Who cites an encyclopedia? It's not a primary source. It doesn't matter if it's electronic or print, but this is one of those long standing annoyances with the "zomg you can't cite Wikipedia!" folks. Of COURSE you can't cite it, it's an ENCYCLOPEDIA! Citing encyclopedias becomes unacceptable once you pass the 5th grade.
I know you were joking, but someone modded you INSIGHTFUL for crap's sake. +3 Funny, sure! But modding it up as insightful suggests pretty strongly that my mean ol' response here is appropriate.
The space tourist was paying most of the cost of the Soyuz booster/capsule while allowing the RSA to continue meeting its commitments to the project. This is a step backwards for space, government funding doesn't have the same potential for long term growth that commercial money does. Look at the airplane, for instance. Government funding did big things, but the real growth and expansion came with private funds.
My page has more info. Now, do they just write me a check? Or is there a form I need to fill out? Probably a form. They might want to replace some of the styrofoam, I'm guessing.
The aircraft are based off the Velocity, a popular homebuilt aircraft. Usually pushed by a prop, these planes are pretty flexible, as this novel use indicates.
There are other canard aircraft that have flown under interesting power. The LongEZ and Cozy have been built with everything from aircraft gasoline engines to jets to wankel rotaries, even rockets. Experimental aviation is the fastest developing part of general aviation, and anyone with the right commitment and willingness to learn can build a plane too.
If I'm building an atomic bomb, the threat of being hit by a patent lawsuit seems somewhat lower than, say, the threat of being bombed into a metaphor.
Plus, this is just the patent office. Now if the _IRS_ were involved...
It looks very similar to the X-20 DynaSoar, a re-usable spaceplane that Boeing was building for the Air Force in the 1960s that was canceled as part of the Vietnam budget crunch.
Sub-orbital planes have very, very different needs from orbital ones, it's interesting that the design of this happens to (at least superficially) mirror the aerodynamics of the orbital X-20. Perhaps XCOR plans to collect data from the Lynx that could be applied to a followup craft with somewhat expanded characteristics.
Most large scale transportation technologies/systems have been developed with the military in mind, so an equivalent here would be appropriate.
1. Roads - Built to make cross-country marching faster (The Romans could project force rapidly with their road systems, keeping rebellion in check for centuries) 2. Freeways - Built to be an even FASTER way to get things across country for the military (see the Autobahn, for example, it was one of the most effective force multipliers the germans had) 3. Airplane - The military has funded development of technologies like turbines, rockets, supersonic flight, GPS, and more. and so on. Same w/ computers, for that matter.
So what's the military usage of this technology? On the surface, moving supplies and ammunition between cities to bolster defense would be an obvious one. Could cargo pods be fitted to move soldiers too? If the air is pumped out of the tubes to reduce friction, tremendous speeds would be possible.
There are some serious problems with how the TSA is doing things, and this is a great step towards communicating some of them....if we, as the public, can keep our act together long enough to avoid dropping shrill, screeching, hate bombs of ranting incoherence on this website that'll convince the TSA that there's nothing of value to be gained from this conduit. Each "YOU GUYS ARE FASCIST NAZI LICKING THUGS!" message cancels out the positive effects of any five or ten polite & firm, well reasoned messages describing weaknesses and suggesting positive change.
Unfortunately, I'm guessing this restraint won't be evident.
Second Reality, Unreal, the various music demos from the scene, these were pretty incredible. But one of the demos that rocked my socks the hardest was because of what it did for so little space. It was called 'MARS.EXE'. It was about 4KB and, when ran, would generate a VGA 3D world with shading and what looked like a fractal sky. You'd use your mouse and navigate in any direction (always facing the same direction, sure, but you could strafe) and you would slide up and down the smooth terrain.
There were demos with better graphics, but the most astonishing thing was what this could do with so little disk space. This ran under DOS, not Windows, so there wasn't a bunch of free APIs it could take advantage of, it was all crammed into a tiny-tiny package with built-in mouse support and everything.
Anyone can make a 'demo' that blasts megs of raw graphics through a video card. Hell, half the 'demos' today are probably made in the modern equivalent of 3DS or something with a chunk of 'player' code attached.
But that 4K 3D landscape program... that was tight.
So, here's the thing. I've got a plane. And I have a window in the plane. The rules say (FAR 91.15) that I can chuck stuff out of the plane if I take reasonable precautions to avoid hurting anyone on the ground. So the answer here is simple:
A bunch of paper airplanes with japanese writing on them, air brushed lightly at the nose to look like it's re-entered.
