Another slide from the NASA HQ archive depicts a Gemini capsule landing under a Rogallo wing paraglider. The concept was given considerable study, and there was serious expectation that it would be instituted for “operational” Gemini spacecraft, such as military MOL flights and the like.
Take a look here:
The author of the piece posits a relatively minor social breakdown… EBT cards no longer function. From there, millions of urbanites who have been drawn into dependency upon the government for their food go on a rampage. The suggestion is that it starts like the Watts and LA riots… but amped up with the addition of technology “flash mob” abilities, and fueled by worsened ethnic tensions. Before long (so goes the hypothesis), we have a full-out race war.
The writer then goes on to describe the proper operation of anti-flash-mob “death squads,” trained snipers in the back of pickup trucks who set out to kill as many rioters as possible.
Yeeeesh.
Sure, it’s slopping over in paranoia. But the question, as always… is it paranoid enough?
I dunno. I do know that the “War On Poverty” has set the US up to take one hell of a fall if something goes substantially wrong. We haven’t had really bad civil disturbances since the advent of Twitter and texting and such, so who knows how bad things could get.
Someone making a homemade copy of a sci-fi weapon? Not newsworthy. Making the weapon functional? Potentially newsworthy. Here we have a German feller who made a replica of the “Gauss Gun” from a video game, and went to the bother of making it a functional electromagnetic slug-thrower. It accelerates 5.7 mm diameter steel “bullets” to a claimed 100 meters per second. Certainly not in the category of a good firearm, but it’s respectable.
[youtube nVgbtqsmx54]
And here’s the actually exciting part: much of the limitation in muzzle velocity, rate of fire and rounds-per-recharge is wrapped up in the battery. And since numerous governments are pushing electric cars, battery capability is bound to improve… which means that homemade Gauss guns like this will be able to improve alongside ’em. Nothing here would seem to be restrictable as a firearm; so coupling battery advancements with rapid prototyping/3D printing, it’s conceivable that before too long the average enthusiast will be able to go to Walmart and buy some batteries and plug them into their home-printed full-auto, 900 fps Gauss assault rifle.
Also known as the “Solar storm of 1859.” This was the most powerful solar flare ever observed, with the added bonus that it was directed at Earth. The consequences of the event were pretty spectacular at the time; were the same event to occur today, at the very least you could expect virtually all power grids and phone lines to not only go down, but burst into flames. From the Wikipedia article:
From August 28, 1859, until September 2, numerous sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun. Just before noon on September 1, the British astronomer Richard Carrington observed the largest flare, which caused a major coronal mass ejection (CME) to travel directly toward Earth, taking 17 hours. Such a journey normally takes three to four days. This second CME moved so quickly because the first one had cleared the way of the ambient solar wind plasma.
On September 1, 1859, Carrington and Richard Hodgson, another English amateur astronomer, independently made the first observations of a solar flare. Because of a simultaneous “crochet” observed in the Kew Observatory magnetometer record by Balfour Stewart and a geomagnetic storm observed the following day, Carrington suspected a solar-terrestrial connection. Worldwide reports on the effects of the geomagnetic storm of 1859 were compiled and published by Elias Loomis which support the observations of Carrington and Balfour Stewart.
On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, even over the Caribbean; those over the Rocky Mountains were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning. People who happened to be awake in the northeastern US could read a newspaper by the aurora’s light.
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases shocking telegraph operators. Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire. Some telegraph systems continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
A repeat of this could be something of a civilization-ender. With a universal power grid failure, the factories needed to produce the replacement parts for the trashed grid would themselves be out of power, and very likely damaged. While everything could of course be repaired, the problem would be that the timeframe could be weeks to months before basic utilities are back up and running… and as has often been noted, modern cities are only a few meals away from anarchy. What would New York, Los Angeles or Chicago be like a week after the power goes down, the phones stop working and the food truck stop coming in?
This is one of those unlikely-yet-conceivable events that Doomsday Preppers spend lots of time trouble and treasure fretting about.
Fortunately, unlike an EMP burst from an orbital nuke, this is something that can be seen coming a few hours to a few days out. The proper response would be to issue warnings, and then an hour or so before the pulse gets here… shut down the grids and start physically disconnecting the transformers. It would be unpopular, and it would leave people in the dark for perhaps a few days, but it’s better than having transformers explode and power lines vaporize.
Also fortunately, such events are rare, about once every 500 years.
NOTE: Don’t sabotage aluminum structures. However, the following video shows how *easily* aluminum can be trashed. This would be useful for someone writing a James Bond-type story, or a sci-fi story where an aluminum spacecraft gets pranged by a gallium meteoroid, or who wants to prevent someone else from trashing *their* aluminum structures.
In short: aluminum + gallium = BAD. A little blob of hot gallium will infiltrate through the aluminum and create an aluminum/gallium alloy with almost no structural strength whatsoever.
[youtube FaMWxLCGY0U]
Early days in the project, but here’s the start on the Soviet “LK” lunar lander for Fantastic Plastic. This is targeted at 1/48 scale. It will not come with an interior (be damned hard to see through the rather tiny window), but it is being modeled in hollow shells so that if someone wants to add an interior, it’ll be doable.
A piece of NASA artwork from 1976 showing who was responsible for what. This slide from the NASA HQ archive shows an *almost* final Space Shuttle; the differences between this and the actual STS are probably due to artistic error or omission rather than design differences (the longer aft skirts on the SRBs, the bigger “spike” on the nose of the ET, differences in the color/tiles on the Orbiter, etc.)
Discussion of the “Israel-Palestine Problem” often makes mention of the numerous settlements in the West Bank, and how they’re illegal (or not). Thus when the two-state solution – separate and distinct Israeli and Arab nations (because there are no other Arab nations, I guess) – is discussed, “what about the settlements” pops up.
Well, how about this: Israel cuts the settlements loose. Israel firms up its borders and says “here we are.” But the West Bank? Let the “settlers” and the Arabs work it out. Thus if the settlers and the West Bankers want to go to war over turf, let ’em. Israel can thus be every bit as standoffish and morally superior about the plight of the poor settlers as the Arab nations are about the “Palestinians.”
Short form: The Israelis have taken to hosing down “Palestinian protestors” (the euphemism for Cis-Jordanian would-be exterminators of the Jews) with a substance called simply “skunk.” It is an apparently non-toxic but foul smelling liquid that combines the most impressive aspects of sewage and rotting corpses with skunk-stank and lasts for *days.*
While the recipe is classified, I’d bet that it is composed at least in part of cadaverine and/or putrescine. Appropriate given that it is being sprayed on people who seem to worship death to a disturbingly high degree.