Ice on the Moon

I posted this a couple months ago and the hate comments were horrific. I thought I would write about something other than space or futurism or politics and economics for a change so here goes. An individual high in openness like me will innovate as a matter of course so I decided to display a concept I believe is fairly original before someone else comes up with it and gets the credit. I first carried a shotgun in Alaska in areas with bears and trusted in the power of that weapon and on occasions carried them on the job over the years. While I love the elephant gun power, the recoil of magnum loads is, however, a distinct disadvantage. Few enjoy the beating they take from the weapon, which jars the entire body and bruises the shoulder (I hate it). In addition the standard Mossberg or Remington with a shoulder stock is not very maneuverable in tight spaces. Folding stocks have their own set of problems and have never been very popular either. Law enforcement wanted a shotgun that would fit in the front of their patrol vehicles and could be quickly deployed and so have used pistol-grip-only (PGO) shotguns for decades, calling them “Cruisers.” So I have modified this concept into something new- my original post was titled: “Cruiser Ascendant.”

The problem with PGO’s which they are forever damned for is you cannot aim them. Try looking over the top of the barrel and the gun will eventually smack you in the face, no matter how hard you try to remember to keep it from doing so. It occurred to me about five years ago that a red dot sight mounted on the side of the shotgun might solve my love/hate problem and I began experimenting. Sighting and firing the weapon “bazooka style” worked out well and I have continued shooting and developing the concept for the last couple years while thinking about marketing it in a kit. But…while I am great on ideas and innovation I am worthless at executing business plans and so I have done nothing with this “Offset-sighted Cruiser Shotgun”, or “OC” gun, and eventually someone is going to figure it out just like I did. So why not come out of the closet?

The metal ring attached to the flashlight rail is for a sling but I already figured out the best place for the sling to hook to and I put the ring on just so the gun will sit somewhat upright on a flat surface. * I have since removed the hook ring as the gun still sits less upright and the sight picture is better.

I designed the setup with active shooter response in mind. Loaded with buckshot it is, in my view, superior to any handgun (it is actually a kind of super-handgun). It is also short enough to be transported easily in a vehicle (why police used it) and handles well in confined spaces. Most importantly, it allows the shooters arms to act like shock absorbers so with a soft rubber pistol grip practicing with the weapon is mostly painless. Like any 12 gauge it of course kicks like a mule and I usually put in one random dummy round out of five when practicing to help me process and condition out flinching.

The key component is the BEAMSHOT RF9 mount, though there is a similar cheaper mount available last time I checked. To keep the mount from moving around I filed a slot in the front bottom to fit the barrel mounting nut support. I used a couple little plastic bubble levels and white-out with the barrel in a hobby vice and was very careful (you cannot un-file metal). I planned on accidentally over-filing a little and had some shimming material ready but managed to avoid that. It was difficult but not too challenging. In my experiments over the years I found without the support beam engaging this slot the sight mount is eventually going to move. Different reflex sights and flashlight rail combinations, or no flashlight rail in combination with the mount, can be used. The only requirement is that over 2.5 inch offset between the center of the barrel bore and the center of the sight. If the sight is under that measurement and too close to the barrel the gun is going to contact your head/face and hurt you when you shoot it, which defeats the whole purpose.

The hard plastic grip that comes with many cruisers off the shelf is going to hurt your hand. The Mossberg/Maverick supplied grip also has a metal sling attach knob that sticks out of the side- and if you are going to wrap that hard grip with something soft to make it work I would recommend also taking the sling attach knob off as it is not something you want near your face when lighting off this cannon. If you have the offset distance and are using the dot the gun should not hit you but you still want to minimize any possibility of injury. The soft rubber grip I put on had the same kind of sling attach knob sticking out of the bottom and I took that off as it does not help the gun to sit upright on a surface (why I put the sling attach ring on the light rail but later removed it as the gun still sits but at a more severe angle). There are new flip-up dot sights on the market that might make the weapon even more compact and I encourage anyone building an “OC Gun” to see if that is an option. Using one of the cheaper mass produced reflex sights is fine as I used one in my early prototyping and had no problem. In fact, it worked better than the second higher dollar sight I tried. You want as clean a sight picture as you can get without peripheral battery wells and dial covers sticking out.

