Bullethead

MUCH better! Thanks for all the hard work.

Glad to hear you're recovering nicely. Good luck with the infection.

Ah, the multi-generation colony ship, a favorite setting of science fiction stories from the Golden Age (Heinlein's "Universe") to today (the movie "Pandorum"). Always something goes terribly wrong, which makes for a ripping yarn. But my favorite of the whole genre is where, after overcoming all these problems, the colony ship finally arrives at its destination and discovers the ruins of a previous civilization. Upon exploration, they learn that these ruins were built by their homeworld. A few centuries after the colony ship had set out on its 1000-year voyage, the homeworld had developed warp drive and colonized the target planet, where a civilization had risen and fallen, all before the original colony ship arrived :).

Damn, I wonder if I can ask the author for a cut of these sales ;). BTW, to keep this more on topic, I should have mentioned that aerial recon is mentioned many times in this book. No details about it (no units, plane types, etc.), but what is clear is that a great many key decisions on both sides were taken as a result of it. So air power definitely had a big effect on this campaign. I'm sure most folks here know that already, but I like to point it out for the benefit of those who think WW1 airpower had little effect on the outcome.

Glad to hear progress is being made. Keep up the good work, Erik and Fates :)

Yeah, I'm not much good at it, either. I compensate by relying heavily on 3rd-party MFD mods and autopilots to do most of the flying while I just worry about the delta-V. No, I'm definitely not saying to stop. I'm just saying that conventional rockets are a dead end. Physical laws have imposed a known limit on their abilities, and that limit is launching small capsules. Small capsules ain't gonna establish colonies of hundreds of people, let alone the thousands needed to make them viable. Thus, if your goal is to colonize space, continued incremental improvements in conventional rocketry are a complete waste of time because they will never be able to exceed (or even quite equal) the limits imposed on rockets by physics. If we have any desire to colonize space (even including LEO), we need to develop something other than conventional rockets. My complaint is that we're not pursuing these alternatives with anything remotely approaching seriousness. At this point, we've just got a collection of what seem like wild-ass ideas and we can't yet even sort out which ones might be worth pursuing. So to me, this is what we need to be researching. IMHO, we can't extrapolate analogies from Humanity's past achievements to the colonization of space. There is simply nothing in the past that comes close to the size of the wall facing us at the edge of our atmosphere. We colonized this entire planet simply by walking out of Africa, except for a few islands here and there that we reached in open boats. Better vessels (and the nation-states that built them) simply allowed globalized commerce (with all its benefits and pitfalls). Likewise, the Wright brothers were just an incremental improvement on the much earlier man-carrying kites and free gliders, and the 747 is just a couple more incremental improvements down the road from the Wrights. And these planes have just carried on the work of globalization begun by the galleons and their contemporaries.

