The B-17 “Texas Raider” was hit by a bell P-63 Kingcobra today at the Wings Over Dallas airshow. Both planes broke apart in midair and crashed.Hard to imagine that anyone on either plane survived. It *almost* looked as if the P-63 aimed at the B-17 (I doubt it could have hit the bomber any worse if the goal was destruction), but that seems really unlikely.
The Paramount/Nickelodeon series “Star Trek: Prodigy” is very definitely a kids show. The main characters are kids, the plots are generally kid-friendly, the writing is pretty much kid-level. Given how the last three Star Trek live action series – STD, STP and SNW – have all to greater or lesser degrees crapped on the legacy of Star Trek, it would be both easy and fair for an actual Star Trek fan to simply give “Prodigy” a pass. But I am becoming more and more of the opinion that prodigy, like fellow animated series “Lower Decks,” is *actual* Star Trek worthy of attention.
Prodigy has started in on the second half of the first season. The most recent episode, “All The World’s A Stage,” has our heroes stumbling across a primitive society that was previously contacted by the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk a hundred years previously. As happens rather a lot in Star Trek, there was cultural contamination and the locals have picked up on Starfleet appearances, iconography, technology and ideology, though incompletely and somewhat inaccurately. But what *is* accurate: when it came time for “Star Trek Prodigy” to depict the shuttlecraft, phasers, uniforms and bridge of Kirks Enterprise… they used TOS designs. Not Discovery, not Strange New Worlds… The Original Fricken’ One And Only Series.
It is somewhat amazing to me that the people behind the friggen’ *cartoons* care vastly more about canon than the people with actual vast sums of money to lavish on the live action shows. While the animated series have from time to time dropped little nods to the Crap Series like STD and STP, when given the option they go with the good stuff. This indicates to me that the two animated series (three if you want to go back to the 70’s) are canonical with TOS and TNG and DS9 and VOY, while STD, STP and SNW are not.
The video below is by a couple of guys who arguably spend *way* too much time on this sort of thing. Here they’re geeking out over the appearance of true TOS in Prodigy. Included are a number of screenshots, including several when the bridge of the USS Protostar is holographically reconfigured to have TOS crew stations. And these guys are correct: it looks *glorious.* There was never any good reason to redo the TOS aesthetic.
By the way: I know a lot of people liked “Strange New Worlds.” Compared to STD and STP, it was a massive step up, but it was still a massive step down from proper Star Trek. The link to Discovery was enough to mean it’s not canonical, but the show was *filled* with evidence that SNW cannot be considered to exist in the same universe as TOS. Besides the various carryovers from STD (including the fact that the Enterprise is like 50% bigger), there are two main discrepancies within SNW:
1) They run into the Gorn, again and again. They’ve had direct interactions with them, met them face to face, have detailed scans and biological samples. This is around ten years before Kirk & Co. were supposed to have run into the previously wholly unknown Gorn for the very first time.
2) The season finale had Captain Pikes mind projected into an alternate future where he was still captain of the Enterprise during the TOS “Balance of Terror” episode. In the end, his mind is returned to the “present,” and he decides to choose a path that won’t lead to that divergent timeline. Great, wonderful. But… he *remembers* that timeline. The McGuffin that permitted the time travel, a Klingon “time crystal,” is a previously established thing that Starfleet is fully aware of. So doubtless Captain Pike will promptly file a report. A report that will tell Starfleet that:
A) The Romulans are a Vulcan offshoot
B) The Romulans are working on their plasma weapon
C) The Romulans are working on a practical cloaking device, and methods to detect it
D) The Romulans will attack this, that and the other outpost on such-and-such dates.
In the SNW universe, when “Balance of Terror” does eventually roll around, that Romulan warbird will get blown to smithereens the moment it first drops its cloak, because Starfleet will have had a decade to prepare. So, no… SNW is not in the TOS universe.
Any discussion of this denotes conspiracy theorizing.
A little self knowledge is important.
