McDonnell Douglas heavy lifter art

 aircraft, art, Hmm..., projects  No Responses »
Oct 112014
 

From the same eBay seller mentioned HERE is an illustration of a McDonnell-Douglas heavy lift cargo aircraft. This design features a non-circular fuselage (it appears to be two cylinders side-by-side and faired over) and six engines located over the wing. Without further documentation, the reasoning can only be guessed at, but I would expect that the idea was to get the engines up high away from foreign objects that might be found on unimproved runways, while permitting a very low stance for the landing gear to ease cargo loading. It appears that there were cargo doors on the sides of the nose, possibly indicating that it indeed had two independently pressurized cylindrical bays.

ebay 2014-09-29 a

 Posted by at 10:04 pm

Homeopathic Battleship

 awesomeness, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., religion, ships, ಠ_ಠ  3 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

Homeopathy, for those who don’t know, is a form of magical thinking that masquerades as medicine. The idea, if you can call it that, is this: water magically absorbs the healing properties of drugs that have been added to it and, importantly, *remembers* those powers no matter how dilute the solution. And, apparently, the diluted water is *better* than the medicine itself.

Rarely described by homeopathic apologists is why a bucket of water remembers aspirin, but not that sewage treatment plant that it passed through.

But hey, if you believe that diluting medicine so far that it is statistically likely that not a single molecule of the stuff remains in a gallon of water, then you’ll love…

Homeopathic Battleship

The normal game of Battleship is played on a board whose initial ratio of ship to water is 17:100. But here they’ve diluted the warships by jacking up the size of the board, using the homeopathic measurement of 6C (a dilution of 10 to the power of -12). In order to do this, there are columns A through J, and rows 1 through 100000000000. Have fun!

 

 Posted by at 9:47 pm

Witchcraft is alive and well. In Britain.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, news, religion, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

No, I’m not referring to Wicca or the Druids, but to something much worse.

Reports of Witchcraft-Related Child Abuse On the Rise in London

As if importing Ebola from Africa wasn’t bad enough, the West seems to be importing the dumbest of belief systems: anything bad is due to demonic possession, and the proper response is to abuse the hell out of kids.

Brilliant. Put these Christian jackholes together with the Muslim kiddie diddlers of Rotherham and you’ll have a temptingly-nukable target.

 Posted by at 12:47 pm

“And” and “the”

 blather, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics, ಠ_ಠ  15 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

Firstly, famed Nobel-prize winning viral epidemiologist Barack Obama on speaking about Ebola assures the world: “You cannot get it through casual contact like sitting next to someone on a bus.”

[youtube gFKMYY-2A2k]

Then those know-nothing untrustworthy anti-science chumps at the CDC posted this, giving advice for Americans who have traveled to Liberia, returned home, and now are displaying the early symptoms of Ebola:

Limit your contact with other people when you travel to the doctor; avoid public transportation.

Clearly the CDC is racist. Or something.

ebola

 Posted by at 11:31 pm

The Great Martian War

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., science fiction  10 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

This is kinda neat… actual WWI footage tinkered into footage of the war against the Martians. Even without dialogue or description it results in a comprehensible and interesting tale… but ya gotta wonder what the years following would have produced. Imagine the European Imperial powers equipped with alien weapons technology. How many minutes of peace would there have been before villains such as the Tsar or Kaiser or King of England decided to conquer the world his own self?

[vimeo 107454954]

 Posted by at 10:26 pm

I guess it’ll be a relaxing weekend at home

 AARRRGH, blather, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Oct 102014
 

So, I was driving home from Logan (about 30 miles and one shallow mountain pass) when I heard an odd, intermittent  slipping or grinding sound. It got progressively worse, so I decided to pull into the repair place in Tremonton (about 7 miles from home). As it was only a half hour from closing, they briefly looked at it and declared that most likely it was due to some belt slipping, not a problem, bring it back Monday. About half a block out of the parking lot, the radio couldn’t decide if it wanted to stay on, every light on the dashboard lit up and the power steering decided to go on vacation. I managed to horse it back to the repair place, where the explanation now transitioned to “sounds like your alternator’s screwed up.” They still couldn’t get to it until Monday, but they wanted to pull it into the shop… but putting the key in the ignition and turning it resulted in little more than a brief “uhhh” from the engine compartment then… nada. So, we pushed it in and I got a ride home.

Yaaaaaaaaay.

