Damon Alan's Blog, page 5

Titan: Capital of the Outer Solar System.

I’ve long thought that Mars was a natural target for Mankind to diversify our location and to create a species that can’t be wiped out by one tragedy. I always thought, “Moon, then Mars.”

I’m not so sure anymore.

With the discovery of lava tubes on the Moon, it is improving on the chart. I think it’s looking like a good choice more than ever, mainly because it seems to be providing natural shelter for colonies below the surface. There is water, there is abundant solar energy, and there is shelter from cosmic radiation and huge heat variations over the night/day cycle. It’s close to home and emergencies don’t necessarily mean help can’t be provided from Earth.

Titan is rapidly becoming my 2nd choice. The atmosphere is very close to that of Earth in regards to pressure. So no pressure suit required to be on the surface, just a source of heat and oxygen. There is ice, there is methane. Energy from hydrocarbon fuel sources is virtually unlimited there. Solar is not going to be practical, but the moon itself is one giant energy source. Combustion engines and generators are a natural fit for Titan. Because the pressure is close to Earth, construction doesn’t need to be as robust. Saturn isn’t a high radiation environment to the degree that Jupiter is. And there are lots of other moons in the Saturn system to provide metals and volatiles as needed.

Plus Titan may be way more interesting than we expect. If nothing else, it’s a natural port for the outer solar system.

Titan has an interesting atmosphere

 

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New Book Release and what’s going on

It’s been a while! I’ve been busy. As I posted in another post months ago we bought a house in May. We’ve upgraded our first room, so the last few weeks have been about that, creating a woodshop in my garage, and, of course, releasing the 6th book in the Dark Seas Series.

Book 6 is available for pre-order as I write this, and will be released on November 21st, just in time for Thanksgiving break reading.

You can get it here: Komi Syndicate on Amazon

This book is about the nature of human evil, and about the corruption that comes from absolute power. We see this in our societies. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, these were all manifestations of absolute power corrupting absolutely. And the little guy is always the one to pay the price until the scales are balanced once more.

 

The fish tank project I started a few months ago is coming along nicely. I feel like the river bottom feel has been captured pretty well, and that’s what I was going for.

The biggest problem is that neon tetras have become so genetically weak from a century of unethical acquisition and breeding that they die far too often. I think if I had the facilities I’d breed tropical fish for aquarists that were selected for hardiness and tolerance of various water conditions, not solely for color and shape. It’s too bad, really, that we as people don’t see to the health of our animals, but are more worried about aesthetics. We do the same thing to dogs.

 

The next big project my wife and I have going on that is all but finished is the remodeling of our guest bathroom. We tore out the old toilet and pedestal sink, replacing them with modern equivalents. The sink is no longer a pedestal, I have no idea why people would want to waste all that potential storage space. The faucet is just about the coolest faucet I’ve seen recently. And the color improvement is dramatic. My plumbing doesn’t leak, and I learned some new things. Such as how to get a mirror that is glued to the wall off without breaking it.

This is the color of the bathroom when we bought the house.

This is the color now, after renovation

This is the faucet. I love the trough feature, and it works great.

The next small house project is to replace the chandelier in the dining room. It looks like someone had a sale on hideous ’80s brass light fixtures. We’ll be installing something either iron or rubbed bronze. Depends on what we find.

We also have a new addition to the family. This is Clay. He’s a rescue, because that’s how I like to brings doggies into our family if possible. He’s full German Shepherd, and has a great look to him. A good stance, and he doesn’t have that stupid sloped back that American breeders try to shoot for, which causes hip dysplasia. Bad breeders. Bad. Good Clay. Good.

He still has some training to do, hence the leash he is wearing. If he doesn’t have it on, he makes me chase him around the house when it’s time to go outside. With the leash on, I think he feels like that jig is already up. He’s smart, but hasn’t ever been made to behave. That is over, he’s in a house where dogs are both loved and expected to be productive partners in the family.

