I’m not sure if this is a complete collection of the “Pern” books, but it’s a lot of ’em. Interested? Email me an offer (plus postage). I’ll send via media mail unless some other postage is needed. 
SOLD
Sep 212019
Sep 212019
Continuing…
Rockwell in 1985 considered the business case of small unmanned launchers of 15,000 pounds payload capability. The goal would be low cost ($100/lb of payload delivered to orbit). It’s not clear, at least from this report, if Rockwell had a design of their own under consideration; the illustration included shows only non-Rockwell commercial designs… the “Dolphin” and “Conestoga II” from Space Services, Inc; the “Phoenix” SSTO from Pacific American Launch Systems; the “Space Van” from Transpace Inc. (though what’s shown is just the standard orbiter atop the 747 SCA); the “Constellation” from Star Struck Inc.; the Delta from Transpace Carriers Inc (which appears to be a standard Delta II); the Atlas from Convair; and the “Excalibur” from Truax Engineering, a reduced-scale version of the Aerojet Sea Dragon of two decades earlier.
Sep 212019
Sep 202019
Well, those were a few hours of my life I’ll never get back.
I found myself near a theater showing “Ad Astra” today, so, what the heck, I saw it. It’s profoundly awful.
Firstly, and most damningly, it’s utterly *boring.* I didn’t fall asleep, but I did check the time, sighed, closed my eyes and daydreamed. Stuff happens, but you Just Don’t Give A Rats Ass.
Secondly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The plot, the tech, the characters and the lack-of-science conspire to create story that comes off as gibberish.
Thirdly: the science is laughable. Just in case anyone cares about spoilers, the full rant is behind the break.
Sep 202019
So what did I fail at this time?
Tonight I watched the 1972 Woody Allen movie “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex.” I think I might have seen bits and pieces of this movie a long time ago… by which I mean sometime perhaps around 1980. I have previous mentioned that I just don’t find Woody Allen funny. So once again I watched a WA movie and I looked for the humor… and I utterly failed to find it. If I was one of those “reaction” YouTubers, I suspect the image of my face as I watched the movie would be a whole lot of stone-faced boredom interspersed with occasional slight frowns.
So, yeah. Another total failure.
I. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
Sep 182019
How do you react when hauled before a kangaroo court of self-important political bullies? You do like this feller and drive ’em batty:
His line to “Nuke’ Em” Swalwell about his safe? Priceless.
Sep 172019
One of the more common yet irritatingly pointless human reactions to a problem is to demand that Something Must Be Done. Sure, often there’s a problem that can be fixed and there’s a practical, wise fix available. But far too often people just demand action… any action. Even if the action would actually make the situation worse. I suspect most readers of this blog would expect that at this point I’d proceed to bringing up some brainless American leftist nonsense like gun control or speech codes. But hey, I’m broad-minded. Not every person putting forward useless ideas is an American leftie. Gentlemen, behold:
Priests Pour 18 Gallons of Holy Water Over Russian City to Stop ‘Alcohol Consumption, Drugs and Fornication’
Yeah, that’ll do it. After pouring some water out of an airplane, I feel confident that Russians will give up booze.
Sep 162019
Continuing…
Moving away from the Space Shuttle, Rockwell looked towards the next generation of manned space vehicle. In this case, a small vehicle with about 10% the payload of the Space Shuttle. The general configuration was used by Rockwell for several small space launch vehicles at about this time, mostly military vehicles. While the payload was nowhere near the STS’s, it would- if it worked as advertised – potentially wreck the business model for the STS program by providing a far cheaper means of getting crew into space.
Sep 162019
At the end of the last “Jurassic World” movie, the idiot-child character decided to let a bunch of dinosaurs, including carnivores, loose in northern California. One of the last scenes was a typical Spielberigan shot from a hillside, looking down on the ‘burbs; but what was looking down into the yards full of pets and children was one the Utahraptor-sized velociraptors. The implication was that humanity was about to take a beatdown for its hubris, with monsters rampaging through the population.
Small problem: in the real world it would take about fifteen minutes before every hunter within a five hundred mile radius had his truck loaded up, heading for that location. In about two days, dinosaurs would be extinct again.
Nevertheless, another Jurassic World movie is due out at some point. In the meantime, Universal has released a short flm set sometime after the dinosaurs were released. It’s amusing enough, in particular the very brief sequences during the closing credits of various incidents with the beasts out in the wild. The main story is the “only in California” kind, with people camping in the woods with full knowledge that there are giant predators roaming the region… and, being Californians, they didn’t bring the sort of firepower a sane person would. Of course, a sane person would not take their infant camping in woods full of carnivorous dinosaurs, but hey, Hollywood.
Spoilers:
Sep 152019
FYI:
Beto O’Rourke arrested in 1990s for burglary and DWI
While he was not *convicted* of burglary, he has at least been open and honest about having been arrested for such. It makes you wonder if, perhaps, his psychotic and profoundly anti-American urge to disarm the public is due to him having realized at one point that he had been on a course that would have set him on a course to catching a bullet. It is not uncommon for people who have displayed near-terminal levels of bad judgement and downright stupidity to assume that everyone else is as fatally flawed as they are, and thus everyone else is is as much need of external control as they are.