SS1 flight set for June 21

Miles Bader wrote:

"Christopher M. Jones" writes:

What is slashdot? I've heard of it, but I have no idea what it is.

Consider yourself lucky. Sometimes the news they post is halfway
decent, but the comments are just a tar pit you don't want to ever
bother with.


There are some real gems in there though, if you've got the time to look
for them. Browse at +2 (or +5).

It's kind of like netnews except that (1) the typical cliques that
usually dominate newsgroup discussion don't seem to exist (this is
sometimes good and sometimes bad, but it does mix things up a bit), and
(2) the moderation gives you a chance of cutting through the bull****.
Kinda.

-Miles


Heh.. Make a derogatory post about the current state of gaming and see
what happens to your moderation in the future..

In article , derekl1963
@nospamyahoo.com says...
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message

(On a side note: I got to see a Trident underway Friday for the first
time in over a decade. I had forgotten just how beautiful they were
underway.)

I thought the entire point was to NOT see them underway. :-)

g True enough, but she'd just cleared the Hood Canal Bridge and was
not yet submerged. (They don't do that until they clear the Straits.)

Speaking of submarines, I heard that the USN Jimmy Carter (a Sewaolf-
class sub, IIRC) was commissioned the other day. She still has a good
year of interior fitting to go before she starts her sea trials, but I'd
be interested to see what nickname her crews give her... I'd give odds
on "The Goober"... *grin*...

Doug

In article ,
om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy... _facility.org says...
On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 06:24:46 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

Nope. Even a non-qual puke knows that a conning tower is still called
a conning tower, but since a sail doesn't have a conning tower, it's
called a sail. (If a sail did have a conning tower, it would be
called a fairwater.)

...Unless it's a Tuesday, and you got a second jack.

Oh, look! You got a second jack! How lucky you are! Spock, what are
the odds against that?

Doug

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org
wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 06:24:46 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

Nope. Even a non-qual puke knows that a conning tower is still called
a conning tower, but since a sail doesn't have a conning tower, it's
called a sail. (If a sail did have a conning tower, it would be
called a fairwater.)

...Unless it's a Tuesday, and you got a second jack.

Um, no. It's pretty straightforward actually.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 15:06:02 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org
wrote:

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 06:24:46 GMT, (Derek
Lyons) wrote:

Nope. Even a non-qual puke knows that a conning tower is still called
a conning tower, but since a sail doesn't have a conning tower, it's
called a sail. (If a sail did have a conning tower, it would be
called a fairwater.)

...Unless it's a Tuesday, and you got a second jack.

Um, no. It's pretty straightforward actually.

http://interoz.com/madhatters/legionwest/fizzbin.htm

....This isn't the version that comes with the daily modifier rules,
but it's a start.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Tue, 08 Jun 2004 14:34:50 GMT, Doug...
wrote:

Speaking of submarines, I heard that the USN Jimmy Carter (a Sewaolf-
class sub, IIRC) was commissioned the other day.

....The only time I'll ever pray that a US sub sinks.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

In article ,
"Mike Walsh" writes:

"Dale" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 6 Jun 2004 14:11:52 -0400, (Peter Stickney)
wrote:

In article ,
"Mike Walsh" writes:

Interesting. I don't know about the specific impact of the
GeeBee racer, but it was my understanding that racer design
and development did have an impact on fighter design.

overly snipped just for brevity's sake

The fact is, the State of the Art in aviation in the 1930s ws advanced
far more by the efforts of the NACA, Cranfield, the
ReichsLuftMinistrie, and the Italian AIr Ministry than by any air
racers.

Mike might be thinking of the Polikarpov I-16. I've read several
accounts suggesting it was inspired by the GeeBee racers- not
that it actually drew from them for much in the way of engineering,
though.

Not any more than the concept of "Wrap teh smallest airframe around
the biggest engine you can get" goes. Which was hardly something
exclusive to Granny Granville or Howell Miller - the Me 109 and
Spitfire certainly adhere to that philosophy.

Where that probably came from, BTW, was a comment by Capt Eric Brown,
RN (One of the World's truly great Test Pilots, and an excellent
reporter, proof that you can be a competent, confident ego-filled
Fighter/Test Pilot without being a jerk) in his brief report on his
flights in teh I-16 in "Duels in the Sky" (Airlife, 1989 - If you want
a Reallly Really Great book on the comparative performance of most WW
2 fighters & attack aircraft, this is the one) where he mentions that
the shape of the Rata "reminded me vividly of the Granville Gee Bee".
I wouldn't put too much stock in it, since he also compares its
appearance to the Brewster Buffalo, and later, in his report on teh
Buffalo, compares _that_ to the Gee Bee.

