Checking in
I’ve been gone for a while, here. Sorry about that, but I’ve been going through a rough time and haven’t been feeling quite outgoing enough to post stuff here. But I’ve got a lot of backed-up reviews and links, now, so I’ll at least slap them up here before they spill over.
Fantastic Four: Decently cast, well-executed, and pretty dull, at least until the last half hour. If you know some science, be sure to bind and gag that knowledge and lock it in the car trunk before entering the theater 🙂 OTOH, isn’t it great to be a comic-book fan in an year where the worst superhero movie of the summer is still fairly decent, and the best is Batman Begins?
War of the Worlds: Not necessarily better than the George Pal version, but certainly prettier. I sure would like to see Spielberg’s people do a Godzilla or Battletech flick – at least I would believe all the visuals. This is the first version of the story I know of that gives humanity a glimmer of a workable tactic against the aliens before the traditional denouement takes care of things. It would have been nice if they’d somehow worked a USS Thunderchild into the river crossing scene.
Half-Blood Prince: Far superior to Order of the Phoenix, both IMHO and in an unscientific poll of people I’ve asked. Hard to talk about it much without causing spoilers or boredom, but Tonks and Lovegood (not a 70’s cop show) are still two of my favorite characters.
Shortpacked! on why there will be a few changes to the G1 characters in the Transformers live-action flick.
Shortpacked! again on Batman reaching the pinnacle of human reflexes and agility.
Brad Hicks on “The Spaceship We Have”, parts one, two, and three. He talks about why we have the Space Shuttle instead of the equipment every space geek in the early sixties thought we were going to have by now; and why that’s going to be a real problem real soon.
Tags: books, comics, movies, space, technology
Heavy, disturbing stuff in those Brad Hicks articles. Hope he’s wrong. Fear he’s right.
He missed something about the solid rocket boosters: Solids are actually quite safe and reliable because they are so simple, when made as one piece. The Shuttle uses segmented solids. Which are a nightmare.
To explain: A standard solid rocket is a single cylindrical chunk of fuel with a hole down the middle, a cap on one end, and a nozzle on the other, clad in a pipe. When lit, it burns from the inside out. The thickness of the unburnt fuel in the middle protects the walls of the pipe from the heat.
The Shuttle needed big solids. So big that we couldn’t make or handle them in one piece. So we make them in sausage-link segments and stack them on top of each other. This is very dangerous. The joints between the segments are a natural place for flame leaks. And you really have to worry about quality control. Each segment was built on a different day in the factory. What if Segment #3 happens to have been made a little thick, and it happens to burn a little differently than Segment #2, right below it? One burns faster and exposes the gap between them. Or one burns down to the wall sooner and exposes the thin metal pipe to the heat of the still-burning one.
Or worse: There are two of these things, on opposite sides of the Shuttle. If their thrust is not perfectly balanced, the vehicle will spin cartwheels in flight. The only way to balance thrust is to make sure they were built the same in the first place. They have no throttle, after all. Each extra segment in the stack makes it harder to balance the overall rocket.
Liquid engines must be balanced too. But they have an advantage in that you can throttle them in-flight. Solids only operate at full throttle. You have to light the pair at the same moment, and hope that they both run out of fuel at the same moment.
I’m gonna hold any agreements about your superhero movie statement until Sky High is out.
They found a workable tactic? It looked to me like they lined a bunch of TOW-armed Humm-vees shoulder-to-shoulder on a hilltop, and charged.
Or are you talking about the re-enactment of the how-to-take-out-a-war-machine scene from “The Tripods”?
No, no, that doesn’t count as a superhero movie. It’s a Disney Family Movie. It’s expected to suck. If it doesn’t, it’s just a glitch in the Matrix. 😉
I’m more worried that “Sky High” stars Kurt Russell. As the father. If I were a few years older, it would depress me.
If you are referring to the book series I’m thinking of, yes, I believe that tactic’s the one I’m referring to. (How’s that for a qualified statement?)