I must not be expressing myself very well, so I'll try again.... We've had enough intel since the Viking probes of the 1970s to know what we have to do to live (after a fashion, in great discomfort) on Mars. That's not the problem. The problem is getting enough people and their stuff off the ground here to do anthing more than just take pictures of a guy raising a flag there. You know what Curiosity really is? It's an official recognition that the days of small-scale manned spaceflight (which is the only kind we've ever had, or will have in the foreseeable future) are over. The precision of its landing was due to its ability to steer itself down autonomously, which means there's no longer any need for a human pilot, which was the last-ditch justification for sending humans there. The rover itself is nothing but a robot geologist able to work 24/7/365 for years on end, without need of food, water, sleep, vacations, etc., and with no health problems from the low gravity and constant exposure to high radiation. Anything that humans on Mars can do with foreseeable technology, Curiosity can do better and cheaper. IOW, astronauts are just the latest vocation to be replaced by machines. Venus has an assload of CO2 in its atmosphere. So seed the atmosphere with some custom-made extremophore algae, which will float in the ultradense atmosphere. They ignore the acid and heat, they eat the CO2 and make O2, and problem solved, leaving a nice, thick, breathable atmosphere at a cozy temperature and pressure. This is MUCH easier than building a breathable atmosphere from scratch on Mars. We could do this today. Having lived through the so-called false-positive reported from Viking 1's search for Martian life, I'm over the excitement there. And in the decades since, I've learned that organic compounds are quite common EVERYWHERE in the universe, seemingly as a natural result of chemestry. More recently, I've learned that life, and not just bacteria but advanced multicellular things, can exist in Hellish conditions just here on Earth. In a nutshell, life appeared on Earth as soon as it cooled off enough for organic chemestry to function. Thus, I firmly believe that there is life today on Mars and just about every other body in the universe. The universe is probably totally covered with bacteria. If Curiosity finds any, my reaction will be "Well, what else did you expect?" I submit that humans have exactly nothing to do with the current changes in climate. Ater all, we're STILL in an ice age, just an "interglacial" interval in it. Observe that there have only been 5 relatively brief periods in the entire existence of the Earth where polar ice caps have existed at all, and we're living in 1 of them. Humanity has never seen an epoch without them. Yet for the vast bulk of Earth's long life, there haven't been ice caps at all. So how did that happen without human intervention? But be that as it may, Mars is uninhabitable, with or without a better atmosphere, for 2 reaons we can't fix. #1 is the intense radiation it receives from the sun because it has no magnetic field. No matter what the atmosphere looks like, the surface will always be uninhabitable because of this, so any Martian colonists will have to be obligatory troglodytes. #2 is the low gravity, prolonged exposure to which will cause all sorts of health problems even underground. So barring conjectural medical breakthroughs like pumping colonists full of nanobots to repair this damage, the best that can happen is that after a few generations, the colonists adapt to it. But that means they won't be able to survive on Earth, so will effectively be a separate species from Earthlings. Only the slowest, least significant progress is about incremental improvements. Incremental improvements just make you better at what you're already doing, making life easier within unscalable walls. To get over those walls, you need either a really major breakthrough in an existing field or the discovery (and wide application at a reasonable price) of an entirely new field. As far as practical manned spaceflight goes, we're at such a wall. Rocketry has an immutable limit that's been well-known for over 100 years and there's no getting around it. Incremental improvements will get us slightly closer to this limit than we now are but no further, and this limit is still WELL short of the height of the wall surrounding us. So, until we invent some radically new and differnt form of propulsion, or at least some other way of climbing out of Earth's gravity well, we're stuck here. Don't blame the messenger. Go mess around with Orbiter and see for yourself.

Apples and oranges, and even more than that, nobody (as in a nation with real money to put into the necessary research) is even trying to solve the problem here. Until we have something about 1000 times better than our best current rockets, we're not going anywhere. This isn't a case were incremental improvements and scaling up previous systems will work. It requires an entirely fresh start.

@Widow: Great pic ;) @Flyby: The increasing size of Mars rovers is not an indication of increasing lift capacity. We could have sent something as big as Curiosity long ago, and in fact we did. For instance, the Viking probes of the 1970s were heavier in total (combination of orbiter and lander) and the landers were nearly as big as Curiosity. The main reason the earlier rovers were so small was when they were launched, almost all of NASA's budget was going to the shuttle program and the ISS and all other projects were fighting over the crumbs. Plus, of course, they were prototypes intended more to test vehicle and control systems, and to decide what types of sensors were really needed, than actually to study Mars itself. Building a base on the Moon is just as hard, and therefore equally impossible, as colonizing Mars, because both face the same initial hurdle: getting sufficient mass (lots of people and stuff) to escape velocity. Rocketry isn't going to do either one for us because the best it can do requires something with the size, cost, and complexity of the Apollo program merely to get 1 minivan-sized object going fast enough to leave Earth's gravity. That's why the proposed NASA manned Mars rocket was about the same size as the old Saturns. From a rocketry POV, the length of the trip doesn't matter that much, it's the getting off the ground here that requires all the horsepower. What really gave me an understanding of this problem (and thereby crushed all my long-held hopes and dreams) was messing with the Orbiter software. I say "messing with the software" instead of "playing the game" because Orbiter isn't a game, it's a pure simulator. Anyway, it's a very realistic spaceflight simulator. It will give you a better understanding of the limits of rocketry than any book or discussion. And that's where it all sinks in on you. To do anything more than sending a small capsule or spaceprobe somewhere, you have to cheat. Either give yourself an endless supply of massless fuel, or use a ship with far-future, hypothetical technology. You can get Orbiter here: http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ @HD: I agree, sending unmanned probes all around is reasonably cheap. And they send back useful, or at least interesting, information. I have no problem with them and wish, actually, we did more of them. But putting humans aboard jacks the price up astronomically AND is counterproductive. Keeping people alive requires a lot of mass and volume that probes don't need, and which cuts into the scientific payload. Plus, the rocket now has to be designed for a round trip instead of a 1-way mission, so has to be MUCH bigger and more expensive. And there's zero return on all this investment other than the propaganda value of a picture of an astronaught raising a flag (which people will say was faked in a movie studio anyway). I have yet to hear any good argument for sending people to Mars with existing and foreseeable technology. Colonization is a non-starter; it just can't be done right now. And there's nothing a couple of scientists can do in person that a rover can't do. Now, if we had or were close to developing the means of moving large numbers of people and their stuff there, then sure, send a few guys first as lab rats to make sure we know how to survive before sending the colony ship. But before that day comes, manned spaceflight is a waste of money at the expense of science.

