Enterprise: got it right the first time

 art, awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., models, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  17 Responses »
Mar 252018
 

The video below explains why the original starship Enterprise design looks great, using a few bits of art-math.

To my eye, the TOS Enterprise is the pinnacle of sci-fi spectacle. No other spaceship design comes close in terms of just being plain beautiful… sure the XD-1 has sorta-realism going for it, the Millenium Falcon and the Star Destroyer have their charms, the Gunstar and Starfury are utter badassery. But the NCC-1701? Just gorgeous.

What’s sad is that with such a fantastic basis, Star Trek ship design has kinda cratered. The refit Enterprise from the movies? A worthy successor to be sure, and a number of the other movie-era ships are up there: the Grissom is good, the Excelsior and Reliant are awesome. And even though the actual *show* is something I’ve completely lost interest in, the NCC-1701D from TNG has grown on me, as hav a number of other TNG/DS9/Voy ships. But the 1701E from the movies? Meh. The Enterprise was always *elegant,* be it 1701, 1701A or 1701D, it was just a slick design. But the 1701E started the trend of making Trek ships… well, not quite sure what the word I’m looking for is, so I’ll go with “shardy.” The NX-01 from “Enterprise” left me cold, which, actually, was kinda fine since it was supposed to be a technology prototype built by people who didn’t really know what they were doing yet. The Enterprise from the nuTrek movies? Bleah. And the “Discovery” ships took “shardy” to whole new levels of excess. The brief glimpse of the TOS 1701 from the last scene of the season finale of “Discovery” (plastered all over youtube) just looks sucko. It’s a mishmash of TOS and movie era with a whole lot of needless excess CGI’ed onto it.

 

 

The “Discovery” take on the 1701:

Bleah. Details and greeblies just for the sake of tacking them on.

The Mirror Universe episode of “Enterprise” included a faithful CGI 1701-type ship. That, along with a number of fan-created CG Enterprises, show that the design *still* works just fine, no need for a bunch of Just Cuz design changes or revisions to jazz the thing up.

With the rapid advance in CGI, there’s no good *technical* reason (though some powerful legal reasons – the rights are all over the place) why a movie or series couldn’t feature not just *a* 1701-type ship, but *the* TOS-era Enterprise, complete with Tarkinized 60’s-era Kirk and Spock & Co. I suppose someone could even write some bloated crossover event flick where the nuTrek Enterprise goes through a spatial anomaly into a parallel reality, runs into the Discovery, they start comparing notes, rejigger the anomaly to send the nuEnterprise home and whoopsie, end up bumping up against the *real* Enterprise. Do it right, and it might even redeem Discovery and nuTrek. If nothing else, it’d be worth the price of admission to see the Karl Urban and Deforrest Kelly McCoys making life hell for the two Spocks, and the Chris Pine Kirk putting the moves on the Grace Lee Whitney Yeoman Rand. Maybe use *that* as the excuse for why she left the show: she left her Enterprise to be with PineKirk. And there’s even a good way to explain why TOS didn’t suddenly get a bump up in technology levels: they wanted to adopt the nuTrek technologies, like interstellar transporters, but the cost would have been prohibitive. The new technologies would have introduced lens flares all over, and no sane civilization wanted to put up with that.

 Posted by at 7:51 pm

Blog troubles?

 Hmm...  10 Responses »
Mar 252018
 

I received an email from a reader stating he’d had intermittent trouble accessing the blog. I’ve not seen any such problem, but that might be just timing. So has anyone else seen anything anomalous recently?

 Posted by at 1:16 pm

15 minutes… or a thousand years?

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  17 Responses »
Mar 252018
 

As some art guy whose name I can’t recall once may have said, everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame. Of course, a  very, very small fraction of people get rather more than fifteen minutes. It’s always hard to tell in the beginning whether someone entering the news cycle is going to stay there or burn out. Take, for example, David Hogg, Obergruppenfuhrer of the latest iteration of the civilian enfeeblement movement. He’s riding the wave of unthinking mob action with great enthusiasm. But is he riding it for fifteen minutes or a thousand years? Given that he certainly seems to be emulating a certain emo Corporal who also dreamed of dominating the civil rights of everyone else, it sure looks like he *wants* to go the long-term route.

Parkland Student’s ‘Salute’ After Speech Causes Major Twitter Reaction

A previous contender to the throne of “Greatest Example Of Why We Don’t Let Dumbass Kids Vote” has recently lost his last chance at unearned fame and fortune at taxpayer expense, and now begins his long descent into complete obscurity.

 Posted by at 2:36 am

Good news: new antibiotics against superbugs

 awesomeness, news, science  6 Responses »
Mar 232018
 

First proof a synthesized antibiotic is capable of treating superbugs

Teixobactin is not an entirely new, invented antibiotic, but instead an artificially synthesized version of a biological antibiotic found in the dirt a few years ago. It was modified slightly to make it easier to manufacture and the new version proved effective in trials with mice.

Western science and medicine FTW.

 Posted by at 11:52 pm

Nukes for NASA

 news, nukes, science, spacecraft  6 Responses »
Mar 232018
 

After a criminal lapse in judgement allowed the US RTG manufacture capability to decline, it seems NASA is finally getting back to the stage where they can proposed future space probes with that very basic, reliable and *good* power source:

NASA to Allow Nuclear Power Systems for Next Discovery Mission

Even so, the projections are for a production of only 1.5 kilograms of PU-238 per year by 2022. Even though this is  a great improvement, production of three and a third pounds of this strategically vital material per year seems pretty anemic to me. A better world would see NASA doing its job of exploration and science by launching a few *dozen* long range probes every year.

