The End of the Era ...

[LizzieMaine]

True, for industrial and military applications. But you won't find anyone anywhere today who can manufacture or rebuild a 12AP4.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Some years ago, I read about a study of the US-Department of Defensive/US Navy about the theoretical costs on bringing the four Iowa-class battleships back to service.

As far as I remember, the article said, altogether, including the costs of "loss of knowledge", there would be costs of 269 billion USD. I believe, it was "billion".

 

[Trenchfriend]

True, for industrial and military applications. But you won't find anyone anywhere today who can manufacture or rebuild a 12AP4.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/12ap4_manufacturing.html

 

[alanfgag]

I once bought my niece a T Shirt, it read: "My parents got to see a man land on the moon but all I got was Freaking Facebook!"

We went to the MOON, Dudes!

Love your post.

While I too am nostalgic about manned (and womanned) space missions and the era when the public accepted the tremendous expense and physical risks of these efforts, the scientific community is not at all in unanimous agreement that this type of space mission is the best foot forward in the current age. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I do think you have a lot of brilliant science missions to get excited about. From Voyager in the 1970s on to the mars rovers, the Cassini Mission, the Solar Dynamics Observatory taking photos of the sun from space 24/7/365... the images from these missions are, to my mind, as inspiring as the iconic Hasselblad photos of the lunar landscape and the portraits of earth from the moon. Designing these missions within today's wafer thin NASA budget adds another magnitude of magic. I am sure you are aware of the JPL facility up on Mt. Wilson 18 miles from Los Angeles. I hope you have a chance to visit and experience the science going on there. You can even get together a bunch of friends and rent the 100 inch Hooker telescope (the largest in the world for more than a generation) for an evening of observing.

clear skies!

 

[MikeKardec]

Love your post.

While I too am nostalgic about manned (and womanned) space missions and the era when the public accepted the tremendous expense and physical risks of these efforts, the scientific community is not at all in unanimous agreement that this type of space mission is the best foot forward in the current age. I don't have a dog in that fight, but I do think you have a lot of brilliant science missions to get excited about. From Voyager in the 1970s on to the mars rovers, the Cassini Mission, the Solar Dynamics Observatory taking photos of the sun from space 24/7/365... the images from these missions are, to my mind, as inspiring as the iconic Hasselblad photos of the lunar landscape and the portraits of earth from the moon. Designing these missions within today's wafer thin NASA budget adds another magnitude of magic. I am sure you are aware of the JPL facility up on Mt. Wilson 18 miles from Los Angeles. I hope you have a chance to visit and experience the science going on there. You can even get together a bunch of friends and rent the 100 inch Hooker telescope (the largest in the world for more than a generation) for an evening of observing.

clear skies!

View attachment 55885

My real point was the horrible irony of '73 and the blue marble photograph being the symbolic end of a certain type of age of exploration and imagination. Until then the ends of the earth were still mysterious and the moon was somehow possible. The same moment is evocative of our hitting our limit both above and below. As I said, you could still have a Skull Island and a Land That Time Forgot ... those things were unlikely, but not impossible here on earth. The "Golden Era" referenced here so often is full of the discovery of exotic places both real and fictional.

I can see people walking on the streets of North Korea with Google Earth. I find that funny and humanizing and sad. I don't want to know that much, I don't want to feel the possibilities are limited. Robots will go into space and probe the depths of the seas. Today children sail what used to be impassible oceans in pleasure boats while others climb Everest multiple times. "Experts" may tell us a new insect has been discovered or that prions dance in the night. Science Fiction will discover other ways to transport our imagination but our tactile sense of beyond is diminished ... the sense that we could go there ... and that's really too bad.

It makes me want to take up spelunking!

I love Mt Wilson, and in a good dark location (hard to find these days) I've even been able to see some of the moons of Jupiter with just a pair of good binoculars. Very cool.

 

[Stearmen]

There are young people making chain mail and plate knights armor, so there are plenty who could build a Saturn V. There is now such thing as a lost art, just no one has taken up the challenge yet! An armature rocket has already made it into space, so it is just a matter of time. Like the old racing joke says, how big is your wallet?