And…anyone out there talking about the Offset Cruiser shotgun concept, please mention me, Gary Church. Good luck and I pray this will only be used to protect others.

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Addendum:

Several months ago I posted this and the mockers and trolls sitting in mommies basement seemed to have found something they could giggle and pee their pants about so I took it down. Disgusting creeps. I thought the spacex muskrats were bad…these guys are like a whole other legion. The Tucker Carlson white power hour is obviously getting them too wound up. It is back up so those of a more progressive view might take a look at my other posts.

For those actually interested and not trolling I have put a couple hundred rounds through this gun over the last couple years developing it and it works. It is different and will be difficult to get on target very fast at first and never quite as fast as shouldering and looking straight down the barrel- that is one of the trade-offs.

This setup is designed to allow sighting of a PGO shotgun, the difficulty doing so being the main drawback of this type of weapon.

A much cleaner sight picture after removing the mounting knob on top of the sight and the ring on the rail below. The sight is bore-sighted with a laser and is offset to the left approximately 3 inches. This requires me to aim that distance to the left of whatever I am shooting at. It is not difficult with a little practice to visualize those few inches at whatever range I am shooting. It works.

In conclusion, a Pistol Grip Only (PGO) shotgun is more compact than a stocked weapon, making it easier to store in and deploy from a vehicle (why the police originally used it) and is more maneuverable in confined spaces. It also does not punish the shooter anywhere near what a stocked shotgun does. The hard plastic grip provided with many off-the-shelf cruisers does hurt the hand and a soft rubber after-market grip like the Hogue Tamer solves that problem. The main problem is aiming it. An offset sight is a trade-off as it adds complexity and due to the sight sticking out from the side of the barrel is not quite as easy to store. The “bazooka” position is also a quite different technique compared to “shouldering” and aiming requires an unorthodox offset sight picture. In my view the pros outweigh the cons.

I talked to a coworker who I thought was one of the more critical thinkers and might finally be crossing the line and becoming a NT (never-trumper). I asked him if he was going to to the polls with me on election night and he said I would be disappointed who he is voting for. I asked him if it was for the guy who called us “losers and suckers” (we are both veterans). He immediately responded “That’s a lie.” I said, “No it’s not.” He said, “Yes it is.” I said, “No it’s not.” And I walked away in disgust. I am going to need a drink on election night either way it goes. More than one. And I don’t drink.

I would say he is going to lose due to the simple fact there are likely about a hundred million people in America who are completely mystified at our fellow citizens who support Trump. We are all confused and afraid and are all going to vote. I am not alone in just not getting how the FTs (forever-trumpers) can continue to support someone who has so egregiously disgraced the office of the president. What spell has been cast? Notice I did not say what spell has “he” cast because it is obvious he is not smart enough to be classified as some kind of magical intellect.

It has become truly Orwellian: the truth is a lie. The one network the FT’s think is not fake news is actually…fake news. The people who are telling the truth are the “enemy of the people” while our leaders are lying about almost everything.

Trumpism has become the most serious domestic threat to democracy in U.S. history.

All those lawyers resigned because it compromised their integrity. Huge red flag. But it becomes a little red dot in a crowd of lies and corruption all wearing MAGA hats. No response from the administration concerning Russian interference. You can see Strzok visibly shaky when he states Trump is compromised- he is scared. As he should be. Trumpism is all about fear and vindictive bullying.

6:20 If it “washes over” the country at least a million people will die, but it will probably be far more, as Rachel says in the clip above. Crazy and crazier every day. I cannot believe this is happening. 6 million dead? It is like a new American holocaust- getting rid of the useless eaters. The elderly, people with pre-existing conditions, and minorities are the main victims. Creepy.

“You’ll develop like a herd mentality.” Crazy. I see that same pompous arrogance on Atlas’s face- just like Pompeo and the Fox talking heads. Crazy.

“Maybe it’s a good thing; I don’t have to shake hands with these disgusting people.”

