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Skim-read the last few pages, but just to quickly answer a few questions (rhetorical or not) about Mike Hughes and his rocket: - This launch wasn't supposed to prove the Earth was flat or not - it was a demonstrator designed to attract publicity and get him funding for his next vehicle, which would have been launched from multiple helium balloons from ~80k feet which in theory would have got him past 100k and officially in space. - It's entirely possible Hughes was grifting the Flat-Earthers to fulfill his own dreams of having his own rocket - he had made one (heavily-debated) previous launch long before he got into the Flat-Earth community - Steam rockets are a valid and very safe way of doing very short flights - probably the most famous one was Evel Knievel's Skycycle, which spookily failed in the exact same way (although with a less fatal outcome) as Mad Mike's rocket. The point of a steam rocket is that it has extremely predictable and safe failure modes - you can (and he did) build one out of a household water heater tank with very little reinforcement. It's easily the cheapest and safest way of building a rocket motor capable of lifting a man, and lets you get all the control and safety stuff done before putting a true rocket motor in. It also gets him round the fact that nobody sells a human-flight rated rocket motor to the general public so his only other choice would have been to roll his own, which would have been *way* more dangerous - Black Knight/Black Arrow, the UK's launch vehicle, used hydrogen peroxide (or rather the decomposition of it into steam and oxygen) as an oxidiser - it wasn't intended to provide thrust on its own in the way things like the Bell Rocket Belt and various Nazi rocket-assisted takeoff devices did. - The blatantly obvious cause of the failure was that he forgot to reset his staging after editing the rocket in the VAB  I think that covers it all. e: The only possible animal snipe for this post: 
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Feb 23, 2020 23:39
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namesake posted:The conclusion is clear - from 2015-17 the attempts at reconcilation with the Labour right were the correct approach because the ideological leanings of party members and the public weren't really known. From the 2017 GE they were demonstrably known and favouring the left. At that point we should have asserted our strength, pushed for open selection to get out the rightwing or force them into silence and gotten Tom Watson fired while refusing to accept the anti-semitism attacks as legitimate criticism, encouraging the development of other leftist media outlets where people didn't have to hear liberals making things up every day and using that drive and effort to embed activism and social political organisations in communities. this seems like a representative statement of a common inthread thesis, so let me lay out the obligatory counternarrative - v far from obvious, especially in retrospect, that the left-wing read of GE2017 that was popular until ~May 2019 (that it was about notionally left-leaning policies* and that voters don't really care about Brexit) was the correct one - * rather hard to square that pitch with McD's strenuous effort to emphasize iron discipline across 2016 - remember that mandatory reselection was debated and failed during Conference 2018 - it got knifed not by the party right, who spent 2018 being largely irrelevant, but instead the left-wing trade unions. Who is this 'we', kemosabe? Wind back to 2018 and recall that elaborate power struggle between one Corbyn faction aligned around Lansman and another Corbyn faction aligned around UNITE veterans - Formby, Murphy, etc. If there is any self-reflection to be had, it must include recognizing that the Labour left in fact controlled all party roles of import after the 2017 NEC elections and attributing a vicious intra-left fight to the right or soft left is questionable at best - on 'alternative media', outlets like Skwawkbox were/are firmly aligned around the UNITE wing; e.g., it reacted to the drama at Conference in a... curious language (compare). - recall that nonetheless the left did manage to push through some triggers. The reselection process then failed to replace the MP with a left-backed candidate - Margaret Hodge and Diana Johnson were both re-selected. It is very hard to see how selection could force a majority sufficient for self-censorship and dutiful silence - a party that voted 40% for the soft left of Owen Smith is going to have a significant fraction of dissenters that will control at least some significant share of MPs - likewise the left did not lack for notables who did publicly advocate that the anti-semitism attacks were illegitimate criticisms, not least of which a former Labour Mayor of London.... one problem is that it's not possible to simply silence the topic; the left does not lack for people who, unprompted, will table I/P issues first (that remark that left-wing Conference rallies have more Palestinian flags than Union Jacks is cutting because it's true). The intensity of feeling on this leads to endless bikeshedding, most visibly demonstrated in the IHRA+ episode in 2018 with its multiple, contradictory messages on the position from an NEC that was supposed to have aligned on it before announcing it (having Lansman pitch it as more rigorous in the Graun even whilst McDonnell was on TV pitching it as less rigorous was, let's say, amusing; at least some of the media frenzy is self-inflicted).