I'm of the opposite opinion. IMHO, for a variety of reasons, Mars will never be a viable place for long-term human settlement, which is why I want to send my ex-wife there . But even if I'm wrong about that, any thought of terraforming Mar or even Venus (which is a better idea IMHO) is putting the cart WAY before the horse. Before we can do anything along these lines, much less send a meaningful number of colonists, we first have to solve the basic problem of getting anything larger than a minivan to escape velocity. To have any hope of establishing viable colonies in space, we have to be able to move hundreds of people, with all their household possessions, and with whatever tools they need for their trade, all at once. We're nowhere near being able to do this. The task requires an increase in our lifting capacity about 1000-fold, give or take, far beyond what any conceivable improvements in rocket efficiency will produce. Thus, just to get all this stuff off the ground into low Earth orbit, we'll have to use some totally different technologioes like space elevators, none of which are even under serious consideration at present. And then, assuming we get the huge colony ship assembled and loaded in orbit, it now has to get going fast enough to leave Earth orbit while carrying not only its immense cargo but also enough fuel to slow down at the destination (and hopefully then come back for another load). This part probably won't be possible for a very long time, if ever. So in all honesty, I give humanity essentially zero chance of ever getting off this rock in anything remotely approaching meaningful numbers. Can we send a handful of people in a minivan to Mars? Sure, we could do that tomorrow. But is there any practical value in doing this? Nope, none at all. Thus, to me, there is no point whatsoever in manned spaceflight and I don't want my tax money wasted on it unless and until we invent the warp drive. I really hate to say that. I myself grew up reading science fiction, watching Star Trek, building model spaceships, and playing space empire games. I would love to be able to live on another planet, or just take a cruise past them on for a vacation. But we're stuck with the laws of physics and for the foreseeable future, there's no getting around them.

I wouldn't worry about that. I seriously doubt we'll ever be able to get any significant amount of rubbish, whether inanimate or human, off this rock, which is too bad. There are quite a few people I'd love to send to Mars, starting with my ex-wife . But anyway, I see the thing got down safely, even with its new method of landing which appeared to have many ways to go badly wrong. Bravo! Quite an achievement. Now let's see what the thing finds. Although I'm sure nothing it finds will be nearly as cool as video from the orbiting probes of Martian missiles shooting it down. Oh well

I'm actually hoping it comes to grief. Mars is like the Bermuda Triangle for space probes, but this time there are several survivors in orbit watching this one come in. It would be so cool if these others captured evidence of malicious native Martian intent behind the failure of yet another probe to land safely ;).

