Ship Design Philosophy

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Design Philosophy and China's Strategy Against Trump and America: Trade War, Huawei, 5G—Gen. Robert Spalding

In the US China trade war, what’s behind the Chinese communist party’s (CCP’s) strategy, with Liu He walking away from the trade talks at the last minute? What’s the real relationship between Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and the CCP’s quest for global 5G dominance? And how is this all a much, much bigger issue than just trade?

This is American Thought Leaders and I’m Jan Jekielek.

Today we sit down with General Robert Spalding, who was a Brigadier General in the US Air Force, chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and a Senior Strategic Planner for the White House, at the National Security Council. Now, he’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7VIeykAxsE


1. Ignore the politics, it's an interesting take on design philosophy in general.

2. Captains may want a closed network system, especially when their spaceships are docked at any starport.

3. Most spaceships should reflect the values of their designers and/or societies.

 

[Anonymous]

1. Ignore the politics, it's an interesting take on design philosophy in general.

2. Captains may want a closed network system, especially when their spaceships are docked at any starport.

3. Most spaceships should reflect the values of their designers and/or societies.

Number 3 is just Conways Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Number 3 just naturally happens without prompting. For example If our company has small independent teams, we'll naturally produce a system made of independent modules because each team will work on one. If our company is a monolith, our product will be a monolith.

I don't know what you mean by 2 because of the way it's phrased. I assuming you mean they want a system with a publically published design so they can fix it no matter where they are? When you buy a complex item like an engine that must be field-repaired, you often DO get the plans but aren't allowed to freely share them. But, those plans will tell you what you need to tell the local workshops. So it doesn't really matter unless you want to encourage open engineering to improve your design and can understand how to do this without losing control over it.

Number 1, even if Huawei were not spying - and there is no evidence that they are which has been made available to the public - it would be the victim of sanctions anyway since they're about 6 months to 1 year ahead of everyone else in 5G technology and the west is very, very upset about having lost the lead in mobile data innovation. So that was coming regardless.

 

[Condottiere]

1. Alphabet drives had to be open source, though going by the fact that you have to pay for it, I doubt that any of the computer programmes are.

2. To be fair to the American tech corporations, they may have thought that eventually security will be simulated by software, and that hardware is both costly to develop and would lag behind.

3. No, I'm pretty much stating that spaceship Captains will want no outside connections interfacing with their ship systems.

 

[Anonymous]

1. Alphabet drives had to be open source, though going by the fact that you have to pay for it, I doubt that any of the computer programmes are.

1) There's plenty of commercial open source software that you pay for - look at Redhat.

Note that open source means you have a license to modify and redistribute, not just "you can see the plans". Hardware people, not software, are the biggest opponents of open source.

2. To be fair to the American tech corporations, they may have thought that eventually security will be simulated by software, and that hardware is both costly to develop and would lag behind.

2) I can write a very long essay on this, but I won't.

No-one in big tech is really being lazy or slack about security. The amount of time and energy big tech puts into security is quite significant. Small IOT firms are terrible though.

Suffice to say that perfect security is impossible, and some hardware is old, and this is why everything's busted.

I bought some locks and they can all be picked. Am I angry with the lockmaker for doing a bad job? Of course not. Why do I expect a lock to resist when I have many hours to pick it? A computer isn't magic and doens't have special magic rules to delete hackers.

The biggest problem is user education and the commoditisation of tech. The majority of the big hacks have come from social engineering - phishing and "hey click this free game".

Experiment to demonstrate poor user education: Leave a USB lying around in an office carpark. I guarantee you some idiot will grab it and plug it into something to see what's on it. If they had a firewall to stop exterior intrusion, it just got bypassed.

Example to demonstrate commoditisation of tech: Many forums aren't https. Because it's not run by IT people. Because the tech has been commoditised to the point where non-IT can use it. And they don't update to https when literally every big tech company is saying "do it now or else".

3. No, I'm pretty much stating that spaceship Captains will want no outside connections interfacing with their ship systems.

