Moonraker: a Technical Analysis of the 1979 James Bond Film. Louis Shalako.

The structure is typical for the era, shiny and mostly bullshit...

 

Louis Shalako

In the James Bond film Moonraker, in the opening scenes, a space shuttle is stolen off the back of a Boeing 747. 

You may remember the scene, where a couple of guys sneak out of the broom closet or the pantry or somewhere. They fire up the engines, and take off, with the blast destroying the plane. 

(Yeah, piss-poor security, eh. - ed).

The empty weight of the shuttle would be about 165,000 lbs. It was transported on the back of a 747. That part is real. It really did happen, sort of. There would be no payload, obviously, what is really interesting is that there would be no fuel either. That is because the engines were fueled from the massive central tank system, additional boost coming from the solid-fuel rockets strapped onto that. So the entire premise of the film is bogus from scene one. Further criticisms are sort of redundant, and yet I plan on doing it anyways...

(That's our Louis. - ed.)

I could mention that the aircraft crashes in northern Canada and Drax’s shuttle base is in South America, or at least somewhere with some really big fucking snakes.

You simply can’t get there from here. There is no reason for the onboard tank, which would be located behind the cargo bay and ahead of the engines, to have any fuel at all in such a scenario. 

It is true, that the shuttle was glide-tested, and landings were conducted in order to gain the knowledge necessary to fly and land the thing. That was one reason for the whole 747-rig, that and transport between assembly and launch pad. Landing gear might get a lot of assistance from gravity, but they do have to contend with aerodynamic forces, and you want them to fully deploy and to lock into position. This implies some sort of powered system. You want to see three green lights on your dashboard. Two greens and one red would be real bad news—

It’s not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen—

It's not rocket science, Mister Bond...

#snork

You don’t use reaction control in the atmosphere, not when you have rudder, ailerons, elevators, all of which could run on battery-powered electric servo-motors. You don’t use reaction control to run the pumps and compressors for the hydraulic landing gear system, for example. All you need are batteries, in fact otherwise powerless aircraft have been saved by deploying a wind-turbine into the slipstream in order to generate minimal electrical power. With electrical power, temperature is less of a consideration, you don’t want an air tank or a fluid, hydraulic system to freeze up just when you need it most. And if you want to trickle a little bit of heat to any such system, you still need a battery.

Drax's shuttles do have external tanks, and solid boosters, and their cargo bays are full of people. They did that much research, they checked that many facts. Once that central tank is dropped, minimal fuel is aboard the shuttle, that is for maneuvering and re-entry, otherwise you're kind of stuck up there. The big problem there, is that the blast from all engines popping off at once in an enclosed space, would surely destroy the shuttles, all of them, as they were built as lightly as possible…also, there is no way in hell Bond and Doctor Goodhead could ever outrun the blast, directed as it is down, in an enclosed space, with ducts and tubes and all of that. Even so, Bond and Doctor Goodhead seem to be blasting along in Drax's personal Shuttle Five all right, trying to shoot down the pods that are to dispense the bug-juice, thereby destroying the human race…right? Those lasers run on electrical power from one source or another...

Oh, James...

As you know, in the actual shuttle flights, the solid boosters dropped off first, the shuttle riding the tank up a little higher, but of course it's the bottom part of that equation that takes most of the energy—going from zero miles per hour, at the bottom of that gravity well. The force of gravity varies inversely to (or with), the square of the distance, as we recall from our elementary school exercises, ladies and gentlemen. The higher you get, the less the force of gravity upon your 'body', organic, celestial, or man-made machine. The force of gravity would be an accelerating (or decelerating) curve, the further you get away from Earth.

Bearing in mind Drax's space station has a 'radar jamming system', even if it worked, (and not just putting out a strong signal in the sky, over a large band of frequencies, which could hardly be missed), such a large object would be visible due to simple reflected sunlight. You can see the ISS, (International Space Station) on any clear night, (even when it's dark out), and you can even track it online so you know where and when to look. The only thing more predictable than an orbit, is a geosynchronous orbit, if I may submit. That's because it ain't actually going anywheres, it just sits there in one spot all the fucking time. It's not really clear what Drax's station is doing from the available information, probably nothing if you ask me...