I have never understood the problems so many folks have with the OFF claims department, other than that caused by Mr. H. Thengsupp. While ALL my pilots have died with pending claims, those who have survived long enough to receive a decision on at least 1 claim have always had a 90% or better approval rate. Seriously, rejections are so few and far between for me that I don't worry about them even when, after watching the replay, I realize I got everything totally wrong on the claims I just submitted. Seems to me all you complainers don't know how to deal with bureaucrats. OT1H, they're compelled to check up on every detail you've submitted. But OTOH, they are themselves judged by the amount of paperwork they can put through their office in a given time, and are under scrutiny to make sure they show their side is winning the war. So baffle them with BS. The more details you include, fictious or not, the longer the bureaucrats will have to look at it. With luck, they'll be at it longer than it takes the next lorry full of claims to arrive. At this point, they can't just throw all the previous load of claims away because they're all typed on government-issue forms which have to be accounted for. So they pass the buck upstream. The next level up doesn't want to be bothered doing the claims department's job, and they hired the claims department to reject everything they could. Thus, to the next level, anything that comes up from below is good enough so gets approved.

Glad to know it's not just me. For a moment there I was about to give up the drink (at least for tonight), take a sledgehammer to my modem, and other such nonsense, thinking it was some mistake on my end. Even more glad it's going to be fixed soon :).

Welcome aboard, HH! Nice to have more Jarheads

Yup, it was Edwards. IIRC, that was the original landing site because that's where the refurbishment facilities were. But as I heard it, loading the shuttle on the 747 to get it back to the Cape was such a pain that they extended the runway at the Cape and moved the refurb operation there. After that, Edwards became an emergency field. There were several other designated emergency fields scattered around the world, too, but they were never used. Once when I was stationed at the USMC base of 29 Palms, I had a day off so I rented a car, drove over to Edwards, and just wandered around all over it. In those days at least, all you needed as a military ID to get in the gate. And there on the ramp was the 747 with the shuttle on top, getting ready for the trip to Florida. I also learned something interesting on that trip. When newly built, the shuttles came by truck to Edwards, where they got on the 747. They went right down the main street of Lancaster, CA, which was a tight fit. In fact, for a couple of blocks, the wingspan was too big to fit between the streetlamps, so they installed special hinged lamp poles to fold back out of the way while the shuttle went by. Sadly, I can't find a pic of the folding lamp poles, but this pic should give you an idea of why they were necessary :) http://bentcorner.com/something-never-seen-in-texas/ I have a cousin (the age of my parents) who in the early days of the shuttle was one of the honchos in charge of training astronauts. He was nice enough to give me a backstage tour of the NASA facility in Houston, where they did all the training (it's not just "Mission Control"). There I got to see the simulators (sadly, just "look but don't touch"). The 1st simulator they built shows you just how long ago the shuttle program started. This simulator was just for the final landing approach, to support the very first glide tests of Enterprise. It consisted of a physical scale model of the terrain around Edwards and the runway with a TV camera moving on a mechanical arm in response to control inputs and gravity. This was in 1 room while the trainee was in another with a mock-up instrument panel and a TV monitor on top, foreshadowing what some dedicated flightsimmers build today in their homes . The main purpose of this simulator was get the pilots used to the brick-like glide profile of the shuttle, which came down at like a 45^ angle. And I was told in all seriousness that one of the guys who helped build and test it was a former X-15 pilot, and he'd managed to do a barrel roll on final approach and still land perfectly . The main simulator, however, occupied a room the size of a small warehouse. Most of this was filled with what was then a supercomputer and its RAM, dozens and dozens of metal boxes the size of double filing cabinets. In 1 corner of this huge room was a mock-up of the shuttles whole cockpit on a stand that could rotate it from horizontal to vertical, plus a few consoles outside where the training crew set up the scenario. I suppose that today, apart from the mockup prop, you could do all this on your PC with the freeware Orbiter software . When I was there, the crew of the 6th mission were inside practicing for their upcoming job and I got to meet them.