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Feb 23, 2020 23:44
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Lungboy posted:Just in case people have forgotten how bad some of the Blair poo poo was, have a comprehensive list. Ugh that is rage-inducing, but handy to wheel out if someone tries to claim we haven't been living under Tories my entire life  Also, every Labour minister 1997-2010:  Especially Tony Blair. But especially David Blunkett
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Feb 23, 2020 23:46
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ronya posted:this seems like a representative statement of a common inthread thesis, so let me lay out the obligatory counternarrative Lord help me but I agree with basically all of this post. There's some very hallucinatory hindsight being bandied around to justify what happened between 2017 and 2019, and failing to address the mistakes the left of the party made is just buying us a ticket back to 1983 because we're going to end up chasing our tails over stuff like open selection rather than actually keeping at least one hand on the controls.
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Feb 23, 2020 23:50
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I've just had a magnificently the biggest problem there would be that in October the positions were still reversed - the left were confidently calling for an early GE but the centrists in Labour and outside it were resisting it (in favour of that unicorn of the public vote)
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Feb 23, 2020 23:53
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thought - what if the Centrist All-Stars deliberately forced an early election last year to prevent President Sanders from blowing all their THE LEFT ISN'T ELECTABLE bullshit out of the water?
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https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1231706707748950016
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Feb 24, 2020 01:13
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Bobstar posted:Ugh that is rage-inducing, but handy to wheel out if someone tries to claim we haven't been living under Tories my entire life Spinelessly continuing to use refugees and benefits claimants as a kickball while turning to the tabloid press like a contestant on The Prick Is Wrong is a consistent theme though, which directly led into bigotgate. gently caress me I hope there's one Home Secretary in my lifetime who isn't a frothing fascist. goddamnedtwisto posted:- This launch wasn't supposed to prove the Earth was flat or not - it was a demonstrator designed to attract publicity and get him funding for his next vehicle, which would have been launched from multiple helium balloons from ~80k feet which in theory would have got him past 100k and officially in space.
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Feb 24, 2020 01:54
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Lord help me but I agree with basically all of this post. There's some very hallucinatory hindsight being bandied around to justify what happened between 2017 and 2019, and failing to address the mistakes the left of the party made is just buying us a ticket back to 1983 because we're going to end up chasing our tails over stuff like open selection rather than actually keeping at least one hand on the controls. (this butts up against another set of problems; how representative are the big unions, for example, of the contemporary class formations that make up Labour's current and future voter base, and how do their interests intersect, where are the tensions? thinking of stuff like the responses to climate change and so on) What are the options for the membership to fix things? Seems like the power of exit as voters / members - not useful if there isn't a vote coming up, also very binary with no option but to lose all influence if the leadership doesn't do what's requested - or the long, slow march through the institutions when time is kind of a pressing concern. What else do we have? (for reference: this isn't me being defeatist this time, i'd genuinely like to know)
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Feb 24, 2020 02:11
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Guavanaut posted:I'm extremely skeptical how a 5,000ft sea level(ish) flight is a reliable marker of something that would have taken him from an 80,000ft start to the 328,000ft Karman line, maybe he's a lot more confident in how steam expands in low pressure than I am. But also maybe it's for the best that he died in this one rather than spending his last 5 minutes on this earth tumbling wildly but inevitably towards the ground while strapped to a hot water tank. Sorry, to clarify 100k *feet* legally qualifies as "space" in America - the USAF lobbied for that definition so they could start giving out astronaut wings to test pilots in the 1950s (not, as you might suspect, to try and claim they'd beaten the Soviets into space but to try and claim they'd beaten *NASA* into space after they "lost" the X-15 programme to them). That definition was snuck into some random law and is the only actually *legally defined* definition of "space" in America, even though they're signed up to multiple international treaties recognising the Karman line. FWIW NASA themselves still don't recognise either number - after the debacle over the X-15 they chose 50 miles as their definition of space (as an altitude the X-15 could reach but none of the previous USAF test planes could), and they've kept it ever since - the USAF (no doubt very grudgingly) accepts that number too now. If you've not read The Right Stuff, which goes a bit into these sort of shenanigans as an aside to the stories of the test pilots and astronauts themselves, it's well worth looking up.
