« "Remember the spider that lived outside your window? Orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer, then one day there's a big egg in it. The egg hatched..." "The egg hatched..." "Yea." "And a hundred baby spiders came out and they ate her." | Main | Oh my god it's full of pixels! »
July 28, 2006
"And as every present state of a simple substance is naturally a consequence of its preceding state, so its present is pregnant with its future."
More help for the lazy sci-fi author: space weapons (or: sp'weapons). via
Powering up a particle beam to the point where it can cut armor is difficult. But there is another option: death by "Bremsstrahlung".
Consider the the x-ray tube in your dentist's office. It is basically an electron beam striking a metal target. Now, what if the electron beam was a particle beam weapon and the metal target was the hull of the enemy spacecraft? A hypothetical observer on the far side of the ship could make a nifty x-ray photo revealing the skeletons of crew members dying in agony of radiation poisoning.
Please note that Bremsstrahlung only occurs with charged particle beams, it doesn't happen with beams of neutrons.
Of course the simplest is no warhead at all, making the structure of the missile an impromptu kinetic kill weapon. According to the first law of space combat, above about a three km/s relative velocity difference a chemical explosive warhead is superfluous. Rick Robinson says that at these speeds the only reason for conventional explosives is for the bursting charge on a shrapnel cloud.
I know all you Battlestar Galactica fans are not going to want to hear it, but looking from a cost/benefit analysis, space fighter craft do not make any sense. Go to The Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy and read the entry "SPACE FIGHTERS"
Rick Robinson said: "Fighters substantially outperforming big ships can be justified, though. Big ships (presumably) need crew habitability for extended voyages, fuel for same, usually an FTL gizmo, and crew including maintenance types, etc. All of which are mass penalties. A fighter is pretty much just drive engine, enough delta v for its mission profile, minimal habitability for a minimal crew, and ordnance carried."
Being a spoil-sport, I said: "The question then becomes why doesn't the designers replace the minimal habitability crew space with some electronics and turn the fighter into a missile bus."
Mr. Robinson answered with: "What a rude question. {grin}". But then he got me, by invoking Burnside's Zeroth Law of Space Combat. SF fans don't want to read about the life and times of a nuclear missile, therefore space fighters will exist.
The spoilerrific Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time (endings, as in final minutes, not final act twists) won my heart by putting Real Genius smack dab in the center. via
Tim Boucher's been researching the occult's relationship with science lately. It's a topic that's been on my mind since reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle this past spring. The overarching theme of that series of novels is that outmoded belief systems do not disappear or die out, but, rather, remain as the hidden (occulted) foundation of new conceptual models. When apocalypses occur, what was before is not destroyed but reborn. Chemistry didn't replace alchemy as much as the former subsumed the latter, as Christ superceded Mithras, as bankers developed from goldsmiths. There's no firm dividing line between epochs. The Royal Society counted alchemists amongst its members from the beginning. As Tim discovered, the RS then moved on to fraternizing with the Freemasons, as they had similar conflicts with the Powers That Be:
We’ve already seen that by championing scientific exploration and discourse in their lodges while it was outlawed most everywhere, the Freemasons must have aroused the ire of the Church. This was, you may recall, only a little over 25 years after the Catholic Church had Galileo tried for heresy for publishing scientific ideas counter to the Bible. With such a clear division between religious authority and what the Masons were doing, it is small wonder that they were painted by Luciferians by the Church, and also seemed to have proudly adopted that symbol of rebellion in some cases of their own accord. The use of Lucifer for them - if you take their talk of dismantling superstition and outmoded religious authorities at face value - worked in their minds as a secular-literary symbol, while for Christians it retained the much more loaded “superstitious” meaning of devil-worship.
This talk too of “destroying the moral and social order” makes sense when you realize the “moral and social order” in question is the authority of Churches everywhere. There is a good Adam Weishaupt quotes about something similar, such as “When man lives under government, he is fallen, his worth is gone, and his nature tarnished.”
Anyway, Tim's now gone a bit further and discovered some fascinating information about the technocrats. Before the term was transformed into a slur lobbed at Dukakis-style liberals, technocracy was a sophisticated ideological movement. They intend to provide societal structure after the collapse of the capitalist nation-state by migrating to a true energy economy.
As near as I can tell, sci-fi author H.G. Wells popularized the term “Technocracy” in his book The Shape of Things to Come. It is essentially a “government by experts,” or more broadly “a government or organizational system where decision makers are usually highly-skilled in fields of management or any other field.”
The term “technocracy” is also referenced in James Burnham’s 1940 book, The Managerial Revolution. I found an essay by none other George Orwell which seems to summarize Burnham’s book.
Orwell in that essay seems to be saying the Burnham believes Nazi Germany and the USSR to be examples of this new “managerial” model of society. That description Orwell gives above though of course sounds like a plot outline for his novel 1984. I am assuming that Orwell penned this essay around the time when Burnham’s book came out, because he is analyzing predictions for the course of the war that Burnham makes, and 1984 (originally titled The Last Man In Europe) wasn’t published until 1948. Burnham’s book is also listed under Orwell’s influences for that novel.
The technocratic movement in the United States was originally begun by Howard Scott, who created the Technical Alliance after World War I, which was one of the nation’s first think tanks. They did some kind of “energy survey” of North America, which I frankly don’t understand and then were disbanded. According to Wikipedia, “In 1933, the group became incorporated in the state of New York as a non-profit, non-political, non-sectarian organization known as Technocracy Incorporated.” And they still exist under that name, Technocracy, Inc. today.
That ying-yang looking thing is what they refer to as their “monad” whose meaning is said to be something like “a balance between a nation’s production and consumption” - presumably through perfect technical-scientific control.
One of the most interesting things I have found is that apparently Peak Oil theory (aka Hubbert Peak Theory) - which has been on everyone’s lips a lot the past couple years - was created by a member of Technocracy, Inc, M. King Hubbert. If that doesn’t interest you, then perhaps mention of their hopes and aspirations will. Seems they want to create something called the North American Technate to replace the current nationalist system in place today.
In my opinion, the next step for Mr. Boucher should probably be a thorough investigation of the Fabian Society, which was founded by Wells and counted Orwell as a member...
Sidenote: for once my title quote is appropriate for every item! The sci-fi weapons are extrapolations of the "present state" of weapons technology, Real Genius' ending is "naturally a consequence" of an off-hand statement early in the movie and literally grows out of a kernel, the theme of the Baroque Cycle is a rephrasing of the very Leibniz quote I chose as the title, the technocrats use Leibniz' monad as their logo (my title quote is from Monadology), and the Fabians pretty much invented the modern notion of progress and adopted gradual evolution as their favored method of action.
Posted by Jon Rubin at July 28, 2006 06:34 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.ubiquit.us/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/223