Actually Olham, it was was heading east. It blew up over central Texas and the bigger, heavier chunks were strewn across south-east Texas up to near the Lousy Anna line. The smaller, lighter pieces came down as far east as southern Alabama. That was the usual landing pattern. It would come across Texas a little south of Waco, then over Lousy Anna's armpit towards the Florida panhandle, by which time it was low enough to actually fly and it would turn SE towards Cape Canaveral. I watched it re-enter several times over the years and heard the sonic boom countless times when I wasn't looking. One time when I lived in Waco, Texas, it landed on a beautiful clear, full-moon night. I drove out to a local city park to have a good view of it. When I first saw it, it looked like a flagpole on the western horizon, a silver pole with a golden ball on top. But this flagpole was growing. At that time, the radio was saying it was just coming in over California. In just a minute or so, it was passing nearly overhead and the silver pole was revealed as a contrail illuminated by the moonlight. It went by with the same bearing rate as a jet doing a low pass at an airshow (IOW, it looked like it was doing 400 knots right in front of you, although it was still like 30 miles high). Just as quickly, it was nearly to the eastern horizon but just before it went out of sight, I watched it make its turn to the SE. The contrail stretched across the entire bowl of the sky, glowing in the moonlight. By the time I'd gotten back in my car, the radio said the thing was on the ground safely, and the sonic boom didn't reach me until I'd driven a little ways home.

I found one of those little thin pieces of rubber that went between the heat shield tiles. Other folks found a couple more of those. We also found some small tufts of what looked like insulation and tinfoil. Given they were found way out in the woods with no obvious terrestrial source nearby, we thought they might have come from the sky so we picked them up, too. Never did hear if they were part of the shuttle or not. But that was the sort of thing that made it this far east--just light stuff that could float on the wind. All the solid, heavy parts fell in Texas. We also investigated dozens of reports where people called in saying they'd found part of the shuttle. All of these turned out to be common, everyday objects, pieces broken off normal things, which had been lying there for a long time. The people hadn't noticed them before but when they saw on the news that debris was in our area, they naturally started looking around their yards and their imagination got the better of them. I especially recall one old lady who handed me a small blue, plastic button sewn to a small scrap of blue vinyl sheet. She thought it was part of an astronaut's uniform but it was obviously part of an old piece of pool-side furniture. She still even had part of that furniture set, with identical fabric and buttons, out beside her swimming pool.

Great stories, Widow and Cap'n V. There was a famous crash where I live, too. When the space shuttle blew up on re-entry some years ago, my area received a shower of the smaller, lighter pieces of debris. With the rest of my fire department and the sheriff's deputies, I spent the next couple weeks hiking the hills looking for pieces and even found one.

Funny thing about the word "cider". It's actually a survival of "cyser", which was its predecessor, a type of mead where the honey is diluted with apple juice instead of water. In fact, many wines today carry the names of the mead varieties they also replaced, such as "claret" replaced "clare". On the subject of local words and phrases, my part of Lousy Anna has quite a few from many sources because for a long time this area was on or near the border between 2 or 3 great empires at different times (French, Spanish, and British), plus has a lot of African, some straight from the source and some filtered through French or Spanish islands in the Caribbean first. And then, of course, quite a few Indian words, some from quite far away. And many of these words were rendered (often poorly) into the orthography of whatever European power owned the area at the time, then retranscribed into another orthography when a new boss took over. My favorite is "lagniappe", which these days is seen as a characteristic Lousy Anna word that's threatening to go mainstream. These days, it means a freebie, something extra thrown into the deal just to be nice, along the lines of "buy 2, get 1 free". Most folks look at the spelling and think it's French, but the best guess is that it's Quechan (the language of the Inca Empire). The original word was "ñapa" and apparently it originally had exactly the same meaning as the Persian "baksheesh", something to grease the wheels of the native bureaucracy. The Spanish in Peru adopted the term as "la ñapa" for use in their colonial bureaucracy, and some of their descendants brought it with them to Lousy Anna. Here, it quickly became so indispensible to local affairs that it remained in use when the French took the area over from the Spanish. But they had to give it a French spelling, so now it's "lagniappe". It's original meaning was then taken over by English words like "bribery" and "kickback", so today "lagniappe" has a much friendlier connotation. Other interesting Lousy Anna words: Maringouin = mosquito. This word came from Guarani, an Indian language from Paraguay. How it got here, I have no idea, but it entered colonial French long ago because it's also used in Quebec. There's a town of this name here. Cocodrie = alligator. A Cajun "Spoonerism" of "crocodille"; unknown what caused this corruption. Also the name of a Lousy Anna town. Carencro = buzzard. A Cajun version of Franglish, from "carrion crow". Also immortalized as a town name. (NOTE: These 3 town names tell you all you need to know about Lousy Anna ). Chaoui = Cajun for "raccoon". From the Choctaw "shaui". NOTE: "Raccoon" itself is Algonquin. Ouaouaron = bullfrog. This is an Iroquoian word, also common in Quebec. Les maringouins on tout mangé ma belle Ils ont quitter que les gros orteils C'est pour me faire des bouchons de liège C'est pour boucher mes demi-bouteilles Et ton papa r'semb' un éléfant Et ta maman r'semb' un tomobile Et ton 'tit frère r'semb' un ouaouaron Et ta 'tite soeur r'semb' un coin d'banquette

