If there's one conference this year to attend

It's the singularity summit. I write about the singularity, and I read about it in books from the likes of Charlie Stross. Did you read Accelerando or Stephen Baxter's Ring and pause to think about the implications? How about Tipler's Anthropic Cosmological Principle or Physics of Immortality? Even, if I may, Shane Williams and Sean Dix own, somewhat less "ambitious" Orphans trilogy? What could be more interesting than a Summit whose sole purpose is to discuss the prolonging human life, to escape this moribund and earth-bound existence for something truly remarkable.

Provided I can physically make it, I'll be doing my damnedest to attend. So we're looking for friends to maybe put us up in New York and taking the Acela up. I can think of a few of you who could help us out there.

Wifey will probably be coming along to push me about a wheelchair as I'm still not able to walk or sit quietly in a conference chair for the entire time (which isn't especially different, on reflection, from my time at SC05 or any of the other conferences I attended in 05/06, and I was nominally uninjured back then).

The conference is important because Humanity needs to be driving towards the singularity. I understand that people are scared; it's only natural to think of post-humans as terrifying. However, it is inevitable. We are going to get there. Let's make sure we get there in a way that's safe. Let's nurture computer intelligence that doesn't immediately become SkyNet or Agent Smith. Instead, let's focus on a more Tiplerian brain-computer-interface and the simulation argument.

Death, folks, is so outdated.

Fuels, briefly

I should look into plasticizing agents and epoxies. I can probably make a cast of any arbitrary shape I like and fill it with a liquid that subsequently solidifies, and use that as a core for the solid element of a hybrid rocket. Immediately coming to mind is a combination of coal and aluminum (maybe with magnesium?) in epoxy. The form would have more than enough energy to be useful when burned with an oxidizer. I am concerned though, as I've been reading about hybrid rockets being amenable to throttling. I can't think of an especially good way to stop-restart an already-running hybrid when the fuel itself is as cantankerous as aluminum and magnesium. Coal, sure.

Maybe it would be effective to have exactly the opposite of the previously mentioned "igniting fluid": carry a small supply of halon that can be flushed into the monster to turn it off, and use varying oxidant supply for throttle control. You'd probably also have to be careful with nozzle design if you want throttle control that's better than "on" and "off". I'm not sure how some of these really ugly fuels (benzene...) were "turned off" and restarted, as they apparently are capable of doing. We have enough trouble putting those sorts of fires out without the presence of an oxidizer.

Oh, wow; actually I think I have the idea for how to do it. Not ready to share it here yet, but I think all the pieces work.

Irony

short: fentanyl or orthopedic devices as analgesic; discuss.

My surgeon told me today he wants me off of the fentanyl and that I need to wean off the back brace. Okay, I guess. When I think about it, though, I'm kind of startled that, given the choice — between fentanyl and the back brace — I'll pick the brace every single time. I suppose I was expecting that I'd want to make sure my supply of fentanyl was uninterrupted, since I use it to stop pain. But, that's also what I use the back brace for.

The difference between the two is important. The brace, while it doesn't give me any euphoria (it's hardly true that the fentanyl gives me any euphoria anymore, either), I am 100% sure it will work, every time I use it. There's no tolerance, no fussing with the pharmacist or scheduling a visit to the doctor's office. It prevents me from reinjuring myself, and it helps me walk around, drive, even sit in a chair, as though I had not sustained any injury. Granted, I think that's what the fentanyl is supposed to be doing, nominally, too, but I guess I've read enough about opiates or drugs in general that I expected that on some level, my body would demand the drugs more than relief from pain.

It's both pleasing and a little unnerving. Pleasing because that tells me I'm not kidding myself about why I'm using the drugs; I have felt, every time I've been given a strong narcotic for pain, that it was expressly for pain, and not to feed some addiction. The fact that I get injured a lot gives me just enough self-doubt to think, am I really that prone to injury? Is it possible that I am getting this injured, this often, on purpose, to sustain a drug habit?

Normally, I would have scoffed and said there was no chance, and even acted offended at the suggestion. But, when one looks at the track record, it would be easy to make a case for it. And so, the nagging bit of doubt. I hadn't considered the brace's place in this equation. The problem with the brace is not addiction or withdrawal, or cost or licensing or anything as sordid as any of that. The problem is that, while keeping my body fairly safe by supporting my spine, it provides support that I'd normally be providing with the muscles in my back and on my sides (the obliques). By using the brace all the time, I ensure that those muscles will atrophy as they're not needed, and any time I am not using the brace, I'll be in pain because those muscles aren't up to the task.

And now the unnerving: the brace is so effective at preventing pain and injury, it makes me actually stop and think, can I just wear the brace forever? I mean, I have kept all the other orthopedic devices from previous injuries and accidents: knee and wrist braces, et cetera. But, isn't that what I had expected to feel for the fentanyl? That since it is so effective at blocking pain, that I'd actually consider using it in perpetuity?