Thrown out the window over the local university.
Playing the odds, at least one of them will be seen landing by someone who reads slashdot. "Holy crap!" he/she (just kidding, he) shouts.
Mua-ha-ha-ha.... I don't know what step 2 is, but #3 is profit.
Nope, Pogo oscillation was caused by compression waves that affected pump volume in liquid fueled rockets. This was solved in the SSME for the Shuttle by adding a chamber along the fuel feed that acted like a capacitor. Transient pressure waves would back fill the chamber, then the other side of the wave would suck it out. Constant flow, no pogo.
Drop the current checks. No more stupid liquid rules, no shoe removals, no taking the laptop out of the bag. Go back to metal detector and X-ray machines if you like, but acknowledge that you cannot protect against EVERY POSSIBLE THREAT and focus on the most likely.
Over 50,000 die each year in the US on the highways. If the same "zero tolerance" rule was applied to cars, then all cars would be required by law to remain at speeds below 15mph, would be covered in big foam bumpers, and would require five point safety harnesses and helmets. To maintain the effectiveness of automobiles, we don't do this. As part of acknowledging that risk exists and that we're responsible for our lives, we make tradeoffs.
Absolute security is impossible. It also makes people complacent.
Nobody will ever succesfully hijack a plane the way those were in 2001, because we've all seen a possible outcome. The TSA is the embodiment of the old saying that generals always "plan for previous war".
Where do I collect my check? Or is the painfully obvious exempt?
Absolute zero is when all atomic motion ceases, right? The effective speed limit of the universe is the speed of light, so I'd assume absolute hot would be when when the atoms are traveling near or at the speed of light. Because mass cannot actually reach the speed of light, nothing can actually reach the absolute hot.
If nano-technology reaches the point where we can program assemblers to take local materials and build structures from electronic plans, what are the implications to space travel?
Imagine, for instance, if someone could take a box of Rocketbuilders out to an island somewhere and deploy it, then sit back as the nanocites build a metal extraction plant, extracted the materials it could get from the sand/ground, built pipes into the sea to process metals that are there, etc. It'd build a gantry, then assemble a rocket from specs and finally fuel it from hydrogen and oxygen cracked from the water.
An open source rocket would be a neat, easy way to get a good start for a project to create the instructions for these assemblers. I figured the big open source project when this technology came onto the scene would be digitizing and CAM'ing the specs for, say, the Saturn V (moon rocket). Make it easy enough to grow these launchers, and folks could launch prefabbed housing and supplies no problem. Just find the right spot, maybe rent an acre of seafront property with no downrange population, and go for it.
Sure, it's fantasy at this point, but who knows? This is a shot across the bow for folks that are inevitably going to say "This is a stupid idea. What use is an open source rocket if you aren't a huge government or company with a bajillion dollars/euros/rubles to spend?".
Sure, maybe the reward isn't obvious now, but what about sometime in the near future?
For the folks saying "use the ISS!': Won't work. When coming back from the moon, the approach speed is far too high to enter the orbit that the ISS or any other reasonable future space station is in. The braking is done through friction as the spacecraft enters the earth's atmosphere, and provides MUCH more delta-v than would be feasible by using rockets.
To use the ISS, the spacecraft would need to perform a complex aerobraking maneuver (basically, a partial re-entry), then have the fuel needed to circularize its new orbit so that it can rendesvous with the ISS. By the time this is done, the design for the capsule is far heavier than the 1,500lb penalty that airbags impose.
My idea, make the water landing a known 'capsule loss' scenario, the same way it is with the Shuttle. If things go _so wrong_ that a water landing is unavoidable (say, launch failure) then design the capsule for quick-egress after a water landing. Airplanes ditch in water and people have time to get out before they sink. My Piper Cherokee will float long enough for me to climb out onto the wing, and for a real shock look at the survival training that helicopter passengers go through in the military, that's some pretty intense worst case scenario stuff.
With Rogallo steerable parachutes, landfall should be available at all times except the first few minutes of launch. Skip the airbags, make the capsule so it stays afloat just long enough for egress, and train the astronauts on how to get out fast.
I've been accused of being part of the 'cabal' because I'm an administrator who pissed off a bunch of people last year, and have on-again off-again been hounded by characters who keep baying conspiracy and trying to get folks worked into a lather.
