From the very early 1960’s, this piece of Hughes artwork depicts a hot-cycle “Helibus.” The “hot-cycle” was a briefly studied form of helicopter that did not mechanically drive the rotor, but instead ducted hot exhaust gas from a turbojet up into the rotor hub and then down through ducts in the rotors, exhausting out nozzles near the tips of the rotors. The exhaust gas would then push the rotor blades directly. The advantage was that since there was no direct mechanical linkage between the rotors and the fuselage, the torque that a helicopter normally needs to counter with a tail rotor would be largely eliminated. Thus this “Helibus” has no tail rotor, but it would still need to have some sort of reaction control thrusters at the tail to provide directional control at low speed.
Note that every row of passenger seats has its own door. This would greatly facilitate passenger loading and unloading, at some considerable weight and cost penalty. it would also firmly lock in seat pitch… as the engines are swapped out for newer, better, lighter, more powerful and less fuel hungry versions, the airlines drive would be, as we’ve seen, to pack more and more passengers onboard. But here the doors on the side have to precisely match the seat rows.
A vehicle like this would probably be used mostly to transport office drones from rooftop heliports in urban city centers to transport hubs out in the burbs or the sticks.
The headline contains just about all the actual information that’s available. Maybe it’s a series. Maybe a movie. Maybe a video game, maybe a comic book, maybe a pack of trading cards.
Still, lack of data is never a good enough reason to not speculate wildly. One possibility: Paramount has finally realized that STD is promising to be such a disaster that they’re already looking at ways of rapidly recovering by doing something that, unlike STD, won’t irritate the fans. Possibilities include the obvious such as a series set 15 years after the end of Voyager in the “prime” Star Trek universe. If it covers such stuff as the trashing of the Romulan empire and twenty years of post-Dominion War changes, it could be pretty interesting.
But for some reason, the suits think it’s a good idea to keep setting Star Trek series in the “past.” Enterprise, the NuTrek movies, Discovery. It seems they have an obsession with it. So… fine. I have an idea.
How about a series that covers *two* eras? Deep Space Nine showed Reliant-class vessels and Excelsior-class vessels all the time. These ships could well be pushing a century of service life. This it not that unlikely… the B-52 has been in service more than 60 years, for example. If things were only slightly different, Iowa-class battleships might still be in service, three quarters of a century later. So a starship a century old? Sure, I can buy that.
So here’s my notion: Star Trek: Rand, say. The adventures of the USS Ayn Rand (because why the hell not), a Reliant-class vessel that was first built around the time of “The Motion Picture” and was the pinnacle of high tech for its time. And… it’s still around a century later, with upgraded everything. No longer front line, but still doing a job. So show two entirely different crews: an early crew wearing “Wrath of Khan” era uniforms, the top of their class , in a ship that’s still new, out doing a 5-year mission. And alternate that with episodes featuring a post-Voyager crew… *not* the best of the best. You can use a lot of the same sets, and maybe even go to a lot of the same destinations, a century apart.
Have a *few* overlapping characters. Ensign Skippy is Early Rand’s enthusiastic young Vulcan science officer-in-training. Commander Skippy is Old Rand’s curmudgeonly, cranky first officer or Chief Engineer. “A century I’ve spent on this same damn ship, serving under a succession of increasingly dumbass human captains. Sigh…”
You could throw some real curveballs in there. Voyager showed a lot of new propulsion technologies, stuff pushing well past warp drive. Most of the time they didn’t work well or reliably, but they’ve had a generation to perfect what Voyager brought back.So the warp nacelles have been removed and replaced with… what? Tiny nacelles? Landing gear? Cargo pods? Empty space? Given the possibilities of the new propulsion system, then perhaps the Rand is a technology testbed, being sent to the Magellanic Clouds.
Here’s an interesting thing that is, in fact, A Thing, in Japan: “Name Seals.” It seems that instead of scribbling their signatures on everything, the Japanese custom is to use a little stamp. I guess it’s half a dozen of one, six of the other… someone could copy your stamp (or steal it), but someone can forge your signature, too.
