Kind of makes me wonder if using the barge as such a small target is contributing to the hard landings, simply because it's such a tiny target relative to the area that the rocket has to come down on
Since the first attempt hard landed because it ran out of attitude control gas, and the second hard landed because of a control valve problem... how would a larger target have helped? In case of the first attempt, you've still got to control your attitude regardless of the size of the field. In the second, the size of the field is irrelevant if you can't properly control the vehicle in the first place.
Seriously, don't be misled by the frantic activity in the final seconds of the most recent attempt. That burst of activity was the vehicle attempting to null it's horizontal velocity and then trim it's attitude before landing - something it has to do regardless of the size of the field.
The basic flaw in the landing sequence isn't the size of the target, it's the design of the vehicle. Its minimum T/W ratio is well over unity at landing, meaning it can't hover, can't ease itself down, and you have to take great care to not end up with positive vertical velocity. The only way it can land (with any reasonable sized target) is to approach at high speed, then at the last second try to null horizontal velocity without excessively reducing vertical velocity (I.E. bouncing), followed by a return to vertical and touchdown.
You could avoid this by having a circle of paved ground a quarter to half a mile in diameter - but that's not cheap to build or maintain given the need to resist a rocket's exhaust. Long term, given that the tests are essentially free*, it's cheaper and easier to figure out how to land precisely on a smaller target.
* The first stage is bought and paid for by the launch customer - and so long as the added equipment for landing poses no undue risk during ascent, they don't care what happens to it after separation.
It sure seems that if a larger landing area was available, so that the rocket didn't have to lean so far to adjust to a very small target and thus could prioritize staying vertical, it would be able to land successfully.
No so much as you might think - you still have to trim and eventually null your horizontal velocity, and null any horizontal residuals arising from trying to remain vertical. It's a complicated problem, even if you're just aiming for an arbitrary landing spot in a larger landing area.
On top of that, the crash seems to have been caused not by prioritization, but by a control valve operating sluggishly causing the response time to go out of limits. Even if you're just accepting a landing wherever you're coming down, if the control system gets out of phase you're screwed.
So just send people who are happiest sitting at the same keyboard for days if not hours on end, with minimal human interaction.
The truth is, that kind of person is damn near the worst choice possible and the polar opposite of the kind of person you need.
You don't need someone who can't or won't deal with individuals. You need someone who can deal with forced close quarters interactions with individuals while also being able to deal with near complete isolation from society. These are two very different kinds of people.
The crew of a Mars-bound craft will invariably be forced into contact with each other due to the small size of the vehicle. On top of that, they must come together as a team because much of what they'll be doing will be done with close coordination in close proximity to each other. Someone who willingly isolates himself (or worse yet deliberately isolates himself) psychologically and socially from his crewmates over a long term is thus more of a liability than an asset because he'll have a hard time coming together and remaining as part of the team (if he can do so at all).
The latter (near complete isolation from society) is actually the difficult part. Unless they're truly out at the end of the bell curve (and thus edging on being mentally ill), all but the most introverted basement dweller has email, guild chat, chatrooms, forums and blog comments, social media, and other forms of real time or near real time communications. (Not to mention shared experiences and events as raids, game releases and updates, movie releases, etc...) They've isolated themselves from close physical contact with individuals, but they're still in close social and psychological contact and interaction with society. (Very few people actually willingly completely cut themselves off from society.) Onboard a Mars bound spacecraft, that close contact and interaction (fostered by real time and near real time communications) and those shared events and experiences will be nearly completely absent - not just due to speed-of-light delay, but due to limited communications bandwidth.
Disclaimer: Former SSBN crewman, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. (Or at least about as close as you can get without actually being an astronaut.)
Last I heard we weren't anywhere close to running out of coal, there is literally mountains of the stuff still around and relatively easily available.
Welcome to 2015 - where coal isn't still "relatively easily" available. Surface deposits and those that can be mined without serious powered machinery have been gone for most of a century.
Steel and iron production would probably happen on a smaller scale but you'd have huge quantities of it still sitting around waiting to be recycled.
Without massive amounts of charcoal, coke, or coal - you aren't recycling significant amounts of anything.
The one thing that I can think of that could be problematic would be making plastics in a world with less available oil.
Then, frankly, while you may be thinking - you're not very well informed.
