Moving To Step Two
If you are following this blog faithfully then you'll be aware that yesteryon Conrad took on the challenge of intercepting the San Ti invasion fleet from "3 Body Problem", thanks to human ingenuity and the ability to lie, convincingly.
To recap, my idea for Step One was to intercept the San Ti's fleet of starships with 3,000 stealth-enabled 'remote cameras', except 9 out of 10 would actually be a stealth-enabled lump of cast iron. Art!
Artist's impression
To the sticklers for hard-science out there who will insist that the San Ti will have physical or energy screens out to deal with micro-meteorites - yes they very probably will. These are doubtless highly effective against MMs the size of a grain of sand. Against a lump of cast iron with the mass of a bowling ball? No.
We can anticipate that the San Ti will be extremely wary about any such ambush being mounted again, so it's a one-and-done kind of plot.
STEP TWO: This is nothing subtle, merely stealth-enabled gigaton thermonuclear warheads lurking silently within the Solar System on any likely approach routes the San Ti might take. Thickened up with Enhanced Radiation Warheads, just to see how well-protected the Trisolarians are. Again, once they've been bitten they'd be even warier, so definitely another one-and-done job. Art!
STEP THREE: Very much a Dog In The Manger approach here.
Here an aside. People consider the dog to be ignorant and outright wicked for sleeping on hay it cannot eat itself and thus preventing cattle and other livestock from having a nibble. Have these people considered that a bed of hay is a lot more comfortable than a barn floor for sleeping on? Art!
Now, we know that the San Ti fleet will not approach Earth for four centuries, which gives Hom. Sap. sufficient lead time to manage a bit of asteroid re-direction. We can currently land on asteroids and blast big holes in them, so if we jump forward in time 200 years, that still gives us sufficient lead in order to alter a large asteroid's trajectory. Art!
This Step embodies the characteristic of If We Can't Have Planet Earth, Nobody Can.
ALTERNATE STEP THREE: Conrad would also suggest a more mundane, administrative alternative if you feel that dropping a planet-killer on your very own planet is a bit extreme; get rid of environmental health and safety legislation. Just imagine, rampant, centuries-long deliberate poisoning of the earth and the oceans, to the extent that what's left of Hom. Sap. will be grateful to be exterminated. That leaves the San Ti with a whole planet to clean up, especially if nuclear power plants are multiplied to increase electrical generation, and then all 4,400 (that is, ten times the current number) are allowed to melt down. Art!
You can imagine the banners the Trisolarians will be greeted with when they arrive. "This is Planet Earth and you're welcome to what's left of it".
STEP FOUR: Disease! This one would require a fair bit of astro-biology. You remember those 300 remote camera drones that were going to network, collate and transmit information back to Earth when they intercepted the San Ti fleet? It ought to be possible to retrospectively create a biological model of the (I'm guessing here) hideous Trisolarians. After which, creating virulent viruses that would cause them to vomit themselves inside out should be a bit of a doddle. Done under the guise of 'medical research' and if those interfering buggers the sophons start to send people round the twist, that's as good as a confession that the research is on the right track.
No, the atmosphere wouldn't be laden with them. They'd be stored within innocuous-looking facilities, and released on a timer across every continent simultaneously. Art!
"Coughs and sneezes -
punish planetary predators"
STEP FIVE: Perhaps tomorrow.
Murky Mathematics
According to Kremlin State Television (which is all the channels all the time), a Ukrainian drone was intercepted before it could attack their oil depot at Proletarsk, in Rostov oblast. Art!
Except that, as per usual, some 'debris' from the drone fell on the depot, and you can see the results above. The fire is still burning 2 days later, despite the best efforts of 250 firemen, 40 of whom have been hospitalised. Art!
Kinetic sanctions at work
I have read on Twitter that - no, Elong Tusk, it is still going to be called 'Twitter' here on BOOJUM! so there - that there are 75 storage tanks there, and a third of them are on fire.
Sooooo - one of these giant oil drums stores 5,000 tons of oil, and 25 of them are alight? At the current retail price of about $70 per barrel, that means $2.5 million going up in smoke, literally. Thanks to a drone that cost perhaps $2,500? A one-thousand times return on the investment.
Construction Not Destruction
What's this next entry on Conrad's list of loco makers? 'Colmar', which is a tad confusing because that's the name of a town in France near the Swiss border, and 'Colmar Technik' is a Roman business, based in Rovigo in Italy. Art!
They have been around since the Sixties and have a global reach, even to the extent of a branch in the UK. Rather than merely making locomotives, their trade is in the production of plant that maintains railways, as seen above. They do make shunting locos, in case you were feeling deprived of an engine or two. Art!
Here you have a traditional diesel shunting loco with the classic cab-behind-engine layout. Colmar also do an up-to-the-minute all-electric shunter that can travel off-rail. Art!
What I notice about many of their vehicles is that they are also capable of movement off-rail, having retractable rail wheels that can be kept out of the way when the rig is travelling by road. Art!
See here for an example. This particular beast seems to be carrying out a type of welding work to judge by the storm of sparks, and it doesn't seem especially safe given how close that control panel is to said sparks.
There you go, I bet you never realised what an expansive market there was in the niche world of railway infrastructure maintenance, nor that the Romans were leading the field.
More Of Bernie
Mister Wrightson, it seems, is no longer with us. I did mention that he's stopped drawing thanks to having brain surgery, the surgery being thanks to brain tumours. Well, the tumours got the better of him quite a while ago: in 2017. So there hasn't been any new stuff by him since then, in case you were wondering if all that from-beyond-the-grave artwork he did influenced real life. Art!
That's not a juxtaposition you see every day. Ruins, girl gambolling in dirt and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The violent sort of dinosaur, unlike Barney. There's no attribution on the webpage I've collected this from. I couldn't reverse-image search a source from it, and Google was entirely no help - Ol' Bern drew a metric ton of dinosaurs in his day. Art!
More gorey than creepy is my judgement.
Finally -
Wouldn't you know it. All day long whilst I have been stuck inside the Sekrit Layr, working, the sky has been lowering and gloomy. Now that I've finished and could use a bit of sunshine to sit outside and read that Himmler biography, it begins to rain. Then it really begins to hammer down. Roll on winter.
No comments:
Post a Comment