> Bede's certificated plane, the American Aviation AA-1 Yankee

The original BD-1 never matured as Bede lost interest in finishing the design and spent his time on the network of dealerships he was going to build to sell them.

The investors had to fire him and give the design to someone else to complete. They had to do pretty much a complete redesign on it.

This is a recurring theme, Bede was clearly an "ideas guy".

> The BD-5 is a propeller-driven plane with an internal combustion engine, which Bede derived from a sailplane version he never sold

Incorrect.

The BD-5 design was copied, deliberately and publicly, from a Schweizer glider. The goal was, always, to produce a powered light aircraft. The B model, the glider, was an offshoot of the A model. As it turned out, the A model wings were substantially under-designed, and an intermediate length was substituted on most models. All of the designs initially made considerable use of fibreglass, but the entire series was moved to aluminum as the orders poured it.

The design was flawed from conception to construction. It fails due to a well-known issue in aircraft design, as it is "close coupled". The short length of the aircraft means that there is limited distance between the various force points like the CoG and CoF and the control surfaces. Exasperating this is the rear mounted engine, which means there's only, literally, inches between the heaviest part of the aircraft and the control surfaces. That means the controls have to be made larger so they have enough force to operate at low speeds. However, this also means that they are dramatically overpowered at higher speeds. There's no way around this, its basic physics. The "solution" for more expensive designs is powered controls and artificial feel.

Worse, in terms of the length of the aircraft, moving the pilot's seat a few inches is more of a relative shift than it is in, say, a Cessna. This means the aircraft is extremely sensitive to changes in W&B. Even something as minor as burning off fuel will require constant trimming, and that trim point will, for the reasons outlined above, change with speed.

So all of this conspires to make the aircraft difficult to fly on approach. As the aircraft slows the trim keeps changing. Combine that with high approach speeds and ever-more-sensitive controls. And finally, put the thrust line above the aircraft, so if you goose the engine it pushes the nose down, precisely the opposite of what you want it to do.

There is a reason a Cessna looks like it does. It is, for the vast majority of cases, the proper layout for an aircraft. Canard and other layouts have well known advantages in particular situations, but these are generally offset by their disadvantages which is why they are used only in edge cases like fighters.

The BD-10 was a joke from start to finish. Bede had no idea what he was doing, which is not surprising because he never really did any of the design on any of "his" projects - the actual design was left to young engineers typically fresh out of university. In the case of the -10, it was designed using a piece of Mac software known as MacFlow which had a number of bugs in both the software and the models. They initially predicted supersonic performance, but this was due to a bug in the model, From that point on the performance of the aircraft continued to degrade as drag and weight increased continually.

Building a transonic aircraft from pop-rivets? Yeah, that will work...

"Conservative cost estimates for building a single Hyperloop track from Los Angeles to San Francisco come in at US$6 billion."

Is that supposed to sound expensive?

SFO's two terminals cost well over $1 billion each in inflation adjusted dollars. The new tower was $350 million. I can't find numbers on the physical plants, like the runways, but I suspect they're similar. I think $5 billion for the entire airport is not unreasonable. LAX is significantly larger and more expensive; they're spending $270 on elevator repairs alone.

A six-lane highway costs between $10 and $26 million per mile. It's 380 miles from LA to SF, so that's $3.8 to $9 billion.

The F-35 program is one trillion and counting.

Sorry, but this number seems fine to me.

Every statement in this post should be postfixed with "in the US" or some variant thereof. I can't speak for Europe, but I know that here in Canada very very little of this applies. For instance...

"Legislators do not pay each other for votes."

This assumes your political system allows any sort of free voting and thus trading of votes. As far as I can tell, this is generally very rare.

In systems descended from the UK parliament, representatives are expected to vote along the party line, and there is a party whip to ensure they do. Horse trading takes place though the whip, and involves party positions and goals, not votes. There is little or no ability for benchers to arrange this amongst themselves, and they will find themselves out of the party if they try it. There are votes that do not follow these rules, the "free votes", in which case the member has to vote according to their own personally feeling or their constituent's wishes, and again the trading of votes for favors is explicitly not allowed.

Although there is still considerable gamesmanship and jockeying for positions, for cabinet positions for instance, but there is very little of the sort of rider-attachement and "hypocrisy" you see in the US system. You may not like the ruling party's decisions, but typically they at least follow party lines and pass without compromise.

"Legislators do not pay each other for votes, and every member of a parliament in a democratic society is legally equal to every member,"

Legally perhaps, but I'm unaware of any system, the US or otherwise, where this is even remotely true in practice.

And they're cheaper to launch from the equator too.

So when I want to know about nuclear reactor problems, I immediately turn to an anthropologist.

Seems like it's time for another Sokal affair.

> I'm pretty confident that absorbing half of the energy output of a significantly sized fusion explosive

How do you propose to do that?

In space, the primary effect of the bomb over any sort of range, like a kilometer, is x-rays. These rapidly heat nearby objects and cause shock waves. The energy transfer is not particularly efficient.

They work great against RV's because the shock wave can cause the heat shield to detach from the underlying aerostructure. Against something like an asteroid I suspect it would damp out rather rapidly.

So that leaves offgassing from the outermost layer of the asteroid. That might be what, 0.1% efficient?

Take a liquid sodium reactor, connect it to an electrical heater that scoops up and melts the asteroid material. Allow that to radiatively cool (and even regenerate the heat) and then fire that out of a mass driver. The total delta-v-per-pound-of-fissile is going to be at least one order of magnitude better.

> Throwing a handful of nukes at it would be about as effective as throwing pebbles at a tank

Plus we have no way to deliver it.

> This is unprecedented in the history of the nation state mechanism ::rolleyes::

You really need to read more history. You might want to start with Pax Romana and the late 19th century, to name two.

All the nukes did was make us fight proxy wars instead. Ask Korea, Angola, Vietnam, and Afghanistan how much they enjoyed this unprecedented period of peace.

> the "various murky details surrounding the U.S. moon landings between 1969 and 1972

Yes, let's relive that time in history where the US absolutely crushed your country in a come-from-behind victory.

> Falcon9 / Dragon / DragonRider/ CST100 represent serious competition

They represent the death of the Soviet launch industry. And the Chinese, Japanese, Indians and pretty much everything in the US as well. The only niches still open are heavy lift like Ariane 5, and how long will that last? Couple of years, tops.

Surprised the hell out of me, but BDB turns out to be the correct solution.

> What's been your experience with fraudulent robocalls?

Didn't get too many until very recently, the last two months. They were originally from a fake number in one of the nearby area codes, but now they've started coming in using my own number. I wish there was a switch so you could reject calls from your own number.

Invariably they are of the "your recent reservation" variety. First was a string that lasted about a month for Marriot hotels, but the most recent I got was for Air Canada.

Interestingly, they all come in around 5 to 7PM.

They couldn't buy an RTG, didn't have the tech themselves, and so how exactly is this unnecessary?

It's totally unnecessary for you to walk to school, you should drive there. Except you're 5 years old and it's illegal.

Stupid article.

> We'll see how well solar competes when it gets (almost) the same tax treatment as other power sources

You mean when we dump billions of dollars of into a military side-project and let that flow downhill into the panel prices?

Yes, I await that day.

> or you are in a situation where you have to subside the baseload power plants

Which is a problem why?

We subsidized their construction, and the construction of the wires to bring that power to us, so why are we complaining about subsidizing the power output - which we already do anyway?

Is the real problem here that you don't like subsidies going to big companies, or the other way around?

As opposed to the trillions received by all the other energy sources over the years?