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DDE
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Posts posted by DDE
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24 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Ya know, one deleterious effect of these black and white, good vs evil sci-fi stories
Sci-fi isn't to blame, it's a reflection of the thinking applied to the real world, especially by third-party well-wishers.
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Korolev's brainstorming for the name "Vostok"
Everything up to and including Volna, Vulkan, Veter (wind), Vykhod (escape), Voskhozdeniye, Vzlyot (ascent) and Vozrozhdeniye (renaissance).
Love how Vostok was still his first idea, followed immediately by Voskhod
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The first Salyut station had a fairing stenciled "Zarya". TASS didn't care, so that's how the station is known now.
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4 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:
My question would be if this is lack of resources rather than lack of interest in space.
Part of the reasons the Soviets were underfunded is because the CPSU had economic issues and the task of building up the nuclear arsenal on their hands. There probably wasn’t money to afford fully funding everything even if they wanted to.
Is it the same in Russia? Apart from the obvious “if we spent a fraction of what we do on military on space we’d be on Mars by now” that can apply to all of the big three (US/RU/CHN).
I think the missing link is the unexpected commercial success and the Shuttle woes. Basically, at roughly the time you'd have expected a resurgence of government space spending, instead the mamy-named Russian space industry first began to scoop up commercial space launches, and then it got the biggest one of all - the Soyuz seat-sharing agreement with NASA.
I think at this point a dubious decision was made to wean it off into a commercial venture, despite little evidence that it would be sustainable, which was promptly exemplified in the pre-Rogozin disaster spree.
Premature attempts to monetize something are not an uncommon problem, and politically it's rather difficult to fish not for a one-time bailout, but a near-permanent garden hose of money.
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2 hours ago, Lisias said:
Sooner or later someone will try to deploy Commandos with these things! ("Commandos away...."
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That was one of the proposals, yes.
Ah, yes, I found the IRL Helldiver pod.
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A person far braver than I am.
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4 hours ago, Lisias said:
Crazy, almost desperate idea from WW2 era: doing MEDEVAC on pods mounted on the bomb mounts of a P-38.
What could possibly go wrong?
("Bombs awa..." uh... Whoops.. 
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(but it would be a hell of view!)
https://aviationhumor.net/experimental-air-ambulance-version-of-the-p-38/
It keeps coming up and coming up. I know several sides in WWII had this sort of kit. This was the latest known attempt to bring it back:
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28 minutes ago, farmerben said:
I do. The total solar eclipse was cool.
The opthalmologists won't be free.
Sorry, I still can't get over how people just stare up at the sun to the point of sustained damage.
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9 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
Yikes. At least Soyuz got a quarter of the funding requested in 1964.
Yeah, basically Khrunichev went bust developing it exclusively out of their own pocket. This in turn became a great excuse to sell off the expensive land under Khrunichev, forcing Angara's production to move to the stillborn Energiya Block A production line at Omsk, which didn't do the timeline any favors.
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3 hours ago, darthgently said:
Smells like hermeticism wherein the world is viewed as a prison to be escaped from.
Probably closer to Kampfgesetz or whatever, with a side helping of "thermoethics". The world isn't a prison, but it is what you make it out to be, and if you don't out in a constant, coordinated effort, if you leave things be and let them slide, they degrade, rust, rot, decay and die.
Not exactly an unnatural mindset for a space traveller, eh?
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1 hour ago, Terwin said:
It always amuses me when people forget that all humans are born as self-centered sociopaths, and only through socializing do we learn to reciprocate, cooperate, and all of the other 'virtues' of humanity.
I doubt it. I do believe there is an initial bias towards empathy.
You can't rely on it to run a big society, though.
1 hour ago, tater said:This. "Natural" systems appear by themselves. "Unnatural" systems must be imposed with force.
Yes. But life is an unnatural phenomenon. Any increase in complexity comes not from some synergistic murmuration, but through a coherent push with a unified will.
Both the free market and government dictate have their niches.
"The form is the despotism of the internal idea that prevents matter from disintegrating. If the bounds of this natural despotism are broken, the phenomenon dies."
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8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:
I think building a Mars colony based on earthly ethics, laws, and societal structures is not a good long term backup for humanity. Such a Mars colony has an equal chance of destroying itself as Earth does
Hence the civilizationists' argument why humanity needs more backups that are still here but different.
At which point... bye-bye international Mars colony run by some sort of a global government.
8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:You could say, why not build lots of colonies then? Which brings us back to the idea capitalism will eventually facilitate the construction of a colony, which I believe is wrong…
That's just capitalism allocating resources more efficiently, as advertised.
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9 minutes ago, Codraroll said:
Or, well, that's not quite what he said, but he might as well, because what he promised will be equally impossible to deliver in the time frame:
Oh, it is possible to deliver in that timeframe.
But what if, hear me out, we gave the rocket scientists about a tenth of the necessary budget, and were utterly amazed they preferred to twiddle their thumbs, find excuses and set up rat lines and Swiss bank accounts instead of working? After all, that's how Angara happened. For the first decade, it received 4% of the funding it was supposed to.
Combine that with a stalwart example of KB feudalism (Makeyev's pet Korona) and you have an absolute swamp that needs a new authoritarian like Korolev or Webb to sort it out.
Borisov, meanwhile, just rattles off what his grammar-deficient PR team pushes his way. Be happy they don't boast of building a factory to produce carburetors for electric cars (there's such a scandal going on right now, someone included a news article from the equivalent of the Onion in a regional ministry's annual report, to great public embarrassment).