So that is life for now. I’ll share the next update as things happen. And things are always happening.

 

 

 

 

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Around to Mars in 40 Days

NASA has recently announced an ion drive with sufficient thrust to get a spaceship to Mars in 40 days.

Let’s admit that is fast. Chemical rockets can get a spaceship to 5kms or so, this new ion drive can get a ship to 25kms. That’s as fast as a meteor, pretty much.

With that speed the millions of miles to Mars tick away like clicks on a clock, and 40 days later the ship enters Mars orbit. Ideally with a full load of cargo and enough people to make the trip worthwhile for research, or if Elon Musk has his way, colonization.

So the hype of course if for Mars. But imagine this engine used for a few different things.

A ship in permanent use in space, transferring cargo and colonists to Lunar orbit for transfer to a Moon colony. The trip would be much faster than the Apollo missions, I’d think, although I’m not about to do that math right now. Even a chemical rocket gets to the moon in a few days, this engine might allow a ship to travel back and forth to the Moon in hours. That’s the sort of thing that makes Lunar tourism a possibility, although only for the rich. It still takes a chemical rocket to launch from the surface of the Earth to LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

Or how about Titan? Colonizing Titan makes way more sense than colonizing Mars when you study the opportunities of the Red Planet and the Yellow Moon. The trip to Titan will be reduced to months instead of years. I also suspect (but haven’t looked up) that fuel for the ion drives (Xenon if memory serves) is probably much more available on Titan.

This engine opens up the solar system if we’re actually interested. That remains to be seen. I hope we are, I just wish I was young enough to be part of it.

Thanks, NASA, for giving me hope that there will be American flags in space once again.

The story that started this post: http://www.thespaceacademy.org/2017/10/nasas-new-ion-thruster-breaks-records.html

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Aliens

I was thinking tonight of the things needed to have a technological civilization arise from the primordial dust. And the rules that apply for us, apply for aliens as well. I believe intelligent life is as rare as gold in the universe. A number of factors come into play, I’ll make a list.

Time:

When the universe was born, the constituents of that universe were hydrogen and helium. Great for making stars, bad for making rocks, metals, proteins, hydrocarbon chains… you know, the ingredients of life. Stars were born, however, big ones that had short lifespans in stellar terms. Boom! They’d supernova, many collapsing into the black holes that potentially form the heart of galaxies today. In the process of exploding and collapsing, they produced the elements of the periodic table. Including carbon, the most important atom for life. It took billions of years to synthesize these elements in the hearts of stars and spread them across the nascent galaxies, incorporating them into new stars. By the time we got to the third generation of stars, the metalicity of those stars was sufficient to form rocky bodies, aka terrestrial planets when the proto nebula collapsed and formed a star. After 9 to 10 billion years of existence, the universe was diverse enough in the elements to create our Sun, which was born with a planet we later came very much to need. Earth.

It’s entirely possible that because of the metalicity stars need to create terrestrial planets that are metal rich like Earth, we are among the first civilizations to arise in the universe. It takes time to build up lots of iron.

A Lucky Collision:

Shortly after the new Earth was formed, a rocky body named Thea slammed into the planet. It hit at precisely the right angle that didn’t allow it to shatter both worlds, but did allow Earth’s gravity well to retain much of the ejecta. The result: The Moon. The Moon is remarkable. When it was born it was a mere 15,000 miles above the surface of our planet, it’s been receding since the beginning. Tides a mile high inundated the coasts, mixing molecules, providing water to lifeless lagoons and ponds. And, as a side benefit, the gravity of the Moon prevents the Earth’s axis from tilting much more than it does now. Without that stabilization, the planet’s axial tilt can swing wildly, creating dramatic and devastating climate events that would make it difficult for life to arise, and probably impossible for multi-cellular life to exist. Don’t believe me? Imagine the Earth with an 85 degree axial tilt. The northern hemisphere would be in the sunlight for months, then a day/night cycle, then months of darkness. The temperature under full sun would skyrocket, under months of darkness it would plummet to 3 digits below zero. What animal or plant survives that? Now imagine a species that does survive trying to rise to intelligence, agriculture, trade, technology, flight, etc. Without the Moon it’s unlikely anything like life as we know it would be here.

