OK, I agree with what you say, but there are a couple of points:
If Turing had not been around - or if Enigma had never been broken - the war would have been longer, but the Allies would not have lost. According to David Kahn in "Seizing the Enigma" the increased shipping losses could have delayed D-Day until 1945. So, three months after the invasion in June 1945, the USAAF would have dropped an atomic bomb on, say, Hamburg, then another one on Dusseldorf, then the Germans would have surrendered.
The success against Enigma meant:
Fewer dead Allied sailors;
Fewer dead German civilians;
Fewer dead Jews, communists, Gypsies, etc. since the Final Solution was disrupted and delayed by the advancing Allied and Russian armies in 1944-5.
Second, you claim that only bigotry made the British think of homosexuals as a security risk. In fact, the most damaging spies in British history, the "Cambridge Ring" - Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross and most of all Kim Philby - were all homosexual.
I though, at first, that this was a troll. Then I checked the posting time (11:27 am)and realised that it must be an Olog-hai. No troll would be active in sunlight.
True, if you're thinking of making a great big can. That would be massive, heavy, expensive, etc. But you could just make a ship consisting of two modules - one habitation and one service, say - and tether them opposite each other to a common hub which would also contain the engines. That way you could spin them fast without having to build a great big can. Basically the ship would look like a bean can with two tetherballs attached to opposite sides.
Oh, just one more thing... in fact, you'd have to make two pairs of modules and spin them in opposite directions. Otherwise you get precession, which makes steering a bit tricky. When you arrive in Mars orbit, stop the spin, winch in the tethers, and send down the landers.
Important: make sure the tether doesn't break. Otherwise your precious astronauts go whizzing off on an eccentric orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars, out of the ecliptic plane (probably) and die. But building a 2km tether to support a 20-tonne module shouldn't be impossible. Anyone?
Also, make sure the two sides don't get out of balance. Ballast weights that can be winched up and down the tether - or just winching in or out a bit to balance the angular momenta - are best for this.
Otherwise, you've got the same sort of problem as the flat-earth myth: What is the earth sitting on? Four elephants. What are the elephants standing on? The back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle standing on? You get the picture.
Can't resist the quote...
"Didactylos gave him a blank look. 'It doesn't stand on anything,' he said. 'It swims, for heaven's sake. That's what turtles are for."
Can't remember the origin of the quote (I suspect Niven/Pournelle/Heinlein) but:
"While her schoolmates were worrying about boys and hairstyles, she was reading science fiction and worrying about nuclear winter, ozone holes and resource depletion. Her teachers called it escapism."
Actually, it's five sections, each 985 feet. So it's really rather big.
I wonder how wide it is? After all, as 'The Perfect Storm' mentioned, any ship can be overturned by a beam sea more than half its beam in height. From the picture it looks like a hundred-foot rogue wave could roll this sucker. Now that is a disaster movie worth making.
Not oil - cable TV. L Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth. May you be cast out for making incorrect Neal Stephenson references!
Personally, I think it could be used as a tax haven - just moor up ferries for accommo, old carriers as a landing strip, and maybe an obsolete battleship as a bank vault for a unique piece of antique jewellery. Call it the Logjam. (First Banksie reference).
Actually, something like this was described in the James Cobb technothriller "Seafighters" - take nine big barges and moor them together, call it a Mobile Offshore Base (aka Floater One) then run American UAVs, Fleet Air Arm helicopters and singularly cool hovercraft gunboats off it to suppress piracy and warfare off the West African coast.
The book mentioned that something similar, but smaller, was used to host Special Boat Squadron units in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq tanker war, when the Iranians were sending out light naval units to beat up oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. So it's probably not entirely a new idea. Still pretty good though.
Enough with the gun control debate! Can we all just agree that 1) Americans believe that high gunshot wound rates are an acceptable price for the right of private gun ownership and 2) the rest of the world doesn't?
It's a matter of the value you put on different aspects of liberty (right to life vs. right to carry) and there is NO objective way to determine which is more important. All right?
Personally I'm a Brit and the idea of letting my fellow citizens buy any sort of gun over the counter scares me badly. Also, I don't believe armed societies are polite societies. I'm thinking here about Kurdistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Albania, as well as US (and some British) inner cities. But that's my opinion.
I found it interesting that Bush's decision was devoid of ideology. If you are pro-life and believe these little clumps of cells are human life, then experimenting on some because they had already been killed is hardly a logical moral or ethical distinction.