The Zambian space program was a magnificent Other Way Of Space Knowing. Did it fail due to machinations from the bigger nations? Or did it succeed, and right now Mars is populated by enlightened Zambians?
“Send Us Thine Asteroid, o Lord” is a hymn I would kind of expect to hear in increasing frequency in this new era of intentionally electing the brain-damaged to the Senate and White House and letting absolute weirdos corrupt kids in school and turning STEM upside down in favor of “other ways of knowing.”
Can’t he;p but think that somewhere, HPL is nodding along to this.
The LOFTID inflatable aeroshell was apparently a complete success, inflating in space, entering, popping a chute, splashing down and being recovered at sea.
I wonder if this could be conveniently applied to the Falcon 9 second stage.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 4:25 a.m. Eastern Nov. 10. The primary payload of the rocket is the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) 2 weather satellite …
A secondary payload on the launch of JPSS-2 is Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID), a NASA technology demonstration. While JPSS-2 will be deployed nearly a half-hour after liftoff, LOFTID will remain attached to the Centaur until 75 minutes after liftoff, following a deorbit burn of the Centaur.
Shortly before deployment, LOFTID will inflate a reentry shield six meters in diameter. That heat shield will slow down the vehicle from orbital velocity to Mach 0.7 as instruments on board collect data on the performance of the shield. LOFTID will then deploy parachutes to slow it down for the rest of its descent, splashing down in the Pacific east of Hawaii to be recovered by a ship.
Inflatable heat shields have been studied since before humans flew into space. Normal heat shields need to withstand insanely high temperatures, requiring materials that are either insanely expensive and complex, or that involve complex, fragile and heavy active cooling systems (such as water cooling through transpiration), or which are ablative. The latter variety is technologically fairly simple, but ablatives tend to be heavy and they are labor intensive to apply and make reusability difficult.
With temperatures reaching several thousand degrees, inflatable materials would seem inappropriate for heat shields. But those high temperatures are not a mandatory feature of re-entry. To a first hand-wave approximation, the maximum temperature is proportional to the mass-per-surface-area of the re-entry vehicle. A one-ton vehicle is going to have to shed all of its orbital velocity, converting all that kinetic energy into thermal, regardless of the size or shape or cross-sectional area. The way that is done is by compressing the air the vehicle slams into; the heating isn’t due to friction, but to the compression of the gas. If you can spread that heating energy out wider… the gas doesn’t heat up as much per unit surface area. Heating can be reduced from the sort of thing that will melt tungsten to the sort of thing that can be survived by advanced polymer fibers. As a bonus, the inflatable shield, being far larger than the solid shield on the vehicle, provides drag all the way down. In principle it would be possible to dispense with parachutes, wings, retro-rockets, and simply drift down using the shield as an inverted parachute. This was the case for the Douglas “PARACONE” concept from the mid-1960s, designed for, among other uses, as an emergency “life boat” for astronauts in space. It would provide for a safe entry, deceleration and touchdown on either land or water.
Guillermo del Toro has released some -re-viz video created by ILM for his cancelled 2011 “At The Mountains of Madness.” There is a fairly creepy critter here, but it does not seem to match the descriptions in the novella. It’s *certainly* not an Elder Thing; all it can be is either a Shoggoth (which should be an oily black “the Blob” with a bunch of eyes and pseudopods) or an all-new creature invented for the movie.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkwxWwstuW6
A video tour of the Hughes H-4 Hercules, the “Spruce Goose.” This would have been a hell of a plane had it been made available several years earlier, but by the time it flew it was not only no longer needed, it was obsolete. being made largely of wood, its durability out in the world would be questionable. During wartime this might have been a small issue; they probably couldn’t be expected to have a long lifespan. They’d get taken out by enemy action, by crashes and by wear and tear long before weather and aging would do them in. But in civilian service, the aircraft seems unlikely to have stood up well for long periods.
An all-metal version with turboprops? that might’ve been a hell of a sight to see all through the 1950’s.