base) as well as unbuilt non-sci-fi but speculative concepts such as the Bernal Sphere, O’Neill colonies, Dandridge Cole concepts (Aldebaran, Macrolife, etc.), Orion battleship and SDI space weaponry. A few sci-fi designs of my own *may* be included (The Falcon-Class Starfleet runabout USS Millenium is a notion that appeals to me for some reason).

The Space Station V Booklet includes eight 11X17 inch sheets, printed directly rather than photocopied, in a specially printed envelope (which goes in another, larger shipping envelope). These are going for $12 each, plus postage. If you are interested, send me an email letting me know how many you want and what your address is; these will be made available first-come, first-served.    I’ll work out postage and send you a Paypal invoice. (NOTE: On  Tuesday. I’d intended to go to the post office on Monday and take  couple booklets along to get them weighed… but it turns out that that’s a federal holiday…)

Remaining: 12  11 10 9  8  7  6  5 4  3 2 1  All gone.

 Posted by at 6:41 pm

More evidence for the need for cheap spaceflight

 AARRRGH, blather, Gah., Hmm..., spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 262019
 

There are lots of good reasons to go to space. But one less discussed reason is the urge to individual adventure. Earth, it seems, is pretty much all out of things to do that other people not only haven’t done, but that aren’t already booked solid. Take, for example, climbing Mt. Everest. Within living human memory, climbing that mountain was something no human had done. And now… this:

Posted by Nirmal Purja MBE: "Project Possible – 14/7" on Wednesday, May 22, 2019

This is confirmed to be the “conga line” of tourists trying to reach the peak of Everest. When they get back, what can they really say? They will have been surrounded by a mass of humanity; hundreds before, hundreds after, not allowed to spend a moment in silence and solitude at the roof of the world because you’ve got to get out of the way of the next crowd. Sure, they will have climbed the tallest mountain on Earth, but really… is it much more of an experience than, say, climbing to the top of a skyscraper, or running a marathon that ten thousand other also ran?

It’s getting to be about as unique an experience as all that hollow Instagram “influencer” nonsense.

What the adventurers of the world need isn’t a chairlift to the top of Everest, but a direct flight to the base of Olympus Mons, or the rim of Valles Marinaris. A lodge at the base of Verona Rupes on Miranda, for the ten kilometer climb to the top and the twelve-minute freefall for the basejumpers. A base camp in the rings of Saturn for a whole new kind of marathon, one where people bounce from chunk to chunk. Skiers on the sulfur snows of Io. Hang gliding across Titan.

Earth is *done.* It’s all been done. Pretty much nothing left that not only hasn’t been done, but that you won’t have to wait in line for.

 

 

 Posted by at 4:37 pm

Will the protestors tear down his statues?

 blather, Forward!, history, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 262019
 

They laughed at Trump a few years ago when he suggested that the current crop of history-hating protestors would demand the removal of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues because they, too, fell short of the level of moral perfection that modern SJWs demand. These same people demanded that Brett Kavanaugh be not only denied a seat on the Supreme Court, but fired and made a permanent pariah because of unsubstantiated, and in many cases clearly fraudulent, claims about youthful impropriety.

So… will they be consistent and demand the erasure of Martin Luther King Jr. and all his works from the history books?

FBI tapes reveal Martin Luther King’s affairs ‘with 40 women’

It’s not the affairs that should be really noted here. SJWs seem to be generally unconcerned with such things, especially when it’s one of their own. But it seems that MLK also #MeToo’ed pretty badly:

The recording from the Willard Hotel near the White House shows how King was accompanied his friend Logan Kearse, the pastor of Baltimore’s Cornerstone Baptist church who died in 1991, along with several female parishioners of his church. …

The FBI document says: ‘When one of the women protested that she did not approve, the Baptist minister immediately and forcefully raped her’ as King watched.

He is alleged to have ‘looked on, laugh and offered advice’ during the encounter. 

Huh.

Now, since I’m one of those horrible moral degenerates who demands actual evidence before passing judgement on someone, I have to say “I’ll believe it when I hear it.” Which, honestly, I suspect I never will… I’d be stumped if the FBI had held onto these tapes for fifty years and only released them now. And I’ll bet a nickel that if they are released it’ll be audio mush… a lot of static, a lot of “something vague is going on,” some muffled voices that someone claims is MLK, but could just as easily be an impersonator or someone who just happens to sound like him. But even so, the mere *claim* of the existence of this tape is more evidence than was ever presented against Kavanaugh, and he still got not only death threats but serious attempts at ruining his life and career. There are, I suspect, no statues of Kavanaugh, no roads or schools named after him; but if there were during the confirmation hearings you can bet that those would have been torn down or damaged.

