Yep, if we're going to go the bangarang balls-to-the-wall lets get there inside of a human life-time (Guess what kids! Pack a couple of books because you're about to be stuck in the backseat for the longest road trip EVER! Better fill up at the Stuckey's on I-15 because the next rest stop is several billion trillion miles) way, we're going to break ourselves, use obscene amounts of energy, and do nothing that an unmanned probe couldn't do. Sure, the telemetry would take a while to get back to us, but space is for the patient.
As an alternate, why not just sail there? The accelerations are much much lower, but nothing in our current catalog of space technology beats solar sails for specific impulse. Yes, the materials technology for something on a huge scale isn't quite there, but we have working solar sails on satellites that are doing both main propulsion (The IKAROS probe, on its way to Venus) and course adjustment (many, even the voyager probes used solar pressure as a fuel saving alternative). The energy to drive the sails already exists in both locations, Sol for us and GJ667C on the destination side.
Even better, an electric or magnetic (or hybrid) sail. Instead of using only photon pressure and being constrained by a piece of material, an electromagnetic sail can be created by spooling out some wire and applying an electric field. This would make the whole mess much more feasible, as we've already got the technology to provide the needed amounts of electric power, and the materials technology for all the components. We even have flight tested versions.
Still, this is all pipe-dreaming. We can stay in orbital space for years, comfortably close to all of the food, water, oxygen, and spare parts that we'd need, but a few steps further out and even a minor problem becomes a crisis.
Oh, that guy who claims he did the Kessel run in less than 5 parsecs? You know he's full of shit right? A parsec is a measure of distance not of time. You can't ride a bike 15 miles per kilometer. How that guy got such a good reputation I'll never know. Drummed out of the Imperial Pilots Corps, flies around in a hunk of junk, strokes his Wookie all the time, and is pretty scruffy looking.
Yeah, nothing like being accused of being a terrorist and a pedophile in the same day then having people tell you they have a right to privacy on a public sidewalk then demand you show them all of your pictures.
I remember going on a school field trip to see this tree. There was a lot of grumbling and horsing around by most of the other kids, but the tree fascinated me.
Also, it gave me the chance to piss off one of my extremely religious teachers when I said "Wow, that thing is so old, it was around when they created the Jesus mythos!"
Alright, fair enough. With the right tools, know-how, and some bitchin' access to parts that are already mostly in the form that you need, I suppose you COULD bang one together in a weekend.
Not a flight rated one, but one that would sure piss off the neighbors.
Jeez, that had to be an ass clencher of a flight. My dad was flying a G-1 over Angola back in the early 90's and had a SAM shot at him. Luckily the missile malfunctioned.
A mile away is 5280 feet or 1760 yards. Even during WW2, German snipers were killing American soldiers from 1000 yards, and the world record sniper shot during war time is currently two human targets at 2707 yards.
Oh, well there's your problem. The Robin isn't fit for carrier duty because that front wheel has to take all the stress. I would have done it in a Kitten, or at least a Supervan.
I lived just off the end of the runway of the airport where they assembled and tested the original JSTAR. It was a big deal in my town because every third person living there worked for a defense contractor, and you couldn't sling a dead cat without hitting someone working on the project. I remember seeing the JSTAR every day on the way to work, and what they had to do to that 707's airframe could easily be described as flaying.
I'd never seen an aircraft pulled that far open, even for major overhauls or refits. The JSTAR upgrade touched every single system on that plane, but after they sealed her back up, she looked like every other KC-135, except with that thingy behind the nose wheel and no refueling boom.
So no, JSTAR conversions aren't cheap. Not by a long shot.
HuntingHades had a really good answer but also take in to consideration that the aircraft in question was probably older than most Slashdotters. The last 707 rolled out of the factory in 1979 and the Air Force has been beating the shit out of them ever since. Even with upgrade programs, airframe strengthening, and all the maintenance you can stand, metal wears out, tiny fractures that you can't detect lead to big cracks that make really important parts fall off at the worst of times.
The amount of stress put on the metal in an aircraft is pretty enormous, and there isn't a whole lot you can do about that. The damage may be $25M, but the COST to get that aircraft flight worthy is much much higher.
The engines on a medium/large private jet can run you about a million each, and that's for a unit that GE mass-produces for civilian use. That you're saying a gas turbine is elegantly simple means that you've never ever ever worked on one. Ever.
Ever.
The concept might be simple, but when you're got a huge shaft studded with titanium blades spinning at 10,000 RPM and then you're intentionally using all of that compressed air to cause an explosion.. well, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that you're not going to bang one of these babies together over the weekend in your garage.
As for the aircraft, wings can and do cost a significant amount of money. If the wing spar was damaged, then the aircraft is toast.
The wing walker is a ground crew member for an aircraft that monitors the position of the aircraft's wings as you are towing it in or out of a hangar or around other aircraft. Their job is to walk just beside where the end of the wing would be and alert the tow tractor driver if the plane is about to hit something. Of course, the wings aren't the only part of the plane that can hit stuff, so wing walkers are supposed to keep an eye on the whole thing.
A C-5-A is almost 250 feet long with a wing span around 220 feet. That's a lot of aircraft to watch.
