Precisely. I was rarely spanked as a small child, and only when I was caught red-handed or otherwise in the middle of misbehaving. The spank was one swat on the ass, delivered immediately, not some kind of ritualized thing--and certainly not a beating. It was just a quick "stop that right the fuck now" kind of thing; true punishment was nonverbal and nonabusive, but far worse. Knowing you really let your parents (and God forbid, your grandparents) down was the ultimate low.
Corporal discipline should be used very sparingly and only in the most deserving of circumstances. I further believe that it's kind of like housetraining a puppy--you need to administer the punishment right then and there rather than after a delay, else the kid's just "why is mommy/daddy hitting me?"
No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
Actually, the B-52 can often be seen flying nose down in level flight. It takes off and lands fuselage-level.
Why?
Because it's not the fuselage angle that matters, it's the angle of attack relative to the wing. And the B-52's wing is set so that it is at a positive angle of attack relative relative to the oncoming air when the fuselage is level. This pre-set wing angle is called "incidence".
For small angles of attack, you can generally assume that a graph of lift vs. angle of attack is linear. A symmetrical wing will have an X-intercept of 0 (so at zero angle of attack, you get no lift). Adding positive camber slides that X-intercept negative, so to get zero lift you actually need a negative angle of attack. You will also have positive lift at zero angle of attack.
I think the discussions about AOA and other topics are covered far too lightly in most pilot training courses. It also seems to me that it would be very useful to put all new students into some kind of simulator (even just a PC fighter sim) with a heads-up display showing nose "boresight" and a flight path marker, and demonstrating the relationship between alpha, weight, lift, and airspeed in a format that is clearly visible and understandable. Even just 20 or 30 minutes of this might give them a far better understanding of what's actually happening when they're flying.
Yes, I'm a private pilot too. And when I eventually get around to building my airpane, it's going to have a nice prominent AOA indicator, which is far superior to just airspeed for slow flight, maneuvering, and landing.
I should also mention that I like the unadvertized feature (bonus!) that many of these USB sticks can now survive washing machine cycles, if you just give them a few hours to dry when they come out of your wet pant pockets.
I had a 256mb drive for years, it survived several washer-and-dryer cycles and a bent-while-inserted incident without trouble, till the lanyard broke off and I lost it.
The new 4gb drive I ordered failed after one such cycle.
A better statement would have been "reducing energy", perhaps, because although your final velocity for the new lower orbit is higher, you do slow down twice to get there.
First, you burn retrograde from the higher orbit, reducing your overall energy and your instantaneous velocity, and resulting in an eccentric orbit with a perigee coinciding with a new, lower orbit. On the way "down", you trade gravitational potential energy for additional kinetic. You then burn retrograde again, further reducing your energy and once again reducing instantaneous velocity, to circularize. It's true that your earth-relative velocity in the lower orbit is higher, but getting there does require slowing down.
Yeah, orbital mechanics is quite fun and counterintuitive, at first.
The Russians did it--their space shuttle's only flight was completely unmanned, with an automatic landing. The US shuttle's autopilot could easily do it too, with the exception of a few deliberately-left-out manual steps like lowering the landing gear.
Autolanding has been around for a relatively long time; airliners have been doing it for decades. The starting conditions are different, and energy management is more of a factor, but that's just an engineering task.
Essentially, the development of adaptive optics and better control algorithms has allowed ground-based telescopes to catch up on Hubble. Plus, they have larger mirrors for more light-gathering ability, all at substantially less cost.
What ground-based scopes can't do is analyze spectra that don't penetrate the atmosphere very well. Infrared and UV light, for example, are hard or impossible to read from the ground. Space-based telescopes are more useful there.
Hubble development was started when we were still fooling ourselves into believing that shuttle operations would be cheap. That turned out not to be the case, and the costs of servicing launches will almost pay for a new telescope anyways. Don't expect to see any new servicable ones built until we have a truly economical manned launch vehicle.
