Anyway, this here's a collection of my recent thoughts upon rocketry and aviation and, y' know, SPACE.
- Went to the Pima Air and Space Museum. Saw some historically significant, but boring, WWII planes. And, more importantly, a UH-1 Huey and a AH-1 Cobra and the A-10 Thunderbolt ("God's own anti-son of a bitch machine"), and a couple of those giant cargo planes that can carry an M1 Abrams tank. And, well, let's just say that place is sodding Disneyland for rocket nerds, because not only have they got a Blackbird (yeah, Sierra Romeo Seven One, sonny boy, there ain't another), they've also got, get this get this get this, a Vomit Comet. I trust you don't need that explained? Yeah, and the Super Guppy, which is used for flying Saturn V rockets around. And looking like a cartoon whale.
- But alas, the space display there is somewhat...depressing. Why? Well, couple reasons. First is the display of shelved ideas for Shuttle replacements, Single-stage to Orbit reusable launch vehicles, and, well, of all the words of tongue or pen, the second worst are "it might have been."
- Still worse are those we often see, "it is, but it hadn't ought to be." As, for instance, nary a word in the displays there about nuclear rockets. And let's face it, ain't no other game in town, kids. You wanna get out of this hole we're in, you gonna need somethin' a little richer 'n combustion. NTR's the bare minimum; me, I'm thinking fusion. H->He, if you can get it; 3He-2H or even mere 3H-2H, if you can't.
- 'Nother thing that hadn't ought to be: so there's apparently this treaty that says space resources can't be claimed in situ, but can be owned once they're mined or refined or whatever. Which, um, hey, that's real cute and all, but why are you deliberately shooting asteroid mining in the foot? Where I come from we got a name for what that treaty legalizes, and that name is claim jumping. Gawd.
- And yet those selfsame schmucks turn around (after cheerfully strangling space industry in its cradle from some weird hatred of private property) and go on and on and on about "privatizing space". Did it occur to anyone else that the kind of things you need to get anywhere in space are precisely the kinds of things no sane person wants in private hands? I'm sorry, I think most of the agitation about corporations being too powerful is poppycock, and Marxist poppycock at that, but I, for one, do not want Boeing to have the bomb. Kzinti lesson? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Speaker-to-Animals?
The other problem I have with it—"space tourism"—is, it's the Scrooge McDuck approach to cultural conflict. Because obviously the best way to preserve and husband any resource is to turn it into a tourist trap! - Got GURPS Basic and GURPS Space. Um...wow. This system took me a day to learn. Damn, that's impressive, that's the Mac of RPGs (except universally compatible—zing!). But (and I know this is weird), something in the Space book was the final straw, and so I took the pion/beam-core antimatter rockets out of my book, and replaced them with an unspecified type of H->He fusion ship. I'd recently changed a few descriptions so now all the ships have the "tower" floorplan (because a spaceship ain't a plane or a boat), though I still have artificial gravity because 1 g of acceleration is too damn slow. I even changed the felinoids' ships to have that floorplan, and they have a reactionless engine...though, then again, they always visualized spaceships as fortifications, not boats.
Whoo. Yeah, actually it didn't take that much rewriting to change the ships from pion to helium fusion rockets. Actually, though, they only use the H->He rockets on starships, to get to the edge of systems so they can use the FTL as quickly as possible; in-system ships use conventional 3He-2H or 3H-2H fusion, and go a lot slower. And for landing? Yep, they use either little shuttle-type ships, or have detachable habitat sections. Because no sane person lands a fusion rocket (I've always wondered why Niven has people do that). - Then again, Heinlein and Niven and all the other people who just transplant "rugged frontier individualism" wholesale into space, yo, got a point, gents. Two, actually. A) It never really happened in the first place, sorry, I live there. And B) how the hell do fiercely-independent Belters, or whatever horse-hockey colonists Heinlein has, manage to hang on to their rugged individualism when they all have to pool the very air they breathe, like some pinko's daydream? You can't live off the land in space, guys, I'm pretty sure you yourselves are constantly telling us that.
- Finally, apparently, Whedon, during Firefly's over-prolonged existence, would apparently start off fan Q&As by saying, "If you ask me science questions I'll cry."
That pretty much says it all, really.
4 comments:
Why does their language need to borrow the English word for rocket if they were exposed to 14th century mass rocket launchers when they tried to invade Korea and they had contact with the Chinese, who invented rocketry?
Possibly for the same reason they call milk "miruku" even though they're, y' know, mammals (and have both a Chinese and a native word for cow-milk, to boot).
Or because those things? Yeah, not an engine. A weapon. Therefore, not the same word.
Why does any language define its lexemes how it does? Why do you think there's a difference between a wardrobe and a warehouse? They're both rectangular structures you store things in.
The whole thing about privatizing space is just an excuse not to go there, by people who don't think America deserves to go there, because they know private industry can't do it any meaningful way. Otherwise, that same faith would be place in private car and energy companies. Same with the whole "the moon? Been there done that - let's focus on Mars" nonsense. Aside from a willful ignorance of how much research needs to done before a Mars trip, and how much nicer it would be to use the moon for much of it, its also saying "look! see the shiny?" and hoping everyone will just forget about NASAs current mission (and I don't mean making Muslims feel good.)
But! A guy at Barnes and Noble yesterday ordered a book called Mining the Skies, by a professor at the U of A, and apparently asteroid mining is being taken seriously, and certain people (hopefully us...?) are thinking of using tagged vehicles to crash into asteroids and stake claims, since real mineral law will probably supersede some lame treaty. That's how it works with maritime law, anyway.
Heartening—though my heart is completely black, so you may not wish to "-en" it.
Part of the slow development of manned space travel is that, well, a life-support system is just added mass, and there ain't much a crew's strictly necessary for anymore. Half of what they thought you'd use space stations for is handled by satellites.
There sadly probably won't be grizzled asteroid miners staking out their personal claims—we'll do all that with robots, much more "Gulf oil drilling" than "Gold rush". But at least man will mine the Belt, and that's all I ask.
Too bad about the automation though. Me, if I was gonna do the mecha version of 7 Samurai, I wouldn't've had 'em still be growing rice (because apparently that's what powers 4-storey cyborgs...). I'd a had 'em be asteroid miners. Tell me that wouldn't rock. And you could have Shichijiro and Kikuchiyo drilling 'em in erecting three dimensional defenses.
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