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Oh, how very, very familiar. Unfortunately, going from experience, the late Uber driver was involved, she just didn't know she was being used as a courier. Heck, there's been a dozen cases in Russia where the couriers realized what they were being used for and opened up the packages to find thick wads of cash.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/16/us/ohio-uber-driver-murder-charge/index.html
Warn your relatives, folks, you're now in the same boat as us, it seems. Unexpected calls from the FBI, FRS or Bank of America, "secure accounts", urgently needing you to read that code from a text message or installing an "anti"-virus on your phone, oh no, someone's taken a loan on you and the only way to rescind that loan is to set fire to a local public building while yelling (e.g.) "Glory to Comrade Kim!" And that's before deepfakes go industrial-scale.
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Korona SSTO has been making rounds in the press again. I find it alarming that it's still a thing alongside Amur-SPG (Falcon-Methanski) and is getting more and more official endorsement. The last thing Roscosmos needs on their plate is a Korolev-Chelomei situation, but instead they're just throwing more and more things at the wall (Angara, Soyuz-5, Bartini's Krylo, even Don/Yenisei SHLV is still making noises).
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During the closing days of WWI, the Germans developed the B-1E Elektronbrandbombe, a 1 kg incendiary bomb with a thermite payload in a casing of an aluminum-magnesium alloy known as Elektron. It was the predominant Luftwaffe incendiary in WWII, leading to many raised eyebrows as contemporary materials keep referring to "electron(ic) bombs".
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Ah, a six-day work week due to upcoming Labor Day. I only learnt about it on Monday.
3 hours ago, Ryaja said:I partially agree with this, I do think we need to be taught that no the world won't tip toe around you. I'm autistic myself and accepting that no the world isn't gonna treat you nice, has helped me pull through my symptoms. Acting like losing control is normal didn't help me. Treating as a instinctual action that I can push through did. In the end treating autism as a barrier rather than part of me has helped me push through at least a bit.
It's a barrier that never goes away.
Frankly, I think the bigger problem is the pathologization of any eccentricity. You're expected to be "quirky" in ways that are seemingly harmless (and easily commoditized), but that genuine strangeness is actually a lot more dangerous and untolerated in this ultra-connected, hyper-socialized world than it used to be. It has become an impairment. Although I do sense there used to be a pretty severe asymmetry of tolerance based on the sex (will this get censored?) of the individual, guess we achieved equality of discrimination.
7 hours ago, AtomicTech said:I had a moment today, in my last slug through high school senior year, where I realized how tired I am and how much I want to not be here in Austin, doing school stuff. I wanna go back to Hawaii. I wanna have that promise of exploration. I wanna have a slow life for a little while. I just want to get away from all of the essay writing, AP test preparation, calculus homework, decluttering my room, and all of that stuff that just brings me down. Is it bad that I just wanna get away from all of it for a little while? Is it okay that I want to put everything on pause and just get back to it later when I can feel like I'm not forcing myself to do the nth calculus problem or the nth in-class or take-home essay? I am just so tired and I really, really need a break.
I can't promise it will get better. Maybe take a gap year while you can, because afterwards HR will look at you funny for having a hole in your resume. Then months will start to fly past like days, and you'll be headed to an early midlife crisis, just like me.
****...
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26 minutes ago, grawl said:
I picture VR experiences of Earth most noisy crowded places to keep mental sanity up into the deep loneliness of space.
As someone who experienced the lockdown in a city of twenty million... you will quickly find people not wanting to ever be in a crowd. Intsead, they could likely succumb to parasocial relationships...
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Rebel Moon's premise belongs here. An interstellar-capable empire bullies peasants to give up grain.
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Bunch of mission patches
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On 4/21/2024 at 2:03 AM, SunlitZelkova said:
It is written by a bigot, who believes autism and ADHD are “educational and parental cop-outs.”
Don't forget "pharmacological cash cow" in case with ADHD. It's the reason why I'm really skeptical of its prevalence, much less so with autism where the pharmacological remedies seem non-existent and misdiagnosis is nowhere near as likely.
SpoilerThat, and I'm hitting too many notes of a moderate, undiagnosed Aspie to believe this pattern doesn't exist
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8 hours ago, grawl said:
I really don't see a billionaire going into such a maddening and self-destructing endeavour.
What if they were told it was perfectly safe?
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1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:
You see these
uglygloriously beautiful sketches? I made this in about three minutes in Powerpoint for one of my working papers in ICAO CAEP Working Group 3, and somehow they ended up in the final draft, never getting replaced by something nicer.I know the feeling. Last week I found a non-material typo in the heading of a report we've worked on for a year. Cringe.
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2 hours ago, tater said:
I suppose with the decline in people living normal lives (ie: more and more childless people), blowing their savings on this as "something to do" might happen—or single people who are no longer young. Leaving Earth for a couple years when you have family is not a thing.
Hm. I wonder whether this affects the ultrarich more or less. Without research, the feel I get is decidedly ambivalent - there's this one billionaire playboy philanthropist that's sired almost a dozen, but one anecdote doesn't indicate whether they buck the trend or not - and then there's their tendency to live for themselves, children be damned.
Maybe the Moon can have highly preferential divorce legislation...
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Bad science in fiction Hall of Shame
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
...which of course is undermined by the Jedi being pointedly apolitical to the point of apathy, which the old fluff explored in-depth.
Your post kind of reminds me of the in-universe early Imperial propaganda claiming the younglings were mind-controlling the local populace, and so Vader and the 501st did nothing wrong.
While I won't entirely disagree, this is a case where a sci-fi cliche muddles our perception. Sci-fi doesn't generally know how to do non-sentient droids. Accordingly, it's not clear how sentient the droids are - and then we wonder into the real-life debate of what sentience is and how AIs can passably "fake" it by simply responding in-line with out expectations. All tha before the question whether sentience is even the primary factor to consider when asking whether droids deserve rights.
Also, when SW did finally have a crack at the droid rights problem, it produced a character so obnoxious I signed up with the Butlerian Jihad.