 

[ChrisB]

My real point was the horrible irony of '73 and the blue marble photograph being the symbolic end of a certain type of age of exploration and imagination. Until then the ends of the earth were still mysterious and the moon was somehow possible. The same moment is evocative of our hitting our limit both above and below. As I said, you could still have a Skull Island and a Land That Time Forgot ... those things were unlikely, but not impossible here on earth. The "Golden Era" referenced here so often is full of the discovery of exotic places both real and fictional.

Ask an oceanographer and they will tell you that 70% of the world is virtually unexplored.
That being said, space and the ocean depths are an alien enviornent, discoveries there lack something when compared to finding a new continent, or even a small island.

 

[BlueTrain]

I jumped over to this thread and, unusually for me, I started on the first page. The firs thing I thought was, Wow! A whole warehouse of gizmos.

My boss is an engineer, although not working in an engineering position--he has an MBA. It isn't easy. He sees everything in engineering terms. My late father-in-law was an engineer, too, aeronautical (pre-aerospace). There is no problem than cannot be solved with an engineering solution, they think. Me, I'm not so sure.

Lots to talk about in this thread. For one thing, I really doubt there is anything such as from-scratch technology. Everything builds upon something that has already been invented and developed, although it may never have had a practical application.

Speaking of old things being reproduced, you can, if you want, buy reproductios of just about any sword every made. Naturally, sword afficiandos will complain that they aren't historically correct, although it is widely recognized that few are ever likely to find themselves in a sword fight. On the other hand, however, it is a never ending argument over exactly what is historically correct.

It is ironic, to me at least, that claims abound that there are no unexplored places in the world. People have been saying that for over a hundred years. Yet there are so-called television reality programs in which people are dropped off somewhere and expected to fend for themselves for a few days in a place where most people would pay good money to visit in the first place. In other words, survivalism begins with an expensive long distance airplane voyage.

I disagree that there was ever a time when people went into the unknown lands without government support. Columbus was sponsored by Isabella. The government made the Allegheny frontier more or less safe for settlement by defeating the selfish Indians who wanted it for themselves and tried to claim squatter's rights. Then the rest of the country, skipping over the parts that had already been settled by somebody else's government, was bought and paid for or conquered by the government. And likewise, it was made safe for settlement or passage through by dealing with the Indians, which included some that had been displaced already from east of the Mississippi.

 

[MikeKardec]

Interesting links -
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2016/09/spacex-reveals-mars-game-changer-colonization-plan/
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/03/spacex-advances-drive-mars-rocket-raptor-power/
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/54souf/spacex_carbon_fiber_tank/

 

[LizzieMaine]

I disagree that there was ever a time when people went into the unknown lands without government support. Columbus was sponsored by Isabella. The government made the Allegheny frontier more or less safe for settlement by defeating the selfish Indians who wanted it for themselves and tried to claim squatter's rights. Then the rest of the country, skipping over the parts that had already been settled by somebody else's government, was bought and paid for or conquered by the government. And likewise, it was made safe for settlement or passage through by dealing with the Indians, which included some that had been displaced already from east of the Mississippi.

The myth of the Rugged Frontiersman Who Wears No Man's Collar dies hard. The entire westward push was fueled by government land giveways -- the "Homestead Acts" which divided up and gave away millions of acres of territory seized or otherwise "acquired" from various Indian tribes. Although these programs were intended for individual farmers, it became all too easy for "individuals" to be used as pawns by huge ranching, logging, or oil operations, thus passing huge swaths of "public" land into corporate ownership at little to no expenditure. Many of the great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were thus built on the foundation of a hijacked government program.

 

[HudsonHawk]

The myth of the Rugged Frontiersman Who Wears No Man's Collar dies hard. The entire westward push was fueled by government land giveways -- the "Homestead Acts" which divided up and gave away millions of acres of territory seized or otherwise "acquired" from various Indian tribes. Although these programs were intended for individual farmers, it became all too easy for "individuals" to be used as pawns by huge ranching, logging, or oil operations, thus passing huge swaths of "public" land into corporate ownership at little to no expenditure. Many of the great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were thus built on the foundation of a hijacked government program.

see "Land Grant Checkerboarding".

 

[Fading Fast]

I've read a lot about the building of the transcontinental railroad and have come any with the impression that nearly everyone was corrupt - gov't officials, railroad officials and all the other related parties. There were enough scandals at the time and enough evidence has come to light over the years to support that claim.