Well, actually, no, I would not consider using fentanyl in perpetuity. Because, frankly, it's shitty as a pain reliever compared to the brace. It has additional side effects like fucking with my sleep schedule and the suspicious look from pharmacist and nurse alike (clearly, this guy has been using the patch too long, we have to get him off of it); features I really don't like. The brace, by contrast does not. I have also developed tolerance to the fentanyl so that, not only am I still taking the drug, I am taking the drug and pain is breaking through it ("breakthrough pain"), making me want more of the drug, and that makes me uncomfortable. There's a checks-and-balances thing going on whereby I am thinking to myself, I don't like that feeling, and I recognize it as dependence. I guess.

So, between the two, I'd prefer to use the brace, to not be given fentanyl again, and to have the sure-shot prevention of pain and injury that is the brace. But, I can't have that either, and the only way I'm going to get from here to some pain-and-injury-free future is hard work at physical therapy, and not allowing accidents like that (or at least, doing my best not to cause them) to happen again in the future. But, for the meantime, I'm cutting back on the fentanyl, back from a hundred mikes down to seventy-five, and I have to cut back on my use of the brace, too. I wish I had known the brace would be this much of a problem down the road; I'd have stopped using it earlier. Having the brace to sustain me while I tapered off fentanyl, or the fentanyl while I tapered off the brace would have made my life a lot easier. Now, I have to taper off both, and that more or less guarantees I will be spending some of the next month in (perhaps substantial) pain.

Drat.

Minor disappointments

short: I have been doing a lot of thinking about fuels, oxidizers, bypass ratios, bleed valves, and making use of enormous wings to get enormous lift. You may find yourself yawning already.

I stated previously I wanted an aircraft that was safe, should it thump a landing. As it's unmanned and small (when compared to even fairly small commercial passenger jets), this means the fuel has to be safe. I don't really like the idea of carrying JP-8 or JP-7 around with me, as I have seen JP-8 aircraft "thump" and explode into a large fireball. While I never saw pictures or evidence of JP-7 aircraft losses, at least a couple are mentioned, and they don't look real safe, either.

Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is a great fuel and could quite easily be purged deliberately from the vehicle, and it would certainly escape quite quickly from the vehicle, should it break apart. Extensive testing by P&W engineers found that it was hard to get LH2 to actually ignite, because it is so light and tends to disperse so quickly. If you consider the size of the aircraft, let us say a wingspan of 16', it almost sounds like the best route to work with (and in fact, the J58 and the "304" Suntan engine are — necessarily — very similar in operation) because you can't really keep too much in the wings, and the fuselage contains a lot of "open space" to keep it light. Even then, however, I'm not sure how much LH2 you'd be able to store and whether that would get you to San Francisco from San Diego (this is a common unit of measurement for Californians — how long does my commuter flight take? how much will it cost?).

While the primary problem with LH2 as a fuel is distribution (NASA has documented this extensively), but other obstacles, such as range and fuel containment in the vehicle, also crop up. (I am aware of the Rex engines; I intend to discuss them in a bit after I've digested exactly what they can do; so far it seems like the Rex 2 and Rex 3 were designed to be hammer-of-god fast, without much regard for fuel consumption)

Unfortunately, while methanol burns at 740° F or so (and is thus suitable for a liquid fuel), one of the other functions of fuel in many jet engines is lubrication. This is similar in concept to the 2-stroke piston engine. You guessed it, methanol is not going to cut it as a lubricant (come to think of it, I don't recall the specifics of the 304 Suntan engine's guts so I'm not sure what they used in their engine).

It seems that it may just be best plan to burn diesel, but keep my eyes out for other possibilities. In theory, anything that burns diesel well should be able to burn any of the alcohols. Lubrication has been partially solved by the use of ball bearings (even in axial-flow turbines!); in fact one such configuration actually uses gold-plated (treated?) bearings, which use the gold itself as a lubricant once the engine reaches sufficient temperature. Sure, it sounds great, but it's a lot of money, and while there are a few patents on these sorts of things, you have to try it in your own lab to determine whether it's right for your engine. This means you need to have lots of venture capital, or Uncle Sam must like you a lot. And those liquid-metal, ball-bearing turbojets? The really clever solution? Well, it's great if you never have to use it again, and all the engines with this sort of setup are part of a cruise missile of one sort or another.

On that last notion, it is kind of depressing to note that DARPA presently has very little interest in high-altitude, high-efficiency, or even long loiter engines. This says, to me, that they've pretty much got what they want in that regard. If that's the case, the principle of what to do with an air-breather that will fly above 100,000' comes down to two fields, neither of which will make anyone rich.