There's also a Rube-Goldberg-esque rig they can fit that allows the orbiter to land completely on autopilot (because currently some steps are manual-only, undocking, lowering the gear, popping the drag chute, etc). It involves removing a couple control panels, slipping a special wire harness in between the mid-deck and the flight deck, and uploading a special softare rev. I'm sure if they did that it would be targeted to land somewhere like Edwards.
And what we're telling you is that no mere explosion or part off a launch is magically going to wind up in a retrograde orbit. It just can't happen. An explosion (or even a significant collision) isn't going to impart a 14km/sec delta-V.
Actually, there are a few satellites in retrograde orbits. Some are nearly polar (sun-synchronous orbits, for example), but others are truly retrograde. I believe Israel does it (even despite the disadvantage of fighting earth's rotation by launching west) because that's the only way they can launch their own stuff without overflying populated areas and/or pissing off unfriendly neighbors.
If we really need more Plutonium, we should be looking to dismantle our weapons stockpile instead. It is way way beyond what could ever be considered reasonable.
I see. I'm going to make the assumption that your assessment of "reasonable" was not based on any (even slight) understanding of nuclear targeting and warfighting, but instead on an uninformed "ZOMG big numbers is reddikkulus!!1!" opinion.
I'm not a targeteer, I'm not a strategic policy analyst, and I'm certainly not a fan of nuclear war. But, I've studied the subject for a while. There are many reasons for having a large number of warheads:
-They break. Seriously. It's fully expected that a significant fraction of them will fail to initiate. Duds, if you will.
-They can be intercepted or destroyed. Contrary to popular belief, terminal-phase ballistic warhead interceptors have been around for a long time. They were working and deployed in the 70s. Manned bombers and cruise missiles can be shot down, submarines can be sunk. Land-based missiles can be taken out preemptively. All of the above systems can also break.
-Multiple small warheads can be more efficient than one large one. And ironically, small warheads are "cleaner", making less fallout.
And so on, &c. Point is, given a target list the size of Russia and China, for example, you're going to need a lot of warheads. Airbases, rail yards, air defense sites, army bases, missile silos, etc. are all on the targeting list.
Witness, for example, reports from the train explosion in the north of North Korea a few years ago, which stated that many citizens perished going back into their burning houses to rescue their portraits of Kim Jong Il, and imagine, for a moment, what sort of psychological conditioning could make people behave in this fashion
That could also be a party command of "you will protect and revere the portrait or we will shoot you and/or your children".
I can see owning an older SUV for when you need to transport many people, but keeping two cars to go to work in and for general driving.
Precisely. I'm buying myself a pickup later this year, just some old 4WD Ranger or something, so I can make trips to Home Depot and have something I can take hunting. My wife and I drive small hatchbacks for work and all, and will continue to do so.
The trick is to make sure any "beater" cars like that are paid for, at least. My car's paid off, I'll be paying cash for the truck, and so we only have one car payment.
That shit's creepy, man... I'm going to wally world tonight and buying some.22 ratshot in case those things make it to the US... they freak the hell out of me.
And if the ratshot won't do it, 30 rounds of.223 will. I hope.
You may also run into commonality problems down the line--integrating changes (fixes, minor engineering improvements, etc) one one line is hard enough; on three lines it's even worse.
It'd require an extensive change in how the US military does this sort of thing. I know this is just airchair engineering/generaling, but I think the US military's procurement processes are so out of whack with what the US needs that even the relatively uninformed can get the big things right.
Difficulties with integrating changes on multiple production lines isn't a military procurement problem, but rather one intrinsic to production processes. Further, having three separate lines running may prove to be far more expensive. Remember, these things aren't cars--you aren't churning out thousands of them a year. In the case of ships, you might be lucky to make more than one per year. Multiple production lines aren't going to help you at all--you'll have to pay startup and capital costs for three lines instead of one, pay for three separate (though somewhat smaller) groups of workers, and so forth. It's a lot more trouble than it's worth.
We have had answers in front of us for at least one, if not two decades.
Feel free to enlighten us any time, then...
I do agree that the expenditure of combustible fuels to run electric power generation is stupid. Hydrodynamic dams, tidal generators, and nuclear reactors are the way to go.