If you're "re-booting" civilization, then you don't have an established market to upset, so there aren't the same issues.
Just because there aren't the same issues doesn't mean there aren't different and equally intractable issues - such as the lack of cheap long distance transport, and the lack of cheap fertilizers and high performance farm machinery. The result is that you still end up in the same place we are today - bio-diesel competing with food over scarce resources.
The first electric cars were made in the 1800's, but they didn't get much of a chance then, because fossil fuel powered cars were there. Without fossil fuels, they would probably have been developed faster and become much more significant.
Sure, so long as we handwave away the fact that electrical cars only existed because of the existence of a massive fossil fuel powered industrial infrastructure.
The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel.
Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke - a fossil fuel.
It [charcoal] doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.
Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.
In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.
What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.
Matching the orbital planes (due to a mismatch caused by launching outside the window) is performed by the payload once in orbit - not by the first stage during boost. That's the margin problem - the payload hasn't enough delta-V.
You're remembering wrong. Most ISS launches have windows a few seconds wide, at most. There's a lot of stuff in LEO, all moving very fast, If you want a course that will hit the ISS at exactly the right speed, and not come too close to anything else, you've got a narrow window to do it in.
You're explaining wrong. It has nothing to do with "other stuff" in LEO, and everything to do with the ISS's high inclination orbit. The plane of the orbit only passes over Cape Canaveral at intervals, and if you miss that window it will take excessive energy to match planes with the ISS.
You *can* launch outside that window (space is a big place), but it eats into your fuel and safety margins and usually there's no reason to do that.
Um, no. The width of the window is determined by the performance (available energy) of the booster and payload - you can't launch outside of it at all and reach the target. That's why windows exist in the first place.
I'd use "trolling" myself, because the action and the result of both"traditional" and "new" trolling are functionally indistinguishable. The "non-malicious" claim is a distinction without a difference as intentionally disrupting a list (or group, or forum, or whatever) is malicious on the face of it. In the end, both are intentional actions performed by and for the benefit of the troll to the detriment of the discussion.
Today the media conflates "trolling" with "abusive asshole." I think they misunderstand the word "troll." "Trolling" meant "fishing." To dangle bait for newbs to take and work themselves into a lather, and then laugh at those who don't get the joke. It was performance art.
*Sigh*. For as literate and educated (generally speaking, though not as much as they believe) as Slashdot is, one basic concept seems to continually elude them - words and their meanings do change. In this case, the so-called "classical" meaning of "troll" vanished not long after the start of Endless September. The "new" meaning (an individual that's deliberately abusive or deliberately fans the flames) has been the more commonly used one for a very long time.
nobody can say with 100% certainty that current encryption technology will forever be secure
That's the thing - they don't need to be "forever secure". For tax data, all you need is seven years, then you can burn or shred the media you probably can't read anyhow because either it has failed or you no longer own a compatible reader.
Well, there are a lot of unknowns at this point, but I've heard Musk has claimed that the first stage is responsible for 3/4 of the cost of the launch.
[Much piffle and handwaving deleted]
Thank you Captain Obvious.
Now, try actually adressing what I posted rather than simply serving up the kool-aide.
Granted the limited reuse of the Shuttle launch system was almost as expensive as building a fresh one
Not in your wildest dreams. A Shuttle launch cost (out of pocket) between 100 and 250 million per (depending on who you ask and setting aside the fixed costs that you pay regardless of flight rate). The last Shuttle built (Endeavor) cost 1.7 billion. (The rest of your paragraph is on the same level - clueless bilge.)
If SpaceX actually lands on the barge and flies the first stage to orbit again it's a really big deal, because it radically changes the economics of getting to space.
*Sigh* I really shouldn't have to explain this again, but you're counting the chickens before the eggs have hatched.
Much depends on how much it costs to refurbish the vehicle and how many additional flights it makes. These are both huge, huge known unknowns - and there's the non trivial possibility of significant unknown unknowns emerging in the process. SpaceX is betting a significant chunk of cash on return and reuse, but that means they're confident - not that they will succeed.
First, for someone who has been playing chess competitively for the last twenty years, none of the results of the analysis is a revelation. Like so many "data" posts that seem to be in vogue, this one states quite the obvious viz the game of chess has evolved and has improved in quality. Hence opening colour matters, games are longer and many end in draws. DUH!