First, there are the sail planes (sometimes called power gliders). These are enormous wingspan glider-form aircraft, which people have affixed an e.g., TJ-100 to the fuselage. An example of this would be the air show crowd-pleasing Super Salto glider. The second, likely more far-fetched than a 100,000' "high altitude sailplane community," would be to get someone like Cirrus on board. Their Vision aircraft would benefit enormously from a higher-efficiency, smaller form factor engine. I could see an aircraft like the Vision equipped with two such engines attached at the fuselage much like the T-37 Tweet. I would imagine you could extend the range of the aircraft, give it a higher service ceiling, or even dramatically increase the power available to the pilot (without having to use an afterburner, but still very much at the expense of fuel consumption).

Would Cirrus be interested in building a twin-engine Mach 1.5-ish plane for commercial customers? My guess is probably not.

an english source for a japanese novel

Looking for a translation of 黒い樹海. 

Lakes of fire

Having an oxidizer and a fuel that is some large portion water has its advantages. First, the water/fuel portion can be used in standard internal combustion (cf. aquamist) and second, steam is actually a pretty good propellant under very high pressures. This mandates a clever nozzle (clever is easy to get ahold of these days; a lot of the work's already been done), and a fuselage that can withstand the pressures and temperature of, essentially, a steam turbine (which as I understand can be fucking enormous). There's also a kind of tricky benefit about a quotient of water in your fuel: if you have steam in your exhaust, it tends to aggregate the particulate that comes out of the nozzle. Especially with the solid polymer ("black plastic tube") rockets, there's a lot of outright filth that just comes flying out of them. Instead of riding an inky column to 15,000' and perpetrating a sonic boom, why not have, as my wife does, a pink and black rocket that has a white fuel plume? In this case, the steam acts rather like a particulate trap (and flapper valves among other things) in a modern turbo-supercharged diesel where the huge black clouds of "smoke" are actually particulate.

But there's always a catch. The problem is getting the water to catch fire. Everyone knows Bacardi 151 burns, but the magic number is 500°F. So 76% ethanol isn't going to cut it. A slurry of water, pyrodex, and methanol or ethanol would probably burn when coaxed properly (I have grave concerns about a thumped landing with a hybrid liquid vehicle, and I want to make sure that if it lands ten feet from a kid, her biggest fear is going to be fiberglass pieces, not potassium perchlorate or any of the nitrates. I want it safe). I can also foresee a second sort of "oxidizing primer," a liquid as well, which serves to both ignite the fuel, and push the primary oxidizer out through the nozzle; this has been documented in Patent 5582001. Credit goes to Bradford, Kniffen, and Mckinney, way back in 1996 or so:

I use the image here for illustration of the system. Note between the pressuring gas (smaller sphere), and the oxidizer (in this case, their preferred oxidizers were LOX – what else? – and H2O2 – again, what else?) there's a tiny sphere with "igniting fluid."  They used powdered metals, like magnesium and aluminum in their fuel (the "crosshatched" section of the combustor here), which is I guess less "cheating" than using pyrodex. Unfortunately, it "eroded" their nozzles, and wasn't much of a success. But I'll guarantee you that the pyrodex is going to go off right each and every single time.

It looks like their "ignitor fluid" draws on a patent by Altman David and Barnet R. Adelman, in 1966, #3,234,729. It looks like the "third fluid" guys preferred benzene, but they just sort of throw out "metal alkoxide," and more or less leave it at that. Great way to do it, but it's pretty unfriendly stuff (you could get your fuel started with flourine too, but would you want to?).

What I find curious about this whole business is that this is a very poor deep-space propulsion system. In 1966, they surely should have known there were (and still are) problems with stopping and starting solid fuel rockets (which most hybrids are), and that they weighed a whole lot, and just taking LOX and LH2 was the way to go (and indeed, "the way they went.") So it's a neat motor for generating a lot of thrust, safely. Even tremendous amounts of thrust and commercially-respectable lift (Scaled and SpaceDev being prime examples) is attainable with these engines. But their utility is limited by their weight, and thus at best can serve as "strapped-on" rockets or single-use-recovery-optional "tubes" of monstrous dimensions for getting things into orbit.

Also worth noting is that the team at Scaled weren't stupid. They didn't dump the spacecraft at 50,000' because it was cool, they did it because that first 50,000' is really, really hard to push through. Watch a shuttle launch. You'll see this:

Getting through that air, even with those monstrous SRBs and the engines on the Orbiter, you are pushing through all that air and humidity and ickiness that you don't have in space. So, perhaps if we're ever able to mine large amounts of (or manufacture large amounts of) material like this in orbit, or in the deeper system, it will be a practical "getting around" engine. But for now, it's low-lift, very high noise (especially, for some reason, the alcohol ones; this part I don't understand) rocket that could probably get your droid to the moon, but the hybrid rocket will never be the safe lift vehicle that can carry people, single-stage-to-orbit unless somebody does something stupendous.

And I'm not saying I'm going to do anything stupendous or anything like that, but I just might do something, you know, stupendous.