Until now, I assumed that people would be able to properly set the bozo bit on these guys, but now that they've gotten The Register convinced, it's time for the big secret to come out:
We (the Wikipedia admins) aren't competent enough to form a conspiracy. Seriously. We all have our own agendas, our own skillsets, varying levels of intelligence, and wildly different ideas on how the project should run. Accusing us of having the ability to form a global star-chamber of sorts that seeks to control the nature of truth is like accusing us of keeping the metric system down or making Steve Gutenberg a star.
We're just editors with some extra tools, and we fight like rabid cats.
Though an older technology, diesel-electric submarines can actually be quieter than nuclear submarines. A nuclear reactor has constant motion. There are usually pumps, valves, turbines, all sorts of things that are moving. The US submarine fleet was designed from the beginning to be as quiet as possible, but there's still some noise. It's not practical to shut down and turn on the reactor, so there's always SOME noise being produced.
A diesel electric submarine, on the other hand, only makes noise when the diesel is on. Running on batteries, in absolute quiet mode, a modern diesel-electric can be a hole in the water.
Combine this technology with good intel, and you could conceivably station a submarine dragnet in the path of a carrier group a day in advance and sit on the bottom absolutely quiet. When your target approaches, pump some ballast out (at the risk of making noise) and begin an ascent. The dive planes can convert some of that bouyancy into forward motion, and you could fine tune your course and potentially be within torpedo range before being detected.
The defense against this is to use active sonar. This is anathema to modern sub doctrine, so surface ships might do it, but it's akin to shining a flashlight in a dark room, it will let everyone else know where you are too.
There are russian diesel-electric subs being tested with part-time reactors for extending the underwater life for minimal noise footprint. It will be interesting to see how these develop.
The future of submarine warfare might end up being loud and fast. Google 'supercavitating torpedo' or 'schkval torpedo' to see more. Teaser: Underwater missiles that travel hundreds of miles per hour. Kablooey!
Slashdot Mirror
Who cites an encyclopedia? It's not a primary source. It doesn't matter if it's electronic or print, but this is one of those long standing annoyances with the "zomg you can't cite Wikipedia!" folks. Of COURSE you can't cite it, it's an ENCYCLOPEDIA! Citing encyclopedias becomes unacceptable once you pass the 5th grade.
I know you were joking, but someone modded you INSIGHTFUL for crap's sake. +3 Funny, sure! But modding it up as insightful suggests pretty strongly that my mean ol' response here is appropriate.
The space tourist was paying most of the cost of the Soyuz booster/capsule while allowing the RSA to continue meeting its commitments to the project. This is a step backwards for space, government funding doesn't have the same potential for long term growth that commercial money does. Look at the airplane, for instance. Government funding did big things, but the real growth and expansion came with private funds.
I built one a couple years ago, useful around the house. Great for lifting heavy boxes, but if you try to pet a kitty, you crush it, so be careful.
Here's a pic of me in it
My page has more info. Now, do they just write me a check? Or is there a form I need to fill out? Probably a form. They might want to replace some of the styrofoam, I'm guessing.
The aircraft are based off the Velocity, a popular homebuilt aircraft. Usually pushed by a prop, these planes are pretty flexible, as this novel use indicates.
There are other canard aircraft that have flown under interesting power. The LongEZ and Cozy have been built with everything from aircraft gasoline engines to jets to wankel rotaries, even rockets. Experimental aviation is the fastest developing part of general aviation, and anyone with the right commitment and willingness to learn can build a plane too.
If I'm building an atomic bomb, the threat of being hit by a patent lawsuit seems somewhat lower than, say, the threat of being bombed into a metaphor.
Plus, this is just the patent office. Now if the _IRS_ were involved...
It looks very similar to the X-20 DynaSoar, a re-usable spaceplane that Boeing was building for the Air Force in the 1960s that was canceled as part of the Vietnam budget crunch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-20_Dyna-Soar
Sub-orbital planes have very, very different needs from orbital ones, it's interesting that the design of this happens to (at least superficially) mirror the aerodynamics of the orbital X-20. Perhaps XCOR plans to collect data from the Lynx that could be applied to a followup craft with somewhat expanded characteristics.
You fool, that was 1999. It's 2008, you insensitive clod!
When you treat children as criminals, they'll be hard pressed to avoid meeting your expectations.
Most large scale transportation technologies/systems have been developed with the military in mind, so an equivalent here would be appropriate.
