| Tuesday,
March 7, 2006
Subject: March 6, 2006 Chaos
Manor Column
Jerry,
I just finished reading
your latest column. I always like reading about your upgrades and
building new systems. I was surprised to hear that you did not have to
re-register Windows XP after changing your motherboard. I read that
Microsoft said changing a motherboard meant you had a new system and that
Windows XP had to be re-registered or a new copy had to be licensed. I find
that bogus since the situation you just experienced is exactly the argument
against their reasoning. Have you heard anything about this and were you
surprised you did not have to re-register XP?
regards,
Mike Wirshup
UNISYS ClearPath MCP Support
I heard this early on, but when I asked
Microsoft the answer was "probably won't make any difference." I have,
over time, changed systems pretty thoroughly without having to
reregister or buy a new copy. I've changed hard drives, mother boards,
CPU -- but not all at once. I have yet to require new registration. Eric
has had some of the same experiences, and a couple of times has had to
telephone, but he does a lot of rebuilding. He's never had to buy a new
copy.
============
Subject: planetary engineering?
Jerry,
There's an interesting story at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4762720.stm about the
possibilities of planetary engineering, space-based and surface, as a
response to unwanted climate change. Some of the responses are amusing - one
fellow said, after running models of a Teller-Wood planetary sunshade
proposal, "Much to our chagrin, it worked really well."
Some are less so: "The knowledge that we maybe could
engineer our way out of climate problems inevitably lessens the political
will to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions," observes David Keith from
the University of Calgary in Canada. So, we shouldn't even talk about it
lest Green oxen get gored? My. Interesting mindset revealed there.
Henry Vanderbilt
Chagrin. That too indicates a mind set. None
of this is surprising.
Note that we are in for a solar storm, and
with lots of sun spots there is increased insolation of the earth. But I
have heard not one word about the possibility of increased global warming.
But if in fact global warming is due to
increases in the solar constant, some kind of planetary engineering is the
only way out: reducing CO2 will bankrupt us without solving the problem.
==============
Subject: Watch Out John
Tyler, Here Comes Jimmy Carter
FYI, Dr. Pournelle...
http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?
Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&
Path=NYS/2006/03/03&ID=Ar00103&Mode=HTML
Or
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110008044
Quoting:
"President Carter personally called Secretary
of State Rice to try to convince her to reverse her U.N. ambassador's
position on changes to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the former
president recalled yesterday in a talk," reports the New York Sun:
"Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to
ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was
undermined by America's ambassador, John Bolton. "My hope is that when the
vote is taken," he told the Council on Foreign Relations, "the other members
will outvote the United States." . . .
"The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with
a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included
the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified
American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from "powerful"
countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and
Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace
the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more
accountable Human Rights Council.
"One of the things I assured them of was that
the United States was not going to dominate all the other nations of the
world in the Human Rights Council," Mr. Carter said. However, on the next
day, Mr. Carter said, Mr. Bolton publicly "demanded" that the five permanent
members of the Security Council will have permanent seats on the new council
as well, "which subverted exactly what I have promised them," Mr. Carter
said.
"So I called Condoleezza Rice and told her
about the problem, and she said that that statement by our representative
was not going to be honored," he said. But despite Mr. Carter's assessment
that there are "a lot of people" in Washington who oppose Mr. Bolton on the
Human Rights Council, Mr. Bolton's opposition to the proposed new structure
became American policy.
"Carter's working to subvert U.S. diplomacy is
nothing new; but his apparent belief that he can speak on behalf of the
country while doing so is rather stunning.
"It must drive him crazy to know that John
Tyler was a member of the Confederate Congress when he died in 1862; that
makes it hard for Carter to surpass Tyler as the most anti-American
ex-president in history. But we doubt he'll ever stop trying."
Charles Brumbelow
But we are in an era of limits and
afflicted with national malaise, and we must not infuriate the Soviets lest
they bring down the world in one great Gotterdammerung. Some of us recall
15% inflation and huge unemployment and the Carter stagflation.
============
Subject: WWII in color
Hi Jerry.
Stumbled across some interesting WWII photography at
this website:
http://www.ww2incolor.com/
Cheers, Mike Casey
===========w
ON BORON fuels and
spaceplanes
Dr. Pournelle,
It seems to me that the most important point to come
out of the article and subsequent discussion on this secret TSTO system is
talk of a newer, more advanced rocket fuel made of a "Boron Gel". I have
never heard that discussed before, but is this not the key point to the
whole discussion? Building a mother ship/drop plane system is easy. We have
been doing that since the 40s. But a fuel that gives you the "Bang for the
Buck" necessary to get both the space plane and a useful payload into
orbit.... That's something new. Forget about the ship itself. Rutan can
probably make a better one. I want to know about the fuel it uses. To that
end, I found this:
http://aerodyne.technion.ac.il/~rocketw3/gel_propellants.htm
and these:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6652682.html
http://www.mdatechnology.net/techsearch.asp?articleid=604
That's all a quick search turned up. Does anyone know
anything about these types of propellants?
