And there’s nothing low-brow funny about it

 aircraft, Hmm..., news  12 Responses »
Jun 182015
 

Paris Air Show 2015: Lockheed Martin unveils new heavy-lift hybrid airship

Lockheed Martin unveiled the  LMH-1  (LockMart Hybrid)slightly-heavier-than-air airship, derived from their prior P-791 prototype. It requires either active vertical thrust or aerodynamic lift to fly; turn the engines off and it’ll sink to the ground. But it’s still pretty much a big ol’ blimp… though one of multi-lobe configuration. It uses air cushion landing gear so it can float around like a hovercraft on water or mud or concrete, and can go into reverse and use suction to lock itself down, thus not needing mooring masts and the like. Speeds up to 60 knots, payloads up to 21,000 kg and range up to 1,400 n.mi., all in a package that looks like this:

kardashian

UPDATE: Mea Culpa

Turns out I snagged the wrong photo… this is *not* the LockMart design, but the British “Airlander 10.” I apologize for the implication that Lockheed engineers are a bunch of pervs, when I should have known that it was in fact those dirty, dirty Brits.

The LockMart LMH-1 design looks like this:

lockheed-lmh-1

Not dual-lobed, but triple-lobed. So, y’know, an entirely different set of references to be made.

yay

 Posted by at 4:37 pm

In praise of profiling

 AARRRGH, Crazy, news  10 Responses »
Jun 182015
 

“Racial profiling” is one of those concepts that cause peoples heads to explode. But there are times when certain types of profiling seem like they might be advisable. Consider, for a moment, the example of last nights shooting at a church in Charlston. The suspected killer, Dylann Roof (who has reportedly been arrested… alive, somewhat surprisingly), posted this photo of himself to his Facebook page:

heymoe

Gee. Who could have *possibly* looked at that face and gone “huh, somethin’ ain’t right with that guy.”

Or:

adamlanza

Or:

sideshowbob

Or:

JustJared

————————-

Like it or not, “crazy whackjob” seems to have a vaguely definable but blisteringly obvious visible profile.

 Posted by at 9:05 am

Bad day for Fingers

 cats  6 Responses »
Jun 182015
 

In the past few days I’ve noticed Fingers acting a bit odd… not eating food, being generally tentative. This morning I noted that her jawline looked different; I figured it was a cyst like Buttons developed a few of, so I took her to the vet. The vet confirmed it; my guess is that Speedbump is responsible, as he remains a rambunctious hellraiser who likes to roughhouse, and these cysts were unknown before he came along. The vet decided that a course of antibiotics and a nice fat bill were all that’s needed for Fingers.

She was very unhappy to go to the vet:

WP_20150617_003

You can see that the lower right lip is “fat” due to the cyst.

And after the visit with the vet was over, Fingers was pretty mad at me:

WP_20150617_006

—-

A “tip jar” for those who wanna.


Feline Tip Jar


 Posted by at 1:08 am

“City in Space” and TAV art

 aircraft, art, history, Patreon, projects, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 172015
 

I have just uploaded 300 dpi-high-rez scans of two things to the APR Patreon “Extras” folder (2015-06 sub-folder):

1) An article from the May, 1956, issue of Popular Science, “Now They’re Planning A City In Space.” This article, illustrated with full-color paintings, describes the gigantic artificial gravity space station proposed by Darrell Romick of Goodyear Aircraft Company as part of the METEOR project. This space station is forward-thinking by today’s standards, and is challenged in scale only by the likes of the O’Neill space colonies.

2) A McDonnell-Douglas painting depicting a Trans Atmospheric Vehicle in orbit.

These items are available to all $4+ APR Patreon patrons, and were made possible by the support of APR patrons and customers. If you’d like to access these and many other extras, please check out the APR Patreon page.

patreon-200

 

cityinspace McDonnell Douglas TAV in orbit art

 Posted by at 2:19 pm

The Sleeper Has Awakened

 news, science, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Jun 142015
 

Rosetta’s lander Philae wakes up from hibernation

Rosetta’s lander Philae is out of hibernation!