1. Roads - Built to make cross-country marching faster (The Romans could project force rapidly with their road systems, keeping rebellion in check for centuries)
2. Freeways - Built to be an even FASTER way to get things across country for the military (see the Autobahn, for example, it was one of the most effective force multipliers the germans had)
3. Airplane - The military has funded development of technologies like turbines, rockets, supersonic flight, GPS, and more.
and so on. Same w/ computers, for that matter.
So what's the military usage of this technology? On the surface, moving supplies and ammunition between cities to bolster defense would be an obvious one. Could cargo pods be fitted to move soldiers too? If the air is pumped out of the tubes to reduce friction, tremendous speeds would be possible.
Be careful to pick a provider that advertises "seven nines of reliability" instead of the more common "nine sevens of reliability".
"That's no moon. It's a gas station!"
There are some serious problems with how the TSA is doing things, and this is a great step towards communicating some of them. ...if we, as the public, can keep our act together long enough to avoid dropping shrill, screeching, hate bombs of ranting incoherence on this website that'll convince the TSA that there's nothing of value to be gained from this conduit. Each "YOU GUYS ARE FASCIST NAZI LICKING THUGS!" message cancels out the positive effects of any five or ten polite & firm, well reasoned messages describing weaknesses and suggesting positive change.
Unfortunately, I'm guessing this restraint won't be evident.
Second Reality, Unreal, the various music demos from the scene, these were pretty incredible. But one of the demos that rocked my socks the hardest was because of what it did for so little space. It was called 'MARS.EXE'. It was about 4KB and, when ran, would generate a VGA 3D world with shading and what looked like a fractal sky. You'd use your mouse and navigate in any direction (always facing the same direction, sure, but you could strafe) and you would slide up and down the smooth terrain.
There were demos with better graphics, but the most astonishing thing was what this could do with so little disk space. This ran under DOS, not Windows, so there wasn't a bunch of free APIs it could take advantage of, it was all crammed into a tiny-tiny package with built-in mouse support and everything.
Anyone can make a 'demo' that blasts megs of raw graphics through a video card. Hell, half the 'demos' today are probably made in the modern equivalent of 3DS or something with a chunk of 'player' code attached.
But that 4K 3D landscape program... that was tight.
So, here's the thing. I've got a plane. And I have a window in the plane. The rules say (FAR 91.15) that I can chuck stuff out of the plane if I take reasonable precautions to avoid hurting anyone on the ground. So the answer here is simple:
A bunch of paper airplanes with japanese writing on them, air brushed lightly at the nose to look like it's re-entered.
Thrown out the window over the local university.
Playing the odds, at least one of them will be seen landing by someone who reads slashdot. "Holy crap!" he/she (just kidding, he) shouts.
Mua-ha-ha-ha.... I don't know what step 2 is, but #3 is profit.
Nope, Pogo oscillation was caused by compression waves that affected pump volume in liquid fueled rockets. This was solved in the SSME for the Shuttle by adding a chamber along the fuel feed that acted like a capacitor. Transient pressure waves would back fill the chamber, then the other side of the wave would suck it out. Constant flow, no pogo.
This is a solid rocket, it's a different problem.
"I teleported home one night
with Ron & Sid & Meg
Ron stole Megan's heart away
and I got Sydney's leg."
- Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Oh the hugegalaxy!
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Drop the current checks. No more stupid liquid rules, no shoe removals, no taking the laptop out of the bag. Go back to metal detector and X-ray machines if you like, but acknowledge that you cannot protect against EVERY POSSIBLE THREAT and focus on the most likely.
Over 50,000 die each year in the US on the highways. If the same "zero tolerance" rule was applied to cars, then all cars would be required by law to remain at speeds below 15mph, would be covered in big foam bumpers, and would require five point safety harnesses and helmets. To maintain the effectiveness of automobiles, we don't do this. As part of acknowledging that risk exists and that we're responsible for our lives, we make tradeoffs.
Absolute security is impossible. It also makes people complacent.
Nobody will ever succesfully hijack a plane the way those were in 2001, because we've all seen a possible outcome. The TSA is the embodiment of the old saying that generals always "plan for previous war".
Where do I collect my check? Or is the painfully obvious exempt?
Absolute zero is when all atomic motion ceases, right? The effective speed limit of the universe is the speed of light, so I'd assume absolute hot would be when when the atoms are traveling near or at the speed of light. Because mass cannot actually reach the speed of light, nothing can actually reach the absolute hot.
Or is that super mega crazy talk?
It's like the original Creative Commons license, except with pointers.
If nano-technology reaches the point where we can program assemblers to take local materials and build structures from electronic plans, what are the implications to space travel?