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Feb 24, 2020 02:32
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hell yeah hope they all die in a fire but going bankrupt is a good consolation!
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Feb 24, 2020 03:13
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I guess this is the main reason why they’re moving into TV and radio then, with the Tories’ help, of course. Unrelated, Keir’s mailout is extremely suspicious. No one at the RLB campaign can work out how he could possibly afford it if he isn’t being bankrolled by some unsavoury character. So he probably is.
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Feb 24, 2020 03:16
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Comrade Fakename posted:I guess this is the main reason why they’re moving into TV and radio then, with the Tories’ help, of course. His whole operation stinks of overproduction and too much cash so yeah, I was thinking that too. Also, good morning UKMT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMuRRXJSU2M Also also what the hell it's snowing. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Feb 24, 2020 |
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Feb 24, 2020 03:22
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Sorry, to clarify 100k *feet* legally qualifies as "space" in America - the USAF lobbied for that definition so they could start giving out astronaut wings to test pilots in the 1950s (not, as you might suspect, to try and claim they'd beaten the Soviets into space but to try and claim they'd beaten *NASA* into space after they "lost" the X-15 programme to them). Putting it at 100,000ft would mean that anyone could sail a gas balloon with a giant camera on it over US soil without it being an act of aggression https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q-U2THOF00 so by setting it at 'no comment' if they ever really wanted to start an international pissing match over Chinese geosynchronous aggression then they've kept that door open. Everyone else seems to have picked some number between 80km and 100km, and I think the UN treaty one got lowered recently owing to some LEO satellite shenanigans. Did Joseph Kittinger ever get any USAF space awards for breaking 100,000ft? More to the point, if Kittinger managed 102,000ft in a big gas bag, why was Mike planning to get to 80 with gas before making the remaining 20,000ft in a flying bathtub that couldn't do more than 5,000 at sea level? The whole thing is more than a bit bananas, and I can't see how the second 'mission' would have turned out any different from the first, just with 15 miles more of the falling bit.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:09
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Hey quick question for the more knowledgeable internet guys here, my nan got phoned by Virgin Media on Friday and agreed to some sort of "mix deal" thing that's apparently cheaper than what she was paying (well, I am but whatever), we had fibre broadband already and this makes that quicker and the phone cheaper apparently. Well she agreed to it because she's been calling her daughter a lot lately and thought it would save some cash, said an engineer was coming round today and then spent the entire weekend getting het up, cleaning parts of the house that an engineer wouldn't even see and such which she always does when anyone is visiting any part of the house (someone wants to read the meter in the garage? Better clean the attic completely). Kinda stressed me out the entire weekend because I really, really needed to just chill but whatever. I took a half day off to be here and they aren't coming today as it turns out, did seem surprisingly quick. Coming some time next week and they're letting us know "by friday", I'm just wondering what an the engineer even needs to do? She seems sure he'll need to pull the cables all out and such whereas I am fairly sure he's just delivering a new hub and tv box, setting those up if he needs to which he probably will since I won't be there when he does come now and then heading off.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:10
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If you're on Virgin already, they'll probably remove the old hub and box, do a bunch of tests on the line to make sure that it meets the minimum standard for what they say they're offering, and then put a new hub and box on. The new hub will still be terrible and so should be put in modem mode with a router if you plan to use it for anything other than basic internet, but should be fine for that.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:21
