C. O. Thompson wrote:I once was driving down an interstate and heard a guy on my radio say that we should have one car length for every 10 mph between us and the car ahead to give us enough room to stop safety... after some reflection I thought that made sense, so I slowed down to open the space... within a few minutes, eight cars slid into the space.
Yeah, it´s sad how few really knows how to drive safely.
C. O. Thompson wrote:If there was ever a major disaster, our interstates would become parking lots within hours and only VTOL aircraft would stand much of a chance to be of much use.
That´s what you have bulldozers for.
And a number of countries did look at VTOL jets all the way from the 50s to the 70s or even 80s. Kinda sad that the only ones going into service was the brilliant but lackluster Harrier(it was simply never designed to be what it eventually became, the Harrier II improved on matters but a lot of the drawbacks of the original design were still there) and the even more limited Yak-38(although the later Yak-141 could have become much more interesting if it had gone onwards into service).
But last year or so i accidentally started looking at experimental VTOL projects, and i was amazed at just how many there had been.
Sweden had one but eventually when it was proven that STOL for high performance jets was NOT "nearly impossible", we took that route instead, Germany had at least 4 designs under development, ranging all the way from crazy to potentially brilliant, the French, USA etc etc, there was a whole bunch of them.
C. O. Thompson wrote:So... if the VIPs wanted to get into some bunker under a highway, they would likely have all the people stranded in the cars, trucks and buses watch them land and scurry to the "secret door"... how long do you think it would take for a mob to fire bomb their way in??
Which is why that use was also mostly dropped.
C. O. Thompson wrote:In another chat room, we have been discussing that fiction must be plausible... that the best fiction (or lie) tells the truth, carefully edited...
Quite. Most of the time, reality is far more weird than fiction.
"Reality always has the advantage over fiction, because fiction has to make sense."
One of many variations on a quote.
C. O. Thompson wrote:If VIPs and "top military brains" are building any bunkers with tax dollars in an attempt to save themselves while the 99% rot on their door step... I think that they will not be as smart as they think they are...
One unexpected turn of events will undo all their plans
Planning never survives contact with reality.
Don´t need no enemy to smash planning into pieces, random chance works perfectly fine.
C. O. Thompson wrote:We could/should have built space settlements by now if the hogs at the tax trough were less greedy.
Yeah, more likely, we would just have had lower taxes, because the sad part is that those kinds of projects don´t have tangible enough rewards or are simply "too big" for most people AND politicians to want to "waste" money on them, and the "we hate taxes" crew is far more influential.
It took national pride getting involved during the cold war to get the massive investments needed. What the bean counters denying money for projects later doesn´t accept is just how much side benefits those investments generated.
And it´s really ridiculous how the Saturn-V rockets were just thrown on the scrapheap and discarded in such a permanent way, and what are we using in the space programs today? Oh yeah, rocketry developed by the Soviet side of the space race at the same time.
Because most things built later have simply lacked the investments needed to develop something better.
It´s like the stupidity with the space shuttles, they were taken into service because they were supposed to be a cheaper, easier and more reliable way of getting into orbit(mostly discarding the ability to get beyond orbit), and once everyone admitted that it actually became the opposite in every way, the tools and knowhow to make the Saturn-Vs was already gone.
And since the Soviet "superheavy lifter" rocket partly failed and partly lost focus(Korolev´s death combined with shifts in what the targets of the space program was), we were left completely without a useful BIG rocket.