Imagine, for instance, if someone could take a box of Rocketbuilders out to an island somewhere and deploy it, then sit back as the nanocites build a metal extraction plant, extracted the materials it could get from the sand/ground, built pipes into the sea to process metals that are there, etc. It'd build a gantry, then assemble a rocket from specs and finally fuel it from hydrogen and oxygen cracked from the water.
An open source rocket would be a neat, easy way to get a good start for a project to create the instructions for these assemblers. I figured the big open source project when this technology came onto the scene would be digitizing and CAM'ing the specs for, say, the Saturn V (moon rocket). Make it easy enough to grow these launchers, and folks could launch prefabbed housing and supplies no problem. Just find the right spot, maybe rent an acre of seafront property with no downrange population, and go for it.
Sure, it's fantasy at this point, but who knows? This is a shot across the bow for folks that are inevitably going to say "This is a stupid idea. What use is an open source rocket if you aren't a huge government or company with a bajillion dollars/euros/rubles to spend?".
Sure, maybe the reward isn't obvious now, but what about sometime in the near future?
For the folks saying "use the ISS!': Won't work. When coming back from the moon, the approach speed is far too high to enter the orbit that the ISS or any other reasonable future space station is in. The braking is done through friction as the spacecraft enters the earth's atmosphere, and provides MUCH more delta-v than would be feasible by using rockets.
To use the ISS, the spacecraft would need to perform a complex aerobraking maneuver (basically, a partial re-entry), then have the fuel needed to circularize its new orbit so that it can rendesvous with the ISS. By the time this is done, the design for the capsule is far heavier than the 1,500lb penalty that airbags impose.
My idea, make the water landing a known 'capsule loss' scenario, the same way it is with the Shuttle. If things go _so wrong_ that a water landing is unavoidable (say, launch failure) then design the capsule for quick-egress after a water landing. Airplanes ditch in water and people have time to get out before they sink. My Piper Cherokee will float long enough for me to climb out onto the wing, and for a real shock look at the survival training that helicopter passengers go through in the military, that's some pretty intense worst case scenario stuff.
With Rogallo steerable parachutes, landfall should be available at all times except the first few minutes of launch. Skip the airbags, make the capsule so it stays afloat just long enough for egress, and train the astronauts on how to get out fast.
I've been accused of being part of the 'cabal' because I'm an administrator who pissed off a bunch of people last year, and have on-again off-again been hounded by characters who keep baying conspiracy and trying to get folks worked into a lather.
Until now, I assumed that people would be able to properly set the bozo bit on these guys, but now that they've gotten The Register convinced, it's time for the big secret to come out:
We (the Wikipedia admins) aren't competent enough to form a conspiracy. Seriously. We all have our own agendas, our own skillsets, varying levels of intelligence, and wildly different ideas on how the project should run. Accusing us of having the ability to form a global star-chamber of sorts that seeks to control the nature of truth is like accusing us of keeping the metric system down or making Steve Gutenberg a star.
We're just editors with some extra tools, and we fight like rabid cats.
But thanks for the compliment.
Though an older technology, diesel-electric submarines can actually be quieter than nuclear submarines. A nuclear reactor has constant motion. There are usually pumps, valves, turbines, all sorts of things that are moving. The US submarine fleet was designed from the beginning to be as quiet as possible, but there's still some noise. It's not practical to shut down and turn on the reactor, so there's always SOME noise being produced.
A diesel electric submarine, on the other hand, only makes noise when the diesel is on. Running on batteries, in absolute quiet mode, a modern diesel-electric can be a hole in the water.
Combine this technology with good intel, and you could conceivably station a submarine dragnet in the path of a carrier group a day in advance and sit on the bottom absolutely quiet. When your target approaches, pump some ballast out (at the risk of making noise) and begin an ascent. The dive planes can convert some of that bouyancy into forward motion, and you could fine tune your course and potentially be within torpedo range before being detected.
The defense against this is to use active sonar. This is anathema to modern sub doctrine, so surface ships might do it, but it's akin to shining a flashlight in a dark room, it will let everyone else know where you are too.
There are russian diesel-electric subs being tested with part-time reactors for extending the underwater life for minimal noise footprint. It will be interesting to see how these develop.
The future of submarine warfare might end up being loud and fast. Google 'supercavitating torpedo' or 'schkval torpedo' to see more. Teaser: Underwater missiles that travel hundreds of miles per hour. Kablooey!