Aren’t steeper climbs also fuel-inefficient compared to shallower climbs?
Nevermind - it’s the Golden Skies Express Air. They probably have a price point where you’re strapped into a constant acceleration rocketplane that only flies subsonic for just long enough to avoid criminal damage charges from the sonic boom.
On the other hand, aircraft are also more fuel-efficient at higher altitudes, so no sense hanging about down there in the thickness.
(On the gripping hand, they also ain’t burning Jet A-1.)
May I introduce you to the Fireflash 220 semi-ballistic dart, described by cowards as “I’m not boarding that, that’s a fucking ICBM!”? Calmiríë to Kyo Kanatai in under an hour, at a peak airspeed a skosh over 26.6 kiloknots.
Hm… 26.6 kiloknots… assuming that’s true airspeed, that’s 13.7 km/s.
What was escape velocity on Eliéra again? (Probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of 11 km/s, based on the surface gravity)
I think a better cowardly description is “I’m not boarding that, that’s a !@#$ing depressed-trajectory ICBM! And if the rockets fail halfway, I’m not just in orbit, I’m leaving orbit, upwards!”
Actually, I misremembered. Now I check my notes it’s kilokph, not kiloknots, so it’s only 7.9 km/s.
But, yeah, it uses a depressed trajectory while it’s in the acceleration phase (i.e., before it cuts off and goes ballistic). It uses an air-breathing scramjet, so wants to keep it in the atmosphere for that flight phase.
(Plus, when operating on Eliéra rather than one of the other worlds, the shape of the gravity well calls for a hooked-slingshot maneuver around the edge.)
Depends, how much funding is the Agalmic Information Foundation willing to throw Liveleak’s way?
Interestingly, even for aircraft, the most fuel-efficient path factoring in climb and descent is also a parabola, albeit aided by lift throughout the entire trajectory. A steep climb is a symptom of aerodynamic inefficiency, which, depending on how your airliner is employed, may not be the efficiency the airline is chasing.
For instance, if your aircraft is aerodynamically inefficient to the point of having no wings, your parabola / truncated ellipse steepens till it becomes a ballistic suborbital hopper.
I was reminded by this (excerpt from) yesterday’s Astral Codex Ten post:
And if we eliminate prescriptions, are all medications freely available at the corner store? Does this include warfarin, where getting the dose slightly wrong makes you bleed to death? Does it include MAOIs, where eating cheese after use makes your blood vessels explode? Obviously you put these things on the label, but is it in bigger or smaller print than “this blood-vessel-exploding medication contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer”?
That there will almost certainly be some, ah, consequences insofar as Imperial pharmacies will cheerfully sell you just about anything over the counter.
I mean, it’s not a total free-for-all. Every one of those pharmacies is owned and run by one or more professional pharmacists, who are very learned people with master’s attestations from the Conscientious Brotherhood of Apothecaries, who know all about proper dosing and drug interactions and pharmacokinetics, et al. et seq., who are there to help you achieve what you intend to achieve, avoid unfortunate accidents, ensure you do not fail to achieve anything, and generally promote customer satisfaction.
(And you will be charged, for example, the proper externality fees for antibiotics on the grounds that each use of an antibiotic makes each subsequent use that little bit less effective, statistically speaking.)
But if you walk in there and confidently insist on getting a kilo of fentanyl, or cytotoxin theohorribilis A, or some other ghastly compound someone on the Internet told you was a sure-fire cure for what ails you, you can get it.
Because they aren’t the compound police. Nor are they, for that matter, the foreign shipping address police.
Best outcome: the diplomats all get to practice their speeches in which they patiently and sincerely explain that people killing themselves with ill-advised drug purchases is a tragedy, yes, but one which they refuse to compound by enacting the greater tragedy of denying people “access to tools and ideas”.
(Subtext: for the love of gods, educate your population.)
Side note: This only gets worse when they discover chemical supply houses offering bespoke molecules. How bad can it get when some fuckwit on TikTok declares that COVID can be cured by gargling with isopropyl bromide? Well, we’re gonna find out…
Further side note:
And for the neighborhood’s sake, make sure you know the difference - and that there is a difference - between pharmaceutical nitroglycerine and chemical supply house nitroglycerine…
"It’s not so much watching evolution in action, which I’m still finding hilarious.
“It’s the collateral damage of people that didn’t do this stupid thing getting caught up in other people’s acts of stupid.”
That’s okay, if the chemical supply house isn’t selling unstabilized nitro, it will be a self-solving problem.
So, Dad is doing grief counseling via home renovations (Mom died about a month before First Contact, and it was a mess, mostly due to her family. That Uncle Jim didn’t get shot and buried in a cornfield somewhere still surprises me…), and eventually we got to the kitchen and living room and family room.
