#winchell chung

[oldschoolfrp]

Winchell Chung illustrations from the future battlefields of Ogre and GEV (from "G.E.V. a designer's introduction" by Steve Jackson, The Space Gamer 17, May-June 1978)

[yodawgiheardyoulikemecha]

[smbhax]

Mighty Nerd vs. the Supervillains (Amiga)

Actually had this back in the day, found wedged down somewhere in a sketchy game shop in Seattle. Got it for the name and I have to say the intro doesn't really disappoint, which is good because the rest of the game does. ; D

Based on an earlier Apple IIgs game by same dev, "MIGHTY MARVEL VS THE FORCES OF E.V.I.L."

[foone]

Sometimes I forget that there's anything in the Mass Effect series besides SIR ISAAC NEWTON IS TEH DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE.

(bonus fun: Serviceman Chung? He's named after Winchell Chung, the creator of the great website Atomic Rockets)

[zandoarts]

how'd you start the hibourverse?

Hibourverse formed out of a collection of ideas originally inspired by the first Avatar around 2014. It was mostly in my brain at that point. In 2017 I was exposed to Winchell Chung’s work and the Atomic Rockets writers resource, which drastically changed my perspective on science fiction. Rocketry and the basics of orbital mechanics started making sense and found it satisfying to envision a history that sort of includes those constraints. Playing a lot of Kerbal Space Program helped too.

At some point around that time I realized most of science fiction is hideously under-scaled and you don’t need a galactic setting to have “interesting worlds” and “aliens”, so I shrank my setting down to just the Solar System and filled it with orbital cities and genetically divergent humans.

I started actually writing things down and drawing things from that universe in 2018. My Scrivener project was started that year.

[tlaquetzqui]

A close second is iodine-131 radiation poisoning from a nuclear reactor breach, and the fact you prevent it by taking potassium iodide tablets.

If the reactor core is breached, the mildly radioactive fuel and the intensely radioactive fission fragments will be released into the atmosphere. While none of the fission fragment elements are particularly healthy, iodine-131 is particularly nasty. This is because one's thyroid gland does its level best to soak up iodine, radioactive or not. … The tablets prevent this by filling up the thyroid first, before the iodine-131 arrives. The instant the reactor breach alarm sounds, whip out your potassium iodide tablets and swallow one.

—Winchell Chung, Atomic Rockets, “Atomic Radiation”

scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

[tlaquetzqui]

Kind of a neat thing for SF writers tinkering with reactionless drives (albeit only neat because it rules one possibility out), from Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site:

A group of German scientists did an analysis of the EmDrive, building their own from the blueprints and discovered that it does not work. They actually discovered a flaw in the methodology that gave a false positive. They knew right away that something was wrong when they got the exact same thrust value reported at 50 watts when they ran their version at two watts. In the real world if you turn down the power input it also lowers the output. The killer finding though was when they did a "null test." They ran the test with zero power going to the microwave cavity (meaning that full power went to the entire EmDrive but the power going to the microwave cavity was intercepted and absorbed by an attenuator). And they still got the same thrust value. What was even more weird is that you get the same amount of thrust but in the opposite direction if you turn the test rig to point in the opposite direction. This should not happen. Real propulsion systems like rockets always create thrust in the direction the combustion chamber is pointing, regardless of the direction the chamber is aimed at. If the chamber is aimed North the thrust should be in a northernly direction. If the chamber is aimed East the thrust should be easterly. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark if you aim the chamber East and find the thrust is in a southern direction. You would be understandably surprised if you aimed a rocket at the ground but when the burn started the rocket climbed into orbit moving backwards instead of augering into the ground. Yet this is what the instruments indicated that the EmDrive was doing. Which logically leads skeptical scientists to wonder how accurate the thrust measuring instrument is. Yep, that was the problem. The cables that carry the current to the microwave amplifier run along the arm of the torsion bar (the thrust measuring instrument). Although the cable is shielded, it is not perfect (because the researchers did not have enough mu metal). As it turns out the Earth's magnetic field causes the current in the cable to create a force pushing the cable sideways. Since the cable was attached to the arm of the torsion bar, this pushed the torsion bar sideways as well, which made a false reading that the microwave cavity was creating thrust. And if you turned the EmDrive to point in the opposite direction, this of course changed its orientation relative to the Earth's magnetic field, reversing the direction of thrust. Bottom line: The EmDrive does not work, it produces zero thrust. The problem was the thrust measuring instrument was lying.