In general they are about half an inch in diameter. At one point in the video the presenter shows a display in a Japanese shop that has a whole bunch of stamps that have Western first names, transliterated into Japanese characters… not exactly precisely, given the one he looks at, but probably about as close as you’re going to get (and probably about as close as you’re going to get in writing down a Japanese name in English).
Me, I’m all in favor of “cultural appropriation.” If your people have something I think I might find useful… I’m’a gonna take it and modify it to suit my purposes. And the “Name Seal” thing is something that I think *could* potentially be interesting in the West. The problem, of course, is that in order for it to work, it would have to be pretty much universally accepted. I have no doubt that more than one Japanese businessman has come to Los Angeles for a business meeting and at the end they break out a contract and everyone gave him dead-eyed stares when, instead of signing it, he stamped it.
Still, there is a somewhat obscure precedent in Western culture: the Code Cylinder.
Now, imagine this: some years down the line, people might have their own Name Seal/Code Cylinders. The stamp would be at one end, but instead of being a simple piece of carved rubber, wood or metal, the stamp would be a moving mechanism, composed of, say, rotating or extruding bits. When not in use, the stamp does *not* form the necessary geometry. In order to get the stamp working right, the owner would need to set it. This could be done with:
1: A small metal key, in a fairly straightforward lock
3: Similar to the number lock, but whole sections of the cylinder twist
4: And for the high-end, a small biometric scanner like a fingerprint reader
I’d get a kick out of one of these things that was a combo of 3 & 4. You twist it to the proper orientations, apply your thumb, and *then* the stamp is mechanically produced.
To be really useful, the code cylinder would need to do more than just make a simple ink-stamp. Setting the stamp correctly also correctly sets an internal RFID chip; so when it comes time to sign that all-important contract, in full view of everyone you set your code cylinder, apply thumb, make your stamp, pass the cylinder over an RFID reader… and, because why not, you turn the cylinder around and scribble your signature because, like some of the name seals in the video, it has a pen built into the other end.
Getting such a thing into the culture at large would be a chore. But one area where I bet it might work: city, county, state government offices. The DMV. Courts. Hospitals and doctors offices, with a stamp for every prescription or referral. *That* might work.
And the beauty of it: when an SJW starts screaming at you about cultural appropriation and how you stole the name seal from the Japanese, you pummel them about the head and shoulders with your light saber and yell at them that your code cylinder was actually handed down through your family from the glory days of the old republic, before the dark times. And then you can mash some cheap gas station sushi into their hair.
Interesting times on a Chinese highway when a truck shoots into oncoming traffic, leading to a series of unfortunate consequences. probably due to wet road conditions.
An old (1962 or before) piece of concept art from Kaman illustrating their “ROMAR,” a helicopter meant for Mars exploration. It appears to be powered by rotortip rockets, a decent enough approach for this sort of thing. However, this was before Mariner mars ’64, when the understood density of the Martian atmosphere dropped by more than a factor of ten. As a result, a helicopter like this would need to be made fabulously low-weight in order to fly, something improbable given the needs of a manned vehicle.
The story is objectively *not* funny. But the way it’s told *is.* Bonus: as you listen along, try to guess how old the guy talking is. Chances are *real* good you’ll be surprised.
In pondering my post about the Great Silence, and hypothetical advanced civilizations planning on outliving the stars to take up residence around supermassive black holes, I looked to see if there was an online Hawking radiation calculator and, yup, there is:
Easy to use; enter a value for any quantity, the other values are automatically generated. Some examples:
If you start off with a 1 billion solar mass black hole, the expected lifetime will be 2.1X10^94 years. Long time. But the power emitted while that massive is a paltry 9X10^-47 watts, which might be a bit tricky to live on, even at a really slow rate.
