Star Trek’s dirty little secret

 art, awesomeness, humor, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 052019
 

Good as it can be, Star Trek is imperfect. One of the recurring flaws, visible in every series from TOS to ENT, and appearing in fan fiction and horrible fraudulent cash-grabs like STD, is explained succinctly in the video below:

“The Orville” is also imperfect. But as the video below shows, it can be dayum pretty. Unrealistic space battles are nothing new in sci-fi TV; Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine certainly had their share of memorable ones. But the advances in computer tech, as well s paying-attention-tech, means that this space battle has something a lot of the previous ones didn’t: shiploads of debris. there’s still pew-pew sounds in space, lasers you can see and ships violating Newtonian physics in order to bank and dodge like fighter jets, but it sure does look purty. And that is a win: nobody is watching the Orville for hard sci-fi, but to be entertained.

 Posted by at 3:41 pm

Sea Dragon vs Saturn V

 art, awesomeness, history, models, projects, spacecraft  No Responses »
Mar 042019
 

A scale comparison between the Saturn V and Sea Dragon CD models I’m working on for a 1/7o0 scale kit for Fantastic Plastic. The Sea Dragon would have had about four times the payload of the Saturn V, despite being *gigantic* compared to the Saturn V. This was due to the fact that the Sea Dragon was, by design, a *low* performance vehicle, using simple pressure feed. the result was that everything was necessarily gigantic… giant engines, tanks, wall thicknesses, plumbing lines, etc. While the main propellant feed lines for most rockets are measured in inches, up to a foot or two, in diameter, the LOX and RP-1 lines at the base of the Sea Dragon were about ten *feet* in diameter.

 

 

 Posted by at 10:28 pm

Winter driving in the Colorado Mountains

 AARRRGH, Crazy, news, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 042019
 

The local news here in Utah *seems* to have been especially full of stories about avalanches and rock slides this last winter. This may be due to me simply taking note of a perfectly normal series of events; this may be due to the media paying more attention to these perfectly normal events;or it might be just barely possible that there have been more such events than usual. I dunno.

Winter right *here* has been pretty tame this year. But Colorado has been sort of at the edge of the polar vortex, and I believe it’s caught a goodly supply of actual winter weather. Couple that with the ready availability of digital video cameras, and you get some pretty impressive events recorded, such as these avalanches yesterday that buried part of I-70:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 2:00 pm

Keep it up, nutjobs

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Meh., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won  No Responses »
Mar 042019
 

If far-lefties want to make sure that Trump wins in 2020, they’ll keep doing stunts like this:

“Artists” Explain Why They Put White Men in MAGA Hats on Leashes and ‘Walked’ Them on Donald Trump’s Star in Hollywood

In short, they demonstrated their desire to turn white men into slaves, second-class citizens in a society dominated by weirdos.

I’m sure that’ll go over well with the base of moonbats in Hollywood, but among the rest of society? Doubtfull.

 Posted by at 12:49 pm

“free.fr” is troublesome

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 032019
 

I have customers from all over the world. But some locations are troublesome. In the last year or so I’ve had a lot of issues when communicating with French email addresses… in particular, those from “free.fr.” An order comes in through PayPal, I send a reply with the download link and password, and then, from a few minutes to a few hours later a bot-generated response comes in telling me that the message is undeliverable. And then days or weeks later emails come in from the buyer wanting to know where the stuff they paid for is; and when I reply… it bounces. I have two different email accounts and they *both* bounce like this. I currently have a customer who has repeatedly asked for an update, and every update I send explaining the situation bounces. Which doubtless looks to the customer like I’ve taken his money and am refusing to communicate. Efforts to communicate through PayPal have been fruitless.

So if this is *you*, send me an email from *another* address… one not from free.fr.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.
A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its
recipients after more than 48 hours on the queue on elasmtp-kukur.atl.sa.earthlink.net.

The message identifier is:     1gygD3-
The date of the message is:    Tue, 26 Feb 2019 10:08:01 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
The subject of the message is: Re: USSP 05 document

The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is:

  XXXt@free.fr
    host mx2.free.fr [212.XXX]
    Delay reason: SMTP error from remote mail server after DATA:
    451 too many errors from your ip (209.XXX), please visit http://postmaster.free.fr/

No action is required on your part. Delivery attempts will continue for
some time, and this warning may be repeated at intervals if the message
remains undelivered. Eventually the mail delivery software will give up,
and when that happens, the message will be returned to you.
 Posted by at 12:33 pm

Docking the Dragon

 art, awesomeness, news, rockets, spacecraft, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 032019
 

The SpaceX Demo crew Dragon has docked with the ISS. This is the first flight of the capsule that SpaceX and NASA plan to use later this year (hopefully July) to send actual living human astronauts to the ISS, returning to the US the ability to launch our own people. This capability was lost for at least eight years when the Shuttle last flew in July 2011; in comparison, the loss of human launch capability that existed between Apollo (last flight: July 1975) and Shuttle (first flight; April 1981) was less than six years.

