I started on my Christmas cards. Last year I made a point of saving the envelopes from cards to
me, so that I had current addresses. Feeling smug and superior I pulled
these out and started - only to discover they were from 2003! What the
Hey! So, I spent a lot of time researching addresses, again.
After lunch I went up to Mojave for Plane Crazy,
celebrating the 25th anniversary of Voyager circling the world.
Unfortunately I was a bit late getting there and not much seemed to be
going on. Bummer. Rand Simburg has a little more information. I did take some pics of Dick Rutan's aircraft on the flightline, a Berkut I believe, and of the old Rotary Rocket Roton at their little space park there. Then my camera battery died.
Dick Rutan's Berkut 360.
Memories: I was working at
Edwards when Voyager did it's round-the-world flight. A BIG THING, the longest non-stop unrefueled flight ever done. Some friends from
back east and I had gone out the year before to see it being built in
Mojave, and even bought a few souvenirs then. When it landed at Edwards AFB at about 8:00am I was commuting in to work.
For some reason the USAF decided to close the main gate (crowd
control?), and since we were stopped, I got out of the car and watched
Voyager pass over on it's way to landing. A few years later I saw it
again, at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C..
Friday 16 December
2011
Friday
- not much going on. It looks like I am going up to my sister's place
for Christmas, up in Reno. It's been years since I spent a Christmas
with her and her family, and it's a new house that I haven't seen yet.
Hopefully she has set up the guest bedrooms. Probably I'll go through
Fremont first and stay at my other sister's place for a day or two, and
we'll travel up together.
The few presents I ordered off Amazon finally showed up. I feel a
little blue, which is typical for Christmas season, but I really need
to actually do my Christmas cards, they've been on the dining room
table for two weeks.
I took my friends boy down to Palmdale for a Sea Scouts thing. We were,
it turned out, an hour early, so we just went to a local park and
played with our Droids. Heh, what a couple of nerds. We decided that Google Latitude is cool/creepy. He mentioned that he was using Opera for Mobile
instead of the stock Droid browser, and after looking at it I switched
myself. It keeps getting better, and the stock browser hasn't been
upgraded in forever.
Via Wikipedia's Pledge Week: Electronvolt: the favorite superhero of physicists.
Thursday 15 December
2011
Thursday
- I guess it's BIG THINGS week here at stately Hahnsoft Manor.
Bert Rutan and Paul Allen announced the construction of a HUGE plane, to carry rockets to be launched from the air into orbit, Stratolaunch.
For a sense of scale: those are (2) 747 fuselages and (6) 747 engines.
The thing in the middle is the SpaceX rocket to be launched.
I'm not sure I think it's a good idea. It's a very
subsonic design - straight wings, which means only Mach 0.5-0.7, so
there is not much in the way of a velocity bump. It's fairly large
span, but the narrow wings suggest that it won't really have a high
ceiling - probably 50,000 ft max. And, without a cross tail I think
you'd be really asking for trouble in the vehicle's structural dynamics.
The biggest advantages would seem to be the ability to launch into any
type of orbit, and the ability to use a large expansion ratio rocket
nozzle on the rocket. And of course you do save a bit of rocket fuel by
avoiding flight through the thick lower atmosphere.
I assume some very smart people have done the trade-offs, and there's
certainly a lot I don't know about launch costs and such, but it looks
a bit dubious to me.
If I had $300 million to blow on space, I'd build a all reusable 2-stage to orbit vehicle.
Wednesday 14 December 2011
Wednesday - we had an event at the LPAC in the early evening, the The Blind Boys of Alabama. This was entertaining, a mix of gospel and Christmas stuff, and a lot of fun. The show was too short...
Book #147 was Moon Over Soho, by Ben Aaronovitch. This is a sequel to #146, Midnight Riot,
and again, well done. A portion of the interest for me in these books
was the somewhat jaundiced look at the inside of the British
police forces.
Tuesday 13 December 2011
Tuesday
- Generally small boat sailors who spend time in blue water dislike
containerships. This is because containers tend to fall off ships, as
many as 10,000 a year by some estimates. If even one in ten floats,
that's 1,000 steel boxes floating around, probably just awash. Running
into the edge of a steel container in a fiberglass hulled boat is a
good way to test your bilge pumps and fothering skills :-(
On the other hand, there are so many containerships out there that you stand a pretty good chance of being rescued by them, should you allow your Vigor Black Box to come up empty:
Monday
- Talking of big things (zeppelin's) I am reminded of a joke I read
about big ships.
A father takes his
small boy to watch the biggest ship in the world sail out of harbor on its maiden voyage.
Father: Son, that's the biggest ship in the
world, the only one of it's kind! Boy: Too bad. I wish there was another. Father: Why is that? Boy: If there were two, then they could race!
Another thought on size. The modern Ticonderoga
class Aegis cruisers are now at about 10,000 tons. This is
approaching the size of the old nuclear powered USS
Long Beach at 15,000 tons, and surpasses the old nuclear powered USS
Bainbridge at 9,000 tons. Modern reactor design is, I think, fully fueled for
a vessel lifetime now. I wonder if the Navy ever considered putting
reactors into the Ticonderoga hulls? There'd be an upfront cost vs. fuel issue I
suppose. And I suppose a modern reactor would have to heavily armored against battle damage, which
would mean a lot of extra weight aft.
Sunday 11
December 2011
Sunday
- Not much to say. Lazying about, watching anime on Netflix. The
Japanese are strange, and their cartoons can be laugh-out-loud zany. Having watched three or four series all the way through I
am beginning to recognize common tropes, but it's still fun.
One more thing about the zeppelin's. All else being equal, the lifting
capacity varies roughly as the cube
of the size, whereas the structural weight will probably vary roughly
as the square. So even small
increases in size would mean big increases in payload capacity.
This is the basis of the many designs for transport of large bulk cargo
and military equipment, but it occurs to me that there may be a
civilian use: infrastructure transport. Right now large civil engineering
stuff is usually built on-site: bridges, trestles, tanks, etc. Ships
used to be built like that, in one big piece, nailed up plank-by-plank
or riveted plate-by-plate, but modern maritime construction practice is
to build things in modules and then assemble with large huge cranes. I'm
always amazed, and a little annoyed (as a taxpayer) when I see stick built overpass
construction that goes on for months, fouling traffic.
What if the crews just built the ramps, foundations or landings on either side, and
then a big cargo lifter zeppelin lowered an offsite prefabricated structure down, like a huge
helicopter delivery?
I say zeppelin, not blimp, because if you are carrying tens-to-hundreds
of tons, then a fairly hefty structure is needed just for the payload area,
and one might just as well suffer the relatively slight addition of
weight for a rigid outer cover.
Book #146 was Midnight Riot,
by Ben Aaronovitch. This was a detective story, kind of a mashup of
wizardry and police procedural, set in modern day (but obviously
alternate) London. A rookie constable discovers that he can see ghosts,
and gets assigned to the only remaining wizard on the police force.
Wizardy having declined precipitously after World War II, many on the
force think it fantasy (the older wizard is 100 years old and fought in
World War I). But magic is coming back with a vengeances! A little
rough around the edges, but mostly enjoyable.
Picture of
the Week Photo Notes: Larry sings the National Anthem, Mojave Ca., December 15, 2001.
WEEK 50 2011