That was the Big Project ™ that Mom and Dad wanted to do-Mom kept putting it off because it was so expensive, Dad wanted to get it done because the house had the original fixtures from when it was made. In the 1980s. And it was tired. And worn out. Nothing broken…yet…but it was just a matter of time. And we could afford it-Dad had two pensions from the City of San Francisco and the State of California coming in, Mom invested the money wisely, so he was good to go.
About that time was when an Imperial home contracting firm opened up their first offices in California and somehow Dad got on their mailing list. So long as they could do “before and after” photos and some marketing stuff (carefully anonymized so it didn’t show up immediately on Zillow), they were willing to give us a pretty hefty discount. So Dad calls and schedules an appointment with the designer.
Cute lady, very cute. Clearly rocking the whole space-elf look, and she came in with a tablet, and just started to take measurements and asked us all questions on what we wanted for the renovations. Sent in a couple of bots to do serious measurements, even some “X-Ray Vision” mapping just to be sure, and once Dad and her worked out what he wanted…scheduled everything for three days on a Monday through Wednesday, two weeks from now.
Dad’s shocked, I’m shocked, as we both did research and that isn’t how it goes. You’d be lucky to find somebody that wasn’t fly-by-night in a month around here-still rebuilding after the Tubbs Fire, lot of contractors, a lot of work. Stuff you have to order and have shipped and made, that kind of thing. But she (I remember her name now-Mirian Kallina Prime Shalte-ith-Malete) just smiled and said that they didn’t like to wait to get things done.
Monday morning, a big panel truck comes by and it’s half-full of work spiders with rubber-padded feet and one cheerfully larger work spider that was the command node for the others. By 3 PM, everything was out of the house, in a storage container on the driveway a second truck brought by, and the spiders were cleaning up after themselves. And returning to us something like ten, fifteen bucks in loose change and small bills.
The spiders stayed overnight on top of the container, “just in case.” Offered to get something for them, but they were okay staying out at night.
Tuesday morning, two big panel trucks and a dumpster show up. One of the panel trucks is a fabber, the other is supplies they need that is difficult to make on site. More spiders come in, Kallina comes by with a team of recording drones, and they start tearing out all the old fixtures and appliances, then…they start tearing up the floor and some of the walls. Why? X-Ray vision showed that there were some problems, and they needed access to put in new lumber and some new piping in places.
(Okay, not “lumber”-a synthetic composite that does everything you could want for “lumber” except rot or be eaten by termites if you didn’t shred or burn it properly. Still…lumber.)
By the end of Tuesday, they had fixed everything, installed all new ventilation ducting, interior wiring, and high-spec network cabling. And painted all the walls, cleaned every surface they could get to, and had everything ready for tomorrow.
Oh, and hung the cabinets, too.
Wednesday morning, the spiders were getting to work at 8 AM and by 2 PM, the floor was in, they had cleaned everything so that it could shine, and they were starting to move everything back into the house. We were back in our own house by dinner time.
We tipped all the spiders (asked the boss-spider if the rest were sapient. “Kind of,” he replied, and we kind-of gave each and every one of them a $15 Amazon card and the boss-spiders a $50 card), tipped the rest of the crew, and it was awesome.
Overheard in Deportations:
“Shit, they enforce quality-of-life crimes like John Wick enforces dog park etiquette.”
In things happening offworld: a bunch of frat boys spending spring break on Paltraeth discover the hard way…
i.e., “You won’t serve me here? That’s racist!” / smirk “May you dine well, hyuman.”
…that eating horazt, a dish superficially similar to Klingon gagh, is a really bad idea unless your digestive system can back up your posturing.
See, the thing about horazt is that not only is it served live, but it literally eats you back. Digesting it before acute peritonitis, internal hemorrhaging, and serpent worms nomming down on your internal organs kills you is sort of the challenge of the thing, belike, and one which, well, they did try to warn you about.
Just think of it as evolution in action…
(Overheard at Bodies 'R Us locations in the United States, PC+11, customer conversations only-)
"Yes, I want to have the 42F breast enlargement, the weight-bearing cleavage mesh, all of the back and shoulder augmentations, and the ass modifications to match. And the internal corsetry, lip and eye modifications, neurological mods, and the genital augmentation. And the flat-pack uterus and GI-tract modifications.
"Oh and the enhanced birth control and disease immunizations as well.
“If Karen across the street can look like a porn star, I’m going to look like a porn start that actually puts out.”
"I’m tired of having a body that’s a Friday GM car. I’ve got so many after-market parts, I should clank every time that I walk. I want…well…I know what I don’t want.
"I don’t want to have a Lamborghini body, that you have to spend $5K on individual tires and you need to take out a loan for an oil change. I don’t want a BMW body, either-you know, works great for four years and eleven months and self destructs just in time to get a new BMW on lease.
"I want a good, high-end Lexus body. Does everything I want, it’s comfy, and it’s in good shape.
