January 23, 2015

To Aru Kagaku no Railgun S -- engineer's disease

There are two major screwups in Railgun S which have always bothered me. They're both spoilers, so below the fold they go.

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 11:05 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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January 22, 2015

What's wrong with this picture?

"She's beautiful enough -- in her way -- of course," the man admitted, entirely unimpressed. "But the, so is a Radelegian cateagle, so is a spire of frozen helium, and so is a six-foot-long armor-piercing punch." -- Second Stage Lensman, E. E. Smith

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:35 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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January 02, 2015

Non-optimal solutions

I eat my peas with honey.
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
but it keeps them on my knife.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:27 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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December 09, 2014

I've discovered a new Illuminati!

I think I know the truth about the recent hysteria regarding campus rape. It's...

Fat YAOI fangirls!

Their sinister plot is to make it so terrifying and risky to be a heterosexual male that all the guys will give up on women and turn to each other for comfort. And then the Fat YAOI fangirls will have achieved in the real world the fantasy they had been reading about!

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

UPDATE: I assume most of my readers know this, but やおい yaoi is a Japanese acronym for yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi which means "no climax, no point, no meaning". So even the Japanese are contemptuous of it. What is it? It's the term for mangas about male homosexuals, aka "boy's love". And in Japan the main audience for yaoi is middle-aged married women. In America the stereotype is that it's girls in their teens and twenties who are overweight, hence "fat YAOI fangirls". As a group they're known for wandering around anime conventions carrying YAOI paddles, and quite frankly I don't want to know why.

Every group of freaky fans has someone they look down on ("Yeah, we're strange, but those guys are really strange!"), and for most otaku it would be furries. But I think even furries look down on fat YAOI fangirls. 

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 01:13 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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May 05, 2014

Dog Days -- speculation

What happened to all their parents? Doesn't it seem strange that all three kingdoms are currently ruled by teenage (or preteen) princesses? Where did the adults all go?

Standing outside, maybe it's just a case of Everything is Better with Princesses. But in story terms, is it inexplicable or is it a plot point?

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 09:04 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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March 26, 2014

To aru kagaku no Refrigerator

I've been watching Railgun S all the way through, and I just spotted a huge logic fail. Below the fold, of course.

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 08:41 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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January 15, 2014

Mouretsu Refrigerator

It's taken a long time and many rewatches of Mouretsu Pirates for me to start spotting logic errors in the show. One in particular, which is a spoiler, below the fold.

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:20 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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January 09, 2014

How an engineer looks at the world

When I look at this, the first thing that springs to mind is "mosquitos".

Venice is famous for its canals, but there's a downside to it all. Venice is built in a lagoon, and the water doesn't flush. Another thing Venice is notorious for (besides flooding) is insect plagues. Insects breed in the lagoon, and sometimes they swarm. It is so dense that it shrouds the city in darkness.

I've visited Amsterdam, which also is famous for canals. However, the Dutch, being superlative civil engineers, have their situation under control. The entire canal system is controlled by a set of gates, and the city engineers flush the water in the canals six times per week with water from the Amstel river. As a result, the water in the canals doesn't reek and they don't get insect plagues.

And the owners of this merry little chateau are going to have to do something to keep the water in their little lake from getting putrid and loaded with insect larva. I wonder how they do it?

50 gallons of Clorox every Sunday?

Or a different possibility: 5,000 Koi?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:34 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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December 02, 2013

Vividred -- magical girl

If we're really going to get nerdy, there's an idea I've had for a long time now: Akane is truly a magical girl.

Vividred Operation is an exercise in Clarke's Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Grampa has gone way beyond normal science and technology in designing the keys, but it is nonetheless technology.

More, and loads of spoilers, below the fold.

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Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 10:01 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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November 30, 2013

Mouretsu Pirates -- thrusters

Our current rocket technology is, needless to say, quite primitive. Because of inherent problems with using a reaction drive, space launch is very expensive.

But it doesn't need to be. A reaction drive (that's any drive that is based on momentum change caused by high speed ejection of propellant) can be extremely efficient if the exhaust velocity is high enough. Our current problem is that the exhaust velocity of our rockets isn't all that high, so propellant efficiency is terrible.

In Mouretsu Pirates they have direct conversion of matter to energy, which is able to provide the kind of power that current rocket engineers could only dream of. And they also have inertia control and gravity control.

I was trying to think about how their thrusters work, and it suddenly occurred to me that it might be a form of gravity control. If the propellant is subjected to several hundred G's, and achieves an exhaust velocity of one or two percent of C, the propellant efficiency would be very high, and you've solved the major problem.

They have single-stage-to-orbit shuttles, and if they were powered the way I think they are, then it becomes very practical to build large structures in orbit, like the docking station orbiting Uminoakehoshi. Combined with efficient FTL drives (which they also have) then bulk interstellar trade becomes practical.

We can only dream of such technology, but it doesn't cost anything to dream.

UPDATE: Of course, they couldn't operate that way all the time. If they were firing 0.02*C while exiting from a space dock, they'd punch a hole in the side of the station with their exhaust.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 09:55 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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