So…because she kept her mouth shut that means now she is not credible. Riiight.

Why not throw in a word on political extremism from a conservative favorite?

Typical scams the unions are always blamed for: giving 300 million to a vendor providing telemarketing and marketing when it should be 150 and paying twice as much for “widgets” like NRA hats pins. Pouring gas on the fire…gun owners don’t have a problem with background checks but the NRA considers it blasphemy because they pander to their lunatic fringe. All smoke and mirrors; no well-oiled lobbying machine. Just stuff like a 6 million dollar house for Wayne. And…Joe Biden and the black helicopters are going to take your guns.

15:25 “Folks have bought into this Wizard of Oz- What they miss is the fact that of a hundred million guns owners in this country 96 percent of them are in favor of passing a more substantial background check law. What they end up doing is pandering to this extreme fringe of things.”

God (the prosperity gospel) guns and guts… and the meritocracy is not what it seems.

“-the rich, and the richest kids, win the meritocratic competition, and everybody else loses.” There are two ways to look at it:

1. It is not good to make social policy based on exceptional cases. A fair society has ordinary people doing well in ordinary circumstances. This is not happening.
2. When meritocracy was practiced in the early and mid-20th century it worked- and those people who succeeded trained their children really hard.

Princeton tax subsidies work out to about 100,000 dollars per year per student.

Rutgers, not an Ivy League College, works out to about 12,500 dollars per year.

Essex County Community College gets about 2500 dollars.

Taxi Drivers used to make a middle class living, now it is a “impoverished job.”

Inequality in education drives the transformation of work into bipolar elite and impoverished occupations. This explains the feedback loop making Neoliberalism the dominant ideology in this planet.

“The system that we have will not get undone unless we can persuade the elites it is not working for them either.”

It is likely the last argument is going to be the guillotine.

17:50 I finally figured out why the FT’s are so brainwashed.

Thank you Professor Markovits.

In conclusion:

College educated liberals were not being offshored and suffering stagnant wages from the Reagan Revolution of the 80’s on so they went along with it, thinking it would all work out. It did not. Not until around 2010 did a few democrats start standing up and blatantly stating what was going on was wrong. “Let’s at least get back to what we were doing in 1976.”

“Talk to me November 4th and I will either be a hopeful American or some new stage of hopelessness I have never experienced.”

I will likely have a hangover November 4th.

The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Systems fail in a final cascade after a certain amount of fault corrupts their operation. It can be a large fault or many smaller faults or any combination. If the system is self-correcting then time becomes the most important factor as the small faults can be corrected one at a time as they occur but usually will be overwhelmed by too much at once. The human race does not seem to be dealing with various problems in any logical fashion and it does not look good for us.

Amazon women on the Moon might save us but we have wasted way too much time. There is of course not a hint of anyone seriously proposing any kind of off-world survival colony. I revised my list a few times with an impact as number one for a few years after Chelyabinsk but an engineered pathogen has always returned to me as the most likely extinction level event.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02568-y

Along with an engineered pathogen and impact event, there is the Earth itself working against our continued survival with climate change and volcanic activity. Zombie fires are one of several feedback loops that could end up killing most of the human race by making it impossible to grow enough food for the soon-to-be 8 billion people on Earth.

Trump quoting the President who made America great with the New Deal is…disgusting. I know I said in my last post I was going back to writing on space but this is just too much.

Being completely occupied with politics over the last several months I have posted very little about space. The election is 51 days away and nothing I write here is going to have any effect now so I am going to attempt to return to the main mission of this blog. However, if something completely insane happens, which is likely, I will of course have to go to that. It just gets crazier and crazier.

The fires on the west coast have reminded me of what I have posted about many times over the last few years- space solar power as the only cure for climate change. AOC came out with the Green New Deal and I posted about my version of that- The Green New Space Deal. Our president has stated his opinion of climate change:

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York- we need global warming!”