What a way to waste a day

My desktop is spewing into syslog all this python garbage because I bumped the version of the system python, thinking 2.5.0 and 2.5.2 couldn't be that different. Well, different enough that Apple's use of twisted.web2 is now broken, and I've been at the fix for four hours INSTEAD OF FUCKING WORKING. Thanks, guys.

I think it may be time for an additional weblog

short: do I split this into weblogs? this is becoming cumbersome to manage, information-wise.

Loki's magnificent image of a 38mm reloadable (not hybrid) motor. Hopefully, my saying they have an incredible engine lineup, including their absolutely perfectL1400 motor (for 54mm mounts) will assuage their concerns over my paltry deeplink — and I gave credit, and I pointed at them, not just the image. But my goodness, just look at the chart for that L1400:

I spend so much time these days talking about flight, rockets, variations on jets (e.g., axial/centrifigual flow compressors) and turbofans, and so on, I feel like those who stop by to see "how is Alex doing?" might get the wrong impression.

White Label Aerospace of Australia recently told me I am not allowed to participate in their Google Moon Prize because my knowledge, even if it's UNCLAS and I do it on my own time, still crosses ITAR rules, making me, effectively, an arms dealer for "the enemy." Australia, in this case.

On the one hand, they have a point. If I can build a rocket to get to the moon (land a rover there is such a different story; I could thwack that planetoid pretty good), that means I can develop a rocket that can hit anywhere on Earth, ♁. With the relatively cheap means of propulsion out there, and the entirely COTS nature of the products, I can't really blame BATFE for being worried. Most of the rockets capable of hitting the moon can be put together for less than ten or twenty thousand dollars, and much cheaper if you're willing to cut corners on safety. These are the people that wear bomb vests, right? If I were foolish enough to use an oxidizer like LN2O and kerosene or LNG, a rocket weighing a few hundred pounds could easily (read that again, for emphasis) get above 50,000 feet.

On the other things are two factors which make regulation of (repeat after me: model rockets) silly (or even their rudimentary guidance systems... seriously, have you read the ardupilot code?) are that first, all this is available both COTS and in "plan form" on the web the way us old farts used to distribute plans for making beige, red, and blue boxes. So if you live in Tehran and you want to make a new rocket to hit Esfahan, just cause you're a crazy Ayatollah or some shit like that, you can do it in your damn living room with model glue, epoxy, some interwebs, and Fedex (you better tip that poor bastard for bringing you a delivery in your we-shoot-students state, dick).

The other factor is control surfaces really suck hard at rocket-sized speeds. This means that if you want to actually have a powered descent phase, rather than a "drop and pray" phase (which is a whole hell of a lot easier to intercept), you have to have access to software that, AFAIK, is pretty much only of interest to a very small group of people, and you're probably not one of them.

Supersonic airflow is a real bitch. But I think I've got it figured out now. All you need (Dear Mossad: I am not Gerald Bull. You know he is dead. But the cat, as far as knowledge goes, is out of the damn bag. My wife would miss me if I had a couple .22's put into my medulla oblongata, okay, so just chill the fuck out) is to make sure your payload, whether it's something to put into orbit (at a lot less than $10,000/lb) or a NBCR-WMD type device, and you don't really care about orbit, that it doesn't care about sustaining anywhere from a low five-to-ten g's to as many as 588 g I've seen on cots products. If I can have those constraints (and the US Military gave Dr. Bull that level of freedom), then I can launch rockets into space I would say almost trivially. Certainly trivial when concerned for the amount of money they spent on designing base-bleed projectiles, sabots for the martlets, to say nothing of the rocket-assisted shells or cannon themselves. Or, let's be frank, getting shot in the back of the fucking head. That is to say, if the Mossad or anyone else is getting their panties in a twist about this, it's because they don't understand the situation.

And here's what has skidmarks in everyone's drawers: the rocket itself is smaller than any of the Patriot or HAWK batteries we use for taking out incoming rockets. Hamas has seen "great success" with their primitive-as-nails Katyushas... Imagine if some of those (democratically elected, religiously fanatical, genocidal, misogynistic-yet-breeding-like-fucking-rabbits) neckbeards started reading books instead of burning them.

Speaking of burning.. I mean, reading books, I came across this neat chart today. Basically, it lists a number of propellants I hadn't heard of before. Notably,

• Aluminum hydride
  
• Toluidine
  
• 2-Amino-cyclohexanol
  

Turns out Aluminum hydride is not very pretty stuff, but it can be stabilized easily enough in a polymer, which is cool, because most hybrids run on a polymer fuel cell/core/whatever anyways. Looks like it's pretty easy to get ahold of, too.

Toluidine, is especially cool. It's mostly stable stuff, and will readily (though not entirely) mix with slightly acidic water. Bad news is, it's carcinogenic. I might not mind that so much if I could sing like Freddie Mercury; I just ain't hip to dying, and there would be lots of fright and not so much standing up to it.