No, there is a moral point there. I assume that prolifers are against murder, but would not have a problem (as long as relatives consented) with dissecting dead bodies - for medical teaching, research, transplants etc. With consent from relatives, I imagine they would even be OK about using murder victims' bodies for research.
Reminds me about the "should we use data on hypothermia that was acquired through Nazi experiments?" moral question. The answer, incidentally, being yes, because whatever happens the murder victims will still be dead.
Oh, and IANAPLA. (I am not a pro-life activist).
Ah, I see you are playing Scott-Berkely Rules. Most MC players over here (IMHO unjustly) regard that as too simplistic, but I reckon there are possibilities for some fairly subtle tactics. I take it redoubling is allowed (Scaife's Variation excepted, of course)?
In that case...St John's Wood.
Re:If laser propulsion weren't wildly inefficient.
on
Solar Sail Fails Again
·
· Score: 1
I think you use the lasers at the start, when the sail is still reasonably close in. Unless you're a Motie, of course - but I bet Motie Engineers could hold a beam within 10exp-10 degrees. (Niven/Pournelle reference).
In any case, the sail would be not 1 metre, but more like 1-10 km across. And course would be fairly easy to predict; virtually no forces acting except the laser, once you're outside the solar system.
Michael Faraday talking to Benjamin Disraeli, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister, after a demonstration of various projects including induction:
Dizzy: What good are all these things?
Faraday: One day, Sir, you may tax them.
Alternative:
Faraday: What use is a baby?
First off, is it just me or is everyone on this thread getting all their information on weapon design from "The Sum of All Fears"? Oh dear...
Second, I cannot really believe that you think some rogue nation would nuke Jerusalem. How to get the West, the Israelis and every Muslim in the world after you with weapons free in one easy step. Tel Aviv, maybe.
Third, you seem impressively certain that the North Koreans haven't built a nuclear weapon. Best guess, they had built one or two by end 1994 and two to four since then. They just haven't tested. Unfortunately I can't source this, but it's come up in the press several times, based on "defence sources". Iraq was about 6-12 months away by end 1990. Meanwhile, Iran? China, of course, threatened to bomb LA in 1996. Don't forget that.
Fourth, I just love the idea of someone breaking into an arsenal, putting a bomb together and blowing it up. Just like that. Where the hell did that come from? Does anyone really believe this is a threat?
In fact, the greatest threats are accidental launch by the Russians (almost happened back in 1997, IIRC, after a Norwegian sounding rocket got mistake for an over-the-pole missile launch) and proliferation, with India/Pakistan a strong third. Having these things around is inherently dangerous, especially for Russia, which lacks the money to keep its communications and satellites up to scratch.
Yes, true, but they are a million heavily-armed people who make the NRA look like the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. And if our troops are in their country then their language counts as major.
And how many Arabic and Chinese-speaking immigrants are there in Europe? Certainly millions...
Pusztai's science was, unfortunately, flawed. For a start, his methodology was way off. He did the trial, didn't do the control and then went public. Very unethical. Second, he used potatoes engineered to express a toxin and then reported toxic effects. Well, duh. Third, and most seriously, his sample size was five. Five! Especially with effects as small as millimetric thickening in small intestine walls, that is far too small. As a general rule (so my stats tutor said) if the sample size is less than six, ignore it. This sort of science is very sloppy and doesn't deserve the name. Even people with PhDs make mistakes sometimes.
"Peaceful elections and bloodless transitions" - Derleth.
"Give me liberty or give me death." - Patrick Henry.
Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge...
"This nation cannot long endure half slave and half free" - Abraham Lincoln.
Fort Sumter, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Sherman's March, Atlanta...
Nice going on the bloodless transitions, guys.
Hmm, good point... but most disaster sites these days aren't short of water. There's generally a river or a sea or something. Drinking water, now, that's another matter. But these things could just take it out of the nearest river, typhoid and all.
And if you have to ship a hospital to the middle of a desert (or even, say, a great big tank of water) I guess sand or rocks would work just as well as ballast. Get the refugees to pack it into containers. One man can shift a cubic yard of sand in one hour - halve that for famine victims - only a day's work for a few hundred refugees. And 160 tonnes of water would take care of their needs for months.
Re:finally a movie that belongs here!
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 1
I agree - proper geek movies (rather than just SF) need boosting.
I hope/. reviews Enigma when it finally comes out - I know it's ww2, but the book is very close to reality.
It's certainly better than the awful U-571. Check here for the true story of the Shark capture from U-559. U-505, the "real" U-571, wasn't captured until 1944, by which time the Germans had admitted defeat in the North Atlantic - shortly after the events of "Enigma", in fact.