If your twenty thousand dollar car gets two thousand worth of repairs, then conks out on the freeway in the middle of rush hour the next day, chances are that you'll pull over to the side of the road or at worst, piss off a bunch of people till the tow truck arrives.
If your $244 million dollar aircraft conks out the next day while you're at altitude, chances are, everyone aboard is going to die. If you're luck, you're over an unpopulated area and there aren't additional casualties.
Aircraft are not cars. The amount of maintenance is several orders of magnitude greater and if something goes wrong the likelihood of it going REALLY WRONG! (tm) is much higher.
That being said, it is probably an airframe time issue. If the wing spar was damaged I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Air Force maintenance regulation that disallowed the aircraft being returned to service. Something critical on an old aircraft gets damaged and you're looking at much higher chance of failure.
Aircraft aren't cars. The moment you start treating them the same is the moment you sign your own death warrant.
Reading carefully in the article, the Air Force states that it is beyond economical repair, which usually means that the hours on the airframe are probably beyond some limit for stress or flight hours and to make such a huge repairs near the spar, which is the huge chunk of metal that keeps the wings on, would most likely require a huge program of testing, inspection, and re-certification.
Since the Air Force has dozens of spares of this particular airframe, it is more economical to pull a newer one out of storage and move all the stuff that makes a JSTAR a JSTAR to a new plane.
This is why all of my photography work is done on my ancient 24" Sun monitor. Try finding a video card that will support one of those beasts without an adapter.
Luckily, my hoarding of Sun VGA adapters started a long time ago.
Growing a thicker skin doesn't protect you from being burned alive in your synagogue. Seeing as how there have been a number of firebombings of synagogues in that county in the past couple of months and the SSID was on a router connected to a city owned network, I think a police response is correct. At the very least, the city has an employee or individual that has compromised their network, and as we all know that is indeed a criminal matter.
In that particular neighborhood there have been several murders and firebombings of places of worship, all racially and religiously motivated. I'm sure that all those people need to do is chill out. Nothing stops arsonists and murderers like chilling out.
Wow, what amazing powers you have to determine by sight who is here illegally. You must share your methods with your local immigration law enforcement body. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to know that you probably operate on the same brown=bad logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, if we're going to go the bangarang balls-to-the-wall lets get there inside of a human life-time (Guess what kids! Pack a couple of books because you're about to be stuck in the backseat for the longest road trip EVER! Better fill up at the Stuckey's on I-15 because the next rest stop is several billion trillion miles) way, we're going to break ourselves, use obscene amounts of energy, and do nothing that an unmanned probe couldn't do. Sure, the telemetry would take a while to get back to us, but space is for the patient.
As an alternate, why not just sail there? The accelerations are much much lower, but nothing in our current catalog of space technology beats solar sails for specific impulse. Yes, the materials technology for something on a huge scale isn't quite there, but we have working solar sails on satellites that are doing both main propulsion (The IKAROS probe, on its way to Venus) and course adjustment (many, even the voyager probes used solar pressure as a fuel saving alternative). The energy to drive the sails already exists in both locations, Sol for us and GJ667C on the destination side.
Even better, an electric or magnetic (or hybrid) sail. Instead of using only photon pressure and being constrained by a piece of material, an electromagnetic sail can be created by spooling out some wire and applying an electric field. This would make the whole mess much more feasible, as we've already got the technology to provide the needed amounts of electric power, and the materials technology for all the components. We even have flight tested versions.
Still, this is all pipe-dreaming. We can stay in orbital space for years, comfortably close to all of the food, water, oxygen, and spare parts that we'd need, but a few steps further out and even a minor problem becomes a crisis.
Oh, that guy who claims he did the Kessel run in less than 5 parsecs? You know he's full of shit right? A parsec is a measure of distance not of time. You can't ride a bike 15 miles per kilometer. How that guy got such a good reputation I'll never know. Drummed out of the Imperial Pilots Corps, flies around in a hunk of junk, strokes his Wookie all the time, and is pretty scruffy looking.
Yeah, nothing like being accused of being a terrorist and a pedophile in the same day then having people tell you they have a right to privacy on a public sidewalk then demand you show them all of your pictures.
I remember going on a school field trip to see this tree. There was a lot of grumbling and horsing around by most of the other kids, but the tree fascinated me.
Also, it gave me the chance to piss off one of my extremely religious teachers when I said "Wow, that thing is so old, it was around when they created the Jesus mythos!"
Oooh, I wonder if he'll sign my print-out of Uncle Ghastly's picture of Alan Moore angrily fucking Alan Moore.
LINK NSFW!
http://www.ghastlycomic.com/d/20080809.html
Alright, fair enough. With the right tools, know-how, and some bitchin' access to parts that are already mostly in the form that you need, I suppose you COULD bang one together in a weekend.
Not a flight rated one, but one that would sure piss off the neighbors.
It went right by my head. The palm has been properly applied to the face.
Jeez, that had to be an ass clencher of a flight. My dad was flying a G-1 over Angola back in the early 90's and had a SAM shot at him. Luckily the missile malfunctioned.