That last one's a doozie. While it would seem to be a fuel, I can't see anyone using it for anything other than genome and proteome research. This makes it readily available, but why bother? Seems to me like door number one is the winner. I can either use it as a liquid or mold it into a solid using a plasticizer, add oxygen, heat, and get paid in thrust. Sounds like a good deal to me.

But I am really starting to think another blog, something along the lines of "First one off ♁ Wins!" is appropriate for the stuff I'm cataloguing in this rathole of my head. But if even a few of those ideas pan out, at the very least, DARPA is interested, and maybe somebody like Scaled would let me come work for them (c'mon guys, where's my rejection letter? I'd fall on my sword to work you guys. Just look at what you did for Vanilla Aircraft. They are right down the street from me, doing the same kind of work I'm doing — only they have the cash and the facility to build a full-scale, carbon-bodied, ultra-long flight-time airframe.)

I'd say I'd come work for Scaled for free, but I can't imagine the wire would be happy with that. Some of the DARPA grants are astoundingly challenging; others are not so much. I need to pick and choose carefully, and work with a very small team of very smart people. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're one of those people. If you're interested in the aerospacey stuff, drop me a line. Even if you teach biology. :)

Uncompensated, perhaps foolish plug: Look. At. This. Fucking. Rocket. I mean, its less than a hundred fifty bucks. With a J530 (that's the biggest it's going to take, folks…), you may not exceed M >= 1, but that fucker is going to maybe 8,000 feet. And while it sounds like a kind of spendy habit, trust me, it's a lot cheaper than autocrossing, motorcycle racing, lan-parties and other gaming, and you might learn somoething to get hired in the mean time. And look at her. She's a beauty. A hair over 5' long… give her a nice base primer, then something pretty (like that neat 3M job they did but I'm a sucker for Honda's Sonic Blue and Chrysler's Viper Red), then a coat or two of clear, and you have a rocket that will be every bit as gorgeous as it means fucking business.

I cannot believe

That I just said, "well, yeah, it's really a shame that I need a desk because I need so much [screen] real estate for quality editing [of fiction and non] to say nothing of airframe design... otherwise, a laptop would really be ideal for most of what I do." I need an eight-to-sixteen processor machine with a video card (or cards) capable of rendering textures responsively, along with all the shapes and particle tracking, a minimum of sixteen gigs of ram, and if somebody would give me a copy of ArcGIS or the ANSYS/CFX and ANSYS/FLUENT bundle, ANSYS/CFD*, I'd want a Tesla to go with that. I would also love a copy of Centaur.

I edit text very well with two screens (20-24" seems best for now) because I need two capabilities: a "working draft" and a "revisions page", as well as a "what I'm writing now" and "research". Both require a LOT more real estate that even a 17" powerbook (or a 19" behemothAlienware) offer me. I need a desk. And the recent back injury makes desks really hard for me. It's going to be a bitch to find a chair that lets me be productive, as I tend to work (when I'm really in the zone) twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch, and that's just really hard.

As far as airframes, it's very helpful to have the airframe on one side, and views of it from other angles, or views of the cockpit, or views of the aircraft flying (as in, I'm flying it) with a chase-plane view external to it. Doing stuff with planes, rockets, things that fly, and so on, is really, really hard to do with a laptop unless you're just doing a simple takeoff-landing pattern-land type thing with Saiteks or whatever.

I've digressed. I apologize. Since CACI fucked me right over laid me off, I've had a lot of time to think, and I've learned so much that I just found myself shocked that in addition to the usual text stuff,

* recommended reading

droves

This time it hit a lot closer to home. This time, I found out before the fact. This time, a man admire and owe a good piece of my career to places his wife's fate in God's hands, and, something is urging me to be strong and be there for him and his daughter (to say nothing of his wife). But what are any of us but grains of sand on a beach? How am I, the one who has relied on him for guidance, to "be there"?

I know of no texts in which somebody has had their guts ripped out and written about the feeling, other than Jurassic Park's brief description of disembowelment, yet we as a species often say we feel a though our guts are being ripped out; as though a fish, being gutted and filleted.

And this man calmly introduces me to an expert in hybrid rocketry as we discuss this. What sort of man must he be that he can do this at work, while I am going through a box of Kleenex, knowing the feeling will – must – pass. All I can hope is to one day be something like the man he is. I have growth or character* as yet unachieved, as grow into adulthood. I thought it was something like, you hit thirty, you buy your first new car, you make your first six-figure job, and bang, you're an adult.

* What a petulant, childish ass that post makes me seem.

Congratulations, you're now in arms proliferation.