But you still need some form of combustible fuel for transportation, particularly in aviation, because the power output and energy density of hydrocarbons are unmatched for that application. They are also consumable during flight (lowering weight and extending range). I expect that aircraft will be the last to convert to emissionless power, as demand is relatively small and practical electric drive will take a long time to develop beyond light airplanes. Some form of biodiesel, however, could suffice in the near to medium term, particularly if it can be feasibly produced from waste products and if the corn lobby is kept quiet.
and only purchase military equipment that has three or more independent suppliers (including big ticket gear such as aircraft carriers and fighter jets).
This last proviso will be tricky, unless you require as part of the contract that the design becomes property of the US government, and can be licensed out to other contractors at will. This will probably require separate contracts--one for the design, one for production. You may also run into commonality problems down the line--integrating changes (fixes, minor engineering improvements, etc) one one line is hard enough; on three lines it's even worse.
I agree wholeheartedly on the other points, though.
And guess who winds up paying for the taxes companies pay? Yep, the people that buy the products. Taxing a company is still taxing the people, just adding another layer onto taxation.
That's not to say corporate income shouldn't be taxed; that may be the most efficient means to collect the needed revenue. But let's not kid ourselves by thinking that taxing companies means the "evil rich" will be paying taxes instead of "the common people".
Take a look at Falcon 4 sometime. There are still community modification projects running, over ten years after commercial release. The graphics are dated, and the physics model is substandard, but nothing else has come out with the combination of high fidelity and dynamic campaigns that Falcon offers.
Unfortunately, the market for such high-realism stuff is very limited. Most people would rather play "Online Guild Wars 5" or "First-Person Shooter XLVII":-/
On a field trip to MSFC in 5th grade, a couple of us were brave enough to try water from the prototype of the recycled-urine machine on the space station. Everyone looked at us funny, but it didn't taste any different.
People tend to be interested in the latest celebrity gossip, so papers print celebrity gossip because it sells newspapers. I don't call that keeping people informed (note: I'm from the UK that's how it works here if the USA is different then I apologise).
No, it's pretty much the same here. Some of the faces are different, but otherwise it's just a bunch of gossip. Bread and circuses, my friend...
Thank you for saying everything that I wanted to. I, too, am a light airplane pilot. Unfortunately, I do not get a chance to fly nearly as often as I would wish.
I'm reminded of an incident from high school... I was working at Publix around Christmas 2001. While taking someone's groceries out to her car, a plane flew over rather low, and I stopped to look. The lady looked at me and asked if I was scared or worried since 9/11. I looked her square in the eye and said "no, I'm not scared at all. Why would I be? I'm a licensed pilot and I've been an airplane nut since I was three years old. I just wanted to look at it."
It really chaps my ass when so many people flip out over small airplanes, and call for all kinds of bans or restrictions. What would they say if we put equivalent restrictions on them in their cars?
-Can't drive anywhere within a thirty-mile radius (or even five miles, to scale things a little better) of the President without contacting police ahead of time and remaining in constant communication with them while driving. Private citizens in small cars are absolutely prohibited; priority will be given to public transit and semitrucks.
-Must call police for permission to enter the limits of any major city.
-Driving on the interstate or in poor weather requires special training and constant contact with law enforcement while driving.
People irrationally fear what they don't understand, or what they actually refuse to learn about on their own. The media pushes hype and incorrect statements as fact, and the people take that and run with it.
you don't want to admit that there is actually a lasting advantage to using a drug to help learn. Your sense of right and wrong desperately wants any benefits to be temporary and even better, have some sort of horrible side effect down the road.
I don't think it's so much a moralist denial of benefits as just a healthy dose of skepticism. Most of us learn pretty early in life that things which sound too good to be true usually aren't. Therefore, when something else comes along that claims to do all kinds of good things without any negative side-effects at all, we get suspicious.
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Precisely. I was rarely spanked as a small child, and only when I was caught red-handed or otherwise in the middle of misbehaving. The spank was one swat on the ass, delivered immediately, not some kind of ritualized thing--and certainly not a beating. It was just a quick "stop that right the fuck now" kind of thing; true punishment was nonverbal and nonabusive, but far worse. Knowing you really let your parents (and God forbid, your grandparents) down was the ultimate low.
