With the recent cat illnesses, serious dropoff in business and increase in vet bills, stress levels hereabouts have been at near-historic levels. But hey, at least I haven’t yet contracted a life threatening case of bronchitis in 2014 (that’s me, always looking on the bright side). One of the consequences of stress is a decrease in lesser creativity… I might still be able to creatively think myself out of some emergency situation, but art? Feh. Gone.
Fortunately, things are starting to crawl back towards the normal only-slightly-apocalyptic level of DOOM stress, and creativity is starting to slooowly return. So, some updates:
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Storytime: “Mockingbird:” This one ground to a halt when things started going wrong with the cats. Last two days, though, I’ve started pecking away at it again. Some serious editing and some additional writing, up to page 10. In plot terms I’m still only a fraction of the way from beginning to planned end, so my goal of keeping it to a nice short 10 pages seems to have failed. Oh well.
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ANED: American nuclear Explosive Devices: I started serious work on layout diagrams of the Trinity “Gadget,” using traditional 2D CAD diagramming, when a few discrepancies started to make parts of it a headscratcher. With the additional nightmare of drawing in detonators scattered seemingly at random across a spherical surface, I decided to largely abandon the 2D approach and have started working on a 3D model, which I will use to convert into 2D layout diagrams. Where the discrepancies seem to come from is the rushed nature of the original design. Today we think of nuclear bombs as carefully designed, precisely manufactured mechanisms of startling complexity. But the early nukes were virtually slapped together in appearance. I have concluded that any halfway sober small nation could have a nuclear weapons program capable of building a functional Little Boy or Fat Man type nuke. A very large number of major corporations could pull off a nuclear weapons program in a couple back rooms.
We think of nuclear bombs as these spectacular machines that prit near tear apart the very fabric of reality. But the bombs themselves are, or at least can be, spectacularly”dumb” mechanisms. The bomb itself is a pretty simple mechanism. What makes a nuclear weapons program complex and expensive isn’t building the bomb… it’s obtaining the fissile material.
Given the operating processes, a Victorian-era industrialist could make a nuclear weapon (I’m looking at *you*, Loveless). But there is virtually no chance in hell that they could process uranium ore into weapons-grade U-235, much less plutonium. Materials science has long been the secret of many an advancement: people of an earlier era might have been able to analyze the design, but either couldn’t figure out what the thing is actually made of, or how to make what the thing is made of. Imagine designing a nuke that could in principle be built by someone in, say, 1863. Simple electrical switches, detonators and explosives comprehensible to the weaponeers of the time. But not only do the plans call for refined weapons grade uranium, but also parts made out of aluminum ( not readily available until the Hall-Héroult process in the mid 1880s), seals made out of teflon (discovered 1938), structural elements made out of carbon fiber (not really perfected until the 1960s), urethane foam (1950’s) and big chunks of synthetic diamond and sapphire, using an artificial ruby laser. The design is simple. The materials would be “magic.”
Anyway, here are the 2D and 3D “Gadget” diagrams in progress. As a *potential* side benefit of the 3D modeling, at the end of the process I’ll not only have accurate 2D diagrams, I’ll also have a 3D model appropriate for 3D printing. One wonders if there might be a market for a kit. To me the Gadget looks like it’d make a dandy Christmas tree ornament.
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Messiah: the death of creativity stymied the Messiah project. I’m getting back to it, though.
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Photography: fortunately, pointing a phone at stuff and pushing a button requires neither creativity nor any especial effort. And so:
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US Bomber Projects #’s 9 and 10: The diagrams for these are virtually complete.