From a 1964 NASA-KSC report, illustrations of the Apollo command Module access arms for the Saturn Ib, Launch complexes 34 and 37.
Mar 032012
Mar 032012
Some really bare-bones preliminary CAD sketches of the Message Bearer, a digit ship and the Archangel Michael. There are two “Michaels,” one made the size as described, one 1/8 that size, based on the assumption that the same character mis-spoke *twice*. Not an assumption that makes me terribly happy, but looking at the full-size vehicle, more than a mile long, it’s just silly. The Michael was built under a dome; so this would have meant building a greenhouse dome well over a mile tall. Beyond the unreasonableness of a mile-long spaceship being built under wartime conditions, a mile-tall (and probably several mile-wide) greenhouse would be just a little obvious.
Comments and suggestions welcome. When I’m more or less satisfied with the overall geometries and details, I’ll proceed to 3D modelling.
Mar 032012
Mar 032012
When you find a spare three-quarters of an hour, give this a watch. John Stossel reports on how prit near everything is either illegal or regulated out of existence. He interviews a number of people who express some rather astonishing and anti-American glee over their power to control other peoples lives.
[youtube CFfVeXhtRa0]
New York City pops up with an important role, unsurprisingly.
Mar 032012
GM to suspend production of Chevy Volt
And laid off 1,300 workers.
An extra-expensive car that only goes thirty or so miles on electricity? Yeah, who woulda guessed that it wouldn’t be a rampaging success story.
Mar 022012
Here’s an Excel spreadsheet with all the design bits I gleaned from “Footfall,” covering the Message Bearer, the digit ships, the Michael, stovepipes and Shuttles. Not a lot of specifics, and a fair number of contradictions. The genius of it, though, is that basically every description of a ship comes through the eyes or words of a character… which means that they could be wrong, and certainly cannot be assumed to be accurate.
One contradiction: on page 44 (of my first-edition hardback, your mileage may vary), the President says that the Message Bearer is “well over a mile in length,” but on page 46, the exact same speech quotes “perhaps a mile in length.”
One might question why I’m bothering with all this. After all, “Footfall” will be only a fraction of the chapter on “Nuclear Pulse in Popular Culture,” which will be one of the shorter chapters. And the Michael suffers from not having any mathematical basis, nor a good idea of just what it looks like (while the Messiah from “Deep Impact” is shown in detail, and the Orion from “Orion Shall Rise” was sketched for me by the author, Poul Anderson). But here’s the thing: I am, at the core, a design engineer. Sadly, I don’t get paid to do design engineering these days – even what I *was* paid to be a design engineer, I rarely got to actually do it. Paperwork. Accounting. Corporate rubbish. Feh. So… here we have something of a design challenge: a nuclear pulse propelled space battleship of extraordinary size and power. There’s no such thing as an aerospace design engineer who wouldn’t give his left arm for the chance to design a space battleship. The vague description of the Michael simply forms the design limits.
Of course, if Niven and/or Pournelle were to pop up with some more detailed specs or sketches, that would be great. Barring that, I’ll do the best I can with what I’ve got, and will post progress from time to time.
Mar 022012
Sequel to THIS. Here are images of the NG concept of the flying wing jetliner designed for the NASA “Environmentally Responsible Aviation” program. Cruise for this design is about Mach 0.82 at 36,000 feet, for a nominal range of 8,000 n.m. Fuel burn was assumed to be 41.5% reduce from a 1998 baseline.
More illustrations including three-views HERE.
Mar 022012
Basically the same as the November 2011 chart from HERE, this one dates from late January 2012. Has a few new vehicles on it; the SLS designs are updated.
Mar 022012
Neat! Creepy… but neat!
Japan invents speech-jamming gun that silences people mid-sentence
The “gun” works by recording what the speaker is saying, and then playing it back to him with a 0.2 second delay. This causes the brain to get all confuzzled and shut up. I’ve experienced this effect on a few phone calls where something screwy with the connection caused my own words to be replayed to me with a split-second delay.
Mar 022012
Ethicists who argued that ‘after-birth abortions’ are ethical receive death threats
Newborns cannot be considered “persons,” meaning there is no moral reason not to perform “after-birth abortions,” argue a pair of Australian ethicists in a controversial paper that has drawn death threats.
The authors, both of whom have worked at Melbourne University, say that killing even a healthy newborn could be acceptable if raising the child would put an unacceptable burden on the family.
The paper in question was a purely theoretical thought exercise. But this is a topic where a whole lot of people just aren’t in the mood for thought exercises. People get kinda screwy when you start discussing killing babies.
Included in the article is one of my pet peeves on the topic: the question on “when life begins,” whether at conception or at some later point. Grrr. “Life began” *before* conception. The egg is alive, the sperm is alive. The fertilized single-cell egg is alive. the question is not when “life” begins, but when it can be considered to have human rights.