Hey everybody, sorry this is a day late, I had some last-minute fixes I had to implement on this page, and that set me back a day.
Galaxion
Life. Love. Hyperspace.
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No worries, Tara!
Oh boy. Alex and Fusella always seem to butt heads whenever they interact…
Saaaaay…. any room on the Galaxion? Myrad is looking mighty good today.
No kidding. :/
(sorry for the late reply)
Fixes on an episode about a ship that needs and is seeking fixes. That fits.
If only Colonel Anderson’s arm (or the ship) were in as good a shape as this episode now is.
Maybe I watch too many movies, but isn’t “colonel” a little high for an engineering position on a ship? Should he not be a pencil pusher in an office somewhere overseeing newly built ships? Just asking.
“Pencil pusher in an office” sounds exactly like the type that might oversee an experimental engine test, at least if they’re truly an engineer, instead of a quartermaster or accountant in an engineering group, thus surreptitiously meeting your expectations. The “engineering position on a ship” is in the hands of Anna, who is currently out-of-service.
This might be an exception because it is a special project.
Yeah, I always thought colonels were never “hands-on” due to their high rank. Even if they are a level or two below general/admiral they are still pretty high in the “staff layer”. I do agree that since Anna is downgraded to out-of-action he would be the next logical choice. I wonder what she would say when she gets back to her engine.
Now that I think about it, was it Colonel Sink in “Band of Brothers”? He may not have been in the thick of it but he was also supervising.
Colonel is equivalent to (naval) Captain in rank; you would usually expect a major department head on a ship to probably be a Commander (equiv. Lt. Col.), but I can easily see a Colonel being in charge on a high-profile experimental project.
Jeff Nelson was a Major and Chief Engineer of the Hiawatha, so it is reasonably consistent with what we already know of IPSec’s ranks structure. I would go with the theory that Scavina got someone who was promoted into a senior “shorebound” position or was working in a research department (I’m thinking of John Tiltman at Bletchley Park as an example here – he actually was an infantry lt-colonel, but it wasn’t directly relevant to his work as a cryptographer). In Alex’s case, while his rank probably wasn’t the reason Scavina chose him, she probably did appreciate the fact that he was likely to outrank any other engineers who had to work under him.
What counts as “aft” on a spiral?
The opposite direction where the engine (the inertial/rocket/impulse) is. That is my guess. To be honest, a Nautilus shape makes little sense to me for a large ship.
In spaceships, you have two possible directions for “down”: one that artificial gravity creates and one that engine acceleration creates.
I am assuming the engine acceleration is counted because the artificial gravity might be stacked like a building so there is only one “down”. But what I find more likely is that it is round around the spiral of the shell (so wherever you stand, the center of the ship is under your feet).
Adam, you provided a possible answer to your own confusion as to the nautilus shape – the existence in the G-universe of ‘artificial gravity’. If it turns out that it functions as a point mass of specifiable degree, then just having one ‘focus’ at the center of the ship minimizes lateral stresses and makes calculating real-world accelerations easier as well. The ship behaves like a small planet, basically.
A couple additional advantages:
– It’s a very efficient shape for moving information (ie control) and mass (ie fuel/materiel/personell) around within the ship. The average for any point-to-point distance is low (not as much as a sphere, but close).
– For it’s volume, it presents a small cross section along the fore-aft axis. which may be useful wrt shielding the ship from debris/radiation while underway (we don’t know how their shields work either). Long and thin is better for this particular case, but isn’t nearly as well suited to minimize the above-mentioned intra-ship transport or stress.
Oh yeah, and as a certain Doctor might say – “Nautiluses are cool”…
“Or is it Nautili?”
“Whatever – those twirly-whirly shell thingies they have on Earth. Lovely creatures. A bit chatty sometimes, but still delightful company.”
What I know is that a round shape is good when you need to do lots of maneuvering, like a landing module. A long shape is good for when you are doing lots of long-distance acceleration like if you have a super-powerful rocket engine. Plus you want to put distance between the crew module and the reactor. It’s the design I often see for “realistic” spaceships.
If the Galaxion has artificial gravity field generator (unless the ship is hollow and has a long strip of internally rotating frame), that of course can radically change how’d you make a spaceship of course. Controlling gravity is no small thing.
Maybe pushing would be easier than pulling.
Is Ƶ more comfortable for you to write than Z?
Not according to the door buzzer.
You primarily do that in handwriting where an “s” can be confused for a “z”, thus making “z” more distinctive and less ambiguous. The same reason why some character sets have cross zeroes, so as to not confuse them with the letter “o”.
The comics look hand-lettered and I think the habit transferred.
I would think that one would be far more worried about confusing the letter “Z” with the numeral “2″ than with the letter “S”…
Never seen anything wrong with the stroked Zed myself… I’ve seen it in use in europe quite a bit. And its similar enough not to be confusing, unlike, say, that peculiar German sz (ß).
Umm, hope everything’s alright on the home front.