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Post by gwiz on May 27, 2007 6:06:46 GMT -4
In 1968, Kubrick had already made it look like astronauts and pens were floating around in the weightlessness of space. And he did it all with only the smallest fraction of NASA's budget and resources. I'm sure none of the regulars here would have any difficulty seeing which was Kubrick's footage and which was the real thing. His billowing dust, visible wires, settling liquids, not to mention the subtler stuff like the position of the earth in the lunar sky, all point out fiction rather than fact.
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Post by gwiz on Dec 17, 2006 7:49:52 GMT -4
The radiation models used to determine the hazards faced by Apollo were determined without a large piece of the puzzle. Most of the measurements were made off peak, like working out the average annual rainfall in Darwin while visiting a few times in winter during the dry season. The fact is it may have been possible to accomplish the landings but the fact that they put the cart before the horse can't be denied when CME's were not observed until the Skylab era. Let me get this right. Are you saying that Apollo should have been delayed because of a phenomenon that wasn't discovered until after the programme finished? The radiation levels in space between the earth and the moon had been measured by plenty of satellites prior to Apollo, what more could they have done?
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Post by gwiz on Dec 17, 2006 7:02:52 GMT -4
Heh. Caught by the same language bug that snared turbonium. As I understand it, even "major flare" covers events of magnitudes difference....from several-a-week level (during a noisy sun) to once-in-a-lifetime events. Plus you've got the whole direction thing...solar flares are not isotropic. So, yeah...I'd space walk during a "major flare." Just as long as I got to pick the parameters of that specific flare! Quite right,flares come in a range of intensities with the most intense/rarest something like one hundred thousand to a million times the least intense/most common. Just saying "flare" is as meaningless as using "wind" to describe everything from barely detectable air motion to a tornado.
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Post by gwiz on Dec 8, 2006 5:16:17 GMT -4
So how do you distinguish between zooming out and moving back? And how do you confirm that in fact both methods are not in use? If the size of the earth reduces, it's a zoom out. If the earth stays the same small size but the floodlight comes into view, the camera is moving back.
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Post by gwiz on Dec 1, 2006 4:12:35 GMT -4
O-ring? What O-ring? All I see is something, perhaps a cable, crossing in front of the earth's image and dividing it into two, then later blocking it all together. No evidence of an O-ring.
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Post by gwiz on Nov 28, 2006 5:57:01 GMT -4
Oh honestly! How do you expect people to be able to answer which bit of black is what in a single, out-of-context frame? You know the drill, turbonium. At least give us the time for that frame, don't expect us to search for it ourselves.
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Post by gwiz on Nov 21, 2006 10:15:43 GMT -4
Why is it that HBs constantly call upon technology that didn't exist or wouldn't be perfected for decades to support the hoax? Especially when they also claim that Apollo-era computer technology wasn't up to doing the mission for real. But then they also claim that Apollo-era robotics was so advanced that the rocks were collected and the instruments deployed by an unmanned probe. Consistency isn't their strong point.
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Post by gwiz on Nov 21, 2006 5:24:51 GMT -4
And what does that suggest? Wouldn't a fake be easier to spot at high res? Why? When the fake was originally created in hi-res, by reducing the size and quality of the original it wipes out the original scans interpolated pixels. What interpolated pixels? The originals are on film, and pre-date Photoshop by decades. Any faking in those days would have to be done optically or by physical cut-and paste.
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Post by gwiz on Nov 20, 2006 10:25:27 GMT -4
...harder to spot in Hi-res... And what does that suggest? Wouldn't a fake be easier to spot at high res?
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Post by gwiz on Nov 3, 2006 5:58:41 GMT -4
Assuming that the caption was indeed made by NASA, I put that down to an error by whoever made the caption slide. Such things do happen. Probably converted to British Summer Time instead of GMT.
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Post by gwiz on Apr 25, 2007 16:13:16 GMT -4
I would like to congratulate you all for proving me wrong, it would seem the clever people at various American aerospace engineering works (with the help of the Brits) did manage to produce and aircraft that could compare to the Harrier even if it was some 40 years after. My those goalposts can certainly shift. You raised the Harrier in the context of hover control, and claimed it was too dangerous. Now that this has been shown to be rubbish, the Harrier is suddenly an example of the inability of the US aerospace industry to match their foreign competitors. Has it occurred to you that the reason that the US tried other VTOL concepts that were less successful than the Harrier was that Rolls-Royce already held the patents on the best concept? As to the abilities of the US aerospace industry, it might be significant that although the US had to import Harriers, the UK had to go to the US to get satellites launched.
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Post by gwiz on Mar 29, 2007 10:42:07 GMT -4
The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is a VTOL. The JSF F-35 Lighting II is a STOVL. What do you prefer apples or oranges? Actually, the Harrier is frequently described as a STOVL aircraft too, because that is the way it is usually operated. Vertical take-offs are only possible at low payload or fuel weights, short take-offs are the norm. At the end of an operational mission the weight is normally low enough for a vertical landing, which is the preferred, safer, option for a shipboard landing. This will also be true of the F-35B when it is used operationally, the two aircraft have equivalent capabilities in this respect. What else don't you know anything about, heavenlybody?
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Post by gwiz on Mar 25, 2007 6:31:22 GMT -4
I worked on the new version of the Nimrod towards the end of my career. It was intended to use as much as possible of the old aircraft structure, but with new engines and systems. Those of us on the aerodynamics side wanted to do a new wing design, on the not unreasonable basis that we felt that with current techniques we could now do a lot better than DH did in the 1940s. However, we were told that the resulting new structural design and testing would be too expensive - the plan was to just redesign the inboard wing to fit turbofan engines and re-fit the existing outer wings. By the time the structures people realised that the existing outer wings were not strong enough for the new version, it was too late to do an aerodynamic redesign, so the aircraft now features the expensive new structure inside the 1940s aerodynamic shape.
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Post by gwiz on Mar 23, 2007 11:08:00 GMT -4
It's also hard to improve on a really good design so even if they had wanted to replace the Harrier 20 years ago they probably couldn't have come up with anything that was significantly better then. The McDonnell-Douglas/British Aerospace Harrier II first flew in 1981. It may have looked similar, but it was an fact a complete re-work of the design with few components in common with the original. However, the basic principles of the way it achieved vertical lift and hover control were unchanged. It was certainly better at the ground attack role, but its lower maximum speed didn't help with the air-to-air role, which is why the Royal Navy went for the upgraded Sea Harrier instead.
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Post by gwiz on Mar 21, 2007 16:04:32 GMT -4
If anyone is interested, there is now a Sea Harrier in private hands, the owner has nearly completed the process of getting it a civil registration and intends to take it round the US airshow circuit.
As to how difficult it is to control a hover, in 1976 John Dale, the retiring chief engineer of the Pegasus (Harrier engine) programme at Rolls-Royce, was given a ride in a two-seat Harrier. He wrote up his experience in the Oct 76 issue of the RR in-house magazine:
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