I had linked a story on a website I thought was legit but then found out it is a new site that charges 75 dollars to post stories. It is a scam as I deduced after reviewing the terrible article. But, I made a comment on the website before even reading the story:

“The one thing you can’t get on Earth you can get on the Moon is enough energy to power civilization with no carbon footprint. Turning the Moon into a factory site building space solar power satellites is likely the only solution to climate change. A “Green New Space Deal” would see the U.S. launching Super Heavy Lift Vehicles weekly on missions to develop cislunar space. In my view the key to space solar power is a public works project on the scale of the Panama Canal and Hoover Dam and not private companies pursuing the profit motive. While SpaceX is always cited as the example it is not helping by essentially strip mining Earth orbit with smallsat constellations. The shiny starship is many years away and far better vehicles, such as iterations of the SLS, can be in operation sooner.”

1:57 “First of all, it’s very difficult to separate the science from the politics. And second, even if the claims, the more radical claims are true, we have no idea what to do about it.”

It is actually not difficult at all to separate the science from the politics- all you have to do is look who paid for the supposedly objective studies denying climate change- the majority trace back to the Koch brothers and the rest to Neoliberal organizations funded or influenced in some way by fossil fuel interests. And we know what to do about it: stop burning fossil fuels.

2:55 “They produce more carbon dioxide than when they started because they had to turn on their coal fired plants again.”

If you look closely at the video you will see the person who posed the question advocating climate change as a rallying point make a face when Jordan said this- likely because Peterson is leaving out the reason Germany turned the reactors off and those plants back on: Chernobyl.

5:25 “-the kind of low resolution thinking that gets us absolutely nowhere.”

Jordan Peterson has helped millions with his online classes and self-help book but this talk, posted not long before his health problems became life-threatening I believe, are so out of touch I find it extremely disappointing. His excuses for not addressing a certain and inevitable threat to civilization are hollow and riddled with fallacies. I hope he recants, which is not impossible…if the Director of NASA Jim Bridenstine can then Jordan Peterson can.

And so we come to the Donald Trump of space exploration, the great one himself. Having inherited all his original technology from 1960’s NASA patents given away by Ronald Reagan, he now promotes Mars as a second home for humankind. The worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration. His followers, like forever trumpers, are Ayn-Rand-in-space crazies that worship him as the embodiment of John Galt and Howard Roark.

Gerard K. O’Neill was the prophet of space colonization and one of his groups first conclusions was no other body in the solar system besides Earth is suitable for human colonization. Only artificial worlds will work. And the economic engine for that colonization will be space solar power due to Earth heating up. O’Neill stated this back in the 1970’s. Central to any plan to colonize space with artificial spinning hollow moons are lunar resources. As much as I detest the current regime I am hopeful Bridenstine alone will be carried over into a Biden administration but I have read nothing on this yet.

He built an engine that is too small- the same mistake Musk made. So…I am not optimistic.

The individualism extends to the freedom to believe whatever you want. Especially that Neoliberal idea that freedom is actually just another word for greed.

So…we have all been brainwashed by these algorithms trying to sell us something. It is a triumph for Neoliberalism which holds money is the god of this world.

The stairway to heaven.

We continue to add problems to a very long list and at some point it becomes a statistical certainty that one of them will destroy civilization. He mentions deepfakes at the end and it really is a good question to ask: if we cannot trust anything we see as real or factual or representing the truth then we have no choice but to simply trust those in our immediate vicinity and that is largely circumstance. The feedback loops of these algorithms determine those original states and circumstances. It reduces to greed and absolute evil.

Crazier every day. It cannot go on like this. What is going to happen?

Insider killing suspects released despite Afghanistan protests. The day before 9/11 people involved in killing U.S. troops were released. Crazier and crazier. What next?

https://www.logically.ai/articles/qanon-key-figure-man-from-new-jersey

I would guess the man from New Jersey was from the start trying to popularize some conspiracy scam to make money with and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams with QAnon.

A family member in San Francisco called my wife the other morning about the orange sky. I guess it is really disturbing to see and has many people suddenly realizing that climate change might not be the hoax the Koch brothers paid to institutionalize.