Right wingers, or no-Nazis, or white supremacists, or Republicans, or whatever boogeyman the left wing is ulcerating about today are hardly likely to tear down statues of MLK. Apart from an exceedingly small number of whackaloons, the conservative side of the spectrum doesn’t generally go in for rioting and physically damaging things. That’s the lefts playbook. So it will be interesting to see if the SJWs are even vaguely consistent and decide to stuff MLK down the memory hole alongside some of history’s other great monsters like Washington and Jefferson.

 Posted by at 10:39 am

Another Starfleet screwup

 AARRRGH, art, humor, news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 252019
 

Starfleet is renowned for making some rather unfortunate errors: the M-5 computer wargame, the Prime Directive, agreeing to not develop or use cloaking devices. But this one takes the cake:

Paint job mystery solved: Local college club explains purchase of incorrect color

This bright yellow M-41 Walker Bulldog tank has been maintained by the U.S.S. Yeager Chapter of Starfleet International, a science fiction club at Bluefield State College in West Virginia, for about 20 years. It needed a new coat of paint, so they took a chip to a  paint store which provided them two containers of “Tank Green.” They thought it looked funny when they started applying it, but assumed that it would dry to the right color. Having dealt with a lot of paints over the years, it’s definitely true that a lot of paints look substantially different before they dry, but unless they painted this tank in record time they had to have seen that it *wasn’t* drying to a proper olive drab. So they’re going to sandblast, reprime and repaint.

At least they didn’t leave it embedded in an asteroid in the neutral zone.

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:27 pm

Nuclear powered space station

 art, history, nukes, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
May 252019
 

A small magazine article from 1963 describing and depicting a MOL-like “space lab” equipped with a SNAP 2 nuclear reactor. This would have provided something along the lines of 3 kilowatts, plus an added bonus radiation environment. As show in the art, the reactor would be separated from the lab by a fairly long extendable rod, provided a reduction in radiation flux. The reactor would be the small object at far left; immediately next to it would be the “shadow shield,” typically made of tungsten (to stop gamma rays) and lithium hydride (to stop neutrons). This conical frustum is typically the most massive part of space reactors like this, and was used to shield a relatively small conical region, in this case centered on the space laboratory. If someone were to do a space walk from the lab and drift too far away to the side, entertaining things could well be done to their DNA. Extending beyond the shadow shield is a black cone, the thermal radiator for the system. Contained within the radiator would be tanks of mercury, pumps and turbogenerators; liquid sodium metal would flow through the reactor then through a heat exchanger, boiling the mercury. The mercury vapor would then either directly flow through the radiator, being cooled back to liquid, or through a heat exchanger, some other fluid being passed through the radiator.

Numerous ideas were floated through the mid 1960’s for attaching reactors such as this to MOL-like space labs. The main problem with this was that these labs were typically planned for only a single use; in that case, hydrogen/oxygen fuel cells or solar panels would almost always make more economic and mass budget sense.

 Posted by at 9:36 pm

B-2 drops a MOP

 aircraft, awesomeness, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
May 252019
 

Two MOPs, in fact. Note that the scene of the B-2 unloading two Massive Ordnance Penetrators is from a different test than the footage of the MOPs hitting the ground. The B-2 shot is in glorious Extra Slow Motion, and the B-2 leaps skyward in the process. Given the weight it rather suddenly lost, it’s not surprising that the aircraft would suddenly climb.

 Posted by at 6:27 pm

The age of the super-villain

 art, Forward!, Gah., Meh., politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
May 252019
 

Recently-released “Brightburn” is a movie that is essentially the Superman origin story… but Superman turns out to be an evil psycho rather than all that is good and wonderful. He kills with glee and gore, using his superpowers of flight and laser-eyes and whatnot to spread pain and terror, killing both individually and mass murdering. The kid is clearly a villain.

But he could have been beaten to the screen by a few months if only one scene hadn’t been deleted from “Captain Marvel.” In this scene, the “super hero” uses her super-strength to injure a man and extort from him his property under the threat of mutilation. This… is also a villain.

Due to the over-politicization, it took me months to see “Black Panther,” after having caught Every Single Previous Marvel Movie on Day One. I still have not seen “Captain Marvel.” I suspect I never will at this point.

 Posted by at 6:18 pm
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