Corporal discipline should be used very sparingly and only in the most deserving of circumstances. I further believe that it's kind of like housetraining a puppy--you need to administer the punishment right then and there rather than after a delay, else the kid's just "why is mommy/daddy hitting me?"
No airplane seeking to maintain altitude flies with the nose completely flat; the nose is always pitched slightly upward in order to shove air downward with the wings. At speed it happens that the pitch angle is very small -- too small to notice -- but it's there. It has to be. Yes, I'm a private pilot.
Actually, the B-52 can often be seen flying nose down in level flight. It takes off and lands fuselage-level.
Why?
Because it's not the fuselage angle that matters, it's the angle of attack relative to the wing. And the B-52's wing is set so that it is at a positive angle of attack relative relative to the oncoming air when the fuselage is level. This pre-set wing angle is called "incidence".
For small angles of attack, you can generally assume that a graph of lift vs. angle of attack is linear. A symmetrical wing will have an X-intercept of 0 (so at zero angle of attack, you get no lift). Adding positive camber slides that X-intercept negative, so to get zero lift you actually need a negative angle of attack. You will also have positive lift at zero angle of attack.
I think the discussions about AOA and other topics are covered far too lightly in most pilot training courses. It also seems to me that it would be very useful to put all new students into some kind of simulator (even just a PC fighter sim) with a heads-up display showing nose "boresight" and a flight path marker, and demonstrating the relationship between alpha, weight, lift, and airspeed in a format that is clearly visible and understandable. Even just 20 or 30 minutes of this might give them a far better understanding of what's actually happening when they're flying.
Yes, I'm a private pilot too. And when I eventually get around to building my airpane, it's going to have a nice prominent AOA indicator, which is far superior to just airspeed for slow flight, maneuvering, and landing.
I should also mention that I like the unadvertized feature (bonus!) that many of these USB sticks can now survive washing machine cycles, if you just give them a few hours to dry when they come out of your wet pant pockets.
I had a 256mb drive for years, it survived several washer-and-dryer cycles and a bent-while-inserted incident without trouble, till the lanyard broke off and I lost it.
The new 4gb drive I ordered failed after one such cycle.
Standard Soviet design philosophy: don't trust the user, centralize control.
A better statement would have been "reducing energy", perhaps, because although your final velocity for the new lower orbit is higher, you do slow down twice to get there.
First, you burn retrograde from the higher orbit, reducing your overall energy and your instantaneous velocity, and resulting in an eccentric orbit with a perigee coinciding with a new, lower orbit. On the way "down", you trade gravitational potential energy for additional kinetic. You then burn retrograde again, further reducing your energy and once again reducing instantaneous velocity, to circularize. It's true that your earth-relative velocity in the lower orbit is higher, but getting there does require slowing down.
Yeah, orbital mechanics is quite fun and counterintuitive, at first.
The Russians did it--their space shuttle's only flight was completely unmanned, with an automatic landing. The US shuttle's autopilot could easily do it too, with the exception of a few deliberately-left-out manual steps like lowering the landing gear.
Autolanding has been around for a relatively long time; airliners have been doing it for decades. The starting conditions are different, and energy management is more of a factor, but that's just an engineering task.
Essentially, the development of adaptive optics and better control algorithms has allowed ground-based telescopes to catch up on Hubble. Plus, they have larger mirrors for more light-gathering ability, all at substantially less cost.
What ground-based scopes can't do is analyze spectra that don't penetrate the atmosphere very well. Infrared and UV light, for example, are hard or impossible to read from the ground. Space-based telescopes are more useful there.
Hubble development was started when we were still fooling ourselves into believing that shuttle operations would be cheap. That turned out not to be the case, and the costs of servicing launches will almost pay for a new telescope anyways. Don't expect to see any new servicable ones built until we have a truly economical manned launch vehicle.