So yeah anyway the only reactionless game in town is David Waite’s metric patching (pdf link), and there are probably problems with that that I don’t know enough advanced physics to spot.

[isaackuo]

@realspaceships I don't know if you're on Mastodon/Friendica/Hubzilla, but I just noticed Winchell Chung has been on Mastodon for like a year: @nyrath@spacey.space

(I'm on Mastodon as @isaackuo@mastodon.social )

[oldschoolfrp]

The Ythri -- Winchell Chung's color cover for the 1976 second edition of this very early Metagaming bagged wargame by Howard Thompson. The game simulates both space and ground combat during the Terran Empire's invasion of the planet Avalon, based on Poul Anderson's novel The People of the Wind.

[foone]

Always reblog for THE DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE

Also, fun fact: Serviceman Chung is named after Winchell Chung, creator of the great Atomic Rockets website, which is an awesome reference for all things science-fictional-science.

dont talk to me if you don’t know that this, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed! It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb! That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space. Now! Serviceman Burnside! What is Newton’s First Law?

[yodawgiheardyoulikemecha]

[nelc]

Size comparison

[realspaceships]

(via Winchell Chung's Atomic Rockets: An Invaluable SF Resource) If you haven’t heard, Winchell Chung has been hospitalized with a terminal disease. This is a fitting tribute to his achievements. 

[elbiotipo]

Winchell Chung from Atomic Rockets said it best:

There are some ways to getting around this (that website makes for some AWESOME reading), but the thing is, the more powerful your spaceship is (and your average sci-fi spaceship is VERY powerful), the less likely that in real life it would be afforded to any random stupid space captain

Besides, it makes more sense that Beto belongs to a "spaceline" or a space cooperative/syndicate/union. Someone pays for the insurance and the fuel, makes all the permits and paperwork, and takes responsability if he screws up.

The thing is that realistically, I doubt that there will ever be individually owned spaceships like in science fiction (where A Guy who owns A Spaceship like a car or boat is a common trope), because you just can't trust any rando with a spaceship that, theoritically, commands such powerful forces to take off and land on planets or travel with ANY kind of speculative FTL system. I don't wanna get too much into it, but if your space drive is powerful enough to fly among stars or even take off from a world in a single piece, it's probably powerful enough to be a weapon or a disaster if it ever blows up. (Jon's Law according to the Atomic Rockets website, "Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage.", the faster or more powerful your space engine is, the more capacity that thing can be used as a weapon or blow up espectacularily)

The difference between a plane crash and a starship crash is that starships in science fiction are basically flying fusion (or antimatter, or something else) reactors. Like, what happens if that thing crashes or explodes over an inhabited area?

I'm of course cheerfully (mostly) ignoring this, assuming that spaceships in this setting are no more dangerous or complicated that say, WWII planes. Perhaps by the time, there's a Dark Energy Condenser or something like that that produces power but nothing really bad happens if it explodes, so no harm done if someone semi-responsible flies one, it's just like a plane.

But in real life, I ever doubt spaceships would be trusted to anyone but large scale institutions composed by professionals.

hey who's that musk guy

[bryanharryrombough]

Ogre Mk. V

[tlaquetzqui]

Hot take: if you don’t have a favorite Winchell Chung quote, your opinions on realism in fictional spaceships are essentially irrelevant. (Mine is “Cherenkov Radiation: If you see this in the air, the good news is you can probably live long enough write your last will and testament. If you write very quickly.”)