According to the fine folks at armscontrol.org, a hybrid rocket motor consisting of a polymer and nitrous oxide is a "class II" weapon of proliferation:

Propulsion components and equipment usable in the systems in Item 1, as follows, as well as the specially designed "production facilities" and "production equipment" therefor, and flow-forming machines specified in Note (1): (a) Lightweight turbojet and turbofan engines (including turbocompound engines) that are small and fuel efficient; (b) Ramjet/scramjet/pulse jet/combined cycle engines, including devices to regulate combustion, and specially designed components therefor; (c) Rocket motor cases, "interior lining", "insulation" and nozzles therefor; (d) Staging mechanisms, separation mechanisms, and interstages therefor; (e) Liquid and slurry propellant (including oxidizers) control systems, and specially designed components therefor, designed or modified to operate in vibration environments of more than 10 g RMS between 20 Hz and 2,000 Hz. (f) Hybrid rocket motors and specially designed component therefor.

...

(3) In Item 3(c), "interior lining" suited for the bond interface between the solid propellant and the case or insulating liner is usually a liquid polymer based dispersion of refractory or insulating materials. e.g., carbon filled HTPB or other polymer with added curing agents to be sprayed or screeded over a case interior.

(4) In Item 3(c), "insulation" intended to be applied to the components of a rocket motor, i.e., the case, nozzle inlets, case closures, includes cured or semi-cured compounded rubber sheet stock containing an insulating or refractory material. It may also be incorporated as stress relief boots or flaps.

Which means if you're flying hybrid rockets, which a lot of people do (note that last link is to an academic project; there are recreational users too).

I'm not ready to talk about the engine I want to build yet (primarily because it's hard to find parts and a GR-7 is just Too Damn Big. I am wondering if I can find a ducted-fan type engine with two or three axial stages with electrical start and a standard e.g., fogger with appropriate jetting for fuel & oxidizer.

The problem is it's easier to just run a cone and be a rocket than it is to be a high-bypass turbofan running on rocket fuel. The heat is pretty intense when you bring your own oxidizer on board, and even the copper and steel units I've seen wouldn't stand up to even a minor hybrid mixture (and, damn if it isn't hard finding an inert fuel; I'm looking at acrylics, but all the ones that are liquid at normal temperatures are deadly, all the usual suspects like kerosene or even diesel (which is usually pretty tame) is still not something I want pressurized in an autonomous rocket).

The terrorists have won, and they are us.

What happened to Lutz Moeller?

He was making some incredible advances with the .338 Lapua Magnum round — enough that I considered building a Rem 700-based, surgeon-actioned, Lilja-barreled LM-105 (Lutz's round) gun. But his site is gone. All mentions of him are in caches, revision histories in wikipedia, and the wayback machine. What in the hell happened that a man and all his science (5 shots, 5 hits, 1 mile?? This is important stuff!) disappeared in less than a year? Off the web, where everything seeps into everything else (like here...)?

Anyone? Those are his shells, there on the right. I based my 20mm shell design on his concepts. Thankfully I've got all his math.

The collector's stable

Short: where before, I posted a bunch of really similar looking bikes, today, I'm going to post some bikes with character. This should be fun, even if you don't like motorcycles, particularly.

I find that more and more, when I look at bikes I like the bikes from 1975 to 1995 more. Their styling was more individual. They all had more character. They were different from one-another. As I said previously it seems like at some point in the arms race that is superbikes, everything started looking the same. The Honda Fireblade and the Yamaha R1, about as different a pair of bikes from the 2009 lineup of superbikes, look almost identical in profile.

So I find myself wishing for something with more character. I started looking at the Dnepr:

An interesting fact about the Dnepr is it was the motorcycle with sidecar ridden by Zach Braff and Natalie Portman in Garden State. You can sort of make out here that it has a seat between the fuel take and the rear fender, as well as mounted atop the rear fender (which strikes me as amazingly precarious, but I suppose if you've got 82mm and 105mm mortars falling on you, a motorbike off is the last thing you have to worry about). Here, as well, is the Ural:

They're kind of older, Soviet-bloc type bikes, with or without sidecars, some with 2WD. It may look newer, but this is because they're [currently] being made to appeal to a newer market. They are still available with the sidecar, of course, but this one has the soft leather bags and glossy black (cf. olive drab) paint. The dead giveaway is those low, low pipes; you could never lean that bike over, and even the cruisers today are proud of how far they can lean. It would seem everyone is Vále.

Before we get to the Japanese and other metric bikes, let's first have a look at two other bikes I've got serious gonad itch for (trust me ladies, it's the gonad itch that comes from bikes, not from skanky chicks on Slaussen ave). The first is the Enfield. Who wouldn't? Charlie Boorman sure as shit wouldn't pass one up; in fact he bought one in India and had it shipped the fuck back home!

Here's the Enfield Bullet 500, still being made in India:

From a site I didn't know existed until I started writing about these bikes, India on 2 Wheels. India's a perfect example of a country that needs motorcycles (BMW claims only 2% of the worlds roads are paved; my guess is a vast majority of the worlds roads are in the subasian continent, thus making two wheels in India rather a necessity). But a truly fabulous site for the enthusiast. And it's got fuel injection? Good grief!! What's not to love?

And then, the Norton. A bike, folks, called the Commando.

