testing…
Jun 262022
Jun 252022
Part of the back story to my Zaneverse stories set 500 years in the future is that the 21st century turned out to be the most nightmarish century in human history. The Pan Asian Wars wipe out about half the planetary population and trash the rest of the worlds biosphere via pollution and radiation and plagues. Subsequent to that is the European Diaspora as tens of millions of indigenous Europeans flee the continent as it transforms into a third world hellhole, dominated by the Caliphate, feeding into the resurgence of Iceland and the rise of the Texas Semi Autonomous Region. All this is far in the past of the main characters, but it helped establish the world they live in just as the colonization of the New World starting five hundred years ago established *our* world.
This was all supposed to be *decades* in the future, time enough for civilized society to get set up on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, habitats, leading to *some* portion of humanity surviving The Fall at the end of the world at the beginning of the 22nd century. I fear I was too optimistic.
Jun 242022
A Russian surface to air missile recently failed rather spectacularly, turning around quickly in flight and seemingly tried to go home.
Additional angle pic.twitter.com/YYaGoGiH9M
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) June 24, 2022
This sort of thing is not terribly unusual. Here’s a Saudi Patriot missile taking a detour:
Extremely high velocities, perspectives and vast distances can be a hard thing to grasp… but this REALLY scarily puts the velocities of missiles and rockets into perspective! 😳🤯 this is a Saudi Patriot missile failure 😱 genuinely terrifying! (source unknown) pic.twitter.com/8ucrfkuGRh
— Everyday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) October 12, 2019
Jun 242022
… or is this pair of signs kinda contradictory?
The top sign says that there is two hour parking for the entire block from 7AM to 5 PM. But the bottom sign says that parking is only 15 minutes, from11AM to 10 PM. These two overlap from 11AM to 5PM. Which one has precedence during that time?
Jun 242022
Not *this* blog, but the APR blog:
https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/
I’ve been getting bombarded with messages from the security programs all day telling me that there is an ongoing attack on the blog, such as:
June 24, 2022 11:56pm 194.xxx (Russian Federation) Blocked for SQL Injection in User-Agent String
I’m fuzzy on what exactly that means exactly, and the software says it’s blocking it, but all the attacks seem to be coming from Russia. So if the APR blog goes weird, or vanishes… this is why.
Jun 242022
UKHSA: Poliovirus detected in London sewage
Monkeypox didn’t quite work out. Maybe polio will finally allow the British government to start welding British people into their homes so they won’t see the millions of third-worlders that the British government will bring in…
In seriousness, this is unlikely to amount to anything. Polio isn’t particularly fatal, and finding polio in the sewer is unlikely to mean many infections except for those darn kids who swim in it for fun. But any excuse to cause a panic that can be engineered to increase government power will be taken.
Jun 242022
Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in landmark abortion decision
This will be an *endless* source of entertainment. Stand by for craziness from the whackjobs PO’ed that they might have more difficulty in killing unborn children.
Gonna be a lot of this:
And on the subject of abortion: last nights episode of “The Orville” briefly touched on it. Our Hero Captain Mercer goes to the Krill homeworld on a diplomatic mission. You know going in that this is going to turn out poorly; the Krill have been central casting stock sci-fi badguys from the get-go, driven by a whackadoodle religious ideology. You can tell it’s going to get worse, because an Orange Man Bad stand-in is shown early on gaining political power among the Krill. And, inevitably, the Krill government is taken over by Even Worse Krill, and the diplomatic mission goes straight to hell. Mercer is taken somewhere to witness the evils of Krill civilization: he is taken to see what happens to Krill citizens who abort their unborn children. The leadup makes it pretty clear that the parents of the aborted are going to be badly treated; and when it’s shown, Captain Mercer recoils in visible and audible shock and horror. So, what do the Krill do to the no-longer parents? Do they feed them to monsters? Dissolve them in acid? Set them on fire? Flay the flesh from their bones? No. They put them into a holodeck and project an image of the child that would have been, based on the DNA. The child interacts with them, saying something along the lines of “I would like to have been born.” THAT’S IT. We’re supposed to view that as a monstrous evil.
Yes, I know “The Orville” is written by lefties, because lefties own Hollywood. But really? You kill your unborn child, and you think the greater evil is someone showing you what that child might have become? Shoot, if we had that technology today, I’d recommend it for all abortion *and* pregnancy clinics. Imagine the smarter choices people could make if they could see what sort of child – good, bad, evil or indifferent – they could get.
Jun 242022
Lotsa F-bombs… and lots of good points.
Suggestion: anyone now suggesting gun control should be hauled up in front of the January 6 commission on suspicion of anti-American insurrectionism.
Jun 232022
The Boeing 733 is *reasonably* well known as the designation for the Supersonic Transport before it got re-designated the 2707. However, Model 733 was sort of a catch-all designation for a long (numerically and temporally) series of designs covering the gamut from giant Mach 2+ SST’s down to bombers, strike aircraft and fighters. The link seems to be that the 733 started off specifically as an SST designation; but other aircraft types were designed using the same aerodynamics. A fighter that was basically a scaled-down SST might be a model 733 (such as the Model 733-605). Shown below is a reasonably commonly reproduced piece of art from the 80’s depicting what is sometimes called the Model 606; it’s actually the Model 733-606. I’ve seen diagrams for a number of aircraft based on this basic geometry; the 733-606-11 and 733-606-12 were strike aircraft. The aircraft below is generally described as an interceptor, sometimes as a supercruise research platform.
The full rez scan of this artwork has been uploaded to the 2022-06 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons and Subscribers.
Jun 232022
Halfway through the crowdfunding effort, Tomy only has 14.9% of the backers needed. Unless there’s a big surge, I can’t see how this is going to happen. And it’s a damned shame, it looks like a nifty thing. So if you have an extra $600, give it some consideration. If you have an extra $600 but don’t want a big die-cast Enterprise, buy it anyway and send it to me. I’ll give it a good home. Or you could just send me $600 directly. I’d be fine with that too.
32 Inch Star Trek Enterprise – Die Cast Metal Replica
They’ve recently updated the description to include three shuttlecraft as well:
I think they just butted up against some historic bad luck. An expensive luxury item in the middle of Bidenomics? That’s just tragic; they’ve likely been at work on this project for a few years, and the timing just plain sucked. I just hope that if this doesn’t go through they don’t throw it all away, but store what they need to safely and try again when things are better. Not sure when that’ll be… maybe year two or three of the DeSantis administration?