A Lucky Neighborhood:

One gamma ray burster, one star passing too close and pulling planets out of orbit, one supernova nearby, a black hole going active near us… none of that has happened in the billions of years the Sun has been shining and feeding life on this planet. Or, if any of them did, they happened early enough that life recovered. It’s possible some of the early extinction events were gamma ray bursters, but we don’t know. What we do know is that such events are so rare evolution has time to operate. Because we’re in a quiet neighborhood of the galaxy. Light on stars, and light on threatening objects. Good for us now, although it might make it more difficult for when we become star farers.

We’re lucky for Jupiter too. That giant has swept objects that could threaten us with dinosaur level impacts so successfully they happen over millions of years, instead of thousands. We’ve seen it. Just search Jupiter impact on Google and see.

A Lucky Mix:

There are numerous examples of what I mean here, let’s talk about just one however. Water. What if the Earth had twenty times as much water? There’d be no land, or at most just a few islands. Nothing for technological civilization to work with. What if is had 1/20th as much water? We’d have a desert planet that looks more like Mars than our green world. That water came from somewhere, maybe it’s a function of the type of star we formed around, or maybe it’s because Jupiter scooped up the excess. Either way, we got the mix just right. Lucky indeed.

A Lucky Size:

Imagine if we were a super-earth. With surface gravity of 2-3G. Life would probably evolve just fine. Even technological life might. But would they go to space? Probably not. To get off the Earth our rockets are 95% fuel to get to 11.2 kilometers per second and reach escape velocity. That’s at 1G. One a 10 Earth mass super Earth with twice the diameter of our planet that number changes dramatically to 25 kilometers per second. I don’t know the fraction of a percent payload could be for such a world, but if it was even possible to get a satellite into orbit, the payload would be tiny compared to the rocket and fuel. Payload certainly wouldn’t be 5% of the weight of our rockets. More like .05% (again, just a guess, I don’t know the formula for this, but we know it’s much less than Earth if you can get to orbit at all.

Just a few reasons.

These are just a few of the reasons I think technological spacefaring civilizations are very rare. Others, such as the heat in our core maintaining tectonic activity is also vital. And our fluid core creating a magnetosphere. There are so many things that if one was different we’d not be here. So Drake’s equation might want to consider that number, the number of life bearing planets which give rise to technological civilizations is quite low I expect.

All just my opinions, and I might be very wrong. But it’s why, in the Dark Seas Series, humanity doesn’t meet any aliens from our universe.

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General Update:

So a couple of things have been snagging my interest lately. The first of which is the aquarium I set up.

As you can see, plenty of fish are now in the tank. My goal has been to get the river bottom look, and I think it’s come close. CO2 injection is working perfectly, the plants are going nuts.

I did have one minor setback, the aquarium heater gave up the ghost, it was old and unreliable. I bought a new one today, it’s getting the tank back up to temperature slowly, as it should. The drop in temps, to 70F, cost me a few neon tetras sadly. They are sensitive to environmental changes.

As you can see, there is new growth no the plants, and there is wood in the tank now.

I think over the next several months this tank will blossom into something spectacular.

Da Books

Next is the status of my books. Book six is supposed to be delivered to my house on Tuesday, October 3rd. Then it’s a quick read through and edit from my editor, and hopefully up on Amazon to be released mid-October. I like to release on Thursday, so that the UK will have it for Friday reading.

On top of that I’d like to update you on the cover of book 7, which is about 15% written now.

I’ll let you know that the scene below these grapplers and transport shuttle is on the capital planet of the Komi. I’ll leave you to speculate as to what is happening exactly. It wouldn’t be right for me to give any of it away, would it?

So there you go. Now you’re up to date on the cool things going on.