Just look at those pipes. They look so delicate and yet we know that under that pretty yellow body work and blacked-out frame lurks a carbureted 750cc motor, and it's a damn Norton. Norton didn't build pansy bikes for driving to the supermarket. They built flat-track racers, land-speed racers... they just didn't fuck around. Here, though, is the recurring theme: Scooter Bob's has them, and is selling them. These bikes, like all the bikes in this post, are disappearing faster than I can rescue them, faster than anyone except Jay Leno can rescue them. What do we do in a world where a man named Scooter Bob holds the last few remaining Nortons?

Moving on to the Japanese bikes, we have the Honda CBX, which I have an especially soft spot in my heart for:

An inline six in a bike. Who couldn't resist? Brakes seem a little under-developed, but, eh, it's an old bike. For giggles, we have this quote, along with some amazing photos:

"If you don't know what a Phantom jet fighter sounds like, buy a Honda CBX and have a fiddle with the exhaust system". Even as standard the six cylinder engine sounds amazing, but the story goes that during development a prototype was produced with silencers that made a noise uncannily like a jet (if a bit quieter). This was toned down for the production version because they thought riders might get too excited and tend to go a bit fast. Surely not!

[ ... ]

Rumours had been circulating for some time, but the 1978 arrival of the CBX1000 stunned everyone. Created by a team headed by Soichiro Irimajiri, the very same man responsible for the 1960s racers, here was an all-new machine. With over 100bhp produced from 1047cc shared between half a dozen pots, here was the fastest, most glamorous bike ever. Even so, unfortunately for Honda, Benelli had launched their Sei some three years earlier - and it was especially ironic that the Italian engine was virtually a copy of the CB500 four with a couple of extra cylinders tacked on!

[ note for later contrast with GPZ ]

If that link should somehow become a 404, I've saved a PDF of it. Please realize credit is the author's, not mine.

Another Japanese bike I've been lusting after is the Kawi GPZ:

You might not recognize this (eek, especially in yellow, but it's kinda grown on me), but I'll bet you think there's something familiar about it. That's the bike Tom Cruise rode in Top Gun, years and years ago. A lot of people credit it with the introduction of the one-litre, water-cooled, inline-four superbike that dominates the class today, but there's a dedicated group of people who think the Honda CBX, with its 1054cc motor (albeit an inline six, and air-cooled), really got there first. The GPZ is kind of an ugly duckling by today's standards, but nobody would say it was slow, nor would anyone say the CBX is slow – yet both are remarkable in their own ways.

The "other" metric bikes are the BMW's. I think my favorites may be the old "flying-brick" BMW's I love so much, like the BMW K100:

Not only does it live up to its name, "flying brick" (just look at it! it's like somebody forgot motorcycles had to have engines in them or something; it might be less... "unique" if it were symmetrical, and on the other side, we had another head, like we do today, but trust me, it's a lot more unique over there), but look at that thing. Look at its pipes. It's been used. Somebody loves that bike. And because BMW owners, snots that they are, don't really like the bikes (very much like Porsche owners don't like the 928, 944, 968, 914, Caynne, Panamerica, and others I surely am forgetting), their numbers are becoming vanishingly small.

An interesting fact about the flying bricks is they apparently take to turbocharging like ducks to water:

RB Racing designed and produced Turbochargers for BMW motorcycles for over 15 years encompassing kits for both air cooled twins as well as inline 3's and 4's (R100/K75/K100/K1000/K1100) as well as the newer R1100RS models. The bikes were used for daily commuting, racing, dyno contests, and for all we know coffee tables. We know of K100 bikes that went over 80,000 miles with turbochargers tucked under their chins.

[... and elsewhere on the site]

In our testing with the K12 series we have found the higher output engines which put out 100 to 130 crank horsepower need to have water injection for higher boost pressures. Testing with a high load Grinnall car, using water injection (Aquamist), 16 to 18 psi was safely run with high octane gasoline. This is similar to our experiences with the GSXR 1100 Suzukis that we ran at Bonneville and El Mirage in the period 1988 to 1995. All records set by these bikes as well as the K100 Race bikes (312hp 980cc) employed water injection.

(emphasis mine) If anything, you must watch the video (and this one too) on the site. All are SFW, of course, but there's motorcycle noise. Now, I suppose if one is filling their stable with classic bikes, perhaps a turbocharged variety of K100/K1000/K1100 or even a K1200 (which isn't even that old, ffs!), it's not such a "classic" anymore. But I would argue that the way RB Racing does their LSR work, such as these headers, etc., which are works of art all by themselves, and as such would in no way detract from what is otherwise a beautiful, classic, collectible motorbike:

Two newer Japanese members of my imaginary flock (at least for the current mentioning; consider I spend many, many hours a week reading bike rags and manuals, reading reviews and the history where I can) are a pair of Hondas. In no particular order, the absolutely ferocious RC51:

With the RC51, you have a one-litre twin, one pipe per cylinder, naturally, and two radiators, again, one per cylinder. I can imagine that thing is hot as hell in traffic, and doesn't make life easy on the rider. But its job was to conquer, rape, and pillage, and that it did, with sheer brutal abandon. Quoth:

Has there ever been a more impressive debut in motorcycling's history? In its very first year, the 999cc V-twin RVT1000R literally dominated superbike racing around the globe.

