The Starhopper successfully fulfilled its role in life today.
Aug 272019
Aug 272019
I asked this before. trying again.
So let’s say you find something planet-sized in deep space, but magically it’s not spherical. Let’s say… it’s a pretzel. It’s a pretzel 10,000 kilometers wide made out of solid tungsten, kept from collapsing into a sphere due to Magic Structural Materials. Just go with it, folks. Something that big and that massive would have a terribly complex gravity field nearby. And I want to try to model it. Does anyone know of a program that would do this? It seems to me that what it’d need to be is a basic 3D CAD modeler that you build the object in, then the computer chops the model up into a thousand or ten thousand or however many individual chunks and calculates the force and vector of gravity from each chunk to each point in space and does the vector analysis. The concept is simple enough, but the coding is beyond me.
Might be possible to integrate a CAD model into Excel in some way to work out the 3D coordinates for all the chunks, I dunno. But it also seems like an obvious enough idea that it seems like it aught to already be a subroutine in some extant CAD program.
Who can hook a brother up?
Aug 262019
Continuing…
In 1985 Rockwell suggested stretching the Orbiter to create a 75-foot-long cargo bay in order to carry longer – though clearly not heavier – payloads. Exactly what those payloads might be was not given, but they would presumably be sizable yet relatively light structures… deployable structures such as solar arrays and radar arrays seem not unlikely. Interestingly, the main landing gear were to be moved slightly forward, the nose gear well aft.
Up next: the “hump-backed” Orbiter, with the most amazing shuttle diagram EVAR.
Hey. Hey.
Aug 262019
Most of Monday, the up-ship.com website was either very reluctant to come up or didn’t come up at all; the blog surprisingly was a bit more resilient, but from time to time it, too, failed to load. The web host says this was due to “server issues.” Meh. Things *seem* to be back up and running now.
I received a few “WTF?” emails. Obviously if the blog is down I can’t post “hey, the blog is down” on the blog. But I do wonder if it might perhaps be time to finally hold my nose and sign up for Twitter or some such? Use it *solely* as sort of a mirror for the blog, posting links to the latest blog posts… and updates about the blog when it goes down, which it seems to do with irritating regularity.
I do have the APR Facebook page but holy carp I hate using Facebook.
Not sure if it would be worth the soul crushing horror that comes with using Twitter to create such a Twitter account, especially considering that I will undoubtedly wind up getting deplatformed from Twitter eventually. Thoughts?
NOTE: A few times the blog has gone down I’ve gotten emails asking if I was dead or something. For future reference, I have no immediate plans to shuffle off this mortal coil, so if I die, the way it will be reflected on the blog is that it will stop being updated, and will remain up until the web host gets annoyed at the lack of payment.
Aug 262019
Test
EDIT: Purpose of test… you might or might not have trouble accessing the main webpage, up-ship.com right now and for the past few hours. I certainly do. Turns out, according to tech support, there’s some sort of server issue. But the *blog* seems to be coming through ok. And the main page comes through on my *phone* just fine.
Sigh. I don’t friggen’ know anymore…
Aug 262019
Aug 262019
It may be after the garbage fires that “Last Jedi” and “Solo” were, Disney has just stopped giving a damn about Star Wars. Heck, they don’t even have Star Wars toys at WalMart, a sure sign of franchise malaise.
But they’re still going through the motions, and recently released the first official poster for “Rise of Skywalker.” Behold the lameness:
Judgement: Meh.
But it gets even better: See that Emperor Palpatine there int he background? It seems that they didn’t paint Palpatine from the actual actor in makeup, but from a frakin’ toy.
Star Wars 9’s Palpatine Is A TOY, Not From The Movie
Sigh.
Aug 252019
Here’s what we know: the mother and father in law of a 15-year-old girl find a strange 17-year-old male in the daughters bedroom closet at 2:30 AM; the trespasser then strikes the mother. The parents then the beat the tar out of him, tie him up, call the bio-father and eventually the cops. These parents – who I suspect *most* parents of teenage girls would agree did basically the right thing, are now facing *LIFETIME* prison sentences for – according to the actual criminal in this story – saying naughty words to him.
Note that in the video in the link below, the government authority refers to the violent trespasser as the “victim” and the homeowners as the “suspects.” Ye gods does California suck.
https://news.yahoo.com/parents-charged-hate-crime-allegedly-235755474.html
Aug 252019
Continuing. By stretching the ET and adding a segment to each of the SRBs, an additional 30 to 35 thousand pounds (!) of payload could be carried to polar orbit.
Next time: Stretching the Orbiter itself!
Aug 252019
Snerk.