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Guavanaut posted:The way I heard it is the USA has always been vigorously opposed to any hard legal definition of 'outer space', because that would mean setting a line where things are no longer subject to the laws of nations. Thanks to the Cold War this is already the case - because the Americans were heavily dependent in the sixties on the U-2 and SR-71 for knowledge of what was happening past the Urals, they aggressively lobbied for Open Skies treaties as legal justification for their "freedom" to fly across Soviet territory as long as the flights did not interfere with local air traffic. Obviously it was all a ruse but technically the Americans do not consider a balloon at 100k feet (or any traffic above FL600 - 60k feet) to be meaningfully in their airspace except around certain areas. This has extended to their attitude to surveillance satellites at any altitude - because they have *way* more of them than any other nation (than all other nations combined, for that matter) they don't give a poo poo about Russia or China overflying Area 51 because making noise about that might cause someone to mention the dozens of Hubble-sized telescopes pointing down at them.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:37
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If it's an old house it's possible the engineer will have to trace the cables through the building until where they go outside, we just had a guy round for our vodafone broadband and he had to fix a faulty wire in two places, and needed access to the living room, hallway, and bedroom. But most likely he'll only have to deal with where the phone line comes out of the wall.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:37
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Guavanaut posted:If you're on Virgin already, they'll probably remove the old hub and box, do a bunch of tests on the line to make sure that it meets the minimum standard for what they say they're offering, and then put a new hub and box on. Yeah on Virgin already and it's fast as gently caress as it is, I dunno, this "upgrade" has already been more hassle than it feels worth but I might just hate change. Cheers for the answer, I figured as much just wanted to be sure, she wouldn't take my word for it, she disconnected all the stuff in the living room and moved most of it across the room "to make sure there's nothing in his way" before I got up this morning so not sure a testimony from Something Awful forums poster Guavanaut will convince her either really haha. thebardyspoon fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Feb 24, 2020 |
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Feb 24, 2020 10:39
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I like the idea that sovereign airspace extends infinitely and that you can extrapolate a territorial map of the galaxy from it, and also that depending on the season and time of day that mexico briefly owns mars.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:39
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thebardyspoon posted:some sort of "mix deal" thing that's apparently cheaper than what she was paying (well, I am but whatever) They did the same kind of offer to me a couple of years ago - from 30mb internet only to 100mb with the middle TV package for £2 a month less; the engineer came and set up the TV box (which takes a little while for it to synch and update) and that's about it. They then put the price up by £2 a month before the next billing period (and then again 6 months later) - I've never paid the quoted price in the 10+ years I'd been with VM. Also, keep an eye on the bills, they have a habit of "forgetting" that you've got a discount and charging the full package price - and if you don't cancel the package 30 days before the deal ends, you'll be rolled over onto the full price for what you're getting. (edit) and as above, the hub is still a piece of poo poo that overheats if trying to do anything than be a modem.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:44
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OwlFancier posted:I like the idea that sovereign airspace extends infinitely and that you can extrapolate a territorial map of the galaxy from it, and also that depending on the season and time of day that mexico briefly owns mars.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:46
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A large laser to melt and/or push satellites out of orbit with photon pressure.
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Feb 24, 2020 10:51
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ronya posted:this seems like a representative statement of a common inthread thesis, so let me lay out the obligatory counternarrative The trade union leadership is heavily entrenched and poo poo making them a right-wing block against necessary left wing reforms as you've illustrated here along with GMB nearly sinking the Green New Deal motion at 2019 conference because they wanted to defend fracking and Mark Serwotka making pro-TERF statements in defence of his bigoted wife. gently caress them. The 2017 GE took everyone by surprise but as far as theme and style went the conversation wasn't about Brexit (because the party agreed with it), it was about reinvestment, refunding and doing things in a left wing way. That could and should have been used as an anvil to crush the right wing narrative thereafter if the tools had been developed and used for that purpose. Basically the only way it could have worked was a co-ordinated squeeze from the top and the bottom against the middle rungs of the Labour party and the top wasn't aggressive enough and working with the angry base enough to take over completely and Labour paid the price.
