What does Battlestar Galactica get right?
[Update a couple minutes later]
I liked this:
FP: And the worst shows for realistic space warfare?
CW: There are so many that are so bad. Star Wars is probably the worst.
I know that’s heresy for a certain generation.
They’re about to find out just how hard it is to run one. It has this amazing statistic that I’d never seen before:
Between 1949, when the U.S. Navy began deploying jets on a large scale, and 1988, when the combined Navy/Marine Corps aircraft accident rate achieved U.S. Air Force levels, the Navy and Marine Corps lost almost 12,000 aircraft and more than 8,500 aircrew.
Emphasis mine. That’s accidents, not combat. And what they mean by getting the rate to Air Force levels, is reducing it to that rate. In other words, those are the casualties of learning how to fly combat-proficient aircraft from carriers, and it didn’t really occur until the introduction of the F/A-18 Hornet.
Here’s a related link: the U.S. Navy’s transition to jets.
And yet we obsess about safety in spaceflight.
[Via email from Jim Bennett]
No, a bridge back to 1933.
It’s a never ending source of hilarity and irony that these people fashion themselves to be “progressive.”
This isn’t exactly a new question. The Space Studies Institute has been thinking about it for a third of a century. And of course, one always finds the inevitable “it’s obvious that the first colony should be on Mars” comment.
Well, this is interesting. My most immediate question is, even though it says it won’t stall, what happens if it loses power? Can it glide?
[Via Sarah Hoyt]
The slow-speed rail in California is being killed by green tactics.
…to lighting up the moon.
One quibble. If you really bought that many one-watt green lasers, I’m sure that you’d get the price well below $300.
Five reasons that it would suck.
I think it misses the point a little, though. It assumes that only you would be immortal. If everyone was, some of the reasons would go away. But more importantly, the goal isn’t immortality, it’s the ability to live as long as one wants to. I think that when you phrase it that way, none of the objections apply.
Here comes Smith Electric:
The company has very limited customer base of only eight companies, and “the loss of any of these customers could materially harm our business.”
The SEC filing contained other damaging revelations. The firm said that its truck’s lithium-ion battery cells “have been observed to catch fire or vent smoke and flames,” and their warranty reserves may be insufficient to cover future warranty claims.
The company’s top management has limited or no experience in the automobile or truck business. Hansel previously led Evo Medical Solutions, which sold portable oxygen concentrators.
But other than that, it was a great bet, Secretary Chu.