Colin Edwards, of course, took the World Superbike crown from Ducati in a very convincing manner. Closer to home, returning hero Steve Crevier walked away with the Canadian Superbike championship. Even in the United States where Honda's lead rider, Miguel Duhamel was injured, the RVT still rallied to a close second position finish with brash young Nicky Hayden at the helm. And wins at the prestigious LeMans 24 hour and Suzuka 8 hour endurance races prove that the RC51 has all of Honda's legendary durability.

Whether it's the hugely powerful, but immensely controllable, V-twin's torque or the rock-steady handling provided by the twin-spar, aluminum frame that is responsible for Honda's dominance, the result is the same. The RC51 decimates the competition. And you can own a part of history because the RC51, the latest in our series of exotic racing four-strokes that started with the RC30, breaks new ground by being the first of Honda's sophisticated roadracers made readily available to aficionados.

The 2001 Honda RVT1000R. More bike than the competition can handle.

The link to the article the quote is sourced from is another one of those things you have to look at if you're at work, or at home, or have a few minutes to drool over some phenomenal bikes (unless your name is Colin and you live on the east coast, in which case, dreaming is not allowed), and the beautiful paint on them. I think I still prefer the Red/Silver/Black version, but the Black-on-Black-on-you-guessed-it works real well, and hot damn that blue one is pretty. Essentially, it's a piece of race history you can pick up today for less than ten grand, but won't be able to in, say, ten years.

The last contemporary Honda I'd keep in the stable is the CBR1100XX – the Blackbird. Nobody needs to guess where they got the name for this bike... (hint: it's fast)

This bike was so threatening to Suzuki and Kawasaki that they went batshit insane and decided they needed to make 1200 (ZX-12), 1300 (Hayabusa), and 1400 (ZX-14) cc motors to smash anything on the street. Corners, well, I understand the Hayabusa and the ZX-14/Concours can actually corner, but I think I'd mostly leave that engine on tap for streetlight-to-streetlight and those long, lonely drives through Kern County, California. The blackbird was a beast, is a beast, and again, can be picked up for five or six grand, and won't be around, or won't be cheap in just a few short years.

As far as newer bikes, a friend of mine showed me the newish Guzzi Breva 1100:






which, while it seems to be hiding a cat in those V-Rod-esque cans (and this is easily-enough fixed), is still a right vicious v-twin litrebike. A real brawler. Windscreen? What's that? Sure, it's not a 75 - 95 model, but it looks differentthan all the other bikes on the road. It's a twin, sure, but it's a laterally-mounted twin, sticking out from either side of your crotch. I'm not sure how much more attention you can draw to your genitals with a machine in public. And my god, it oozes secks. People will do double-takes when they see it that they don't do for the run-of-the-mill 1098S. And that says something. This, of course, speaks nothing for the reply when asked, "so what do you ride?", "Oh, a 'Guzzi."

What's a guy to do? I would love nothing more than to give a loving home to all these motorbikes, quirks and chokes and weird clutches and everything else that comes with them. But what would I commute in? You really can't commute in the Ural or the Dnepr. It's hazardous. They only do about 75mph. The RC51 and Blackbird are pretty well guaranteed to get me killed. The Kawi GPZ is probably the same story, and a 300hp turbo brick is, again, the same story. The Guzzi? Well, the bike would either kill me because she's a brute, or I'd rub up against a parking garage wall in this horrid town and do a bajillion dollars in damage to her, or she would kill me in a fit of indignant rage because I hadn't properly petted her and whispered loving things to her before mounting for a ride.

I'd really love to be able to have these bikes to take them out for relaxed rides to Manassas/Bull Run or Big Sky Meadows out by Shenandoah and just cruise on them; enjoy bikes for what they were made for. I'd get a commuter, a nice and cheapy one like a Hyosung:

which really, really ain't a bad bike. I liked them at the DC motorbikes show last year, and the year before, but I just couldn't get past the "I'm looking at a Korean motorcycle?" But surely within ten years, we'll be seeing Indian and Chinese (or, god help us, even French) motorbikes in the USDM. For $5400, I  pick up a brand new Hyo, with a warranty, and start pinching pennies or (hint hint, wifey) selling the STI to buy some bikes with character that we can keep around before all the good examples are destroyed.

Bikes. They really are like guns. You can't have just one. There's a different bike for every job, whether it's breaking the sound barrier, pootling around some small New Jersey town with Natalie Portman hugging your johnson, or just looking awesome... there's a bike for the job.