Like so many on Slashdot, you don't grasp the difference between "Duh, everyone knows that" and "proven by analysis of the available data".
At what point does the game cease to be fun and become an obsession?
Why do you presume the two are mutually incompatible? (Other than the negative stereotyping of obsession.)
I'm accumulating a library of haiku books, translations, commentaries, etc... but that doesn't mean that writing them has become less fun. On the contrary, the deeper I delve, the more fun I'm finding.
Let me tell you that the issue is far more complex and far more nuanced than any of the comments here unveil.
Slashdot doesn't do complex and nuanced. We (well, most of us commentators and moderators, though not I) do simple and simplified - and insult and shit all over everyone else's rights, but scream like a toddler when one of our (usually self assumed) "rights" are so much as glanced at askance.
What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons
Ummm, yeah they did. The RBIG's report started development of Minuteman's decoy suite.
In other words, you've got cause and effect completely backward - you can't have experience before starting development.
Which is every ICBM and SLBM in the world has been packed with decoys and chaff starting in the 1960s.
As a former SLBM technician, I can safely say there is absolutely no publicly available information supporting this claim. (Nor is there much need to so stuff said missiles given the lack of BMD systems to defeat.)
neglected the developments of the past half century plus
Right, because the laws of physics changed in the last 50 years.
Right. Which is why we don't have VLSI IC chips. And we certainly don't have nearly microscopic lasers so cheap they're embedded in common household items. And why we don't have cell phones. And why... well, you get the picture. Technology has evolved in the last fifty years, and your arguments entirely ignore that.
The problems with decoys were well known in 1958, and panel after panel of the super-smart (including nobel laureates) examined the issue in depth and basically said that a good decoy is literally impossible to distinguish from the warhead. Why? Because you can put the warhead in a mylar balloon and launch several similar balloons on nearby trajectories, and that's basically that.
What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons. Your entire argument essentially boils down to a false appeal to authority.
On top of which, you miss the bigger issue - a good decoy (one which is impossible to distinguish from a warhead), essentially replaces a warhead thus reducing the carrying capacity of your missile. (This is essentially what happened with Chevaline, which was developed in the 1980's, not the 1960's.) This means that to deliver the same weight of attack, your force needs to be proportionally larger - and ABM missiles are much, much, cheaper than ICBM's. (And modern phased array radars and computing means you need less infrastructure per ABM in flight.)
Etc... etc...
The short version is, you've made the classic mistake of the armchair general in that you've assigned all the positives to one side and neglected their negatives and conversely to the "other" side. You've also based your entire argument on 1950's technology for that "other" side and completely neglected the developments of the past half century plus. (Which have mostly been to the positive of the "other" side.)
Just put two reasonably competent people in the cockpit at all times and stop trying to f**k an extra penny out of every dime, you cheap chiselling b*st*rds.
That'll happen the day people stop using Expedia, Travelocity, and other such services and choosing ImaginaryAir flight 419 over Theta flight 271 because 419 is $0.15 cheaper.... and then the next time they make that trip, choosing Theta flight 271 because Theta has manged to squeeze and now it's $0.15 cheaper than ImaginaryAir 419.
Seriously, practically everywhere it's touched the 'net has started a race to the bottom (cheapest price) - and, as always, such races have consequences. Sometimes, it's your local computer store or small bookstore going under - others, it's a load of passengers scattered across the terrain.
And don't give me that bull about how it's all the airlines fault for cutting services. The airlines have discovered what every other big business has - as much as Americans whine about quality, service and all the other intangibles, the vast majority of the time their purchase decisions are driven by price.
Choosing someone for 'best author' because they're white and male is ridiculous. What doesn't ever seem to sink into the discussion is that choosing a 'best author' because they're NOT white and male is equally ridiculous.
True, on both counts.
What's not true is the summary, or the article linked. (It's essential the Faux News version of events.) The Sad Puppies movement isn't really about choosing authors or works based on their color, sex, or creed. The Sad Puppies movement is about two things; First, breaking the "monopoly" of a small group of tastemakers in the nomination process. Second, breaking the "monopoly" of the same small group in determining the winners of the poll. Or, to sum up both in another way, the movement is about overcoming voter apathy and broadening the base of nominated works and voters to include a larger and more representative slice of works and fandom.