3) They might want to, or have to accept data connections to their ship.

Navigation. Traffic control. Auto-landing with starport's tractor/repulsor. Formation jumping. The cargo crane at the port being able to know where you want a container put. The starport maintenance autobot that checks the things. Combat datalink (PAAMS or AEGIS).

Also internal connections which should also work during EVA therefore must radiate outside the hull and therefore vulnerable to an attacker with a computer-controlled "radio". For example the solo pilot of a type-S operating the ship from their spacephone while working on a hull repair.

Passenger wifi should be a PHYSICALLY separate network. It isn't on many current airplanes (they use a software wall). Please do not ask me why.

 

[AndrewW]

1) There's plenty of commercial open source software that you pay for - look at Redhat.

Well, your paying for support there not the software itself.

 

[Anonymous]

1) There's plenty of commercial open source software that you pay for - look at Redhat.

Well, your paying for support there not the software itself.

That's what they tell their customers. In reality you use your support allowance dealing with licensing issues. I'm not usually this cynical. It's just something about RedHat.

There's some free open source games that are also sold commerically on Steam or PlayStore for those that can't build the code themselves or want to support the developer. Off the top of my head I can think of Tales of Maj'Eyal (it's a roguelike) but there's others. There might be some other social benefit from Steam integration.

 

[AndrewW]

That's what they tell their customers. In reality you use your support allowance dealing with licensing issues. I'm not usually this cynical. It's just something about RedHat.

The end user is still getting support for paying, thus paying for support. But yeah, that isn't the whole story.

There's some free open source games that are also sold commerically on Steam or PlayStore for those that can't build the code themselves or want to support the developer. Off the top of my head I can think of Tales of Maj'Eyal (it's a roguelike) but there's others. There might be some other social benefit from Steam integration.

Yup, the XChat IRC client also did this, source code was free but you could pay for a prebuilt version for the mickysoft windoze virus (or search and find a prebuilt version you could download for free).

 

[Condottiere]

Manoeuvre and library are free, the first I would have thought required customized tweaking, and the second would get regular updates.

 

[Anonymous]

Manoeuvre and library are free, the first I would have thought required customized tweaking, and the second would get regular updates.

All right let's start this. Where is Riichaar Stalomani?

By free, do you mean "zero financial cost" or "unencumbered by restrictions preventing modification and distribution" ( i.e. open source)?

 

[Condottiere]

I meant free in the Traveller sense, no upfront cost, and no annual maintenance fees.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Hulls and The Aircraft for the Future of Aviation?

What is the future of Aviation? So many have had this question, this includes airports, airlines but most importantly aircraft! In today's video, I take a look at the Flying-V an aircraft that's more efficient than the Airbus A350!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YZ79JyHMo8

Integrate the engines into the airframe, and you might have stealth front and sides.

It's certainly streamlined.

 

[Condottiere]

Space Stations: Colonizing Pluto

Pluto and it's largest moon, Charon, are so far from the Sun and so tiny that they would not seem like promising options for interplanetary colonization. However, they may turn out to be excellent prospects precisely because the double dwarf planet offers some unique options, like space elevators right from surface to surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNRQFKVV68I

1. Seems a natural starport.

2. Water plus low gravity as a transportation medium.

3. One does not simply walk into Mordor.

 

[Condottiere]

Starships: Hulls and How do Star Destroyers Get Refueled? | Star Wars Ships

Have you ever wondered how Star Destroyers get refueled? Learn all about the Altor-class resupply ship, a Star Wars ship larger than Imperial Star Destroyers, and nearly every other ship except the Executor-class Super Star Dreadnoughts. See a complete ship size comparison, and how it was used throughout the Galactic Empire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2N9Wvn9Zj8w

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Vehicles and Why Lunar Landers Had Jumper Cables For Emergencies

The engineers who developed the Apollo program spacecraft really liked to try and think of everything, and that included emergency procedures for almost every contingency. In one scenario an astronaut would leave the Lunar Module with a set of cables designed to transfer power to a stranded lunar module.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGK44fxCstU

And now you know why starships have an air/raft or all terrain vehicle in the hold.

