Captain Aggravated

and really disappointed with his visit to a therapist.

(explaining the joke for those unaware: The Battletech setting is a “nuked ourselves from interstellar space travel back to the stone age” type scenario. An interesting component of the setting is Comstar, the AT&T-like telecommunications monopoly mutated into a religious order which 1. as basically the only extant vestige of the old Star League are convinced they will someday return enlightenment to humanity, with increasing fanaticism, 2. carry telegram-like messages at telegram-like speeds throughout known space, 3. Operate as the de facto international bank and issuer of currency (the C-bill) because milliseconds of transmitter time is the only stable monetary base, and 4. the shifty fucks will sabotage any attempt to climb out of the dark age that isn’t under their control.)

The peace of Blake be with you.

solid Major League reference.

It is my understanding that at least one small, unmanned space plane is in use by the US military. Something small enough to fit in the payload fairing of a commercial or military rocket that can be put in space, flown for a little while then landed at an air force base probably serves some function.

But I’m convinced large space planes on the order of the space shuttle are now museum pieces and/or debris.

The amount of lift made has a lot to do with the angle of attack, the angle between the relative wind and the mean chord of the wing. While the space shuttle is in gliding flight, it flew with a very nose high attitude in a reasonably steep descent, thus the angle of attack. Under rocket power on ascent, the relative wind would be coming pretty much nose on, so a very low angle of attack, thus very little lift.

If the angle of attack goes negative, the wing will lift in the other direction, which is how planes can fly upside down.

Aerodynamic lift has a lot to do with angle of attack. Source: I am a flight instructor.

And more than a little scope creep.

I’m going to bet that we won’t see another spacecraft of the same plan as the shuttle. We barely got it to work, the Soviets managed a single unmanned test flight of something similar, and we’ve got vertically landing reusable rockets now. Large space planes I think are a dead end.

When basically all of your “lift” is coming from thrust, sure it does. As if the space shuttle stack was a work of aerodynamic genius.

It is my belief as a pilot and aircraft mechanic that both accidents share a critical design flaw: The crew vehicle for some bizarre reason was carried next to its rockets instead of on top where it belongs. It meant that Challenger had no way to escape, no launch escape tower could take them away from an exploding lower stage, and it put Columbia in a place where debris shed by the lower stage could hit it. Nothing could fall off of an Apollo first stage and hit the capsule because it was a hundred feet ahead.

No, the ceramic heat shield killed the Columbia crew.

The Challenger crew was killed when a leaky SRB blowtorched the big orange tank. The SRB leaked partially because of an imperfectly designed seal and partially by being flown outside of its design limitations regarding temperature.

“To support our commitment to reducing the number of covid cases, we have elected to discontinue counting them. We kindly ask all infected to kindly die at home.”

I genuinely don’t know if there’s some Amazon policy or if they have an algorithm or whatever, or if people are just dumb enough to think anything other than 5 star reviews chase customers away.

A product with no negative reviews at all…you’re telling me your QC is perfect, no one got a defective one, all of them survived shipping okay, it was never the wrong size or color, it perfectly met everyone’s expectations, and none of your customers are pavement chewing morons?

Here’s a mystery for you: Jorgensen’s website. They sell carpentry clamps, plus an increasing line of hand tools. They’ve got a #4 smoothing plane that manages to be in the mid-range. You either get $20 pieces of useless shit from Harbor Freight, or $400 pieces of jewelry from Lie Nielson, and here comes Jorgensen with a $70 pretty okay plane. On their website, there’s not even a section for reviews on the #4’s page. They have announced a #5 jack plane, it’s not out yet, there’s a section for reviews there. With 5-star reviews “looking forward” to the product.

Idea cancer much?

Oh this is possibly my least aggravated.

I had a seller try to pull this shit on Amazon a few years ago. I had bought a wrist rest for my keyboard, the one I’m tolerating at this very second in fact. Amazon’s pages have a stark white background, the wrist rest was black. Even if details came through in the picture, the background of the page would wash it out. I wanted a simple straight wrist rest. This one has what I can only describe as a waist; the part your right hand would rest on is narrower and thus less supportive than the ends. I gave it a 3-star review stating such. The solution I’ve found is to turn it around so it’s facing “backwards” and that puts the narrowest part in between my hands.

The seller emails me asking if there’s anything they can do to make it right. So far, we’re okay. I just say no, it’s not worth bothering with on my end. They kept getting pushier about changing my review to 5 stars until I contacted Amazon about it.

Somewhere, be it Amazon themselves via the almighty algorithm, or the dropshippers themselves, there is a disconnect from reality. 5-star reviews carry no information, even if they are specific and detailed, the practice of paying or compensating for them is so common that you can just flush them down the toilet with the rest of the piss. It’s the low end that carries the information. I have chosen to buy products based on their 1-star reviews.

For example, I’m invested in the Craftsman V20 power tool system. I went to buy the power inverter they sell for it, that lets you run normal electrical things off of drill batteries, has a NEMA15 socket and a couple USB ports on it. The negative reviews were mostly “Doesn’t run my space heater. Would rate 0 stars if I could. Returned.” I couldn’t find a negative review of the product that didn’t boil down to “I don’t know what 150 watts max means.” Not a problem with the product, it’s a problem with people being ignorant. I bought, and am happy with, the tool.

On the other hand, I went to buy a pocket flashlight, I looked at the negative reviews and many of them said some variation on “tail switch broke after 4 or 5 months.” Ah, this model has a common mode of early failure, I’ll move on.

Does she know her picture is being used to spam Lemmy?

Who thought “you can call me fediverse chick” would work? Please tell me no one has fallen for this fucking thing.

Go price out what a cylinder cost these days for a Pratt & Whitney double wasp. The Corsair has 18 of them.

A baseball bat sticking out of a P-51, an F-16 with a morning star, a foot with a kicking boot sticking out of an A-10…yeah I’ll make that. sounds delightfully stupid.