Seriously, only a few thousand voters in total currently determine the nominees and the ultimate winners - out of a worldwide fanbase numbering in the millions. Those relative few that have dominated the nomination and selection process for decades (and the idiots who parrot their propaganda) are responding in the typical fashion of the "elites" - by demonizing those who would dare to challenge the self assumed predominance that is theirs by right. They, and the idiots who spout their propaganda, are the ones that invented the idea that Sad Puppies is all about skin color and the presence or absence of ovaries.
On top of that, there's the whole "Johnny come lately" attitude typical of any fandom that faces a sudden influx of "new" fans. The tastemaker elite loathes the "new fan". (Not that the issue is actually new, the roots of the issue (and "political" battles over the Hugos) stretch back to the sudden breakdown of the SF ghetto walls in the late 70's and early 80's when Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons broke out into popular culture.) But what they feel about the "new fan" is positively puppies and kittens and sunshine compared compared to the antipathy and loathing they feel towards pop culture - their slogan is (or at least should be) "Nerdom for Nerds!".
The statement wasn't about efficiency, it was about the ability to maintain speed over ground. Aircraft (and airships) do need more power to maintain a given speed over ground in the face of a headwind, period. All this bull about efficiency and relative airspeed is just pedantic nitpicking that fails to make you look intelligent.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the first attempt hard landed because it ran out of attitude control gas, and the second hard landed because of a control valve problem... how would a larger target have helped? In case of the first attempt, you've still got to control your attitude regardless of the size of the field. In the second, the size of the field is irrelevant if you can't properly control the vehicle in the first place.
Seriously, don't be misled by the frantic activity in the final seconds of the most recent attempt. That burst of activity was the vehicle attempting to null it's horizontal velocity and then trim it's attitude before landing - something it has to do regardless of the size of the field.
The basic flaw in the landing sequence isn't the size of the target, it's the design of the vehicle. Its minimum T/W ratio is well over unity at landing, meaning it can't hover, can't ease itself down, and you have to take great care to not end up with positive vertical velocity. The only way it can land (with any reasonable sized target) is to approach at high speed, then at the last second try to null horizontal velocity without excessively reducing vertical velocity (I.E. bouncing), followed by a return to vertical and touchdown.
You could avoid this by having a circle of paved ground a quarter to half a mile in diameter - but that's not cheap to build or maintain given the need to resist a rocket's exhaust. Long term, given that the tests are essentially free*, it's cheaper and easier to figure out how to land precisely on a smaller target.
* The first stage is bought and paid for by the launch customer - and so long as the added equipment for landing poses no undue risk during ascent, they don't care what happens to it after separation.
No so much as you might think - you still have to trim and eventually null your horizontal velocity, and null any horizontal residuals arising from trying to remain vertical. It's a complicated problem, even if you're just aiming for an arbitrary landing spot in a larger landing area.
On top of that, the crash seems to have been caused not by prioritization, but by a control valve operating sluggishly causing the response time to go out of limits. Even if you're just accepting a landing wherever you're coming down, if the control system gets out of phase you're screwed.
The truth is, that kind of person is damn near the worst choice possible and the polar opposite of the kind of person you need.
You don't need someone who can't or won't deal with individuals. You need someone who can deal with forced close quarters interactions with individuals while also being able to deal with near complete isolation from society. These are two very different kinds of people.
The crew of a Mars-bound craft will invariably be forced into contact with each other due to the small size of the vehicle. On top of that, they must come together as a team because much of what they'll be doing will be done with close coordination in close proximity to each other. Someone who willingly isolates himself (or worse yet deliberately isolates himself) psychologically and socially from his crewmates over a long term is thus more of a liability than an asset because he'll have a hard time coming together and remaining as part of the team (if he can do so at all).
The latter (near complete isolation from society) is actually the difficult part. Unless they're truly out at the end of the bell curve (and thus edging on being mentally ill), all but the most introverted basement dweller has email, guild chat, chatrooms, forums and blog comments, social media, and other forms of real time or near real time communications. (Not to mention shared experiences and events as raids, game releases and updates, movie releases, etc...) They've isolated themselves from close physical contact with individuals, but they're still in close social and psychological contact and interaction with society. (Very few people actually willingly completely cut themselves off from society.) Onboard a Mars bound spacecraft, that close contact and interaction (fostered by real time and near real time communications) and those shared events and experiences will be nearly completely absent - not just due to speed-of-light delay, but due to limited communications bandwidth.