If your want one watt of power output, you need a black hole substantially smaller than Earth, 1.9X10^13 metric tons. The lifespan of such a black hole is a mere 1.8×10^25 years. However, this could be extended indefinitely. The lifespan calculation assumes that the black hole is left alone to progress naturally… nothing is added in. So as the black hole evaporates, it loses mass, gets smaller, gets hotter, spits out more power and, in the last second, goes out with a bang. But if you dump mass into the black hole at the same rate that energy comes out, the black hole will be extended indefinitely.
Now assume that your civilization wants to make it to 10^100 years at one watt. Seems a little low-power to me, but go with it. One watt ain’t a lot of power, but 10^100 years is a *looooong* time. One watt would require the conversion of 1.1126500560536E-17 kilograms per second, or about 3.9X10^90 kilograms total. That’s… a lot. That’s about 1.76X10^60 times the mass of the sun. If galaxies mass 100 billion suns, you’ll need about 1.76X10^49 entire galaxies to produce one watt for that long.
One could argue that that’s unrealistic.
However, if one could somehow gather that much mass together into one black hole (and I feel confident in stating “you can’t,” not least because the mass of the visible universe seems to be on the order of 25 billion galaxies), the expected lifetime of it would be 10^248 years. The diameter would be an impressive 10^48 *lightyears* and the power would be a trifling 2.9×10^-149 watts. This is of course much less than one watt. So how to get one watt out of it? Simple, slice a small 1.9X10^13 metric ton chunk out of the big black hole. How? Don’t ask me, but if you’ve got the ability to gather together a black hole that masses more than the universe, I’m sure you can figure it out. Now, you have a *tiny* black hole that radiates one watt, and one *gigantic* black hole that radiates approximately nothing. You’ll need to top off your small black hole every now and again to keep it’s mass relatively constant. How? Well, dip into the bigger hole. The big hole serves as long-term cold storage of mass, to be “burned” in the furnace of your small black hole.
Let’s say you’re a bit more constrained. You still need one watt, but you’re stuck with the mass of the galaxy, approximately 100 billion suns. If you can squish it all down into one cold-storage black hole of 100 billion suns and one small “furnace” black hole, one watt will burn through your supply of mass in only 5.67X10^50 years. That’s only 10^40 times the current age of the universe. If your processor is running at one-trillionth the speed of reality, that means you’ll only perceive a lifespan of 5.67X10^38 years. Hopefully you can get done whatever it is you were hoping to do in that time.
Other Fun Facts: so, your black hole has just about evaporated away. You enter “one second” into the “lifetime” box. With one second left to live, the black hole is only 3.4×10-20 centimeters in radius, but it’s putting out a toasty 6.8×10^21 watts, and has a mass of 228270.5 kilograms. Every last one of those kilograms will be converted to energy in that last second. if you’ve made the mistake of transporting your itty-bitty black hole to Earth, you’re going to make a heck of a dent with the resulting 4.9 million megaton blast.
Another example: let’s say you have a heavy particle collider, working with such power and speeds that you think it’s just possible that you will smack protons together hard enough to squish ’em into tiny little black holes. “Oh, no!” screech the protestors. “You’ll kill us all with your constant playing of god!”
Well… no. Let’s be astoundingly generous and say you can create a black hole massing one microgram, many orders of magnitude greater than the mass of a proton. The microgram-black hole will be at a temperature of 10^32 degrees. This is important, since the radiant energy at those power levels will produce *substantial” photon pressure at atomic scale dimensions. In essence, the black hole will have its own deflector shield, preventing other particles from being sucked in. What’s even better: the lifetime of the microgram black hole is only 8.4X10-44 seconds… and Planck time – the smallest unit of time that seems to exist, is about 10^43 seconds. This means that the black hole will cease to be a black hole in less time than it takes to do literally *anything.*
Give it a read. It is… remarkable. It reads like the sort of thing someone would write if they were trying to spoof creationists. The icing on the crazycake is the anger the writer expresses at the “hoax” of Darwininan evolution.
