Looks like Boeing and, before them, McDonnell-Douglas made the right choice in bailing on their own super-jumbos. Airbus has so far delivered only 234 of the A-380s in the last 14 years; Boeing, on the other hand, built 1500+ of the 747 since 1970, with more than 400 still flying. but even the venerable 747’s day is winding down; the imperative these days is not to pack as many people as possible into an aircraft, but to fly as cost effectively as possible.
I am increasingly seeing commercials for a particular pharmaceutical based on a dubious premise. This is of course nothing new… we’ve been subjected to ads for happypills and the like for years now. But this latest one has me confounded. “Truvada” is a drug that will, supposedly, increase your resistance to the HIV virus. Which is useful… I could see this being valuable for people in the medical and police professions. But it’s being marketed to *morons.* The actors in the commercials aren’t worried about contracting AIDS because their jobs demand it, but because they want to just go out and bone and act like fools. Here’s a better idea: how about you don’t intentionally swap bodily fluids with someone who has a transmissible and fatal viral disease?
Imagine an alternate scenario: “Trubola is great because it reduces your chance of contracting Ebola by up to 75%, so go out and make the bloody beast with two backs with people who are bleeding out, right now!”
If that’s insane, why is suggesting it’s ok for people with *other* terrifying fatal diseases to go out and behave the same way? Some would argue that AIDS isn’t the terror it was a few decades ago. But AIDS has not been cured. It has only been managed. Which means the freakin’ virus is still out there living it up, just waiting to mutate into a strain that shrugs off the current cocktail of expensive drugs that hold it off. There will, I think, be one heck of a bloodbath if AIDS finally mutates into an airborne or otherwise easily transmitted form. We’ve had tests for the virus for longer than a lot of the readers of this blog have been *alive;* there’s no good reason why people should have any doubt about the people they’re with, and no good reason why they should think it anything other that stupid to swap fluids with the infected. Hell, how many sane people would bed someone they know has the flu?
Another early look at US Spacecraft Projects #6, this time showing one of the more unusual space vehicles ever seriously contemplated… a single stage to orbit space station. This one would seem to be especially vulnerable to thrust imbalance, but at least it had enough engines (11,520) so that if one went out, the lack of thrust wouldn’t be *too* hard to counter.
So I was scanning some aerospace documents on my PC when I fired up a downloaded Doomcock rant… and suddenly had an avid viewer show up. Turns out that Banshee, my grumpiest cat, is a fan of Dictor Van Doomcock. Who woulda guessed that she was a disgruntled Star Wars/Trek fan?
As a bonus for those who subscribe to the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program at above the $10 level, I have made available a diagram I photocopied several decades ago at the US Air Force Museum archive: a detailed and seemingly accurate three-view of the MiG-31 “Firefox” from the movie of the same name. I *think* it’s “fan art,” but am not sure… but the USAF thought that it was worth archiving. If this is of interest, consider subscribing at the $11 level of higher.
One of the Green New Deal ideas that the current crop of Democrat Presidential hopefuls have all supported is eliminating air travel in favor of high speed rail. What could go wrong?
Imagine that. More importantly, imagine that *nation* *wide,* with every single commercial air route replaced with this sort of high speed rail. The Los Angeles-San Francisco train has apparently already will eventually cost $77 *billion* dollars, and hasn’t transported anyone anywhere. Pretty sure Boeing and Lockheed could develop a series of competitive hydrogen-fueled VTOL regional airliners for a fraction of that. But even if California had managed to actually build their little train and put it in service for $77 billion, here’s a map of the routes just for US Airways and American Airlines. How many hundreds of *trillions* of dollars would be needed to replace these routes with bullet trains? What sort of environmental damage would be done? How many farms, homes, businesses and whole towns would have to be displaced?
Princess Leia of Star Wars fame was a “strong female character” before people started obsessing about that particular trope and its political connotations. She, like Lt. Ripley and Sarah Connor, kicked substantial ass without necessarily hating on the men around her. So this latest bit of animation from Disney seems a little… odd.
The claim is made here that “Princess Leia could rescue herself,” which, since she seemed to be securely locked in a cell when three male characters broke her out (including two who had set out with no intention of doing any such thing, and not a one of them had any plans for a rescue mere minutes before they actually set out to do it), seems not entirely accurate.
