Helicopters with Bug Legs

 aircraft, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, science, science fiction, youtube  8 Responses »
Sep 172015
 

DARPA is testing articulated robot legs for helicopters. This technology will allow choppers to land on slopes and on actively pitching decks of ships.

Robotic Landing Gear Could Enable Future Helicopters to Take Off and Land Almost Anywhere

I think I can be forgiven for thinking that it wouldn’t be *too* much of a stretch for these legs to be further advanced to allow helicopters to *walk.* That would be useful for maneuvering helicopters in landing areas, of course… but it might also be useful for various military applications using drone helicopters. Imagine a small unmanned helicopter that lands in a small clearing, folds its rotors, and then walks itself under trees or into the bushes for cover. There it waits. At the appropriate time it walks back out, unstows the rotor and takes off. Or perhaps a small cargo-carrying drone chopper lands near some troops, and then walks along with them as they trudge from A to B. It flies ammo in, serves as an ammo-carrying burro, stays with them as they prepare for a mission, and then flies an injured soldier or two out after the mission is done.

 Posted by at 10:35 am

Orion Shall Sit There

 AARRRGH, news, rockets, spacecraft  8 Responses »
Sep 172015
 

Color me stunned:

Orion astronaut flight faces delay to 2023

Orion, NASA’s modernized Apollo capsule, is looking at a two-year delay until a manned flight. This is due to developmental issues, which can also probably be linked to funding shortfalls. Which might seem a bit odd considering that the amount spent on Orion so far is several *billion* dollars, while SpaceX’s Dragon capsule has only seen a tiny fraction of that amount. Yes, yes, Orion is meant to be capable of a more energetic entry than Dragon, but still…

 Posted by at 10:03 am

The pilot is responsible for *all* passengers

 aircraft, awesomeness, critters, news  2 Responses »
Sep 172015
 

A pilot diverted an international flight to save a dog traveling in cargo

In short: an Air Canada flight from Tel Aviv to Toronto lost power to one of the cargo bay heaters. In the cargo bay was a Simba, a French bulldog. The pilot realized that the temperature in the cargo bay would drop to below freezing, so he diverted to an emergency landing in Frankfurt.

Reportedly the other passengers were largely understanding of the (undoubtedly substantial) delay. *That* is the actually surprisingly part of the story. I would not have been shocked if at least one of the passengers had, upon hearing that his flight was being diverted for a *dog,* got likkered up, tried to storm the cockpit in protest, and wound up dropping trou and pooping on the food cart. I dunno, maybe it’s because they were Canucks…

 Posted by at 9:30 am

Kes Ages Badly

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Sep 162015
 

On Star Trek: Voyager, the character Kes was supposed to kinda bring in the eyes of pimply adolescent boys. But the problem was… she was an alien of the Ocampa race, and was something like three years old. Dude, naw, naw, dude. So the character was written out of the show, replaced with the Borg character 7 of 9 and her amazing cybernetic implants.

It seems things haven’t gone well for Jennifer Lien, the actress who played Kes.

Star Trek: Voyager’s ‘Kes’ charged with exposing herself to children in Harriman

kes2

Eeeeep.

Given that a case can be made that the elimination of the character Kes from Voyager led to Barack Obama being elected President, I guess the sense of guilt must’ve been overwhelming

 

 Posted by at 7:20 pm

The Mist: The Series

 art, blather, Crazy, Hmm..., news, science fiction  2 Responses »
Sep 162015
 

Best headline I read today:

The Latest Stephen King Book To Become A Fatally Disappointing TV Show Is…

It’s early days, no word on what network or streaming service will carry “The Mist.”

If the series follows the movie, and if it has a good effects budget, and if it’s done *well,* it could be an intriguing show. Something, never well described, goes wrong at a secretive military base, and as a result a dense mist begins to spread out. The mist is filled with Lovecraftian monsters, *apparently* brought to our world through some handwavy dimensional rift thingymabobbery. People are trapped and have to flee & fight the critters. People who are unarmed are generally pretty well boned.

In the movie (and IIRC the short story it was based on) the monsters are just animals. Scary animals with terrifying tentacles and claws and venom and such, but still just animals. But here the show might benefit from having something rather worse. Perhaps the Mysterious Military Screwup What Done Brung This On could have been inspired/sabotaged/engineered by a mastermind from the other side. Never named, but that’s the sort of thing Nyarlathotep would have gotten behind…

 Posted by at 4:47 pm

Pax Orionis: Casaba Howitzer

 APR, history, Hmm..., My Fiction, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, nukes, Patreon, Pax Orionis, projects, science fiction, spacecraft  8 Responses »
Sep 162015
 

One of the more interesting, but less known, aspect of the Orion program was code named “Casaba Howitzer.” Little is known of this, except that pulse unit technology was somehow adapted to turn the device into a single-shot nuclear directed energy weapon. The propellant was somehow collimated into a tight “beam” that would be able to destroy enemy warheads out in space at some considerable distance. Just what that distance would be, though, remains clouded by Classification.

I created a simple provisional concept for Casaba Howitzer for issue V2N2 of Aerospace Projects Review. Since then… I’ve found out no new info on CH. But I’ve put considerable thought into the thing, and have redesigned my concept. Since the design is all mine, it’s usefulness in a factual history of Orion is minimal, but it’s great for fiction. And so I’m working on a set of diagrams for CH for Pax Orionis, and will include layouts of the “deployed” Casaba Howitzer configuration with the next release. Other diagrams will show the launch configuration as well as internal layouts.

If interested, check out the Pax Orionis Patron.

becomeapatron

 Posted by at 9:51 am

Packaging Error

 art, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, spacecraft  3 Responses »
Sep 162015
 

A few days ago I poked around the few remaining dregs of the Star Wars toys at a local WalMart, and found something interesting. While the dolls (fine, “action figures”) don’t much interest me, toy spaceships always perk up my interest. So I saw this item, which is a two-pack containing a TIE Fighter and the Millennium Falcon from the forthcoming movie:

WP_20150914_002

And there’s this, which contains a different TIE Fighter and the Ghost from the “Rebels” animated series:

WP_20150914_001

And then… there’s this.

WP_20150916_003

WP_20150916_002

Huh.

Granted, in the grand scheme of things it’s a minor issue, but it seems odd that in an age of entirely automated packaging that the wrong back card would be bonded to the plastic bubble containing the wrong set of toys.

So, did I find something interesting here, or are there a bagrillion of ’em?

 Posted by at 9:33 am

Nope. NOOOOOOOOOOPE.

 AARRRGH, art, awesomeness, Crazy, Gah., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Sep 152015
 

A lot of horror movies have villains/monsters that I’d like to think that, were I a character in the movie, I’d have the smarts and guts to realize that I could deal with by either setting ’em on fire, jamming something sharp and pokey into them, filling ’em full of lead, or even just turning on a good flashlight. But Guillermo del Toro’s new movie “Crimson Peak,” which comes out in a month? Were I to see this, I think my reaction would be to tell the proprietor of this fine establishment “I’m’a gonna FO” and the next you see of me is a dot on the horizon, substantially red shifted.

 

Del Toro *really* needs to do a straight-up Lovecraft movie.

 Posted by at 8:09 pm
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