A mile away is 5280 feet or 1760 yards. Even during WW2, German snipers were killing American soldiers from 1000 yards, and the world record sniper shot during war time is currently two human targets at 2707 yards.
Sounds more like it is laser-guided than self-guided too.
Whelp, there goes EVE.
Oh, well there's your problem. The Robin isn't fit for carrier duty because that front wheel has to take all the stress. I would have done it in a Kitten, or at least a Supervan.
I lived just off the end of the runway of the airport where they assembled and tested the original JSTAR. It was a big deal in my town because every third person living there worked for a defense contractor, and you couldn't sling a dead cat without hitting someone working on the project. I remember seeing the JSTAR every day on the way to work, and what they had to do to that 707's airframe could easily be described as flaying.
I'd never seen an aircraft pulled that far open, even for major overhauls or refits. The JSTAR upgrade touched every single system on that plane, but after they sealed her back up, she looked like every other KC-135, except with that thingy behind the nose wheel and no refueling boom.
So no, JSTAR conversions aren't cheap. Not by a long shot.
HuntingHades had a really good answer but also take in to consideration that the aircraft in question was probably older than most Slashdotters. The last 707 rolled out of the factory in 1979 and the Air Force has been beating the shit out of them ever since. Even with upgrade programs, airframe strengthening, and all the maintenance you can stand, metal wears out, tiny fractures that you can't detect lead to big cracks that make really important parts fall off at the worst of times.
The amount of stress put on the metal in an aircraft is pretty enormous, and there isn't a whole lot you can do about that. The damage may be $25M, but the COST to get that aircraft flight worthy is much much higher.
Are you serious?
The engines on a medium/large private jet can run you about a million each, and that's for a unit that GE mass-produces for civilian use. That you're saying a gas turbine is elegantly simple means that you've never ever ever worked on one. Ever.
Ever.
The concept might be simple, but when you're got a huge shaft studded with titanium blades spinning at 10,000 RPM and then you're intentionally using all of that compressed air to cause an explosion.. well, it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to see that you're not going to bang one of these babies together over the weekend in your garage.
As for the aircraft, wings can and do cost a significant amount of money. If the wing spar was damaged, then the aircraft is toast.
The wing walker is a ground crew member for an aircraft that monitors the position of the aircraft's wings as you are towing it in or out of a hangar or around other aircraft. Their job is to walk just beside where the end of the wing would be and alert the tow tractor driver if the plane is about to hit something. Of course, the wings aren't the only part of the plane that can hit stuff, so wing walkers are supposed to keep an eye on the whole thing.
A C-5-A is almost 250 feet long with a wing span around 220 feet. That's a lot of aircraft to watch.
If your twenty thousand dollar car gets two thousand worth of repairs, then conks out on the freeway in the middle of rush hour the next day, chances are that you'll pull over to the side of the road or at worst, piss off a bunch of people till the tow truck arrives.
If your $244 million dollar aircraft conks out the next day while you're at altitude, chances are, everyone aboard is going to die. If you're luck, you're over an unpopulated area and there aren't additional casualties.
Aircraft are not cars. The amount of maintenance is several orders of magnitude greater and if something goes wrong the likelihood of it going REALLY WRONG! (tm) is much higher.
That being said, it is probably an airframe time issue. If the wing spar was damaged I wouldn't be surprised if there was an Air Force maintenance regulation that disallowed the aircraft being returned to service. Something critical on an old aircraft gets damaged and you're looking at much higher chance of failure.
Are you an A&P for an airline? If not, how many times have you seen an owner immediately sell an aircraft after major structural repairs?
Aircraft aren't cars. The moment you start treating them the same is the moment you sign your own death warrant.
Reading carefully in the article, the Air Force states that it is beyond economical repair, which usually means that the hours on the airframe are probably beyond some limit for stress or flight hours and to make such a huge repairs near the spar, which is the huge chunk of metal that keeps the wings on, would most likely require a huge program of testing, inspection, and re-certification.
Since the Air Force has dozens of spares of this particular airframe, it is more economical to pull a newer one out of storage and move all the stuff that makes a JSTAR a JSTAR to a new plane.
Though, it gets awfully close with the Type 59 when the Match Maker makes it the top tier tank in a game.
This is why all of my photography work is done on my ancient 24" Sun monitor. Try finding a video card that will support one of those beasts without an adapter.
Luckily, my hoarding of Sun VGA adapters started a long time ago.
Growing a thicker skin doesn't protect you from being burned alive in your synagogue. Seeing as how there have been a number of firebombings of synagogues in that county in the past couple of months and the SSID was on a router connected to a city owned network, I think a police response is correct. At the very least, the city has an employee or individual that has compromised their network, and as we all know that is indeed a criminal matter.
In that particular neighborhood there have been several murders and firebombings of places of worship, all racially and religiously motivated. I'm sure that all those people need to do is chill out. Nothing stops arsonists and murderers like chilling out.
Wow, what amazing powers you have to determine by sight who is here illegally. You must share your methods with your local immigration law enforcement body. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to know that you probably operate on the same brown=bad logic.
Damn them and their desire to control all shipping traffic in and out of Singapore! DAMN THEM!