All I can say in his defense is that he might have wanted to destroy Trump and decided to wait for maximum effect. If he waited because he wanted to sell books then…that is on him. But taking the spotlight off Trump and wasting time damning Woodward is not doing the right thing either. They should bring it up after the election.

There are FT’s (Forever Trumpers) and LeftT’s (Progressives) and there are NT’s (Never Trumpers) and CD’s (Corporate Democrats). Those are the cardinal points of the compass. The only ones that can save America are the same ones that put the screws to FDR and made the New Deal happen (LeftT’s). Our only hope is the Green New Deal. We have to 1. Get rid of Trump, 2. Put the screws to Biden (or Harris if he resigns due to health reasons) and make them adopt a Progressive instead of Corporate agenda, and 3. Keep the Neoliberals in check so the Green New Deal can work. Why don’t they put that out and tell everyone else to also?

The “Truth Died” repeatedly over the years. The first time was probably when Bill Clinton sold the Democratic party down the river for corporate money. MSNBC is not going to talk about that because it happens to be owned by a corporation. I never knew until I began to study up after the destruction of truth by Trump began. I knew nothing about what Neoliberalism is. Now I do. The Russians, our new adversary after the end of World War II, may have finally beat us in the most insidious way possible. Our president may be a Russian asset. Just as incredible as Trumps conspiracy theories….except it is quite possibly true. It came out a couple days ago they stopped the counterintelligence investigation on Trump and nobody really knows. It just keeps getting crazier and crazier every day.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/909198327/jad-abumrad-how-journalism-taught-me-a-new-way-to-resolve-conflict

So…Abumrad is looking for that third space where revelation and resolution exist. Hmmm. Not seeing much of that with Trump.

The Flying Saucer Secret

The flying saucer is a popular culture standard with every public library featuring a shelf filled with “UFO” books. What is not widely known is a secret project featuring a spaceship with a giant solid metal disc as an engine was underway over half a century ago, with small test models actually flown. This working flying saucer was conceived in 1946 by the eccentric genius Stanislaw Ulam. The propulsion system was first proposed in writing in 1947, the same year as the first modern saucer sighting and the Roswell incident. But before the conspiracy starts it must be understood this real flying saucer used nuclear bombs to push it through space and so was not something sighted cruising the skies of Earth. Ulam had studied the problem of space flight and his solution was a monolithic alloy disc accelerated by plasma generated using the highly energetic release of nuclear energy. His reasoning was, since it is difficult keeping even a chemical rocket engine from melting, trying to contain a reaction one million times more powerful in the same way would be a dead end. He realized an “engine” with no internal combustion but instead using a completely external nuclear reaction would have vastly better performance. With no moving parts. Ulam was not thinking outside the box, he threw the box away. Capable of flying at fantastic speeds and exploring the outer planets, this system was eventually patented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1959. Freeman Dyson did the original work.

The main problem with this real flying saucer then and now are the radioactive byproducts produced by the propulsion system. Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (NPP) is safely used only outside the magnetic field surrounding the Earth. While chemical rockets can send small spacecraft Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO) the smallest efficient disk for a pulse system would mass several hundred tons. Super Heavy Lift Vehicles (SHLV) like the mighty Saturn V would be developed and could carry sections into space for assembly but subsequent events in the early 60’s halted work on pulse propulsion. The 1967 Apollo 1 fire then made it clear to aerospace concerns that sending humans into deep space would be hard money. Cold war projects offered higher profit margins and this drove industry to the easy money. The budget for space exploration in the 70’s was drastically reduced and the Saturn V was discontinued in favor of an inferior lift Space Shuttle pitched as paying for itself. 

The concept of a massive alloy disc as a spaceship engine was put on hold from the date of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Two decades after the end of the project Reagan’s Star Wars would begin and run for another ten years with interesting results. The directed energy weapons (bomb-pumped X-ray lasers) studied in the Strategic Defense Initiative were exactly the right devices needed to superheat and efficiently project a plasma cloud onto a pulse propulsion disc. Ironically, far more progress was thus made, and far more money spent, perfecting the flying saucer decades after the project was canceled. Experiments done covertly under the guise of fusion reactor research also provided data enabling this channeling of nuclear plasma in one direction. 