 Posted by at 10:24 pm

Heavy Lifters: A New Contender Emerges

 Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, spacecraft  22 Responses »
Mar 232018
 

China is Working on a Rocket as Powerful as the Saturn V, Could Launch by 2030

The Chinese seem to be proceeding *real* slowly on their space program, but who can say what their real goals are. They used to kinda suck at space launchers, but the Clintons saw to that; Chinas ability to successfully orbit sizable payloads has certainly improved. And now that SpaceX, Blue Origin and maybe – just possibly – even NASA may soon have heavy lifters of their own, it makes sense that the Chinese will want one as well. He who controls the heavens controls the future, after all.

Seems the Chinese hope to conduct a main engine test for the CZ-9 later this year.

Chang Zheng-9 (Long March 9)

The Chang Zheng-9 (CZ-9, or Long March 9) is a super heavy-lift launch vehicle intended for future manned lunar landing and deep space exploration missions. The launch vehicle is described as a large rocket roughly 100 m in length and 8 to 9 m in diameter, assisted by two or four 3 m diameter solid rocket boosters, with a lift-off thrust of 5,200 to 5,500 tonnes. The launcher will be capable of delivering 130 tonnes of payload to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), exactly the same as the heavier Block 2 version of the NASA Space Launch System (SLS).

If the artists impression is accurate, the CZ-9 is clearly from the same train of thought that produced the SLS. Which means that it’ll probably cost something like the SLS, adjusted for Chinese costs rather than NASA bureaucracy. Which would be fine in normal times, but we seem to be heading into a whole new era… SpaceX and Blue Origin pull it off, or even just one of them, rockets like the CZ-9 will look *really* outdated.

 Posted by at 10:12 pm

Han Shot Never

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., Meh., politics, science fiction, youtube  8 Responses »
Mar 232018
 

I seem to vaguely recall some sort of uproar back in the day when Star Wars first came out with a G rating which then got bumped up to PG due to the violence (or something like that, it’s been a while). Then when Lucas re-released Star Wars in the 90’s, he digitally edited it so that Han didn’t straight up murder Greedo, he shot in self defense. Now, The House of Mouse is editing their own posters for the upcoming and troubled Solo movie to remove all weapons. Because none of the good guys in the Star Wars universe ever used weapons, nosiree.

Ugh.

 

You have to wonder if the eventual goal is to create Star Wars movies with *no* weapons use whatsoever, where all disagreements are settled by blue-haired SJWs sitting down at a table to discuss things, and the galaxy turns into a progressive utopia.

 Posted by at 8:08 pm

SpaceX and Tesla delete their Facebook pages

 blather, Hmm..., news  6 Responses »
Mar 232018
 

Huh:

Elon Musk Deletes Facebook Pages for SpaceX and Tesla

It’s not clear if this is permanent, or some sort of trollish stunt by Musk. Heck, it’s always possible that Musk is starting his own alternative to Facebook.

With the troubles FB has had lately, I gotta wonder if FB is just starting to reach its inevitable peak followed by inevitable decline, like Myspace before it. Nothing lasts forever. With the efforts of companies like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others to ban politics that they don’t like, they are forcing the fragmentation of the market and inspiring the rise of otherwise unthinkable competition (honestly… who would even bother to *try* to directly compete with the likes of FB and Twit and YT if they were non-jackassery companies?). This splits up the advertisers and advertising money and scatters users to the winds. I wonder if at some point in the future whether there might not even be such a thing as a *specific* FB/twit/YT, but instead a sort of amorphous open and uncensorable web where people just do their thing, like setting up a  billboard in an empty field, with no gatekeepers.

 

 Posted by at 1:54 pm

“Toxic Meritocracy”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., politics, ಠ_ಠ  12 Responses »
Mar 222018
 

Is there even the slightest chance that this is a world-class troll? Poe’s Law in fullest effect? Sadly, I suspect this is for real:

Prof blasts ‘toxic meritocracy’ of ‘competitive’ video games

“Games are based on leveling up and getting stronger. We expect the most skilled, hardest working player to win. The typical narrative in a game is a rags to riches story where the player propels the character into a key role and perhaps even attains god-like status,” he said.

“All those things shape our expectations and focus players on individuals, rather than the collective,” he added. “As actualized meritocracies, video games quickly become really toxic spaces where players are focused on individual glory, rather than creating positive spaces for interaction.”

“Moving away from merit allows communities to be developed on different terms, giving an opportunity to build something else, something new, something that has features other than the endemic toxicity that comes with meritocratic systems,” Paul contends.

Oh FFS.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m not much of a video gamer. What few games I did actually like playing I had to stop playing because FRIGGEN WINDOWS 7 would not run them anymore, but the games I played allowed the player to advance and get better & more powerful as they reached goals and *won* stuff. The idea of games based on pure luck or randomness? I’ve never seen them as being all that much fun. Put your coin in the slot, pull the lever… wheeeeee. Collect your “participant” trophy.

 Posted by at 2:35 pm
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