Your chance has come again!
Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds end their two-year marriage
At now, and you can surely score…
Dec 152010
Dec 152010
I’ve been in and out of my shop several times today. I came out again just a few minutes ago… and happened to noticed a wet, black, furry blob of misery near the corner of my garage in the weeds. The source of the misery? It was a juvenile cat with its head firmed stuck in an old soup can. I grabbed the soup can and picked it up, lifting the cat by the head at the same time; the cat didn’t react at all. I figured it was dead. But it slowly slid out of the can with the same sucking sound as you get when dumping out a can of jellied cranberry sauce, and plopped to the ground with the same sound as, well, a can of jellied cranberry sauce.
Rather than being confronted with a dead cat, though, it was quite alive, and stared at me for half a second with eyes the size of dinner plates… then it took off like a shot towards the nearest horizon.
I’ve seen cats get their head stuck in these things before. Always surprising… with their whiskers, you’d think they’d know better.
Dec 152010
A proposal to the US Navy in 1951, the Ryan Model 38 was a design for a relatively small single-seat VTOL day fighter. The Model 38 eventually morphed into the X-13. Initially, the Model 38 could land ona flat deck on its tail; but the X-13 required a vertical surface with attachments the aircraft could hang off of.
In this early design, pitch and yaw control at low speed was provided by a vectorable main nozzle; roll control by unconventionalvectorable nozzles mounted in the middle of the wings. The nozzles had a limited range of motion, and could exhaust either above or below the wings. The exhaust would then impinge upon the main control surfaces for added control authority. This design feature did not last long, however.
Dec 152010
This is as impressive as all get-out:
[youtube jciUYQHa6-0]
Dec 142010
I’m working on a few minor bits of self-publishing by way of MagCloud, specifically getting APR up to speed as a high-quality printed version. But I’d like to do some smaller tests first. Seems to me a good test would be a book of my own photos. Nothing spectacular, maybe 30 pages of full-page photos. The question then becomes… which photos? If anyone is vaguely interested in such a thing, let me know what you think. Options include “every damned thing,” or “cats” (because, sure, there ain’t near enough cat photo books out there), or “nuclear bombs” or “museum aircraft” or “landscapes” or “Utah” or… whatever.
Dec 142010
Mankind has dreamed up a whole lot of horrors, more than enough to be ashamed of the species. Genocide, systematic torture, whackadoodle religions, socialism, Justin Beiber, the list goes on. But every now and then, there’s cause to stand up and say, “By the gods, Men did that.” Here’s one of those times:
The wind is no longer at Voyager’s back
There is gas between the stars, which astronomers call the interstellar medium. The solar wind blows out into it, slowing. There is a region, over a billion kilometers thick, where the solar wind plows to a halt, creating a roughly spherical shell around the solar system. That’s called the heliosheath, and it looks like Voyager 1 is now solidly inside it. In fact, it’s been there for four months or so; the scientists measuring the solar wind speed noticed it dropped to 0 back in June, but it took a while to make sure this wasn’t just some local eddy in the flow. It’s not. Voyager 1 now has calm seas ahead.
But the probe is still moving outward at 60,000 kph (38,000 mph). In a few more years it’ll leave the heliosheath behind, and when that happens it will truly be in interstellar space, the vast and nearly empty region between the stars. At that moment it will be the first human device ever to truly leave the solar system and enter the great stretches of the galaxy beyond.
Men did this.
Dec 132010
Whilst digging through my database, I stumbled across this photo I took a while back. It’s a photo of a large “blueprint,” Convair drawing SD-54-09001, “VTOL General Arrangment Rotating Pilot Seat.” Shown is a 3-view of a tailsitter jet fighter, similar to the Ryan X-13 although optimised for operational duty. It packs a Vulcan in its belly, which is a nice courtesy detail, and canards. The pilots seat would presumably tilt forward while in vertical orinetation so the pilot isn’t on his back. However, there are no indication of windows on the underside of the cockpit.
At the time the photo was taken, the diagram was far too large for scanning or photocopying.
The cockpit and underslung inlet do in some small way presage the General Dynamics F-16 from 20 years later.
Dec 122010
As useful as the NERVA nuclear rocket engine would have been (and may yet be), you wouldn’t want to spend too much time too near it when it fired up. Below is an image from an Aerojet report from late 1964, showing locations of test instruments overlaid atop a graph showing fast neutron and gamma ray flux for an engine at power. Sadly, the graph is pretty damned vague about the absolute magnitude of the units. There are numerous steps in the order of magnitude, at which point the units reset.. so what, on the right, might look like 1.5 ergs/gm/hr, is probably 1.5 time ten to the power of X ergs/gm/hr, with X being an unknown. My copy of the report is sadly incomplete, and is missing out on little details like what “X” is.
UPDATE: the magnitude of the neutron and gama ray flux can be seen in the form of the faint larger numerals in the background. See comments for more.
Somewhere around here I have another report that shows similar radiation levels for a NERVA engine; I’ll look for that until some shiny object passes by and distracts me.
Dec 122010
I’ve been sitting on these blueprints for year, and I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do about ’em. The Model 23 was a 1956-57 study for a supersonic nuclear powered seaplane bomber.
What’s shown here is somethign like 1/4 of what I have on the Model 23. Much scanning and stitching to do yet.
Dec 122010
Back in 2004, United Technologies/Chemical Systems Division, former manufacturer of the Titan III 120-inch solid rocket booster, was rapidly imploding. Everybody that could bailed just as soon as they could; this left vast piles of “stuff” all over that needed to be dealt with. There were boxes of old promotional glossies, binders of photos, file cabinets full of drawings. And paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. While management took a dim view of employees wandering off with staplers and other office supplies, a lot of the old promotional “junk” was left out for people to pick through.
Two of the glossies I snagged were of, presumably, a United Tech lunar transport. I have the artwork, and nothing else. No date, no confirmation that these are actually UTC designs. But they very likely date from the early 1960’s.
I can’t say as I’ve seen any other vehicle designs quite like this. The concept is straightforward enough… a long pole would be used as a piston to push off against the lunar surface. The pole, which appears to be 30 to 40 feet long, would be rotated in flight so that it would take the landing impact.
The idea is not completely insane… if the push off involves non-dangerous levels of acceleration, then the landing, if it’s handled properly, would involve exactly the same levels of acceleration. If the mechanism is electromechanical or electromagnetic, then chances are that the vehicle could recover much of the kinetic energy upon landing. In a completely efficient system (which this obviously wouldn’t be) this would be a virtually energy-free way to cover distance on the moon. However, each hop would require energy to rotate the pole; there’d be losses to heat in the jump, losses to heat in the landing, and losses of rocket propellant as the thrusters fire to keep everything aligned properly.
It’s an interesting idea, but I’ll stick with the rover, thanks. You’d only need to jam that pole into a hidden crevice once to really mess up your plans in an energetic way.
Besides… the configuration is just a little unsettling. Maybe Dr. Evil would think flying around in something composed of a shaft and two balls is perfectly normal, but I think the kids at Clavius Base Elementary would point and laugh.