 

[Anonymous]

I don't get why remembering to pack jump cables is so amazing.

 

[Old School]

Lol

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Hulls and Indestructible Coating?!

Used in everything from bullet-proof vests to the walls of the Pentagon, polyurea's strength comes from its long-chain molecules.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWkYRh6OXy8

The crew and the internal fittings might get squashed in a crash, but the hull will remain in tact.

This is useful, since about a third of my starships look like watermelons.

Well, metaphorically, starships are watermelons.

 

[Condottiere]

Starships: Engineering and The Halo Drive

How could we one day travel between the stars with real physics? Perhaps the greatest challenge to interstellar flight is energetics - it takes vast amounts of energy to accelerate even small ships to 20% the speed of light. But what if we could steal that energy from where? Perhaps even a black hole. Enter the "halo drive", a video by Prof David Kipping based on his new peer-reviewed research paper on the subject.

Further reading and resources:
► Kipping, David (2018), "The Halo Drive: Fuel Free Relativistic Propulsion of Large Mases via Recycled Boomerang Photons", JBIS, In Press: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.03423
► Dyson, Freeman (1963), "Gravitational Machines", in A.G.W. Cameron, ed., Interstellar Communication, New York Benjamin Press: https://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/as...
► Breakthrough Starshot homepage: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/i...

* There’s an error in the video at around 8:30, 2 trillion joules is the cumulative energy output of a typical nuclear power station after 2000 seconds, not 20 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqL9CkNxXw

Laser boosters; and we have unlimited fusion energy.

 

[Condottiere]

Starships: Life Support, Engineering and Bill Gates-Backed Carbon Capture Plant Does The Work Of 40 Million Trees

In Squamish, British Columbia, there’s a company that wants to stop climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

It’s called Carbon Engineering, and it uses a combination of giant fans and complex chemical processes to remove carbon dioxide from the air in a procedure known as Direct Air Capture.

Direct Air Capture isn’t new, but Carbon Engineering says its technology has advanced enough for it to finally make financial sense.

The company is backed by Bill Gates — but also by the oil giants Chevron, BHP, and Occidental. These partnerships will bring Carbon Engineering’s tech to market by using the captured carbon to make synthetic fuels and and help extract more oil from the ground.

Will Carbon Engineering’s technology decrease the amount of CO2 in the air, or is it going to prolong our dependence on fossil fuels?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHX9pmQ6m_s

Trees take up too much volume on a spaceship.

A closed system certainly ensures that all the air gets recirculated to a central fan, the carbon dioxide can be captured and dumped into the main fuel tank.

The newly carbonated hydrogen fuel gives an extra pep to the transitional process, and increases the size of the jump bubble.

 

[Condottiere]

Spaceships: Hulls and I Waterproofed Myself With Aerogel!

Aerogel has extraordinary properties but it can be tough to work with. This video looks at modifying aerogels to take advantage of their unique characteristics.

Aerogel’s extraordinary properties are due in large part to its structure. Aerogel is a solid but on the nanoscale it has a mesh or sponge-like structure. The struts of this structure are nanoscale, as are the pores at around 20nm across. This makes silica aerogel incredibly light (it was once the lightest solid but has now been superseded by graphene aerogel), transparent and adsorbent.

An ice-cube sized piece of aerogel has an internal surface area roughly equal to half a football field. Aerogel is used in high end museum cases to regulate humidity. Plus it helps maintain the vacuum on the Mars Insight seismometers - it adsorbs moisture and other outgassed volatiles that come from the spacecraft itself. Proposed uses include as a physical insecticide by ‘drying out insects’ reducing the need for chemical and toxic pesticides.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcdB5bFwio4

Seems the way to go with insulation, and if mass mattered.