You Might Misunderstand
Especially if you were South Canadian, because I understand substandard housing apartment complexes in their inner cities go by this appellation.
Well, if you were expecting to read an horrifying exposé of people surviving on a diet of ramen whilst fighting rats - or perhaps sweetening the ramen with roast rat - then you are most certainly in the wrong tent. Try that one over there on Alpha Centauri III.
For what I refer to here are 'Project Daedalus' and 'Project Icarus' - Art!
One of Icky's many designs
- which have been referred to many a time on the blog. 'Project Icarus' was the Noughties adoption of the original challenge proposed by PD, itself begun in the Seventies. Art!
This, gentle reader, is "Haze Gray Art"'s depiction of Project Daedalus, assembled in orbit and with the ISS present in frame to give a sense of scale, which is always difficult when it comes to spacecraft. I recall a few of the Project Icarus robotic probes being absolute monsters - but you couldn't tell from them floating around in the ether.
PD came about as a research project from the British Interplanetary Society, who had a few strict parameters about their baby: it had to use current or near-future technology; the trip to target star had to be within a human lifetime (50 years to allow for the relevant humans to have grown up into proper scientists); be available to target other nearby solar systems. Art!
Quite the monster, I think we're all in concord about that.
What made PD more than just another Great Big Spaceship was the power source, which was going to be nuclear fusion, rather than the traditional fission. This, frankly, was a big ask in 1975 as we are still not there when it comes to a self-sustaining fusion reactor. Also of interest was the methodology proposed: pulse-propulsion using fuel pellets of deuterium and Helium₃, which would be detonated at the rate of 250 per second (!) by a laser mesh, thus propelling the 54,000 bulk of Daedalus onward. Art!
The provision of He₃, an isotope of Helium, caused a raft of problems immediately, with original proposals for floating 'factories' harvesting it from the atmosphere of Jupiter, which is almost as ambitious as the Daedalus itself. We now know that it is present in very large amounts on the lunar surface, so - additional immense engineering project avoided.
Another design problem has also surely occurred to you - how safe is the ISS when that monster starts detonating miniature thermonuclear warheads?
Fear not, gentle reader - as HGA depicts above, the Big D will start off slowly, before ramping up the detonation rate. Art!
This is interesting stuff to a spaceship geek, as all the other depictions of Big D I have seen either have it at rest or hammering the heavens at 6% c, with no in-between of how it got there. Art!
This is a wonderfully imaginative shot, and unfortunately as a still you don't get the flicking of the pulse-propulsion; it's there, take my word for it. What's that weird reflection up front? It's the beryllium protection plate that covers the scientific payload as protection against micrometeoroids and interstellar dust. HGA decided to make it extra-bright and polished in order to reflect Jupiter. Art!
We then jump-cut two years, which is how long Big D would accelerate via the first stage, getting up to 7.1% of lightspeed (c). The second stage would then separate to being it's own 2 year acceleration. Art!
Baby D is born
46 years later Baby D would arrive in the target system, in this case envisioned as being Barnard's Star, all of 5.9 light years from Earth. Once again HGA uses the (still) highly-polished surface of the beryllium plate to reflect the target sun as it approaches. I say 'still' because after 50 years of interstellar travel I don't think it would still look like a new penny. Still, cut the chap/chapess/sinister artistic AI a bit of poetic licence. Art!
Those two 'eyes' are the telescope arrays
There you go. The whole thing takes up 5 minutes 16 seconds, but will have taken hours and hours to create.
I can only hope HGA turns their creative eye to Project Icarus next. There's a lot of scope* with that one.
A Mass Of Mathematics
Yes! Inspired by all the numbers that cropped up in the Intro, I have now decided to impress you with what is more a collection of statistics than an off-putting set of calculations. You remember Janet MacDonald's "Supplying The British Army In The Second World War"?
The chapter I've just finished dealt with what you might loosely call 'Engineering' or, in contemporary terms, "Works Services and Engineer Stores". The amount of work put in by Perfidious Albion in the Nile Delta to secure a logistics base is astounding. Art!
The British et al were supported by 24,500,00 square feet of covered accommodation, with 37,550 hospital beds, 8,820 convalescent beds - don't ask me, I don't know the difference either - 400 miles of road constructed to service hospitals or depots, 2,300 feet of landing wharves and 5,000 feet of deep-water berths. Those last two would have been especially important in dealing with British, Commonwealth and foreign convoys arriving in Egypt. Art!
None of this was glamourous or exciting stuff, but it did underpin the British et al in North Africa and is one reason why the Eighth Army could sustain operations all the way to Tripoli in Libya.
Kyle's Isles
More bucolic back-country courtesy 'Geography King', this time Treasure/Yerba Buena Island, which, if we prod that prodigal Neanderthal Art into semi-sentience -
A Kyle points out, these two islands are technically one because a single causeway connects them, as they sit in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Yerba Buena is all-natural, whilst Treasure Island (LACK OF IMAGINATION APPARENT) is artificial, which is rendered obvious when looked at from the air. Art!
Treasure Island's construction began in 1937, as it was planned to be opened in 1939 as an international exposition site, and you need a good lead time to create mile-square islands in the bay. Art!
Construction underway. Note the temporary bridge, presumably used for trucking men and equipment onto the site rather than having to track all around via Yerba Buena.
The Interplay Of Incoherence
You may be dimly aware that there was a televised debate between Pumpkinhead and Kamala Harris yesteryon, where all of the Farting Fraudulent Felon's usual props and accoutrements were divested from his person, and all he had to fall back on were shouting and lies.
I haven't seen this conversational clash, but by all accounts Harris came out on top, jabbing Donold with barbed quips that threw him off-balance, as he's used to being the one slinging insults.
What is more concerning to Donold is the effect this had on his TMTG shares, which did not do well. Art!
Ooopsie.
Finally -
I'm not sure how to dress to go out and do the weekly shop, as the weather had been wildly variable today. At mid-afternoon the Sekrit Layr had all the charm and ambience of the inside of a coal sack, and then the sun came out, and there were fluffy blue clouds, and then the torrents returned, and have now bated, leaving us with bright blue breezy skies. Shoes? Crocs? Coat? Umbrella?
* Do you see wh - O you do.
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