Matt Kirchner Houston, Texas
I know a little about spaceplanes. I was on the
Boeing Dyna-Soar proposal team as well as being involved with WS-110a, a
proposal that Boeing lost to North American. North American was a fighter
company, and the idea that Sac's Factory would lost a major bomber to a
fighter company was bizarre, but North American won fair and square. WS-110a
became the B-70, which, alas, flew at a nearly optimal speed and altitude
for being intercepted by the USSR. On the other hand, the existence of even
a few B-70's required an enormous expense in interception forces. Strategy
of technology in action, but that's a story for another time.
I sent a note to an expert on building rockets:
> Can you write a short answer to this for posting with the letter?
> I recall that the stuff was awful and dissolved the engines, but perhaps
my
> memory is faulty. I think we went back to Jp4 because the engines couldn't
> handle the boronates.
With this reply:
This whole episode is discussed thoroughly, and well,
in John Clark's book "Ignition!". As he says there, he wanted to title the
chapter on boron "The Billion Buck Boron Boo-Boo". Boron looks good on
paper, but in practice, use as a jet fuel proved to be problematic. Of
course the compounds were horribly toxic -- Edwards is still cleaning some
of the old boron test sites up. But the real killer was the properties of
the oxides present after burning boron. When you burn a hydrocarbon, you get
water, CO, and CO2, along with N2 and trace nitrogen oxides when burning it
with air. All of this nicely leaves the turbine. When you burn boron, you
get boron oxide (B2O3), which, at jet engine temperatures, is a very viscous
liquid, which gummed up the turbines, and of course on shutdown it
solidifies with very unpleasant results. If I recall correctly, combustion
efficiency in rockets left something to be desired, but that is the kind of
problem which can be overcome with sufficient effort. I don't have my
reference copy of "Ignition!" handy to check.
Jeff
There is more in Big Jim
Oberg's report here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11691989/
We learned from NASP that you
do not want to spend much time in hypersonic atmospheric flight. That is the
problem with an air-breathing "mothership" approach, which at one time was
seen as the best two stage to orbit system concept. It was used in an Arthur
C. Clarke novel and in several of my early works, because it seems so
logical: fly off a runway, get to as fast and as high as you can using air
for oxidant, then launch the orbiter.
The problem is that to get to
hypersonic speeds you have to fly at hypersonic speeds, and scooping in
oxidants requires that the leading edges of the wings and the air scoops
have to be made of Unobtanium. For the concept to work as originally
conceived you need exotic fuels, and they are also a chimera.
This doesn't mean you can't use
an airplane as a lower stage, but if you do, the goal is not to get speed,
but altitude. Velocity can even be a negative factor since separation gets
more complicated. Max Hunter convinced me that vertical takeoff and landing
is better for SSTO ships, and you don't want wings on them; but there is a
respectable alternate opinion involving a mothership, high altitude
separations, and such like.
I would like to see X projects
funded by USAF in both the best VTOL ship we can build (my SSX, a 600,000
pound GLOW ship with at least 12 engines; build the best one we can build,
and fly it a lot) and the best Two Stages to Orbit mothership/orbiter we can
build and fly that a lot, and see just where we are and where we need to go.
My guess is that both concepts will work, and it will depend on the mission
as to which one you want to use.
==========
More on boron fuels:
The following is abstracted from "Ignition! An
informal history of liquid rocket propellants", by John Clark, Rutgers
University Press, 1972. Chapter 10, p. 120ff
-- excerpts follow --
Fifteen years ago people used to ask me "What
*is* an exotic fuel anyway?" and I would answer "It's expensive, it's got
boron in it, and it probably doesn't work" I had intended, originally, to
entitle this chapter "The Billion Buck Boron Booboo" ...
Boranes are unpleasant beasts. Diborane and
pentaborane ignite spontaneously in the atmosphere, and the fires are
remarkably difficult to extinguish. ... Also, they not only are possessed of
a peculiarly repulsive odor; they are extremely poisonous by just about any
route....
The results, not to put too fine a point on it,
did not encourage euphoria. The performance was dismally bad -- far below
theoretical -- and solid glassy deposits appeared in the throat .. These
consisted, apparently, mostly of B2O3, but appeared to contain some
elemental boron as well. This was a sure indication of poor combustion, and
was not encouraging...
.. And then the whole program was brought to a
screeching halt. There were two reasons for this .. The second lay in the
fact that the combustion product of boron is boron trioxide, B2O3, and that
below about 1800 degrees this is either a solid or a glassy, very viscous
liquid. And when you have a turbine spinning at some 4000 RPM, and the
clearance between the blades is a few thousandths of an inch, and this
sticky, viscous liquid deposits on the blades, the engine is likely to
undergo what the British, with precision, call "catastrophic
self-disassembly". All sorts of efforts were made to reduce the viscosity of
the oxide, but to no avail. The [boron fuels] just could not be used in a
jet engine. The plants were put on stand-by, and eventually sold for junk.
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