When Spin Is A Good Thing

Not, I Hasten To Add

In the same way that politicians tell you that being dead is really great for tax purposes, or a PR company pushes the line that slugs are fantastically loyal and friendly pets, quite besides being delicious, or Tsar Putin blames the poor pistachio harvest in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar on MI6.  Art!

Pistachioless Pazar
(MI6 agents just out of shot)

     No, what I refer to is a remarkable new way to launch payloads up to a sub-orbital height, which news item tried to sneak past me - unsuccessfully.  Art!

Sorry, no puny humans for scale

     This gargantuan structure is the result of Spinlaunch's efforts to boost a payload into the heavens via kinetic energy rather than chemical - using a giant spindle rotating at unholy speed to whip a tethered missile through a vacuum chamber and up into the skies.  A vacuum chamber to remove any resistance from air, before you ask.  You can judge how freaking huge it is by that erected platform above.  Art!

The missile in question

     This is the large-scale prototype accelerator, since the Real Thing will be three times as large.  That missile above was hurled almost four miles upwards in a very real demonstration of what can be achieved by a kinetically-accelerated vehicle.  The Real Thing is anticipated to be able to hurl a bigger vehicle 40 miles vertically.

     Yes yes yes, I can see the naysayers and toothsuckers amongst you cavilling already.  "That's not high enough to go into orbit!" and "The G forces would destroy anything sent upwards!".  Said missile would still use rocket fuel to achieve orbit, just 75% less of it; and there's very little turn-around time.  For Your Information, satellites have been accelerated up to 10,000 G with no ill-effects, and as others have observed, using this system would allow the lofting of G-insensitive materials like structural components, at 5% of the current expense.  Stan Kubrick's Space Station?  If the Real Thing goes into operation, then it becomes a potential reality instead of an SFX pipedream.  Art!

     The cars present will give you a sense of how large this structure is.  There's even a barely-visible Puny Human in dead centre of the picture.  The Spinlaunch company itself has gone from a concept in 2014 to the demonstration above in 7 years, a positively blistering pace in aerospatial technology.  Watch this space*.

     and now a short pause as I go to get my Cham Pong Korean noodle soup.

I Shall Now Ment You With Torm

Nobody has yet protested at my shameless self-publicity in posting bits of "Tormentor", my NANOWRIMO entry from years ago.  It's definitely supernatural in nature but we don't get to that for a while.  In the meantime I'm setting the scene with a tangerine by showing you what a chaotic mess our hero's life is in.  And now - 

By the time that was done, the front door bell announced Jennifer.  Louis looked around, decided that the room was as presentable as it was ever going to get, and went into the hall to let Jennifer inside.

As always, the ginger-haired teenager made his heart flutter.  How could her teeth be that white and perfect, in a grin so sincere?  His daughter’s best friend proved what good taste his daughter had in friends.

‘Hello, Luma!’ she trilled, smooching a kiss at him as she brushed past into the lounge.

‘Don’t try flirting with me,’ he warned her.  ‘I’ve had experts try it on.’

‘Ooh,’ not daunted at all.  ‘Did it work?’

‘ ‘Course not!  Constitution of iron, that’s me.  Enough chit-chat, do you have your English kit with you?’

She did.  “King Lear”, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, “Gulliver’s Travels” and “The Collected Poems of Rabbie Burns”.  With an A4 notepad and several fibre-tip pens.

Louis left his big surprise until the end of the hour, after they’d gone over Joyce and Swift and Burns, touching only lightly on Shakespeare.

     There you go.  Conrad openly confesses that these novels and works were the ones he did for A Level English Literature, even if we never get to a long, painful analysis of them.  You're here for thrills not <thinks> Rills!  Art?

Rills, don't you know.
(Hideously ugly but friendly and clever)

Manx Pranks

Just so you know, people from the Isle of Man regard themselves as a race apart.  Utter foolishness, of course, as they lie within the pale of This Sceptred Isle.  Their ancestral language is known as 'Manx' and so are they.  Nigel Kneale, esteemed scriptwriter and author, hails from the IoM.

     ANYWAY the Mighty Manx Motor Manufacturers dreamt up what you might call a Car Bizarre: the Peel 50.  Art!

Officially the smallest car in the world**

     This beast has a top speed of 35 m.p.h. and is being driven by Alex Orchin (pictured) from John O' Groats to Land's End, which he confidently expects to take at least two weeks and possibly three.  You now, if you Spinlaunched it you'd only take three or four minutes, if you don't mind being a thin red layer at the bottom of the footwell.

     O, for relaxation along the way, Alex will be playing his bagpipes.  They must be carried in a support vehicle because the Peel 50 doesn't appear to have any storage space.

Finally -

We did cover, with horrified fascination - or it might have been fascinated horror - the recovery from waaaaay underground of a badly-injured caver in the terrifyingly difficult OFD cave complex in Wales.  This has resulted in a follow-up article from the BBC, about cavers and caving; what they do and why they do it.  Art!

YOU ARE NOT SELLING IT MATEY

     There are pluses to caving: the sense of going where very, very few people have ever been; the stunning underground architecture of cave systems; the social bonding between fellow cavers.  None of this makes up for what Conrad The Complete Coward regards as the negatives: hypothermia, getting lost, drowning, getting stuck (a very personal fear), rockfalls and becoming exhausted.  Art!

Don't fall!

     Conrad has been through Whitescar Caves in Yorkshire (where they talk funny) a couple of times in recent history with Darling Daughter and that remains as far as he's willing to take it.  We were only there because she'd requested it specially for - I forget - a birthday treat?  She enjoys knitting so she's clearly inherited a few quirks and foibles from Desperate Dad.

     With that, Vulnavia, we are ever so done.

*  Sorry.

**  Expect Tsar Putin to claim a Ruffian roller-skate with a rocket attached is, in fact, the world's smallest car.  He's a bit of a piker like that is Dimya.