As always, suggestions or comments welcome at damon@damonalan.com.

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Book 6

I’ve finished Book 6 in first draft, made a second pass, and am finishing my final edit before I get a copy to my editor.

I was writing it when I realized that I wrote past the point where I wanted to end the book. Thanks to that, Book 7 is 10,000 words complete already.  Haha… nothing like a head start.

I’m really excited about Book 6. The factions are coming together in conflict, and the Hive are really undergoing a bit of a change.

I can’t tell you much more than that, I don’t want to ruin anything for regular readers.

Release dates:

Komi Syndicate is, unless something strange happens, coming in October.

My goal will be to get Book 7 out by Christmas, since I do have a head start on it. As always, feel free to email me if you have questions or suggestions.

 

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The Age of Aquarium

I’ve had aquariums for most of my life, and not the goldfish and a beta kind. Professional level aquariums that people would pay huge bucks for.


 


I haven’t had one since we moved to Colorado because until recently, we didn’t own a house here. Now we do. So here is my aquarium that is being set up.


 


It will be a planted community tank, with a day cycle lighting system, a CO2 injection system, and probably about 80 fish of various types, mostly schooling types.


 


I’ll describe a bit about the tank with each picture, I plan on posting the details on my blog regularly as the tank develops.


 


For now, it’s two to four days of sitting with nothing living in the tank. The CO2 system is being shipped, so I’ll have to take the canister to a welding store and have it filled. I got a 20lb cannister, so it shouldn’t need filled more than once a year. The CO2 is for plant growth if you’re wondering.


 


The bottom of the tank is Special Kitty cat litter from Sam’s Club. Yes, that’s right, cat litter. It’s 100% clay, and I’ve used it numerous times in the past to act as a root base and nutrient source for my plants. It’s why I posted the other day lambasting what people pay for bentonite clay.


 


On top of that are rocks from the Dollar Store out in Falcon. Huh? That’s right, the dollar store. The rocks are for potted plants, but they’re already clean and work perfectly in aquariums.


 


The filter is a Marineland, and is probably twice the size I need for this tank. But I like them bigger, because not only do they filter more of the tank more quickly, but I also use them to stir my injected CO2 into the water.


 


The light that is on there now is a cheap POS that came with the tank, I’ll be replacing it with a full day cycle light that will provide different color light to the tank based on the time of day.


 


So 2-4 days like this. Then the first plants go in place, and one fish of some kind to get the ammonia/nitrite/nitrates cycle going. I told my daughters that if the water isn’t adjusted chemically, that first fish will be a sacriFISHial lamb.

Comic Con!

This weekend is Colorado Springs Comic Con, I’ll be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. My table is #1310, so if you want to stop by and chat I’d love that. Or I’ll sign a book for you if you want. I suppose it should probably be mine, but what do I care about that? LOL! I’ll have the Dark Seas Series, Serum, and Slayer there, along with the All or Nothing Card Game which I’ll gladly teach anyone how to play on the spot.

Colorado Springs Comic Con

There you go. Now it’s the a thing you know.

I’m hoping it goes really well, this is my beloved city and I’d like to attend this one again next year if I don’t lose too much bank in the process. So stop on by, say hi, and grab a book to read.

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Not much of a poet, but I had to put this somewhere.

I was sitting at my desk, eyes closed, thinking about the world. I don’t normally write poetry, and this probably sucks, but here it is. If you can’t tell, I’m not exactly a fan of how life is unfolding in my nation at the moment. Fascists on both sides of the argument are fighting each other, and the power of the state grows as people draw blood from one another. It’s a sad world we live in, and I’m having a hard time with it. We’ve let the insane speak for us too long, and those who would control us while pretending to see to our needs say too much.

So as I sit at my desk, contemplating it all, barely breathing, this flew from my fingertips with my eyes closed.

 

Barely breathing.

Souls are seething.

Everything is corrupt I see.

Deeply feeling.

