Who wants some fiction? A tale of a cruise ship on the high seas when the world is attacked by Lovecraftian sea monsters, Champion of the Seas is, I think, pretty good. This is the second full yarn in the “War With The Deep Ones” book that I’ve released; the first being “Honolulu.” I also released a bit from the “interstitial tales” that will be wedged between the main stories.
To read a preview of the story and to order the whole thing in PDF & EPUB formats, click the “Continue Reading” below.
If’n ya want details of the Tesla Roadsters orbit…
https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi?CGISESSID=c3cbd47fbf603007d1b627107c28962f&s_body=1#top
The resulting wall-o-data is below the break. Useful for astronomers, but not very enlightening for the layman. Anybody know of a site that cranks out orbital trajectory plots, showing the arrangement of selected elements for whatever date in the future? The JPL Impact Risks site used to be really good for that sort of thing, but it requires a Java applet that makes my computer security system just go “nope.”
Well, huh. It’s gettin’ to where I’m less and less surprised at some of the predictions of SpaceX progress…
“I think we might be able to do short hopper flights with the spaceship part of BFR, maybe next year,” says Musk.
Fake news! Fake news! The Russians are involved, somehow!
The latest journalization has it that SpaceX initially contacted the USAF to take care of their errant floater, but in the end hired commercial “demolition experts” to do the job.
Once again, no details are provided. Obviously, an A-10 opening up a can of BRRRRRRRRRT or a B-1 laying down a bunch of laser guided bombs are no longer options. But one can now imagine a whole range of other options. Perhaps the demolition expert was an 80’s aficionado with a great big speedboat and Nothing Left To Lose, and he actually rammed the Falcon 9 at high speed leading to a gigantic orange fireball…
Probably not, I suppose.
I was watching some youtube videos a few days ago and it suddenly dawned on me that *all* of them pretty much started off with “changes in youtube monetization is screwing over the smaller channels, so support my patreon.”
My first thought was something along the lines of “jeez, all that begging seems a little undignified.” My second thought was “Hey! I have no remaining dignity! Maybe I should try that!”
So… what the frell. If’n ya like the Unwanted Blog, or find some value in the stuff post or the yammerings I blather, of if you just want to support some cats or make sure than not all of your money gets stolen by Antifa or other assorted SJWs, why not throw some money into a tip jar, or even subscribe for a monthly amount? Always recommended is to sign up to the APR Patreon; there you get definite monthly aerospace history goodies.
Not the Heavy launched a few days ago, but the previous Falcon 9, launched a week ago and soft-landed in the water.
The booster tested high retrothrust landing. Like a lot of SpaceX’s successful tests, they didn’t expect the booster to survive virtually intact, so they didn’t have a plan in place to recover the thing. Officially that made it a hazard to navigation; boosters like this have carbon over-wrapped high pressure helium tanks and other splodey bits. Unofficially, I wonder if the real reason was a desire to keep the booster from falling into nefarious hands… not so much the likes of United Launch Alliance, but more like Bond villains or the Chinese government (but I repeat myself).
Exactly how the Chinese or SPECTRE would go about snagging a floatign rocket booster is anyone guess. The rational approach would be to pre-position a modified cargo vessel equipped with cranes and such… hardly likely to go un-noticed. Less likely would be to modify a submarine to rise up underneath it, latch on, poke some holes in it, sink and be on its way. Less likely still would be a giant dirigible or seaplane.
These are of course all silly. But then, the CIA paying Howard Hughes to scoop a Soviet ballistic missile sub off the ocean floor was a silly notion as well.
But to the specific topic at hand, I wonder if the strike operation was carried out with laser guided bombs or with gunfire. I suspect the former… a B-1 or B-52 laying waste seems like the sort of excessive drama the situation calls for.
This is advanced headline.
Seems she yanked ’em out herself and stood outside the church screaming. Article leaves unclear what the woman was saying, but boy howdy it’d be interesting if it was something like “Libera tutemet ex inferis.” Or anything that starts off with Iä! Iä!
I might be going out on a limb here, but I’d hazard a guess that some combination of mental illness and drug use just maybe might have been involved.
A while back President Giant Middle Finger went to France and saw their Bastille Day parade and thought “I want that.” So he told the US military to start planning for just that… a parade in the nations capitol to celebrate the US military. Me, I’m not a big one for parades, so my response was essentially “Meh, whatever.”But there are other people who have had an entirely different response. A response that could, maybe, mean that the parade is actually pure political genius. From the twitter/facebook accounts of a “social justice activist:”
We already have 13 people who signed up to lay down in front of the tanks if Trump brings out a Military parade. This is not a Military Authoritarian State. We you join us? #TrumpParade pic.twitter.com/5uAzYuDzVq
— Arn Menconi (@ArnMenconi) February 7, 2018
I’ll be laying in front of the tanks if Trump brings out a Military parade. Will you?Un-Screwing Of America USA Nightly
Posted by Arn Menconi on Tuesday, February 6, 2018
If the result of the parade is that a bunch of far leftists use the opportunity to show themselves to be as anti-military, anti-American, anti-*fun* as we all know them to be, and to do soon live TV in front of the whole world… I suspect Trump will be tickled pink.
At the same time, the president is overtly tying his administration to the most popular institution in our nation—perhaps the only popular institution left—the United States military. More to the point, he’s daring Democrats, and their allies in the media, to stand apart and oppose it. By doing so, Democratic leaders appear either as killjoys complaining about excessive costs (as if frugality were a Democratic Party hallmark) or as diminishing the achievements of the military or the need to publicly extol them. All in all, it’s a pretty clever trap.
I would love to see a military parade that actually does something new… such as showcasing brand new and surprising military hardware. While the M-1 Abrams is awesome, how even-more-awesome would it be if there was a review of the all-new, never before seen *replacement* for the M-1, which is damn near as old as I am? If there were a fleet of heavy trucks each packing fully functional laser weapons capable of bringing down everything from mortar shells to combat aircraft to MIRVs? Even bigger trucks towing the trailer/launchers for dual purpose ICBMs/quick response tacsat launchers? Autonomous combat tanks? Power armor? Hummer replacers? AH-64 Apache replacers?
Granted, ain’t none of that gonna happen. Almost certainly, none of those things actually exist (which is not just a tragedy, it’s a friggen scandal). But if the parade comes together and the only real reveal is that the lefties reveal themselves – for like the millionth time – to be hateful screeching harpies bent on sucking the joy out of all aspects of American life, it will have been worth every last dime.
Let me know when those who are fighting against the cis white supremacist patriarchal system of engineering can come up with something like this:
Watching those two boosters plummet from the sky and dual land like that? That’s some sci-fi sh!t, right there.
EDIT: And then there’s this one, shot from the ULA Delta IV launch pad at SLC-37. I believe you can see the Apollo 1 launch table in the foreground, which I’ve been to and highly recommend in much the same way I recommend the Viet Nam Memorial Wall in D.C. This video has some subtle sounds that are interesting and important, so crank up the volume to 11.
Because many years ago I bought something from them, I continue to get emails from Entertainment Earth. I rarely click on said emails because, let’s face it, they want my money. But I just got one titled “Flash sale! 80% off!” and i figured, what the heck. Maybe they’ll have something interesting for cheap. Well the sale seems to be one item, and something about it makes my engineering senses tingle. See if you can spot it:
