Leadup to Boomer Day

As Murrka prepares to celebrate 250 years since perhaps the second-worst founding document in world history, the Dickinson-Barclay documents are up. The William and Mary Quarterly is examining them.

John Dickinson sent these to David Barclay Jr in London, the latter being perhaps best known for Barclay's Bank. John Dickinson was trying to alert Parliament - through London finance! - that New England's problems were serious.

From New England, we know better Hutchinson's Strictures (pdf). By then - 1776 - the disease had already spread as far south as Virginia and parts of the Carolinas. It could perhaps have been stanched at least before New York City and Long Island.

When the cable is disconnected

Suppose there's a problem somewhere around L1. If there's a space station, it cuts its losses likely starting with the counterweight, dominated by rope. The elastic cables fall. Let's look at Sinus Medii's side first.

Up to 60 Mm of Kevlar or Dyneema collapses upon the base. Coil it, box it, unscroll it - what is the base supposed to do with all this?

At the highest apogee, is potential-energy. That's the integral mg(h)dh. Prepare for terajoules. The drop of this cable is a force, perhaps accelerating as more falls; like a slow motion explosion, more Chernobyl than Nagasaki. Loonies can harness this, but maybe not by design.

Under that; I want some structure as can funnel the thousands of m³ to some convenient depository away from useful work. We need to place it somehow/-where so we don't knot it and doesn't get METEORED. The depo would be large and/or deep: a fair purpose for a kilotower. Assume the depo is dustfree anyway. (If we're banning lander-rockets, that should help.)

Redirect poast

I've been up to stuff, but not so much stuff for the blog, so... I'll do what I used to do and point y'all to 1d6chan. Which was 1d4chan back when.

Over there I've an interest in the deep archaeology of the D&D genre. A (grade-four) classmate, name of Silas, gave me the Mentzer Basic set for my tenth birthday. My parents got me more material the following Christmas, including the Moldvay Basic and the Marsh Expert sets. Over the next year we'd acquired still more (I say we because my little bro got Descent into the Depths, "official module of GenCon XI" - used). I certainly had the Companion Set in fifth grade. Also some AD&D but maybe I wasn't then ready for it - I'll get to this.

These days I've been pondering the stuff which TSR did not publish, in either line. But still important stuff.

Take Paul Jaquays' The Caverns of Thracia. This has turned out a bigger deal than I'd thought. I mean, I already knew that his M5 module added the fourth dimension to that Moldvay-Cook Known World we now call Mystara. Much more so - I propose - than Niles could manage with Alphatia. Here, we see how it was that the TSR writers had to sit up and pay attention to Jaquays such that M5 could happen.

(Where debased mages make themselves into liches in their elder life; it seems that, today, roleplayers become ... Jaquays. We didn't have JK Rowling to warn us, back then. But! back to the main post :-)

Another module I've covered is that module which laid out what was played at GenCon X, in 1977. I shan't name it; roll your cursor over that link. This wasn't as memorable except inasmuch as it might represent the last ten-level dungeon in the lore.

Among the supplements I'd got as a fourth-grader was the Monster and Treasure Assortment. This came out before the Palace of the Silver Princess. This came out before the G1-2-3 and the aforementioned D1-2 bundles. I remember thinking at the time - what the hell is a "Type III Demon"? Marsh's Expert Set didn't tell me. Why would we care to dig into a ninth or tenth level? Marsh was pointing me to wilderness adventure! (And the Companion Set was talking about ruling counties and leading armies.)

I think that, over the 1970s, which may not be appreciated by younger GenX as got to the hobby through Mentzer, the hobby was dominated by the deeper dungeon delve. Computer gamers see aspects of this in Nethack and Rogue. The "Roguelike" take on dungeons kept this up even after Lakofka's failure in GenCon XII which, those players complained, was a step back from the Depths in GenCon XI. I don't know that software gamers got a good Underdark until Ultima V in, what, 1988.

When wheat came to China

An excellent video here on how China adapted wheat as a foodstock. We in the west, alongside the great rivers and defended by cats, have leavened our wheat and baked the result as bread. In the east, once they got wheat (and cat): they steamed it into noodles and dumplings. We store the bread; they store the grains.

The video - from "Taste of Civilization" - takes pains to point out that neither way is wrong. The West-capital-W, which includes the Taklamakan east-Turkestan, had cheaper heat energy. Europe, before and after Rome, had vast forests with a low population, so wood was cheap. China's population, despite the best efforts of barbarians and tyrants, didn't crash; driving up the relative cost of fuel. As for Central Asia, I guess it just got naturally hot half the time such that baking tortilla in metal over the afternoon outside could keep through the winters.

Space habitats will be jealous for water in this gravity-well. I'm thinking we'll be on the Central Asian model: baked breads, and not leavened so-much. Out on Ceres and beyond, where water is cheap and energy expensive, we'll see more noodles and dumplings. (I don't rate The Expanse as serious.)

Space data and stuff

ToughSF wets his blanket to whip us at escape-velocity. The man does use math, which is helpful. But what I see here assumes we build the stuff on Earth.

Side-schemes exist to capture rocks and bring them closer to us, so robots can build the dumber stuff like radiators up there. If we have 14kT in HEO that is 14kT we don't need to schlep from Earth. We just need to schlep a few tonnes of equipment to turn silica and metals into product.

Also: if we have a lunar base (or, better: a long L1 base), we have a lunar base. It does not only have to host a data centre. The base charges the data centre guys and whatever else is being hosted. The L1 base, when we get that, is dangling anhydrous rope to us 60 Mm altitude, further defraying costs of shifting product all up and down the highest HEO ranks.

The real draw of data centres in the GEO-to-HEO space is the sheer SPACE in that in-between. Earth has a surface area of 510,000 km², which we are not carpeting over; and some ocean depth and caves. In the shell between GEO and the end of my dangling tether (and again, I'm a weirdo who thinks we should have that tether) is from 42 Mm to 60 Mm which is a lot more in volume. Yes, LEO has to deal with space junk and rival sats. HEO does not, not at that scale or speed. It only has to consider radiation. Good lord, just sticking these sats in the space between Van Allens would get the job done even without a HEO/lunar industrial base.

Catching 2026 MF2

Who doesn't want a new moon? TransAstra wants to jump up at 2026 MF2 next November. 25m, 14 kT=Mg. To get there: an additional 2.1 km/s of ΔV after an Earth escape. Then TransAstra waits a year and applies force to take away 1 km/s. That remainder happens to match, roughly, 325 Mm semimajor speed of 1.11 km/s HEO (yay, the maths checked out). I assume we don't want it GEO or LEO. Here are the receipts.

[ELLIPSE 6/28: L1 perigee is more like 305 Mm. The orbital velocity of a circular-orbiting particle down there would be faster: 1.14 km/s. But let's say we still need more delta-V to position this thing just right, or to allow for the object's rotation, or there's some mistake; whatevs.]

This is compared with the 2.7 km/s to get from Earth escape to our Moon.

1.4E7 T m/s momentum to be decel'd over 3.156E7 seconds (in a year) comes to a constant 443.6 N... over a year. That, saith Copilot, is 5 MW; and we'd expend 460 T of propellant... for the lower ISP solution. Higher ISP runs more like 20 MW losing 240 T of propellant. So, this isn't their hektotonne tug.

Higher I_sp implies a very hot engine and I believe would constrain the propellant. Also might need to add radiators on the latter. Higher and more-expensive if you want to dip this into the midway of Van Allens, but then we'll need to dodge GEOsats.

Anyway, since it's on my mind of late: with the Spaceline, even using lame-if-elastic Kevlar on this hither end, you don't even have to escape Earth. You just have to get to HEO whence to catch the hook. The rest of it ain't ΔV; it is literally taking the lift.

Also mayyybe if this guy is in HEO it can also catch the Spaceline. For the nerds: that 14kT, even if decel'd to HEO 1.1+ km/s, is packing even more momentum for a Spaceline-rooted cable to catch.

The floating final chapters in Latin Romans

Four years back I looked into a version of Romans which lacked Paul's plans for the future 14:24f. People said Marcion did without those chapters. I said that if so, Marcion was simply following Luke, whose Acts also cuts short. The youtuber "Testify" has lately been on Acts' case if we cared.

Today Peter J. Montoro IV at Evangelical Textual Criticism has been running down some old references to a Latin tradition of Romans 1:1–14:23 followed immediately by 16:24–27. Some scholars have been prepending only; the implication being, that 14:24f wasn't there.

But as far as we know, these chapters were there. They just came after a doxology, like an appendix. Rudolf Schumacher, Die beiden letzten Kapitel des Römerbriefes in Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen (1929) speculated manuscripts which lacked those chapters, but the actual MSS he had in Latin all had them. Such errant MSS perhaps could have existed in Latin and even in Greek. In Italy, anyway, people were copying 1 Clement which (I think) knew of Romans 14:24f.

The mistake seems to stem from T. W. Manson, “St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans—And Others” (1948). He'd mislabeled Schumacher's conjecture as a witness to Latin MSS which Manson didn't own, neither.

We owe to Montoro some gratitude for running down this error before it infect more papers.

That said, I agree with Schumacher. Marcion did write prologues to the Epistles, which included Romans up to 14:23.