There's also a Rube-Goldberg-esque rig they can fit that allows the orbiter to land completely on autopilot (because currently some steps are manual-only, undocking, lowering the gear, popping the drag chute, etc). It involves removing a couple control panels, slipping a special wire harness in between the mid-deck and the flight deck, and uploading a special softare rev. I'm sure if they did that it would be targeted to land somewhere like Edwards.
And what we're telling you is that no mere explosion or part off a launch is magically going to wind up in a retrograde orbit. It just can't happen. An explosion (or even a significant collision) isn't going to impart a 14km/sec delta-V.
Actually, there are a few satellites in retrograde orbits. Some are nearly polar (sun-synchronous orbits, for example), but others are truly retrograde. I believe Israel does it (even despite the disadvantage of fighting earth's rotation by launching west) because that's the only way they can launch their own stuff without overflying populated areas and/or pissing off unfriendly neighbors.
If we really need more Plutonium, we should be looking to dismantle our weapons stockpile instead. It is way way beyond what could ever be considered reasonable.
I see. I'm going to make the assumption that your assessment of "reasonable" was not based on any (even slight) understanding of nuclear targeting and warfighting, but instead on an uninformed "ZOMG big numbers is reddikkulus!!1!" opinion.
I'm not a targeteer, I'm not a strategic policy analyst, and I'm certainly not a fan of nuclear war. But, I've studied the subject for a while. There are many reasons for having a large number of warheads:
-They break. Seriously. It's fully expected that a significant fraction of them will fail to initiate. Duds, if you will.
-They can be intercepted or destroyed. Contrary to popular belief, terminal-phase ballistic warhead interceptors have been around for a long time. They were working and deployed in the 70s. Manned bombers and cruise missiles can be shot down, submarines can be sunk. Land-based missiles can be taken out preemptively. All of the above systems can also break.
-Multiple small warheads can be more efficient than one large one. And ironically, small warheads are "cleaner", making less fallout.
And so on, &c. Point is, given a target list the size of Russia and China, for example, you're going to need a lot of warheads. Airbases, rail yards, air defense sites, army bases, missile silos, etc. are all on the targeting list.
Witness, for example, reports from the train explosion in the north of North Korea a few years ago, which stated that many citizens perished going back into their burning houses to rescue their portraits of Kim Jong Il, and imagine, for a moment, what sort of psychological conditioning could make people behave in this fashion
That could also be a party command of "you will protect and revere the portrait or we will shoot you and/or your children".
That wouldn't surprise me.
I can see owning an older SUV for when you need to transport many people, but keeping two cars to go to work in and for general driving.
Precisely. I'm buying myself a pickup later this year, just some old 4WD Ranger or something, so I can make trips to Home Depot and have something I can take hunting. My wife and I drive small hatchbacks for work and all, and will continue to do so.
The trick is to make sure any "beater" cars like that are paid for, at least. My car's paid off, I'll be paying cash for the truck, and so we only have one car payment.
That shit's creepy, man... I'm going to wally world tonight and buying some .22 ratshot in case those things make it to the US... they freak the hell out of me.
And if the ratshot won't do it, 30 rounds of .223 will. I hope.
You may also run into commonality problems down the line--integrating changes (fixes, minor engineering improvements, etc) one one line is hard enough; on three lines it's even worse.
It'd require an extensive change in how the US military does this sort of thing. I know this is just airchair engineering/generaling, but I think the US military's procurement processes are so out of whack with what the US needs that even the relatively uninformed can get the big things right.
Difficulties with integrating changes on multiple production lines isn't a military procurement problem, but rather one intrinsic to production processes. Further, having three separate lines running may prove to be far more expensive. Remember, these things aren't cars--you aren't churning out thousands of them a year. In the case of ships, you might be lucky to make more than one per year. Multiple production lines aren't going to help you at all--you'll have to pay startup and capital costs for three lines instead of one, pay for three separate (though somewhat smaller) groups of workers, and so forth. It's a lot more trouble than it's worth.
We have had answers in front of us for at least one, if not two decades.
Feel free to enlighten us any time, then...
I do agree that the expenditure of combustible fuels to run electric power generation is stupid. Hydrodynamic dams, tidal generators, and nuclear reactors are the way to go.