Well, for some strange reason, there just never were many lancers compared to hussars, so I guess the lancers got drowned out in the general drunken din. I've never understood why there weren't more lancers in Napoleanic times. The longer reach of the lance compared to the sword or the bayonet would seem a great advantage in most situations, and not long before, all cav had been lancers anyway. Very strange. Lancers did get their props, though. For instance, when Napolean went to Elba, the Chasseurs of the Old Guard composed a song of good-bye to the Polish lancers, a typical bit of which is: Et partout la Gloire est fidèle Aux braves lanciers polonais

What was funnier, the song itself or my pathetic attempt at translation? I do think, however, that many of the verses are double entendres in both versions. IMHO, an old hussar drinking song is fitting music for the Sacred Order of the Flaming Dodo. Hussars were to the 1800s what aviators were to the 1900s, and many WW1 pilots began their careers as hussars. And that old saying, "Any hussar who lives to be 30 is a coward", fits in perfectly with WW1 flying .

Strange. As mentioned, it's never once gotten me all by itself, although I suppose minor wounds from it have sometimes contributed to my subsequent deaths from other causes. And in all the thousands of planes (mine and others) I've observed being shot at by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of shells, I can only recall seeing 8-10 planes ever knocked down by it. More than 1/2 of them were enemies I was dueling at the time, neither of us in formation. It's a very rare sight to see flak knock any plane out of any formation. I think this is one of the keys. If you're in a formation, the flak battery seems to apply area fire to the area target, or perhaps each gun in the battery picks its own target. Either way, little or nothing is aimed right at any specific plane so you only pick up the odd shrapnel ding. Howver, when a plane is alone, every gun is firing at it specifically, so the odds of getting hit are rather higher. Because of this, I quit worrying about flak a long time ago. I haven't zig-zagged my formation through flak in a couple of years biw and haven't noticed any difference from when I was zig-zagging. Now, if I somehow find myself alone under flak fire (which is extremely rare), I definitely zig-zag, but only then, and I exit the flak area as rapidly as possible to the exclusion of all other factors. But in general, I'm either in formation or fighting near to the rest of my flight, and I remain under flak fire as briefly as possible. Anyway, I've always thought the standard OFF flak is perfect without any need to change. It doesn't seem very dangerous at all to me. But I don't like being alone in the combat zone so perhaps that's the main reason it's never gotten me. But I avoid being alone not because of flak but of fighters. I really don't think about flak at all, excapt in how it provides both sides with a way of spotting each other.

About time you got back, Stump. We were about to send Guido's Kneecapping LLC out to collect your long-overdue mess bill . Speaking of which, you might as start another tab by buying a round. I'm in a mint julep mood this hot afternoon.

Amzing persistance there, Wayfarer! Congrats on seeing out the war. I found the causes of your losses interesting. I'm surprised you were brought down by flak so often. I've only ever used the regular OFF flak, no mods, because I've never had a problem with it. In fact, I've never once been shot down by it in all my careers, whether scouts or 2-seaters. On bomber or recon missions, I often collect a few shrapnel holes but that's realistic from what I've read. Now AAMGs are another matter entirely. I avoid them like the plague because they usually take me out regardless of what I'm flying, if I get below about 2000' over their nests.