Disclaimer: Former SSBN crewman, been there, done that, got the t-shirt. (Or at least about as close as you can get without actually being an astronaut.)
*Sigh*
Nobody is assuming that. That's why nobody has discussed iron ores - only fuels.
Yes, we'll fuels - in literally mountainous quantities. And fuel will be very hard to come by.
Welcome to 2015 - where coal isn't still "relatively easily" available. Surface deposits and those that can be mined without serious powered machinery have been gone for most of a century.
Without massive amounts of charcoal, coke, or coal - you aren't recycling significant amounts of anything.
Then, frankly, while you may be thinking - you're not very well informed.
Just because there aren't the same issues doesn't mean there aren't different and equally intractable issues - such as the lack of cheap long distance transport, and the lack of cheap fertilizers and high performance farm machinery. The result is that you still end up in the same place we are today - bio-diesel competing with food over scarce resources.
Sure, so long as we handwave away the fact that electrical cars only existed because of the existence of a massive fossil fuel powered industrial infrastructure.
Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke - a fossil fuel.
Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.
What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.
Matching the orbital planes (due to a mismatch caused by launching outside the window) is performed by the payload once in orbit - not by the first stage during boost. That's the margin problem - the payload hasn't enough delta-V.
You're explaining wrong. It has nothing to do with "other stuff" in LEO, and everything to do with the ISS's high inclination orbit. The plane of the orbit only passes over Cape Canaveral at intervals, and if you miss that window it will take excessive energy to match planes with the ISS.
Um, no. The width of the window is determined by the performance (available energy) of the booster and payload - you can't launch outside of it at all and reach the target. That's why windows exist in the first place.
I'd use "trolling" myself, because the action and the result of both"traditional" and "new" trolling are functionally indistinguishable. The "non-malicious" claim is a distinction without a difference as intentionally disrupting a list (or group, or forum, or whatever) is malicious on the face of it. In the end, both are intentional actions performed by and for the benefit of the troll to the detriment of the discussion.
*Sigh*. For as literate and educated (generally speaking, though not as much as they believe) as Slashdot is, one basic concept seems to continually elude them - words and their meanings do change. In this case, the so-called "classical" meaning of "troll" vanished not long after the start of Endless September. The "new" meaning (an individual that's deliberately abusive or deliberately fans the flames) has been the more commonly used one for a very long time.
That's the thing - they don't need to be "forever secure". For tax data, all you need is seven years, then you can burn or shred the media you probably can't read anyhow because either it has failed or you no longer own a compatible reader.
[Much piffle and handwaving deleted]
Thank you Captain Obvious.
Now, try actually adressing what I posted rather than simply serving up the kool-aide.
Not in your wildest dreams. A Shuttle launch cost (out of pocket) between 100 and 250 million per (depending on who you ask and setting aside the fixed costs that you pay regardless of flight rate). The last Shuttle built (Endeavor) cost 1.7 billion. (The rest of your paragraph is on the same level - clueless bilge.)
*Sigh* I really shouldn't have to explain this again, but you're counting the chickens before the eggs have hatched.
Much depends on how much it costs to refurbish the vehicle and how many additional flights it makes. These are both huge, huge known unknowns - and there's the non trivial possibility of significant unknown unknowns emerging in the process. SpaceX is betting a significant chunk of cash on return and reuse, but that means they're confident - not that they will succeed.
Like so many on Slashdot, you don't grasp the difference between "Duh, everyone knows that" and "proven by analysis of the available data".
Why do you presume the two are mutually incompatible? (Other than the negative stereotyping of obsession.)
I'm accumulating a library of haiku books, translations, commentaries, etc... but that doesn't mean that writing them has become less fun. On the contrary, the deeper I delve, the more fun I'm finding.
Slashdot doesn't do complex and nuanced. We (well, most of us commentators and moderators, though not I) do simple and simplified - and insult and shit all over everyone else's rights, but scream like a toddler when one of our (usually self assumed) "rights" are so much as glanced at askance.
In other words, you've got cause and effect completely backward - you can't have experience before starting development.
