If you haven’t already bought a copy of Dennis Jenkins’ “Space Shuttle: Developing an Icon 1972-2013,” you really should. It’s pricey, but it’s also massive (18 pounds/1584 pages)… and the last word on the subject. It is also the last edition of Jenkins’ Shuttle history that he’s planning on producing, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. The Amazon reviews are enlightening: 95% of them are five-star, 5% are 4 star… and precisely none of them are three star or less. That almost never happens.
And here I was, thinking I’d put a lot of effort into the Orville…
A lot of time went into the “spine,” largely because the contours are complex and the details are a bit difficult to suss out. I’ve finally declared victory on that part and have started in on detailing the rim and underside. Barring the unforseen, the underside should be done in the net day or three, with the aft fuselage/shuttlebay being the last section to tackle. And then… well, a bit of a wait until the book comes out in mid January. Until then, after the ship is modeled I’ll start working on a set of diagrams for some general plans.
Every now and then Fingers and Raedthinn arrange themselves in such a way to show off just how big Raedthinn is comparatively.
Work on modeling the thing proceeds. A whole lot of hours were spent yesterday and today making visually minimal progress, but it’s still progress. What is going to cause the delay is not bad news; in fact, it’s good news. In mid January, the book “The World of the Orville” is due to be published. Exactly what’s in it, I don’t know, but it seems to be well-illustrated; there is just possibly the chance that it will drop that vital nugget of information: “The Orville is XYZ meters long.”
“The World of the Orville” is available for pre-order from Amazon. Go ahead and order it from here and I’ll receive a small fraction of a pittance. Heck, go ahead and order a lot of stuff using the Amazon search box up there in the corner; if you start from here I get a small bit of compensation, maybe even enough to buy some cat food. For… the cats. Yeah. The cats.
And because why not:
A few days ago I uploaded in the 2017-12 APR Patron Extras Dropbox folder a scan of an old magazine article on the X-24 lifting body which including this interesting piece of art depicting an X-24 atop a Titan IIIc launch vehicle. There were indeed proposals to launch X-24 derivatives into orbit with Titan IIIs, but they wouldn’t be *exactly* X-24’s. The X-24 was not built as a spacecraft or a re-entry vehicle; it would be uncontrollable outside the atmosphere and would be a molten collection of rubbish on re-entry. Still, the proposed vehicles did look a *lot* like the X-24.
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No, not just the white people vs. black people divide, or the rich vs. poor, right vs. left, sane vs. SJW. No, it goes deeper than that:
Clearly, the gap between “audience” and “critic” has become unbridgable.
Having seen “The Orville,” I gotta agree with the audiences: it’s awesome. Having seen “Last Jedi,” I gotta agree with the audience: it’s meh. I have no doubt that it’s going to make buckets of money, but… it seemed to just sorta sit there and not do anything. And a lot of just just didn’t make any damn sense. Without getting too spoilery, the bulk of the plot revolves around a sublight chase. One side is running flat out on their sublight engines because they can’t jump to hyperdrive; the other side is chasing them and is unable to catch up to them, so it’s sort of a stalemate. Except… the side that’s doing the chasing doesn’t have a problem jumping to hyperdrive. So just jump a ship ahead of them. How hard is that?
And once again… what’s the deal with Phasma? They make a point of having this apparently interesting character with chrome-plated armor… and she’s on screen for about five seconds and does approximately diddly.
Cherenkov radiation is something you are unlikely to experience in the natural world.This visible blue light is the “shock wave” produce when something travels faster than the local speed of light. The speed of light in transparent substances such as glass and water than be substantially lower than it is in a vacuum, so high energy particles can easily be FTL in those media.
Nuclear reactors generate just such high energy particles. And they are often immersed within pools of water for both shielding and cooling. Thus… Cherenkov radiation, and thus this spiffy collection of videos showing just how fast reactors start cranking out the rads upon startup.
Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxQdS0pbpKo
This sort of thing is unlikely to appear outside of a reactor environment. If you are in space, high energy cosmic rays that penetrate your eyeballs can create tiny flashes of Cherenkov radiation within the vitreous humor, an effect that astronauts have note since the earliest days of spaceflight, something sure to freak the fark out of space tourists. But these are instantaneous phenomena, not steady state ghostly glows. If you do stumble across something out in the wild causing the water, air or glass around it to glow like Dr. Manhattan, you may well have stumbled across something that it would be best to stumble away from.
And as to how good that water shielding is? Your average human would probably look at that Cherenkov radiation and assume that the water ain’t doin’ diddly. But things like electrons *aren’t* photons, and they don’t pass through water as easily as simple light does. This “What If” from XKCD explains it well.
Apart from some “panel lines” and a few greeblies the details on the upper/forward hull are in place. I’ve re-sculpted the aft end of the “spine” and added the whatchamacallits to the forward ends of the lower engine nacelles. I need to detail the underside (there are fewer details there) and the at fuselage. Last thing I’ll do is flesh out the shuttlebay and at that point do another round of scale-guesstimation based on scenes showing people standing in the shuttlebay.
The Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne was without a doubt the niftiest helicopter ever to *almost* make it into production. but, alas, it was ahead of its time… more precisely, ahead of the available technology.
The gunner sat in a seat that could spin 360 degrees (like the gunner in the Gunstar… and if you don’t get the reference, you’ve a geekiness deficiency). The Cheyenne had a pusher prop for very high speed for a helicopter, and small wings to generate lift and offload the rotor at speed. Lockheed had considerable faith in the future of that propulsion concept and incorporated it into designs for civilian passenger transport helicopters such as the CL-1026 9described in US VTOL Projects issue #01).