The signals were received at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt at 22:28 CEST on 13 June. More than 300 data packets have been analysed by the teams at the Lander Control Center at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

“Philae is doing very well: It has an operating temperature of -35ºC and has 24 Watts available,” explains DLR Philae Project Manager Dr. Stephan Ulamec. “The lander is ready for operations.”

For 85 seconds Philae “spoke” with its team on ground, via Rosetta, in the first contact since going into hibernation in November.

When analysing the status data it became clear that Philae also must have been awake earlier: “We have also received historical data – so far, however, the lander had not been able to contact us earlier.”

Now the scientists are waiting for the next contact.  There are still more than 8000 data packets in Philae’s mass memory which will give the DLR team information on what happened to the lander in the past few days on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

 Posted by at 8:00 am

Storytime: A bit of Pax Orionis

 blather, history, Hmm..., My Fiction, nukes, Pax Orionis  25 Responses »
Jun 142015
 

Here is the *start* of the bit of the project I’ve been occasionally poking away at… a bit of back story. How to get from the history we know, where Project Orion was cancelled and the USSR peacefully imploded, to an alternate history where Orion progressed and WWIII broke out in 1984? There is but one major world event that could have changed the course of things… and the historical fact seems to be that if one anonymous sailor threw left rather than right, big things could have changed almost immediately.

Of course, a whole lot of the history in this section is just straight out of *our* history.

What’s below in text is about a third of this part of the history that I’ve written, and it’ll probably wind up being about one-fifth once I’m done with it. I’d appreciate input.

If by some unlikely chance you think it’s awesome and are dying to read more… I’m bribable.

 


Fiction Tip Jar


——————

Excerpt from “My Time On Fire” by Barry Wygant (weapons control officer, U.S.S. Thunderchild). Published by Radiant Fireball Press, New Houston, Texas, April 2002.

Chapter Three: Cuba

A lot of people disagree, but I’m pretty sure that the Orion program probably would have either faded away or taken much longer to come about had it not been for the Cuban War. Sure, it was a disaster for everyone involved, and for millions of people who shouldn’t have been involved, but that war gave America the solar system. Had it not been for the Orion program that rose from the ashes of Cuba, God only knows how we would have fared in the War of ’84. So a bit of history of that war is in order. Sure, it’s all pretty well known… but hey, it’s my book, I’ll tell it like I want.
Continue reading »

 Posted by at 1:46 am

Hydrogen burps?

 AARRRGH, blather, cats, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., science, ಠ_ಠ  2 Responses »
Jun 132015
 

Today I worked on replacing some window screens. The old ones had fiberglass screen; as the cats (specifically, Fingers) proved skilled at slicing through that, I decided to replace them with aluminum screens. Without thinking of what I suppose might in retrospect have been an obvious eventuality, I worked on the screens where the cats could get at them. And unfortunately, that meant that at least two of the cats (Raedthinn and Buttons) decided that the thing to do was to gnaw upon the resulting thin-gauge aluminum “wires” shed from the screens after trimming. In Buttons’ case, I managed to catch him and grab hold of a wire that was projecting 1/4 inch from his mouth… and proved to be about four inches long. So it was nearly fully swallowed. Who knows if he or another cat might have successfully swallowed some of the wire.

Being aluminum, I wonder if any such wire could survive long in the cats stomach? The hydrochloric acid should convert the aluminum to aluminum chloride and  hydrogen; water in the stomach should react with the aluminum chloride to produce aluminum oxide and more hydrochloric acid. Since the aluminum oxide is about as inert as a substance can get, it would seem that hydrogen gas would be the only product of note.

Of course, this assumes that the wire stays in the stomach long enough to get reacted away. If it passes through… I don’t think this will have a happy result. So, I suppose I’m off to the vet in the morning to see what they say to watch out for.

Yay.

 Posted by at 1:43 am
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