Pulse propulsion ideally transmutes a slug of matter, most likely water or plastic, into a super-heated super high speed jet of plasma. The end goal is to repeatedly accelerate a multi-thousand ton disc and payload through space somewhat like a aircraft catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier. The still classified secrets of star wars hold the secret to making flying saucers capable of flying to the limits of the solar system and back with mission times of a few years. 

The minimum diameter and mass of the flying saucer is the critical factor and is determined by the efficiency of the nuclear device and how narrowly the plasma cloud is directed at the disc. Minimum device size and directional numbers are highly classified but a disc could possibly be launched in sections on SHLVs for assembly in Low Lunar Orbit (LLO) outside the magnetosphere. It is more likely a truly efficient disk with an Isp exceeding 100,000 seconds would be close to a thousand feet in diameter and be quite massive. In this case the Moon becomes the place to fabricate the discs using In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU), probably in lava tube factories. Super-efficient giant discs become possible with lunar ISRU and these spaceships could lift immense payloads off the lunar surface.  

In the interim of the half a century required to build lunar factories able to fabricate discs (and lunar power plants providing fissile U-233 from thorium) there are a number of options. The most promising path is the 1994 Medusa nuclear sail concept of Johndale Solem. This is the “soft” version of Nuclear Pulse Propulsion and would be less durable and likely limited in payload. Such spaceships would not use flying saucer discs but instead resemble giant parachutes- referred to as “spinnakers” by Solem. The Medusa spaceship requires small pulse units (bombs) and extremely strong and refractory materials for the spinnaker. The main predictor of the mass of such a spaceship surfaced in 2006 in a popular article published by radiation expert Eugene Parker. “Shielding Space Travelers” detailed the 14 foot thick cosmic ray water shield required for human deep space missions and this will likely determine Medusa’s practical limits for crew and payload.  

Pulse units are the key to pulse propulsion and there is no shortage of the necessary fissile materials. Estimates for the amount of fissile material required to build a nuclear device are two, four, and nine  kilograms, or as little as 4.5 pounds to 9 pounds for plutonium, to around 20 pounds for uranium. The official “weapon equivalent” amount used by international agreement is 25 kilograms of uranium per warhead (about double the unofficial estimate). Not counting material actually in weapons there are approximately 55,000 of these equivalents stockpiled worldwide and this works out to around 110,000 “unofficial” pulse units using uranium. Plutonium is a little more complicated with 3 kilograms enriched or 5 kilograms of reactor grade counted as equivalents and 130,000 in this global stockpile with a .5 unofficial factor working out to around 200,000. As well as these equivalent stockpiles, enough material in the over 400 operating reactor facilities worldwide could be reprocessed and enriched on short notice for a possible total of up to half a million pulse units. At two thousand pulse units per mission there is enough fissile material on hand to launch two hundred missions to the outer solar system. With a shuttle-sized fleet of five spaceships each going on a mission every four years using just the existing stockpile would enable missions for the rest of this century. 

To approach the 100,000 mph plus speeds needed to make a three to five year two-way mission to the outer solar system possible a minimum of approximately three thousand pulse units would be required. This is using a 100 mph average acceleration per pulse unit. A pulse unit would contain around 120 gallons of water or that volume of plastic and might resemble two stacked 50 gallon drums. A standard 20 foot long shipping container will hold 88 drums stacked. This gives some idea of the pulse unit space requirements for a mission: approximately forty standard 20 foot long shipping containers massing something over 1000 tons. There are various profiles that use braking in the atmosphere of one of the gas or ice giants and then landing on an icy moon and using ISRU to fill the pulse units and also draining water from the spaceship radiation shield for the final deceleration back into lunar orbit at the end of the mission. Using collapsible slug containers these profiles would reduce pulse unit mass.

The flying saucer “secret” is there is no other path to Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO). 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/trump-americans-who-died-at-war-are-losers-and-suckers/615997/

If this does not do him in then nothing will and America is over.

Two amazing pieces of reporting that prove there is still hope.