Both 'The Dam Busters' and '633 Squadron' have a sequence with bombers flying along a narrow and heavily defended valley to hit a very small target at the end - a dam or a heavy water factory. But AFAIR 633 Squadron looks more like SW. Mosquitos are more agile than Lancasters, and there's more flak, trick flying etc.
Apparently George Lucas used old WW2 film footage when pitching SW to the studio - which film, I wonder?
Let's all be clear. Without the US involvement in both WWI and WWII the British would be speaking German right now
No, Russian. Eastern Front. Red Army. Largest and most feared fighting force on Earth.
(NB IANAR: I am not a Russian)
And, of course, without the Brits the Americans would all be speaking French right now. Or Spanish.
You'd all be Quebecois or Mexicans! How do you like that?
Yeah, Serbo-Croatian doesn't exist now; but it used to until 1991 - it was the official language of Yugoslavia. (AKA Serbo-Croat). After the country broke up, the Serbs and Croats decided that since they were obviously so different in other ways, they must be speaking different languages, and invented Serbian and Croatian - two languages that just happen to sound almost identical to each other (and to Serbo-Croat).
Pedantic, I know, but there you are.
Re:I think we'd have more important problems
on
Rebooting The World?
·
· Score: 1
I agree. The wider and IMO more interesting point here is: how far down can we be knocked before we lose the ability to climb back up? Our industrial civilisation was built on easily accessible deposits of coal, iron, oil etc. most of which no longer exist. If we lose a significant chunk of resource mining capacity, then we lose civilisation for ever.
Second point: with the loss of machine-readable data, a vast amount of information would be lost -not even preserved on paper.
Forget your (rather unlikely) info-disaster scenario - even losing the world satellite fleet would probably knock civilisation back (although not irrecoverably).
That's the problem with survivalism - any disaster that big leaves us no hope of recovery, whether it's WWIII, meteor impact, plague or whatever. The surviving remnants of humanity would be forced to live in harmony with nature. Than which there is no worse fate.
So the answer is: in a sufficiently bad disaster, no-one would be any good.
Sidepoint: what makes you think most doctors would be any good? Without their X-ray machines, their antibiotics, anaesthetics, lab tests... you'd be better off with a Chinese 'barefoot doctor'. Or an army medic.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I agree with what you say, but there are a couple of points:
If Turing had not been around - or if Enigma had never been broken - the war would have been longer, but the Allies would not have lost. According to David Kahn in "Seizing the Enigma" the increased shipping losses could have delayed D-Day until 1945. So, three months after the invasion in June 1945, the USAAF would have dropped an atomic bomb on, say, Hamburg, then another one on Dusseldorf, then the Germans would have surrendered.
The success against Enigma meant:
Fewer dead Allied sailors;
Fewer dead German civilians;
Fewer dead Jews, communists, Gypsies, etc. since the Final Solution was disrupted and delayed by the advancing Allied and Russian armies in 1944-5.
Second, you claim that only bigotry made the British think of homosexuals as a security risk. In fact, the most damaging spies in British history, the "Cambridge Ring" - Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross and most of all Kim Philby - were all homosexual.
I though, at first, that this was a troll. Then I checked the posting time (11:27 am)and realised that it must be an Olog-hai. No troll would be active in sunlight.
Yes, dammit, I am a Tolkein nerd!
True, if you're thinking of making a great big can. That would be massive, heavy, expensive, etc. But you could just make a ship consisting of two modules - one habitation and one service, say - and tether them opposite each other to a common hub which would also contain the engines. That way you could spin them fast without having to build a great big can. Basically the ship would look like a bean can with two tetherballs attached to opposite sides.
Oh, just one more thing... in fact, you'd have to make two pairs of modules and spin them in opposite directions. Otherwise you get precession, which makes steering a bit tricky. When you arrive in Mars orbit, stop the spin, winch in the tethers, and send down the landers.
Important: make sure the tether doesn't break. Otherwise your precious astronauts go whizzing off on an eccentric orbit somewhere between Earth and Mars, out of the ecliptic plane (probably) and die. But building a 2km tether to support a 20-tonne module shouldn't be impossible. Anyone?
Also, make sure the two sides don't get out of balance. Ballast weights that can be winched up and down the tether - or just winching in or out a bit to balance the angular momenta - are best for this.
Otherwise, you've got the same sort of problem as the flat-earth myth: What is the earth sitting on? Four elephants. What are the elephants standing on? The back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle standing on? You get the picture.
Can't resist the quote...