The ISS is a lot smaller than Drax's space station. I won't worry you with the artificial gravity, although with that central area allegedly 'horizontal', and the station rotating in the vertical axis, there are so many technical problems with this film that it isn't even funny. It has been said the series became, over time, a parody of itself. As for the actual structure, this thing is hardly designed for stealth.

The best part of this film is when Bond comes in the front door of the glass works in Venice. That girl—yeah, that one right there, that one interests me. She makes a lot of other women look like boys...

As for an amphibious gondola, coming up out of the water and zooming off through the square by what is presumably St. Mark's Cathedral, that one is just plain ridiculous. Everyone likes ‘Q’, the scenes where they ride across the pampas to the theme from The Magnificent Seven are cute. Just cute. Fight scenes in a glass museum, tossing a guy out through an antique clock, well, they’re always fun and satisfying for the audience.

Everyone loves me...'Q'.

***

I took my girlfriend to this film when it first came out. It was a thing, these were popular films and the truth is, we had a good time. These films are, first and foremost, entertainment.

I’ve mentioned fight scenes on top of cable-cars in a previous blogpost.

Stealing a parachute in mid-fall is of course hopeless…boat chases and runaway aircraft appear in other Bond films, in fact they reprise themselves surprisingly often. There are hang-gliding scenes in this film and in Live and Let Die, then there is the gyrocopter in You Only Live Twice, the jet-pack scene in Goldfinger and the car-plane in The Man With the Golden Gun. The battle in space, forces conveniently colour-coded, reprises the underwater scene in Thunderball and the ninjas-dropping-from-above of You Only Live Twice.

Right?

There were reasons why this series sort of fell away for a while and in fact it was Timothy Dalton that sort of breathed new life into it. It was still bad, in many ways, but it was at least watchable. Timothy Dalton is not gay, which puts his performance in The Lion in Winter, (Peter O'Toole, Katherine Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins), into its proper perspective and all the more impressive because of that...

 

#technical_stuff

 

END

 

Images. Stolen from the internet.

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on Fine Art America.

Check out this story on the #superdough blog.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

Time, Physics, and Metaphysics. A Parody.

by Louis B. Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved

Max Planck said at certain levels, for example at very short distances, or very high temperatures, under all sorts of unusual conditions; the regular laws of physics just don’t apply anymore.

While most believe that time cannot be changed, sometimes cause and effect don’t mean much because effects sometimes happen before their causes. It is generally believed that the universe is infinite in time. It has lasted forever and will go on forever.

As a philosopher, I find myself defining my terms with ever-greater precision. So one has to ask, what is the difference between infinity and forever?

There are those who believe in creation by God in six days. Some scientists have speculated about a continuous creation. Stephen Hawking described time like an anaconda, one that has swallowed a pig. He likens us to microbes, as if humans were e. coli in the belly of the pig—no matter how far we look, no matter which direction, we will never see anything more than the inside of the belly of the pig. He even speculates that the anaconda might swallow several pigs in succession, each of them traveling down the body of the serpent. It has been speculated that time might run backwards if and when the universe begins to contract back to its point of origin.

No matter what you know about a system today, you have no way of predicting what it will be like tomorrow.

Was the universe created by vacuum fluctuations, where particles appear out of nowhere, and then subside, and energies go back to a zero state, with the universe going on unchanged?

Some speculate there are multiple dimensions in space-time. My favourite is the fifth dimension, but some believe there are nine, eleven, or even twenty-six dimensions, and in truth the likelihood is that there are an infinite number of dimensions.

If a particle appears from ‘nowhere,’ and then disappears again, where did it come from? Where did it go to? Did it come from ‘null-space?’

There is no such thing as empty space. It has been supposed there is some kind of universal frame, a vector rigging field which pervades all of space. The term neo-ether has been used to describe the invisible something that fills the universe. We have to accept the notion that something exists everywhere. Some kinds of data remain forever unknown, for example the proofs of the existence of God. The ontological argument is that God cannot be proven not to exist; so therefore He must exist.

If you put a slot in a bead, and make a moebius strip out of paper, and put a dot of ink on the bead, and then thread the bead onto the strip; you will note that after one revolution the bead is rotated 180 degrees. In order for the bead to return to its original position and orientation, it must go twice around the loop. A geometric circle has 360 degrees, for an electron it apparently has 720 degrees.

A force is that which makes things do things. There are so far only four known forces in the universe. These are the electrical, of which magnetism is a manifestation; then there is gravitation, which is different from magnetism. Then there are the weak and strong nuclear forces. It is theorized that all these forces existed as one super-force in ‘Planck time’ at the moment of creation, which is described in event terms at something like 10 to the minus 54 seconds after the Big Bang.

With the Planck force, there would be more energy than you can safely imagine.

Wormholes have been described and accepted theoretically by scientists. They are about 10 to the minus 33 centimetres in diameter; with a duration of 10 to the minus 43 seconds. You can create a wormhole by heating a volume of space to 10 to the 27th degrees Kelvin or compressing some matter down to the black hole or neutron star densities.

(Don’t try this at home.)

Heisenberg stated the ‘uncertainty principle.’ It is a statement of probabilities, and uncertainties. You know the electron must be there, but you can never say where it will be at any given point in time.

According to the Feynham diagrams, when a particle goes from point A to point B, it splits into two and one of them must being going into a separate universe. Essentially what he’s saying is that a particle can be in two places at once—something even a ghost can’t do. A diagram of all possible paths the particle may take looks like a girl’s braid of hair. Just as when you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet, revealing magnetic lines of force, it has been postulated that there are temporal lines of force.

If you follow the lines of force—i.e. timelines, no problem. If you cross the temporal lines of force, energy builds up and a puncture is made in the fabric of time. At some point there is too great an imbalance in the system, but reality heals the wounds made in itself.

An object crossing time lines builds up potential as it moves. The pull of an object snapping back to its own time would release a huge amount of energy in the space-time continuum or matrix. Hence the mass limitations, which permits only very small objects such as the particles mentioned in the vacuum fluctuations part of our theory. Time is subjective, perhaps even imaginary. Time is closely linked to our perception of it, although many would tell you ‘there is only one moment’ is a fundamental truth. This is the ‘past is gone, the future never gets here’ line of thought. Perception is reality, truth very often depends on who you ask—or who is asking.

If you burn 100g of matter, you may well end up with 10g of ash, and release 90g of gasses, which should be confirmed by Avogadro’s Law. If you put 100 Newtons of energy into a system, you shouldn’t get any more than 100 Newtons out of it. A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless some external force acts upon it.

Does time follow the laws of conservation? One might assume that it does, however, if we know anything at all about the universe, is that ‘anything is possible.’

This may be written as a corollary of Murphy’s Law; “If anything can happen, it probably will eventually,” in a universe where nothing is impossible. If we believe that the universe sprang forth from a singularity, either time existed before it, or it was created at that moment. Also, was space created at this time? Or did it exist previously, therefore giving the new universe somewhere to expand into? If space existed previously, what existed outside of the point of singularity?

If time sprang forth from the singularity, there is no such thing as a parallel universe, they must all be on a slight angle from each other, although there might be an infinite number of alternate universes. Each of these would be reality to an observer encapsulated within them. At one time, philosophy and mathematics were closely linked, but they have tended to drift apart. In a world of increasing specialization, no one has the ‘big-picture overview.’ This is indeed unfortunate.

A friend of mine once went to the library and took out a book on metaphysics. He returned it a day later, and the librarian asked him what was wrong with it.

“The damned thing’s all about religion,” he told her.

Recently Stephen Hawking postulated that the universe might have come into being without help from God. Yet a news report in the last year or two noted that scientists, I think this was at CERN, were looking for 'the elusive God-particles,' which may help to account for the breakdown in conventional physical theories at the quantum or nanoscpoic level.

What if time exists in discrete, 'quanta' or particles, particles which share some of the characteristics of a wave?

Is time a dotted line, and if so, what happens in the gaps?

(Editor's Note: Compiled from sources. Louis really isn't that smart.)