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Feb 24, 2020 11:00
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Can't wait for Prevent obligations to be rolled onto famously non-racist doorstaff under what will probably end up being named Ariana Grande Macchiato's Law or something equally tasteful. 
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Feb 24, 2020 11:05
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The Morning Star is very cool and good, and definitely not utterly indistinguishable from any random right wing shitrag
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Feb 24, 2020 11:08
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It's probably more disappointing that they're good on migrant camps and privatization and austerity deaths and then have like 2-3 issues on which they're powerfully and violently poo poo. At least I expect the Mail to be wrong about everything, and on the 1% of time when they agree with me on something there's a brief moment of 
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Feb 24, 2020 11:36
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I hope this doesn't lead to giving door supervisors legal powers.
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Feb 24, 2020 11:36
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Basically the story of the Labour left 2015-2019 is one where a surprise victory by Corbyn led to a movement forming around him, rather than a movement successfully getting a candidate in place (a la more what's going on with Bernie right now). The question now is how robust was the left movement formed behind Corbyn actually was and what we do with it.
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Feb 24, 2020 11:39
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goddamnedtwisto posted:- Black Knight/Black Arrow, the UK's launch vehicle, used hydrogen peroxide (or rather the decomposition of it into steam and oxygen) as an oxidiser - it wasn't intended to provide thrust on its own in the way things like the Bell Rocket Belt and various Nazi rocket-assisted takeoff devices did. The rocket engine test stands at RAF Spadeadam are pretty cool and somewhat spooky https://www.visitcumbria.com/car/gilsland-spadeadam/
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Feb 24, 2020 11:42
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Spade Adam Spad E Adam Spa De Adam Spa Dead Am Spa Dea Da Dam
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Feb 24, 2020 11:45
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I'd go to Spa de Adam Ant
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Feb 24, 2020 11:46
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I'm blue, Spa De A Da Adam.
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Feb 24, 2020 11:48
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it's pronounced "Spudley", naturally
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Feb 24, 2020 11:49
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knox_harrington posted:The rocket engine test stands at RAF Spadeadam are pretty cool and somewhat spooky My favourite bit of trivia about the Black Knight programme is they did at least some engine testing at Saunders-Roe on the Isle of Wight, firing the engines over the western Solent. The excess steam from the HTP oxidiser, as it cooled, condensed into fairly thick clouds of water vapour, some of which even precipitated out when the clouds hit Portsmouth in the prevailing winds. So while other countries were getting amazing technological and scientific advances from the Space Race, the UK's main spinoff was fog and light drizzle.
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Feb 24, 2020 12:07
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Guavanaut posted:
I think the thing about what happened to Mike was it was a part of a TV show, where they had to see how high up they could get on a budget. Turns out rockets are one area where you don't want to skimp on their budget. I think had he won the show he would have used the prize money/ prestige from winning to go into a second bigger, more expensive project.
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Feb 24, 2020 12:08
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The Question IRL posted:Turns out rockets are one area where you don't want to skimp on their budget. I think the most sensible (given the constraints of the circumstances) thing to do would be to say "I'm going up high with a bunch of gas balloons and then launching a rocket, so I'm going to demo the gas balloons bit for TV" and then done a Lawnchair Larry up to about 10,000ft but with decent ballast release and parachutes as a demonstration of the less insane phase of the plan. Maybe that wouldn't play so well for the cameras. 
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Feb 24, 2020 12:17
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So who's a good candidate for Deputy Leader so I don't vote for a poo poo like Tom Watson again
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Feb 24, 2020 12:17
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Butler and burgon are the best options
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Feb 24, 2020 12:19
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DO we know why Momentum is supporting Rayner over one of those two?
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Feb 24, 2020 12:22
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thespaceinvader posted:DO we know why Momentum is supporting Rayner over one of those two? They’re kinda not anymore. The election related mailings from them are completely silent about the deputy leader race and have been since the vote came back with only 53% support for the rayner endorsement.
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Feb 24, 2020 12:25
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