That said, nobody was going to build that thing on their own or honestly. The gov't had the land but not the capital, the skill or the managerial ability to do it along. Private business raised the capital, but stole, cheated, tricked and fabricated every step of the way. But it also had or developed in real time the skills, expertise, problem solving and managerial ability of the incredible scale needed to forge a railroad across a continent.

The workers were treated like disposable parts, but the Irish and Chinese who did most of the work - IMHO, the Chinese more than gave the Irish a run for their money in who could do more in worse conditions - gained a toehold for themselves or their families in America that they wouldn't have gotten without it. It was a different time - human life was much cheaper, sad, but true.

All the mythical stories of the building of the transcontinental railroad are just that myths - romanticized tales with element of truths.

The railroad got built - an incredible achievement for its day. The entire effort was a cesspool of corruption and mendacity, but it got built. Maybe that is how man moves forward - it seems to be a pretty reliable theme. All achievement is tainted with human failing - sometimes to a horrific degree. But in the end, things get built.

 

[BlueTrain]

Make no mistake; the frontiersmen were tough. Government policies encouraged settlement of the West. It also helped that there was gold and silver, not to mention lots of other natural resources out there for the taking, at least if you could find it. I don't know how much corruption there was, although it seems to be a popular topic for today, but the story of the West was also a story of boom and bust, boom towns springing up where there were mines, which lasted as long as whatever was in the ground lasted.

In an odd way, one could say that two-thirds of the country is "the West."

We were out of town over the weekend, in Denver for a wedding. While there we visited two places that have become symbols of the West: Molly Brown's house and Buffalo Bill Cody's grave.

 

[Stearmen]

The myth of the Rugged Frontiersman Who Wears No Man's Collar dies hard. The entire westward push was fueled by government land giveways -- the "Homestead Acts" which divided up and gave away millions of acres of territory seized or otherwise "acquired" from various Indian tribes. Although these programs were intended for individual farmers, it became all too easy for "individuals" to be used as pawns by huge ranching, logging, or oil operations, thus passing huge swaths of "public" land into corporate ownership at little to no expenditure. Many of the great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were thus built on the foundation of a hijacked government program.

And don't forget, the Army was giving away free boxes of 50-70 ammunition, to any one that would kill buffalo in order to starve the Natives and force them onto reservations, a very cheap and easy way to take their land!

 

[BlueTrain]

Who told you that?

 

[Stearmen]

Who told you that?

If you read books on Trapdoor Springfield's, Remington Rolling Blocks, and the ubiquitous, Sharps Falling Blocks, you will come across it! Here are a couple of articles on it, no mention of the 50-70 rounds, but I imagine most of these people have never handled such a round, let alone shot a rifle or carbine chambered for said ammunition. No coincidence, that General William Tecumseh Sherman was the architect of the plan, to deny the enemy a food sorce! http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwo...-slaughtered-buffalo-plains-indian-wars-30798 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/3/6/1071659/-Indians-201-Indians-Saving-the-Buffalo-People

 

[BlueTrain]

It was said the troops complained about the loss of stopping power when they went from the .50-70 to the .45-70.

 

[BlueTrain]

Speaking of firearms and reproducing something from the past, here's another footnote of military history.

Before WWII, the standard Norwegian army handgun was a Colt .45 automatic. After the Germans invaded and ran off the other invaders (the British and the French), they, the Germans, confiscated all the Norwegian army weapons. They actually reissued the Colts to their own troops. After the war, the Norwegians confiscated the German's guns and issued them to their own soldiers. So the Norwegians ended up being armed with Lugers and used them for the next 30 years at least, finally being replaced by a Glock.

Before that happened, they did an engineering exercise (I guess you'd say) in which they experimentally manufactured some more Colt .45 automatics. I don't know what their intent was but that happened I think in 1987. I'm shocked to realize, however, that that was almost 30 years ago.

 

[Young fogey]

I've been saying 1973 too. I remember that as when the Sixties finally took over Middle America; the change had been gradual since 1968. Through the mid-1960s, it was still the Era.

 

[BlueTrain]

When the sixties took over Middle America? What does that mean.