The dreams they’re stealing.

Nothing seems the same to me.

Steal the dreams away from us now.

Take the future; make it dark.

Burn the stones that hold us up now.

Ruin the only shining star.

Promises broken.

A worthless token.

Is all that’s left for you and me.

Anger growing.

Those without knowing.

Seek to harm the land of the free.

Steal the dreams away from us now.

Take the future; make it dark.

Burn the stones that hold us up now.

Ruin the only shining star.

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The Rise and Fall of Civilization.

Much of my life, since I got my first copy of Sid Meier’s Civilization for my Amiga 3000 in 1990 if memory serves, I’ve been a huge fan. I’ve been loyal to the series over the years, an adamant supporter. I watched as the simple mechanics of Civ I were expanded on in Civ II. Then more so in Civ III. And, in what I consider to be the pinnacle of the Civilization series in regard to gameplay, Civ IV. Civ IV had the ability to create a massive world, vassals, a decent religion system, and it was possible to create a massive war between your nation and the others around you.

I am currently playing a game of Civilization VI, and I just destroyed an entire nation with 2 crossbowmen, a swordsman, and a horseman. The enemy had muskets. There is no way that should have happened, and it speaks to the underlying laziness and ineptness of the developers when they built the game. There are good things about Civ VI. I love the hex map. I love the way things are built in cities now. So it’s not like there hasn’t been some interesting things added to the game. But for the most part, it’s simply continuing the dumbing down that Firaxis started in Civ V.

The absolute best thing I’ve ever seen in Civ isn’t even Firaxis material. It’s from a group of modders on a site called www.civfanatics.com. Direct link to the mod page is here. The mod is called Caveman2Cosmos, for Civ IV. See it on YouTube here. It allows you to start with a wandering tribe of cro-magnons in 30,000BC (or so, it might be 40K BC) and build a civilization that actually does stand the test of time. The Civ IV maps are massive, and modern computers rock them because back then the game was about gameplay, not overly  pretty graphics.

When Civ VI was released, it lacked many, and I do mean many of the features that previous versions of the game had. The “Sentry”, later named “Alert” function for example. When released, Civ VI didn’t have it. An oversight, which by itself, made the game suck. Firaxis knew this, because it wasn’t long before they released a patch adding that feature in.

I think the biggest problem with Civ VI is that it is a compromise. Anymore the developers are so cheap and pathetic they try to release the exact same game on the PC and the consoles. Note to foolish developers: People game on the PC because they want complex games that utilize the capabilities of their machine. People game on consoles because they want easy controls and quick rewards, in my opinion. I don’t know, I’m not a console gamer. But I do know why I play games on the PC, and why I love games like Hearts of Iron IV that take advantage of the remarkable flexibility of PC controls. Look at the image of Hearts of Iron IV, and you’ll see that it would never work on a console. It’s too complex, too deep. And I love it for that.

Any developer that is marketing to both consoles and the PC, other than for first person shooters, is really missing the picture. Gamers like myself are only going to take the degradation of our gaming experience for so long. When Civ VII is released, by the way, I will not be buying it until long after the release date, despite being nearly a three decade fan of the franchise. I can no longer trust Sid Meier, he’s as big of a sell out as EA in my opinion.

I’m just glad that Civilization IV runs on my Windows 10 machine. I’ll be very sad when the day comes that it doesn’t run on the current operating system. Because I guess Civilization games are just like cars. They don’t make them like they used to anymore.

Thank goodness for Steam, where we can find games to fill in for the times our faithful fandoms fail us. And Sid Meier certainly failed those of us who wanted the Civ IV war and peace experience brought into future versions of the game.

This isn’t the only franchise to go this route, btw. Take a look at how the character leveling process for Mass Effect was dumbed down over the series. We’re not idiots, developers. We’re gamers. And we’re sick of you dumbing down our PC games to save you money on the console port. You’re losing many of us. Because other developers are stepping into the vacuum of game quality you’ve created.

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