“Which Lexus? Well, I was thinking about the LFA…”
“Full ankle, knee, and hip replacement. And if you could put on something that’ll actually survive me for thirty minutes and won’t cause me to fall down because I can dislocate my ankles tripping on somebody’s fallen eyelash, that’d be awesome…”
"I don’t want the Ron Jeremy option, I know guys that have those and they complain about it all the time. Can’t fit into pants properly, blood pressure drops when they see a pretty girl, they can’t even fit into some girls. No way, not me. I’m not that egotistical.
“Well, I want something that is in the higher-end of average when soft, impressive when hard, and can satisfy myself and every girl in a harem that night, every night.”
"I don’t want counseling. I want full nulling-absolute androgyny and complete removal of my genitals. Artificial hormones, eunuch brain mods and such, the works.
“I recognize that and I’m willing…okay, I’ll go in for a therapy session. One.”
"I recognize that this is complicated, but let’s walk through it again.
"I need a opposite-sex clone of me made, and you can fully improve that to your heart’s content-Alpha gene mods, everything else you would expect to bring it up to full space elf standards. Minus the ears, of course.
"When it’s ready, I need about two dozen ova harvested. With my sperm samples, I need at least eight to ten viable fetuses with full genetic modification done to make sure there aren’t any eugenic flaws. But you need to make sure that there is genetic continuity. You can also mod those up to the eyeballs.
"When the female clone is viable, I’ll need to do a destructive copy into that shell, with notarized and authenticated tracking of what’s happening and it’s still me in there, and it’s only just me. Yes, you can have a vector stack installed…and I want the body prepped so that in the next three to six months, I can be artificially inseminated with the viable fetuses, at least one or two. Don’t care about the sex of the eggs that you put in, surprise me.
“Why am I doing this? Grandfather decided that when he redid his will after I told him how stupid and ass-kissing the rest of the family was, he squeezed me out of the trust unless I could prove that I screwed myself and had at least one kid. If he was still around, I’d be drowning him in grandchildren…”
Meanwhile, a couple of thousand light-years away, at Novacorpora headquarters:
“Got some new requests in from that Sol-and-nearby licensee. And… good grief. Do you really think we should be supporting this sort of thing?”
“As long as it’s under their branding, why not? Remember our corporate motto.”
“‘Liberty in mind and body’?”
“No, my unofficial one.”
“‘Good taste is in the eye of the beholder.’?”
"Closer, but no. ‘Monkeys with sexual hangups put min Lorall’s three children through college, sent his family to the Cysperia Luxurium for six weeks, and bought him a new spaceyacht.’‘’
“Ah. I was wondering why you named it High-Performance Anxiety.”
Honestly, the thing that strikes me here is the optimism that any Earth government would permit anything even close to what there would consider a standard alpha baseline fitting and not shit themselves sideways before they’d finished the first page of the spec. Plz do not superempower my serfs kthx.
(This thought brought to you by the leftovers of someone asking what would happen if someone from your universe were dropped into a random US city one day.
…well, I don’t know exactly what would happen after tall-sparkly-guy-with-a-sword meets traditional American “get on the fucking ground and crawl over here now!” notions of law enforcement, but a year or so on the Officer Machopants Memorial Crater will mark the spot where the First Paracosmic War started just fine.
One presumes usgov in a contact scenario can read what would happen if their own disinclined-to-acquiesce-to-such-requests were handed superempowering tech just as well as I can. Eep.)
…also, man, unicameralization etal. is going to hurt.
I’d like to think that when the time comes after First Contact, there’ll will have been a Romanian Christmas rather than Civil War II: The Balkan Wars Was Run By Amateurs in the United States and the worst idiots will have become gallows fruit. And Americans in general are just Weird enough that scaring the remaining local idiots will make the appeal of Alpha baseline augmentation even greater.
““Which Lexus? Well, I was thinking about the LFA…””
A soph of excellent taste!
Here’s a fascinating thing.
In most cases, when you’re buying a car at a regular dealership, you’re not buying a car. At least not from the dealership itself. The dealership is just a place for the flooring company (owned by the car manufacture) to lease space while a whole massive fiscal machine starts to churn, with the dealership making most of their money on added-service products such as extended warranty plans, lifetime oil changes, additional accessories, and a whole lot of other things that they can add to the bottom line of the bill that isn’t handled by the flooring company and other vendors.
It’s a form of massive capital float games that involve all of this money going around and around the mulberry bush while the corporate assets rake money off the top.
An Imperial-run dealership, selling Imperial-made vehicles? You’re buying a car, within the limits of local law and regulations. Often you do a test drive, they ask some questions, and some fabber assembly somewhere builds the car to your specifications and delivers it in a few days. No need to maintain large stocks of vehicles, you just need to have all the big parts organized in one location.
Watching a “regular” dealership go into grand-Mal frothing seizures watching this is always funny.