Other than being short-bodied radial-engined, low wing monoplanes,
there's not a whole lot of resemblance.


Not that. However I read something about a Hughes racer that
the U.S. didn't have much interest in but that somehow influenced
the design of the Japanese Zero.

_That_ story keeps popping up no matter how many times a stake gets
driven through its heart, and garlic ssewn into its mouth.

I suspect its driven by the belief of a bunch of people that the Early
20th Century Japanese were capable only of imitation, and couldn't
come up with anything on their own. (Which is also a feed for the
various Pearl Harbor Conspiracies) It just 'taint so. The Japanese
were then, just as they are now, more than willing to learn all that
they could about other people's work, but they made their own
decisions about how the techniques discovered were to be used.

The Japanese _did_ buy, in 1937, the unsuccessful Vought V-143, a
single-engined fighter prototype that had managecd to come in last in
the competitions that selcted the Army Air Corps' P-35 and P-36, and
he Navy's F4F and F2A. (They also had licenses to build the
Lockheed 14 Airliner, the DC-2, and bought the inital Douglas DC-4E
prototype, which was another unsuccessful dead end, oh, yeah, and a
couple of Seversky 2-seat fighters based on the P-35) Given that the
performance of teh V-143 was already exceeded by Japanese fighters at
the time, an the V-143's dismal handling characteristics were the
complete antithesis of the Japanese philosophy of what a fighter
should be, there wasn't much tradeoff. (Jiro Horikoshi, the designer
of teh A6M Zero, did say that he cribbed some of the landing gear
retraction system from the V-143.

I was not claiming that air racers were the prime mover, but only
that they had an influence on fighter design.

Not really. Air Racers were built to Go Fast Cheap. Fighters were
built to accomplish military missions. The real influence on fighter
design was the NACA - if you're technically inclined, check out the
NACA Technical Reports Server, and the hundreds of reports they have
online from the 1930s. There's some fascinating stuff there -
including drag cleanup tests of all the major 1930's combat aircraft
in the Full Scale Tunnel, using the actual airplanes.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

Doug... wrote:

Speaking of submarines, I heard that the USN Jimmy Carter (a Sewaolf-
class sub, IIRC) was commissioned the other day. She still has a good
year of interior fitting to go before she starts her sea trials, but I'd
be interested to see what nickname her crews give her... I'd give odds
on "The Goober"... *grin*...


I thought it would have been nice for Mrs. Carter to swing Nancy Reagan
into the sub to christen it. :-)

Pat

OM wrote:




Speaking of submarines, I heard that the USN Jimmy Carter (a Sewaolf-
class sub, IIRC) was commissioned the other day.



...The only time I'll ever pray that a US sub sinks.


Don't you remember? Jimmy is a reborn Christian...it may sink...but it
shall RISE AGAIN!
Hallelujah, brother! ;-)

Pat

Wow--what a great observation! So the 35th anniversary of landing a
man on the moon took place on July 20th? I hope that what you've
predicted does happen--that all goes well with the June 21st flight
and that they do announce that the first attempt at the X-prize will
take place on July 20th. However, the next observation is terrific
too--the Pathfinder landed on Mars on July 4, 1997, isn't that right?
So that would be an historic date for space travel too, wouldn't it?
(I realize that this date has other significance as well:-).
Paul Allen, who financed the project, announced that he was
Spaceshipone's sponsor on the 100th anniversary of flight (Wright
Brothers), so it would be nice if they chose another historic date for
the actual contest.
You probably already know this, but I heard that a Discovery Channel
special, "Burt Rutan's Race for Space," will be chronicling the whole
thing, from design to launch later this year. I am looking forward to
seeing it.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Apparently, the June 21st flight at Mojave is open to the
public---will any of you be attending the launch? I wish I could go,
but I can't.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Mary


Bruce Hoult wrote in message ...
In article ,
(Remy Villeneuve) wrote:

The first attemp at X-Prize will be made on July 20th 2004, on the
35th anniversary of landing a man on the moon.

I'd bet a 100 on this date... If all goes well on June 21st, they
announce right there and now that they'll launch -exactly- 30 days
later...

That make a certain amount of sense .. but I think equally plausable is
that the first flight of the two required is this June 21 one, and the
second (and winning) one has already been notified to the appropriate
people and will be 13 days later, on July 4th.

-- Bruce