From: alizard@pil
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Space, the final frontier
Date: Fri, 01 Jan 93 20:12:06 PST

Re: Re: Space, the final frontier
 
> From: boylan@sltg04.ljo.dec.com (Steve Boylan)
> Newsgroups: alt.pagan
> Subject: Re: Space, the final frontier
> Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 21:42:31 GMT
> Well, let me see . . .  Grabbing an envelope out of the trash, 5 mi/sec.
> works out to 8,046 meters/sec.  Can we be friends here, and round that
> off to 8 km/sec.?  At 1 g, you'd need to accelerate for 821 seconds
> to reach that velocity (about 13 minutes).  The length of your railgun
> would therefore have to be 6,605,602 meters long.  Yes, that's six
> MILLION meters - 6,606 kilometers, or about 4,000 miles.  It's
> 3,000 miles from Boston to San Diego.
> Let's be a bit more realistic.  You'd probably want to hit something
> like 10 g for cargo.  That means you can hit your target speed in
> 82 seconds (a minute and a half).  The length of your railgun would
> only have to be 658,952 meters, or about 400 miles.

Actually, being moderately lazy, I fed all of this (basic motion /
acceleration equations, assignments of numbers for costs, and variables) into
a spreadsheet for analysis. One major variable I used was acceleration in
gravities. Run the same calculation for 25 gravities and see what track
length you get... you should be delighted by the results. The rail gun I
envisioned was a freight only vehicle... as I suspect that subjecting people
to 25 Gs is a wonderful way to ruin their day. I will have the spreadsheet
in question available sometime soon, it had to be converted from Mac-Excel
to DOS-Lotus to work with the current DOS clone I'm using, perhaps I'll
uuencode it and post it. (it's a lot shorter than some of the Postscript
posts I've seen) 
As for impugning the motivations of the aerospace scientists who responded to
Ashley's questions, 
1. Anyone with any clue as to the history of technology knows that the burden
of proof for a blanket statement that "it can't be done" is on the person who
makes it, no matter what his qualifications are. 
2. The entire corporate culture of the aerospace companies in terms of
propulsions systems is jet/rocket. As is most of the expertise in this area
that they have to sell.  If the primary gateway into space becomes a railgun
or laser launch system, these companies go out of business and most of their
employees become unemployed. (would YOU like to be an expert on high volume
cryogenic fuel pumps the day ground is broken on a orbital launcher system?)
3. The record of the aerospace industry from a taxpayer standpoint isn't all
that great. The megascandals in military procurement come out of there...
remember Morton-Thiokol and the O-Rings that blew up the shuttle? (an example
of engineering ethics ... a bad one... they knew better and they let it go up
with people in it anyway) Or look into the ACTUAL performance of high tech
military applications in Desert Storm. (number of SCUDS from mobile sites
actually taken out = 0 , the body of opinion that says that Patriot missiles
actually increased the damage from SCUD missiles) Or look at the SDI (Star
Wars) program. I once attended a presentation given at Wescon by the SDIO
(Strategic Defense Initiative Organization) on plans and upcoming contracts.
Of the three hours I spent at the presentation, here is the software section
of the presentation in ITS ENTIRETY:
"The existence of large scale expert systems used by telephone companies
demonstrates the feasiblity of designing the type of software required to
control these systems is feasible." (at the time, the SDIO was talking about
computer programs to run "Star Wars" in the 2-10 MILLION lines of code range.
Code that could NOT be run as a whole for testing, code largely generated by
automated program generators which are only as strong as the assumptions built 
into them...) Not a single person laughed or questioned this. 
There is a strong body of opinion in the engineering community as a whole that 
questions the competence of the mil-aerospace community, and strong doubts as
to whether these people can function in a competitive civilian environment of
project deadlines, 60 + hour workweeks, etc.

I'm saying that these people can NOT tell us to "Go back to reading Analog" 
and expect us to accept them blindly as competent Authority figures.

If they've got "show-stoppers" , major theoretical problems, unsolvable
technological problems, etc. to substantiate their viewpoints, let's see some.

I'm waiting.
                                                 A.Lizard
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