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| 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—
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| 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...
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| 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.
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| 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...
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.
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