The video below shows the unmanned demo capsule approaching and docking with the ISS. It just *looks* like a spaceship. Some interesting shots of it rapidly firing it’s thrusters, showing what those plumes look like in a vacuum.

After the capsule is done at ISS (should be there for five days), it will separate and re-enter. All goes well, it will land back at the Cape using a combo of rocket thrusters and parachutes. It was originally planned for the Crew Dragon to use just the thrusters, a capability SpaceX has demonstrated with their boosters, but for safety reason chutes were added. Assuming it is successful, this very same capsule will be refurbished and, in June, used for an In Flight Abort test, which should be interesting.

The launch and successful booster landing were conducted at night, so the relevant videos are less impressive than they might otherwise have been.

Note: people get attacked for wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, and sometimes they are asked to explain just when America was great. Well, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but America was certainly greatER when we had AN ACTUAL GOT-DAMNED MANNED SPACE PROGRAM. One that can launch and recover our own people.

 Posted by at 11:24 am

This seems unwise

 AARRRGH, Hmm..., Meh., news, science  No Responses »
Mar 022019
 

But if the “Green New Deal” gains any sort of traction, we’ll be seeing a lot more of it:

He’s Creating a New Fuel Out of Thin Air — for 85 Cents per Gallon

The fuel in question is ammonia. Which is fine, I guess (quite a number of conventional vehicles have been modified to run on it), except it has a few problems:

1: It is toxic.

2: Its boiling point is low… lower than most Polar Vortex nights. So it will either need to be stored under pressure or at soft cryogen temperatures. Either way, it will have to be a spherical or cylindrical tank.

3: Internal combustion engines aren’t 100% efficient at combustion. So the fumes will reek of toxic ammonia.

4: Additionally, nitrogen oxides – N2O and NO2 – will be produced. NO2 is not only toxic, it’s a major component of smog.

5: The energy density of liquid ammonia is poor, something like 1/3 that of hydrocarbons. So for that 85 cents, you’ll go a third as far. Given that the ammonia tank isn’t the same shape as your modified cars original gas tank, you’re likely carrying a notably smaller fuel load. You might need to fuel up four or five times as often.

6: And then the government starts adding on taxes to the ammonia….

 Posted by at 11:09 pm

Sound from light

 awesomeness, Hmm..., science, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Mar 022019
 

A video exploring the potential of using the very slight vibration of objects to create a *visual* record of sound, recordable on commercial cameras and interpreted via software. The results aren’t spectacular, but they are interesting. It should be noted that intelligence services have been assumed to have used something like this for decades to record sounds at a distance: bounce a laser beam off of a window and into a finely tuned photoreceptor. Voices within a room will cause the window to vibrate slightly; the reflected laser beam will jitter and that can be used to record the sounds. The system in the video below uses ambient light rather than laser beams, and cameras rather than photoreceptors, to approximate the same thing.

Advance the technology  few hundred years down the line, and the USS Whateverprise could sidle up to a wrecked ship and *listen* to it. Obviously it could do so by bouncing lasers off of it, but also just by using reflected starlight. Even with the most advanced processors, though, a fully functional operating ship would seem to be entirely too noisy  for an eavesdropper to pick up individual conversations. But… maybe. Interesting to consider the outside possibility of a sufficiently advanced science vessel being able to evade a Klingon attack because they can “hear” the enemy commander screaming orders at the bridge crew.

 Posted by at 7:12 pm

Social Credit is here

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 022019
 

The ChiComs are leading, the SJWs are gleefully following.

What will be the end result here? Not only will there have to be two “separate but equal” social media systems (Subscribestar vs Patreon, Gab vs Twitter), but it’s starting to looks like separate *banking* systems as well. This sort of thing will create disunity to the point where civil war becomes quite feasible. Who would benefit from the US/West tearing itself apart?

 Posted by at 6:06 pm

This should prove interesting

 news, politics  No Responses »
Mar 022019
 

Trump says he’ll sign executive order for free speech on college campuses

“Today I’m proud to announce that I will be very soon signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research grants.”

On one hand, it’s a no-brainer. If there’s any place that should support free speech, it’s a college.

On the other hand, colleges will now be put between either losing federal funds or being burned to the ground by leftists outraged that the college allows its students to publicly support conventional political positions.

I imagine a lot of college campii are becoming miniature surveillance states. it should thus become relatively straightforward, by watching numerous camera feeds, to figure out who the masked Antifa thugs are and to expel them. it would be better in the long run to simply get rid of the violent whackaloons than to lose federal funding. This will likely mean that a lot of libart identity studies courses will dry up and blow away, but that, in the final analysis, is better for society anyway.

 Posted by at 2:00 pm
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