As a former SLBM technician, I can safely say there is absolutely no publicly available information supporting this claim. (Nor is there much need to so stuff said missiles given the lack of BMD systems to defeat.)
Right. Which is why we don't have VLSI IC chips. And we certainly don't have nearly microscopic lasers so cheap they're embedded in common household items. And why we don't have cell phones. And why... well, you get the picture. Technology has evolved in the last fifty years, and your arguments entirely ignore that.
What's worth pointing out is that none of these of super-smart people have any actual experience with putting warheads in mylar ballons. Your entire argument essentially boils down to a false appeal to authority.
On top of which, you miss the bigger issue - a good decoy (one which is impossible to distinguish from a warhead), essentially replaces a warhead thus reducing the carrying capacity of your missile. (This is essentially what happened with Chevaline, which was developed in the 1980's, not the 1960's.) This means that to deliver the same weight of attack, your force needs to be proportionally larger - and ABM missiles are much, much, cheaper than ICBM's. (And modern phased array radars and computing means you need less infrastructure per ABM in flight.)
Etc... etc...
The short version is, you've made the classic mistake of the armchair general in that you've assigned all the positives to one side and neglected their negatives and conversely to the "other" side. You've also based your entire argument on 1950's technology for that "other" side and completely neglected the developments of the past half century plus. (Which have mostly been to the positive of the "other" side.)
That'll happen the day people stop using Expedia, Travelocity, and other such services and choosing ImaginaryAir flight 419 over Theta flight 271 because 419 is $0.15 cheaper.... and then the next time they make that trip, choosing Theta flight 271 because Theta has manged to squeeze and now it's $0.15 cheaper than ImaginaryAir 419.
Seriously, practically everywhere it's touched the 'net has started a race to the bottom (cheapest price) - and, as always, such races have consequences. Sometimes, it's your local computer store or small bookstore going under - others, it's a load of passengers scattered across the terrain.
And don't give me that bull about how it's all the airlines fault for cutting services. The airlines have discovered what every other big business has - as much as Americans whine about quality, service and all the other intangibles, the vast majority of the time their purchase decisions are driven by price.
True, on both counts.
What's not true is the summary, or the article linked. (It's essential the Faux News version of events.) The Sad Puppies movement isn't really about choosing authors or works based on their color, sex, or creed. The Sad Puppies movement is about two things; First, breaking the "monopoly" of a small group of tastemakers in the nomination process. Second, breaking the "monopoly" of the same small group in determining the winners of the poll. Or, to sum up both in another way, the movement is about overcoming voter apathy and broadening the base of nominated works and voters to include a larger and more representative slice of works and fandom.
Seriously, only a few thousand voters in total currently determine the nominees and the ultimate winners - out of a worldwide fanbase numbering in the millions. Those relative few that have dominated the nomination and selection process for decades (and the idiots who parrot their propaganda) are responding in the typical fashion of the "elites" - by demonizing those who would dare to challenge the self assumed predominance that is theirs by right. They, and the idiots who spout their propaganda, are the ones that invented the idea that Sad Puppies is all about skin color and the presence or absence of ovaries.
On top of that, there's the whole "Johnny come lately" attitude typical of any fandom that faces a sudden influx of "new" fans. The tastemaker elite loathes the "new fan". (Not that the issue is actually new, the roots of the issue (and "political" battles over the Hugos) stretch back to the sudden breakdown of the SF ghetto walls in the late 70's and early 80's when Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons broke out into popular culture.) But what they feel about the "new fan" is positively puppies and kittens and sunshine compared compared to the antipathy and loathing they feel towards pop culture - their slogan is (or at least should be) "Nerdom for Nerds!".
That's my point, a crossover - substituting on for the other at the last moment would have been funny.
Not to the pedantic wing of the nerd community, but they often miss the point.
I was hoping it was the Cybernaughts, but nooooo... Slashdot went the cheap and easy route.
Indeed. It would have been funny if the answer was "There is now". But as is, it's just lame.
*sigh* Do pay the fuck attention.
The statement wasn't about efficiency, it was about the ability to maintain speed over ground. Aircraft (and airships) do need more power to maintain a given speed over ground in the face of a headwind, period. All this bull about efficiency and relative airspeed is just pedantic nitpicking that fails to make you look intelligent.