But you still need some form of combustible fuel for transportation, particularly in aviation, because the power output and energy density of hydrocarbons are unmatched for that application. They are also consumable during flight (lowering weight and extending range). I expect that aircraft will be the last to convert to emissionless power, as demand is relatively small and practical electric drive will take a long time to develop beyond light airplanes. Some form of biodiesel, however, could suffice in the near to medium term, particularly if it can be feasibly produced from waste products and if the corn lobby is kept quiet.
and only purchase military equipment that has three or more independent suppliers (including big ticket gear such as aircraft carriers and fighter jets).
This last proviso will be tricky, unless you require as part of the contract that the design becomes property of the US government, and can be licensed out to other contractors at will. This will probably require separate contracts--one for the design, one for production. You may also run into commonality problems down the line--integrating changes (fixes, minor engineering improvements, etc) one one line is hard enough; on three lines it's even worse.
I agree wholeheartedly on the other points, though.
And guess who winds up paying for the taxes companies pay? Yep, the people that buy the products. Taxing a company is still taxing the people, just adding another layer onto taxation.
That's not to say corporate income shouldn't be taxed; that may be the most efficient means to collect the needed revenue. But let's not kid ourselves by thinking that taxing companies means the "evil rich" will be paying taxes instead of "the common people".
Take a look at Falcon 4 sometime. There are still community modification projects running, over ten years after commercial release. The graphics are dated, and the physics model is substandard, but nothing else has come out with the combination of high fidelity and dynamic campaigns that Falcon offers.
Unfortunately, the market for such high-realism stuff is very limited. Most people would rather play "Online Guild Wars 5" or "First-Person Shooter XLVII" :-/
On a field trip to MSFC in 5th grade, a couple of us were brave enough to try water from the prototype of the recycled-urine machine on the space station. Everyone looked at us funny, but it didn't taste any different.
I'm not talking about supermarket tabloids, but rather most mainstream newspapers. The WSJ is a rare exception.
People tend to be interested in the latest celebrity gossip, so papers print celebrity gossip because it sells newspapers. I don't call that keeping people informed (note: I'm from the UK that's how it works here if the USA is different then I apologise).
No, it's pretty much the same here. Some of the faces are different, but otherwise it's just a bunch of gossip. Bread and circuses, my friend...
Thank you for saying everything that I wanted to. I, too, am a light airplane pilot. Unfortunately, I do not get a chance to fly nearly as often as I would wish.
I'm reminded of an incident from high school... I was working at Publix around Christmas 2001. While taking someone's groceries out to her car, a plane flew over rather low, and I stopped to look. The lady looked at me and asked if I was scared or worried since 9/11. I looked her square in the eye and said "no, I'm not scared at all. Why would I be? I'm a licensed pilot and I've been an airplane nut since I was three years old. I just wanted to look at it."
It really chaps my ass when so many people flip out over small airplanes, and call for all kinds of bans or restrictions. What would they say if we put equivalent restrictions on them in their cars?
-Can't drive anywhere within a thirty-mile radius (or even five miles, to scale things a little better) of the President without contacting police ahead of time and remaining in constant communication with them while driving. Private citizens in small cars are absolutely prohibited; priority will be given to public transit and semitrucks.
-Must call police for permission to enter the limits of any major city.
-Driving on the interstate or in poor weather requires special training and constant contact with law enforcement while driving.
People irrationally fear what they don't understand, or what they actually refuse to learn about on their own. The media pushes hype and incorrect statements as fact, and the people take that and run with it.
I must not understand the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative'.
They don't mean squat in the US any more. Any residual stain from them refers to social/moral issues, not government fiscal policy.
you don't want to admit that there is actually a lasting advantage to using a drug to help learn. Your sense of right and wrong desperately wants any benefits to be temporary and even better, have some sort of horrible side effect down the road.
I don't think it's so much a moralist denial of benefits as just a healthy dose of skepticism. Most of us learn pretty early in life that things which sound too good to be true usually aren't. Therefore, when something else comes along that claims to do all kinds of good things without any negative side-effects at all, we get suspicious.