Wednesday What We’re Reading (Jun. 5, 2019)

It’s almost but not quite the anniversary of D-Day, and is precisely the anniversary of my marriage1.

Between that, travel, finishing Britain’s Future Navy (depressing) and starting Massie’s Dreadnought (exciting), it’s a short one this week2.

Defense

Science and Technology

  • Another open-source project switches to a license which excludes resellers – An interesting problem. The norm in the software industry used to be this: if you develop an open-source project, you have dibs on selling that project as a service. The Big Three cloud providers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) broke that norm, reselling open-source-projects-as-a-service. The open source projects have now fired back with a new breed of open-source licenses that permit users to do everything but that.

Grab Bag


  1. Rather than send flowers on the day, I sent them a day early. That way it’s surprising. 
  2. These are affiliate links. This will serve as a temporary disclaimer/etc. until I get the actual disclaimer/privacy policy written up. 
  3. Mr. Alexander says that this is the second article in a sequence. Idle speculation in the comments wonders where he’s going with it. One commenter put forward the idea that it might be a literal come to Jesus moment, which would be a victory for Christendom on par with the conversion of C.S. Lewis, but I don’t put much stock in that one. I lean more toward a shift in politics. 
  4. That is, I enjoy them, and he doesn’t. 
  5. Do you know what else did a good job at this, hard as it is to believe? The Star Wars prequels. Can you picture a single Lucas-era lightsaber duel with quick cuts? Of course you can’t, because none of them were shot that way, despite the fast pace and acrobatics involved in most of them. 

3 thoughts on “Wednesday What We’re Reading (Jun. 5, 2019)

  1. Agamamon

    Re: the degaussing system – there’s no way they’re actual superconductors. You simply couldn’t provide the cryogenic freezing capability throughout the ship. And definitely without adding thousands of tonnes.

    It some marketing speak from the contractor being repeated by a guy who should, but doesn’t, know better.

    Reply
    1. Fishbreath Post author

      I’m not so sure about that—there have been papers presented on the subject, and even sea trials going back to the late 2000s. Evidently, you only need about 10% of the cable length. The coolers eat half the weight savings on the proposed LCS system in the first link, but you gain a lot of it back with cable weight savings the bigger you go.

  2. Agammanon

    Hmm, looks like I was wrong on that. But coolers are pretty large, you need to devote volume to coolant tanks, a failure of the refrigerators means a massive loss of coolant and you have to run cryogenic coolant throughout the loops – and all that needs to be insulated. Looks like you’re gaining displacement in exchange for losing internal volume to the coolers.

    Just sounds like one of those systems that are great – up until the point that you take actual damage and then they make things worse. If nothing else, a break in the line is now pouring pure nitrogen gas under pressure into those spaces, displacing the air in there.

    Reply

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