It seems that “Besiege” is a physics-based “game” that allows you to build castles and medieval siege engines and then go at it. But it also seems that it has enough functionality to let you build things up to and including aircraft and surface to air missiles, allowing you to play act as Russian-backed separatists, ready to blow jetliners out of the sky. Someone has done just that and posted a number of videos of game play showing a variety of jet aircraft – including, oddly, a Boeing 2707 SST – getting swatted. A *few* of them actually make it to a seemingly survivable landing, but most fall apart in flight or plummet to a crash.
The aircraft are built out of something akin to Legos, so accuracy as to how such an aircraft would respond in the real world to such an attack is minimal. Additionally, some of the physics doesn’t seem quite right… blow the wing off a plane and it *should* promptly begin an impressive roll, but that doesn’t usually happen here (never mind that aircraft built like these would never fly). Additionally, some of the aircraft begin the game with bits already falling off, which, depending on your airlines maintenance practices, may or may not be accurate.
Right now it’s just a game. But something like this could, with further refinement and computational horsepower, become a reasonably accurate simulator of real-world aircraft and other structures. It will not be too long before a downloadable game would allow you to accurately replicate the 9/11 attacks, up to and including the subsequent fires and structural collapses. Imagine how freaked out the anti-video-game scolds will be *then.* But beyond the basic urge to just see things kerplode, that sort of readily available simulation would be useful for architects of, say, nuclear reactor confinement vessels and naval warships, along with FAA crash investigators.
The San Diego Air and Space Museums Flickr account recently added this illustration, showing a Convair “Big Stick” being launched off the back of mobile transporter. “Big Stick” was a Convair concept for a nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile of nearly unlimited range, a less-known competing design against Voughts Pluto vehicle.
A higher rez (though, sadly, not a whole lot higher) version is available HERE.
If you are interested in Big Stick and Project Pluto, I recommend Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N1, which covers both in detail.
A long and detailed video giving the history of Star Trek… not a history of the Federation and the Klingons, but of the various corporate entities and licensing issues that have turned Trek into the mess it is today. One of the more important (for Trek fans, anyway) conclusions is that something we’ve been told for a decade now is false: the “Prime Timeline” ain’t.
Okay. From the 1960’s up until the end of the fourth season of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” everything was assumed to take place in the same narrative universe, same timeline. Even “Enterprise,” which had some definite continuity issues with the Trek canon, did eventually make itself more or less work. This connected, shared universe was not referred to as the “Prime” universe at the time because… why would it be? There was nothing else. But then in 2009 the “Kelvin timeline” or the “JJverse” movies started coming out. This was an obvious, and acknowledged, different timeline.But the source of the break in the timeline came from, we were told, the “Prime” timeline. Some years after the last of the original Star Trek” movies, the Romulan Empire was destroyed by a nonsensical FTL supernova; as a result of that event, Prime Timeline Old Spock and some Romulans got sucked into a black hole and sent back in time. The Romulan emergence and tangling with the USS Kelvin set off this new timeline. OK, fair enough. But as the movies went on, the divergence not only in history but in *everything* from Original Star Trek became more apparent. Then a few years ago CBS decided to start cranking out new Trek for their All Access service. Their first series, STD, was said to be set in the “Prime” timeline, about ten years before the original Star Trek.
But the problem is, there is simply no squaring what we see in STD with original Trek. There is no way in hell that STD could *possibly* evolve into TOS, then TNG, DS9, Voyager. So if this is the “Prime” timeline, then TOS & TNG are NOT the “Prime” timeline. Instead, they are in the “Canon” timeline.
This means that Leonard Nimoy did not play the same Spock we all knew in 2009’s “Star Trek.” Instead, he played the Spock who shows up on STD. The “Prime” timeline and the “Kelvin” timeline that split off from it have *nothing* to do with TOS & TNG. Thus the Picard series currently in development will not feature the Picard known from TNG, but a Picard who lived in the universe derived from STD.
So… current Star Trek isn’t “Star Trek.” “Star Trek” as we’ve come to know and love it ended in 2005. All Star Trek since 2009 is “Trek” in name only. It’s an unrelated sci-fantasy franchise that has appropriated some names and a few bits and pieces of design.
