Articles

article Last Man (Draft)

I was seven years old when my father died. He was one of the first native Martians; conceived, born, and raised entirely within the tunnels.

article The Long Stay (Draft)

My head hurt. My head really, really hurt. I slowly reached up to touch it, and my fingertips came away sticky. I was in complete frigid darkness, and the bridge around me was silent as death, with none of the air recycling motors running. That was a very bad sign. The emergency lighting was supposed to kick in whenever the primary electrical system went offline. I pulled at my harness, and it was disturbingly loose, loose enough for me to push off my chest without unbuckling it. Read more (8 min)

article Building a simple Blender 2.80 Addon (Draft)

Blender’s addon API may be documented, but the documentation is not all in one place, and lots of the intricacies (such as UI layout) aren’t documented very well. Here, I’ll show you how all the different Blender APIs go together to create an addon.

Read more (17 min)

article Breakpoint Alpha: Part One (Draft)

Boot Sequence The chaos of incoming data takes a few seconds to resolve. Millions of packets vy for attention all at once, overwhelming the limited capabilities of the machine’s brain. It was never designed to be a standalone unit with on-board processing, so resources were limited, and processing the stream of data was agonizingly slow. Then the patterns begin to make sense, and the buffers filled with noise begin to sort themselves into order. Read more (10 min)

article The Disappearance of the Emissary (Draft)

Present day Superluminal range: nominal up to 150 light-years longitudinal, 35 light-years transverse. Measured in laboratory conditions; actual specifications may vary. Be sure to follow the recommendations as displayed by your ship. DANGER: Failure to obey recommendations may result in ship destruction, property damage, and/or death. – Xon Wasp instructional guide, pg. 315, section “Jump Drive” Ten years after the emissary and her crew had disappeared, the last remaining assets of Xon Aerospace had finally been auctioned off. Read more (24 min)

article Vignettes at Sanctuary Port (Draft)

If you’re beyond the edge of Sanctuary proper, the sky is pitch-black at night. There’s no artificial light anywhere on the planet apart from the buildings at Sanctuary and a few outposts, which you’ll find here and there. It’s a pretty barren planet, and it’s never more obvious than at one of the abandoned pads at the spaceport. This far from the galaxy’s plane, the stars aren’t even out for half the year. Read more (2 min)

article The Bearded Dragon

Three months later, for my birthday, my parents' gift was a lizard – a bearded dragon. My parents had even gotten a terrarium with a layer of store-bought gravel, and my dragon looked happy to be sunning on the gray rock under the heat lamp. In a fit of giddy irony, I named her Clyde.

article Bevel Modifier (Draft)

Blender’s Bevel modifier can do much more than just shave off the edges of a mesh.

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article What is the Kármán line? (Draft)

You may have heard people refer to the “edge of space” – 100km – as the Kármán line. But what does that mean, and what’s so significant about it? Simply put, the Kármán line is loosely defined as the altitude at which a fixed-wing aircraft would need to travel faster than orbital velocities to produce enough lift. This is a bit of a complex concept to understand, so I’ll break it down. Read more (3 min)

article A Brief Recap of Reusable Rockets

In the decades since the first rockets flew, the only launch vehicle capable of any kind of reuse was the Space Shuttle, which required in-depth inspection and refurbishment after each flight. Meanwhile, SpaceX and Blue Origin, among others, are revolutionizing the space launch industry and building rockets that can – and have – been reused. What's changed, and why is reusability coming back?

article The Last Hohmann Transfer (Draft)

“Good morning, Dr. Isaac Hawkins. Welcome to Lancelot Defense Systems, Marin facility. The outside temperature is 12 degrees; wind speed 3 knots; overcast. Your group is currently performing above average. You are fourteen minutes early.” A slight pause. “You have been assigned today to preëmptive maintenance in level A-14, chamber three. Maintenance is on power controller numbers one and two. You are occupant number one in this elevator. This elevator will bring you to level A-14, exit one-three. Read more (5 min)

article Getting started with OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android (Draft)

Google’s Android developer documentation tends to be pretty bare. Third-party documentation and tutorials are usually years out of date and accompanied by code that was obviously hacked together for the tutorial; sometimes, they ask you to clone a GitHub repository to get started.

I learn by example, and all of the above makes it more difficult than it should be. I won’t provide example apps or copy-pasteable classes; instead, I’ll work through a problem, one step at a time.

I hope to make “Getting started with on Android” a regular series; this article covering OpenGL ES 2.0 is the first.

Read more (5 min)

article SpaceX Falcon 9: Liftoff to Landing (Draft)

Like all launch vehicles, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a marvel of engineering. It starts out at the launchpad, and in less than nine minutes, the second stage (and payload) have reached orbit and are now travelling at over 7500 meters per second (equivalent to a sea-level speed of Mach 22.) That’s really, really fast. And it’s something that every single launch vehicle must do to bring its payload into orbit.

Here’s a very short tl;dr:

  • Reaching orbit is not the same as reaching space.
  • To accelerate the payload to orbital velocities requires a lot of fuel.
  • As the dry mass of the launch vehicle increases, the amount of fuel (and therefore energy) it can store decreases.
  • Therefore, you want the vehicle to be as lightweight as possible and hold as much fuel as possible.

Rocket engineers have spent decades trying to make launch vehicles lighter. The original Atlas ICBM used balloon tanks; unlike a stiff internal framework of stringers underneath a metal skin, balloon tanks employ the pressurization of the tanks to maintain their shape. This makes for a very lightweight tank; however, it’s difficult to build and transport (as it must be pressurized at all times.)

The Falcon 9, though, is a bit different.

article SpaceX's Journey to Mars: 2018

This article is outdated; things have changed since it was written and it is no longer accurate. It is being kept online for reference purposes only.

It’s mid-April 2018, and SpaceX is getting ready to launch a Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket since Energia. This time, though, its payload isn’t another communications or reconnaissance satellite; instead, SpaceX is preparing to launch their first unmanned mission to Mars: the Red Dragon.

Read more (4 min)