"Didactylos gave him a blank look. 'It doesn't stand on anything,' he said. 'It swims, for heaven's sake. That's what turtles are for."
TP, "Small Gods"
Can't remember the origin of the quote (I suspect Niven/Pournelle/Heinlein) but:
"While her schoolmates were worrying about boys and hairstyles, she was reading science fiction and worrying about nuclear winter, ozone holes and resource depletion. Her teachers called it escapism."
Actually, it's five sections, each 985 feet. So it's really rather big.
I wonder how wide it is? After all, as 'The Perfect Storm' mentioned, any ship can be overturned by a beam sea more than half its beam in height. From the picture it looks like a hundred-foot rogue wave could roll this sucker. Now that is a disaster movie worth making.
Not oil - cable TV. L Bob Rife, Lord of Bandwidth. May you be cast out for making incorrect Neal Stephenson references!
Personally, I think it could be used as a tax haven - just moor up ferries for accommo, old carriers as a landing strip, and maybe an obsolete battleship as a bank vault for a unique piece of antique jewellery. Call it the Logjam. (First Banksie reference). Actually, something like this was described in the James Cobb technothriller "Seafighters" - take nine big barges and moor them together, call it a Mobile Offshore Base (aka Floater One) then run American UAVs, Fleet Air Arm helicopters and singularly cool hovercraft gunboats off it to suppress piracy and warfare off the West African coast.
The book mentioned that something similar, but smaller, was used to host Special Boat Squadron units in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq tanker war, when the Iranians were sending out light naval units to beat up oil tankers passing through the Strait of Hormuz. So it's probably not entirely a new idea. Still pretty good though.
Enough with the gun control debate! Can we all just agree that 1) Americans believe that high gunshot wound rates are an acceptable price for the right of private gun ownership and 2) the rest of the world doesn't?
It's a matter of the value you put on different aspects of liberty (right to life vs. right to carry) and there is NO objective way to determine which is more important. All right?
Personally I'm a Brit and the idea of letting my fellow citizens buy any sort of gun over the counter scares me badly. Also, I don't believe armed societies are polite societies. I'm thinking here about Kurdistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Albania, as well as US (and some British) inner cities. But that's my opinion.
I found it interesting that Bush's decision was devoid of ideology. If you are pro-life and believe these little clumps of cells are human life, then experimenting on some because they had already been killed is hardly a logical moral or ethical distinction.
No, there is a moral point there. I assume that prolifers are against murder, but would not have a problem (as long as relatives consented) with dissecting dead bodies - for medical teaching, research, transplants etc. With consent from relatives, I imagine they would even be OK about using murder victims' bodies for research.
Reminds me about the "should we use data on hypothermia that was acquired through Nazi experiments?" moral question. The answer, incidentally, being yes, because whatever happens the murder victims will still be dead.
Oh, and IANAPLA. (I am not a pro-life activist).
Ah, I see you are playing Scott-Berkely Rules. Most MC players over here (IMHO unjustly) regard that as too simplistic, but I reckon there are possibilities for some fairly subtle tactics. I take it redoubling is allowed (Scaife's Variation excepted, of course)?
In that case...St John's Wood.
One comment: so was slavery.
I think you use the lasers at the start, when the sail is still reasonably close in. Unless you're a Motie, of course - but I bet Motie Engineers could hold a beam within 10exp-10 degrees. (Niven/Pournelle reference).
In any case, the sail would be not 1 metre, but more like 1-10 km across. And course would be fairly easy to predict; virtually no forces acting except the laser, once you're outside the solar system.
Michael Faraday talking to Benjamin Disraeli, Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister, after a demonstration of various projects including induction:
Dizzy: What good are all these things? Faraday: One day, Sir, you may tax them.
Alternative: Faraday: What use is a baby?
276473 hours, 30 minutes ago? That's about Christmas 1959, if my calculations are correct. What did he do, mail in a punch card?
First off, is it just me or is everyone on this thread getting all their information on weapon design from "The Sum of All Fears"? Oh dear...
Second, I cannot really believe that you think some rogue nation would nuke Jerusalem. How to get the West, the Israelis and every Muslim in the world after you with weapons free in one easy step. Tel Aviv, maybe.
Third, you seem impressively certain that the North Koreans haven't built a nuclear weapon. Best guess, they had built one or two by end 1994 and two to four since then. They just haven't tested. Unfortunately I can't source this, but it's come up in the press several times, based on "defence sources". Iraq was about 6-12 months away by end 1990. Meanwhile, Iran? China, of course, threatened to bomb LA in 1996. Don't forget that.