Well, if your car *has* to die, I guess ten feet from the repair shop’s entrance is the place to have it happen.

 Posted by at 4:50 pm

Airliners: Wrong Place For Bad Jokes

 Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., humor, Meh., news, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

Here’s a tip: there may not be any good places to make jokes about having Ebola… but on board an airliner? Just about the *worst* possible place. Not only will you inconvenience, annoy and in some cases panic the other passengers, you will make the stewardess get on the PA system and call you an idiot.

At least the bulk of the passengers seen here seem to be taking it well. That seems to be one of the features of the Ebola outbreak… the authorities and the media are freaking the hell out, but the general populace? Meh.

[youtube LJhWVsx1U8c]

Yes, yes, freedom of speech. But airplanes have *long* been places of limited humor. Joking about hijackings or bombs, for instance, would get your kiester in a sling decades ago.

I have been giving vague consideration to flying back home a few months from now. But considering the state of my lungs, the crappy recycled quality of the air and the presence of coughing, hacking strangers in close proximity, I’d probably only do so wearing a dust mask or some such. But now I wonder: if I did so, would I cause a passenger, crew or official freakout? Or, perhaps, would I be just one of a number of passengers so equipped?

 Posted by at 7:39 am

Patreon: October 2014 rewards released

 aircraft, drawings, history, new products, news, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  2 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

The October rewards for the APR patrons have been released. They include:

PDF document: “A Recoverable Air Breathing Booster,” A Chrysler study from 1964 for a strap-on booster system for the Saturn Ib incorporating additional H-1 rocket engines and jet engines for recovery.

PDF Document: “XF-103 Descriptive Data,”a Lockheed collection of information on the then-current XF-103. This is from a Lockheed collection of information on competitors designs.

Large format diagram scan: the Boeing Advanced Theater Transport. A later version of the tilt-wing “Super Frog.”

And for the higher-end patrons, a CAD diagram of an early NACA-Langley design for what would become the X-15.

2014-10 ad

 

If you would like to access these items and support the cause of acquiring and sharing these pieces of aerospace history, please visit my Patreon page and consider contributing.

patreon-200

 Posted by at 12:32 am

Tomorrowland

 art, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  4 Responses »
Oct 092014
 

The movie “Tomorrowland” has been in the works for a while, but little is known about it. It’s made by Disney, so presumably there will be some sort of tie-in to the”Tomorrowland” sections of the parks (do they even still have “Tomorrowland?” I was last at a Disney park sometime in the mid 1970s, and the space themed stuff is just about all I remember of the experience. Well that and lines. Lots and lots of lines, seemingly whole nations of people lined up for hours for a few minutes worth of ride). It is directed by Brad Bird, which is a good thing since he was the guy behind “The Incredibles,” which is in serious need of sequelizing.

I kinda get a “Eureka” vibe from this terribly interesting yet terribly uninformative trailer… it seems like it might refer to a place where the creative drive of scientists and engineers has been unleashed and allowed to flourish, not chained behind miles of red tape and bureaucracy and regulation. But who knows…

[youtube 1k59gXTWf-A]

 Posted by at 9:56 pm

Inflatable “room” for ISS

 blather, Hmm..., news, projects, spacecraft, youtube  18 Responses »
Oct 092014
 

Private Inflatable Room Launching to Space Station Next Year

The “Bigelow Expandable Activity Module” will go up next year on a SpaceX “Dragon” capsule and will, if successful, add some much needed habitation volume to the ISS. It is a fairly small module, however. Doesn’t seem to have windows.

This Bigelow PR video shows the BEAM, along with the BA 330 stand alone inflatable space station. Put a few of those together connected by a truss and tumble ’em end-over-end to generate “artificial gravity,” and maybe finally there will be a truly useful space station, good for studying something other than just how bad long term needless weightlessness is on the human body.

If you have a rotating “bar bell” of habs connected to a non-rotating core station, that would permit the study of what we *really* need to study: the long term impacts of variable G levels. We already know that zero G is bad enough that we’ll almost certainly never accomplish much using crews subjected to it non-stop over long periods. But how about crews who spend part of their day in zero G, and part at, say, 1/10 G?

Since the BEAM can be carried up with a Dragon, this leads promptly to the obvious speculation about launching a Dragon and a BEAM somewhere *other* than the ISS. Lunar flybys, asteroid rendezvous, etc. using the BEAM as a sizable mission module.

[youtube isQU84Kc0Y0]

 Posted by at 11:05 am
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