Fourth, I just love the idea of someone breaking into an arsenal, putting a bomb together and blowing it up. Just like that. Where the hell did that come from? Does anyone really believe this is a threat?
In fact, the greatest threats are accidental launch by the Russians (almost happened back in 1997, IIRC, after a Norwegian sounding rocket got mistake for an over-the-pole missile launch) and proliferation, with India/Pakistan a strong third. Having these things around is inherently dangerous, especially for Russia, which lacks the money to keep its communications and satellites up to scratch.
Yes, true, but they are a million heavily-armed people who make the NRA look like the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. And if our troops are in their country then their language counts as major.
And how many Arabic and Chinese-speaking immigrants are there in Europe? Certainly millions...
Pusztai's science was, unfortunately, flawed. For a start, his methodology was way off. He did the trial, didn't do the control and then went public. Very unethical. Second, he used potatoes engineered to express a toxin and then reported toxic effects. Well, duh. Third, and most seriously, his sample size was five. Five! Especially with effects as small as millimetric thickening in small intestine walls, that is far too small. As a general rule (so my stats tutor said) if the sample size is less than six, ignore it. This sort of science is very sloppy and doesn't deserve the name. Even people with PhDs make mistakes sometimes.
"Peaceful elections and bloodless transitions" - Derleth.
"Give me liberty or give me death." - Patrick Henry.
Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge...
"This nation cannot long endure half slave and half free" - Abraham Lincoln.
Fort Sumter, Antietam, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Sherman's March, Atlanta...
Nice going on the bloodless transitions, guys.
Hmm, good point... but most disaster sites these days aren't short of water. There's generally a river or a sea or something. Drinking water, now, that's another matter. But these things could just take it out of the nearest river, typhoid and all.
And if you have to ship a hospital to the middle of a desert (or even, say, a great big tank of water) I guess sand or rocks would work just as well as ballast. Get the refugees to pack it into containers. One man can shift a cubic yard of sand in one hour - halve that for famine victims - only a day's work for a few hundred refugees. And 160 tonnes of water would take care of their needs for months.
Agent activity, no doubt...
I agree - proper geek movies (rather than just SF) need boosting. /. reviews Enigma when it finally comes out - I know it's ww2, but the book is very close to reality.
I hope
It's certainly better than the awful U-571. Check here for the true story of the Shark capture from U-559. U-505, the "real" U-571, wasn't captured until 1944, by which time the Germans had admitted defeat in the North Atlantic - shortly after the events of "Enigma", in fact.
Both 'The Dam Busters' and '633 Squadron' have a sequence with bombers flying along a narrow and heavily defended valley to hit a very small target at the end - a dam or a heavy water factory. But AFAIR 633 Squadron looks more like SW. Mosquitos are more agile than Lancasters, and there's more flak, trick flying etc.
Apparently George Lucas used old WW2 film footage when pitching SW to the studio - which film, I wonder?
No, Russian. Eastern Front. Red Army. Largest and most feared fighting force on Earth. (NB IANAR: I am not a Russian) And, of course, without the Brits the Americans would all be speaking French right now. Or Spanish. You'd all be Quebecois or Mexicans! How do you like that?
Yeah, Serbo-Croatian doesn't exist now; but it used to until 1991 - it was the official language of Yugoslavia. (AKA Serbo-Croat). After the country broke up, the Serbs and Croats decided that since they were obviously so different in other ways, they must be speaking different languages, and invented Serbian and Croatian - two languages that just happen to sound almost identical to each other (and to Serbo-Croat).
Pedantic, I know, but there you are.
I agree. The wider and IMO more interesting point here is: how far down can we be knocked before we lose the ability to climb back up? Our industrial civilisation was built on easily accessible deposits of coal, iron, oil etc. most of which no longer exist. If we lose a significant chunk of resource mining capacity, then we lose civilisation for ever. Second point: with the loss of machine-readable data, a vast amount of information would be lost -not even preserved on paper. Forget your (rather unlikely) info-disaster scenario - even losing the world satellite fleet would probably knock civilisation back (although not irrecoverably). That's the problem with survivalism - any disaster that big leaves us no hope of recovery, whether it's WWIII, meteor impact, plague or whatever. The surviving remnants of humanity would be forced to live in harmony with nature. Than which there is no worse fate. So the answer is: in a sufficiently bad disaster, no-one would be any good. Sidepoint: what makes you think most doctors would be any good? Without their X-ray machines, their antibiotics, anaesthetics, lab tests... you'd be better off with a Chinese 'barefoot doctor'. Or an army medic.