Brainstorm: On Radio Control Drones, Helicopters, Planes, Boats, Dune Buggies, Tanks. Louis Shalako.

Approx. 1/5 scale Fleet Finch. #Louis

Louis Shalako

Brainstorm. I had just spent $134.00 on a drone that I can fly in my living room.

It is fun, and that’s all very well. I needed to do something different, for just this once.

Then I got curious. I was looking at these teeny-tiny little helicopters for, literally, $29.95 on Amazon, (exactly 3 1/2" long. – ed.) and that’s when it hit me. What if I looked—just looked, at a proper transmitter…some kits, some ARFs, (almost-ready-to-fly) model aircraft…???

Real, fucking aircraft—in purely relative terms.

Down below, we’ve linked to a four-channel transmitter, and it’s only…(drum roll please), $135.00, or about what I paid for the drone.

You see, I also have a 36” wingspan Fokker D-VII in the closet. It's built, it has a brushless motor, I have two Li-Po batteries for it. It has servos. The old FM transmitter was obsolete. I took the batteries out before they gooped out and rotted the innards of the transmitter. What I need is a new transmitter, a new receiver, and a 12-volt power supply, or I could just charge off the battery in the vehicle. I need to upgrade to the 2.4 Ghz, modern tech, just for the sake of safety.

I mean, if you're going to do it, why fuck around.

Electronics are ridiculously cheap these days. I was looking at CB radios one day, which would run right here in my apartment off of a 12-V power supply, and you can literally set up for about a hundred bucks with a cheap radio and a cheap antenna.

And.

I have done all this before—

A simple bench in the spare bedroom, and I would have the nucleus of a pretty darned good hobby at minimal cost. Maybe even two hobbies.

***

Click to enlarge.

I am kind of pleased to see that I held onto that old 12-V/6-V power supply. Lower left foreground, a pair of Li-Po batteries...a little above that, a portable charger compatible with Li-Po. There are some old Ni-Cd batteries, a desktop vice, some meters, a battery cycler/discharger (in red), the obsolete FM Ch. 28 transmitter, and of course my Fokker D VII. This is equipped with a Frio-10 brushless motor, mini-servos on elevator, rudder, ailerons, and an ESC, electronic speed control on the throttle. What I need, is a new transmitter/receiver, and some kind of benches. Better lighting. I don't know how badly I need to be dragging model aircraft up and down the stairs, and there is the question of where in the hell do we fly it.

(Area 52. – ed.)

Looking at the pictures, we can see a long skinny battery pack that appears to be for the transmitter. What I can try, is to dig out a trickle charger, plug the battery into the transmitter, and plug the charging jack into the transmitter and just see if it takes a charge.

I do not plan on flying with this radio, but I could at least turn on the radio, plug in the power battery and discharge the Li-Po batteries. We can run that quiet little electric motor right in the spare bedroom. I could try charging them, as I purchased that charger when I went to the brushless motor and Li-Po batteries. I might want to read up on it first. That only makes sense.

If I dig deep enough, I might even be able to come up with the manuals.

I have never flown this aircraft, but all the stuff in the photos has been paid for. There is some food for thought here. The machine is very dirty after seventeen years of storage. It will take some time to clean that up. The covering could use a little tightening. There is a hole in the bottom of the lower left wing. The aileron hinges are not secure. I need to cut open the covering, align the hinges and glue them properly. I do have covering of one colour or another, a heat iron, so all of that is no problem. We can check for warps in the wings while we’re at it. By the time I take it apart and put it back together again, some of those long-buried memories might resurface, and the truth is, I actually do know a fair bit about building and flying R/C aircraft. 

***

So, we have an Apollo 25-amp speed control, and there must be a receiver buried in there somewhere. You can see all the screws and access panels.

One of the things I might consider is to get a soldering iron, some solder, some soldering paste, and I could simply buy Ni-Cd cells and assemble my own batteries. I have some reservations about any transmitter that accepts dry cells—the old Futaba sets came with rechargeable batteries, along with the trickle charger and three servos when you bought the four-channel radio.

With a transmitter, and a place to work, we can drive electric dune buggies or pickup trucks, tanks, we can drive an R/C boat, and while I’ve never done a tank, that might be interesting if it was fairly large, and not too expensive. What the hell, right. It would look good in the photographs…I could blog about it.

We can always dream.

***

Background. My old man was in his mid-fifties when he got the itch to fly a radio control airplane. He’d grown up with rubber band models. He’d built free-flights with Cox .049 motors on them. We had control-line airplanes that we flew in Germain Park, at least until the noise complaints started and the cops started showing up…

I stopped in to see the father figure one day, and I found him down in the basement working on a .40-powered trainer aircraft. He had all the equipment, brand-new, all kinds of tools. It was fascinating to watch a person with some experience, and it wasn’t very long before I was building one of my own.

We flew together as often as not, for about fifteen or twenty years, and it was something very precious in that we shared that passion.

I learned at my father’s knee, ladies and gentlemen, not even so much as an adult, but as a very small boy. That kind of thing doesn’t happen so often anymore…that kind of relationship really is special, when you think about it.

Dirty. Where there is an antenna, there must be a receiver...???

Frank was a very neat builder, but we might also consider the hundreds of models he’d covered using tissue paper and dope. Heat-shrink covering was a revelation, for a guy like that, someone who’d never had any money way back when. For Frank, with the house paid off, a good job, a little money in the bank, and a club full of pretty good guys to refer to, it must have been the dream of a lifetime—a humble kind of dream, but a dream nevertheless.

 

END

Learning to Fly the Chubory F-89 Drone.

Cheap Four Channel Transmitter and Receiver.

Bluewater R/C Flyers.

The Model Aeronautics Association of Canada.

CB Radio.

Slinger at 3,000 Feet. Pilot in command, MDW 216. Photography/Sound by Louis.

 

Here’s my WW I Royal Flying Corps Memoir, Heaven Is Too Far Away.

Thank you for reading, and keeping that dream alive.

Note: these links are for info only, as I am not into affiliate marketing.

Experiment 1: plug in dedicated Futaba wall charger and attempt to charge Ni-Cd transmitter and receiver packs. After four hours of charging, there was zero charge. Tags on the batteries read 2001 and 2005, so that seems to be that. I can buy a replacement battery at a later date, assuming I wanted to use that transmitter for a boat or dune buggy. To fly at the local club or M.A.A.C. events, one would need a current spec radio system.

Experiment 2: assuming we get any charge at all in the transmitter, plug a power battery into the plane and see if we can get the motor to turn, actuate control surfaces. Bearing in mind the results listed above, this experiment is on hold.

#Louis

So. Who's Training Artificial Intelligence?

Louis Shalako

Are you worried about the future of artificial intelligence, A.I.?

Maybe you should be. That’s because you have no idea of who might be in charge of building it, and even less of who’s training it. Therefore, you have no idea of what sort, or whose moral values will be inculcated.

The truth may be rather more sobering than one would like.

That’s because you—and people like you, are already training A.I.

You pitch in your fair share of unpaid effort multiple times, each and every day. That’s the great thing about the modern world. Everybody just wants to help, and to be heard.

You do it on Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, almost every single day. You do it a little bit more with each and every Google search. You are training those algorithms—the basis of all of the experimental work going on in artificial intelligence.

Maybe you are right to be concerned. After all, you know who you are. And you make a choice every time you click on something—and the algorithms take note.

You may be seizing-on, and reposting every negative little thing—or every negative big thing. 

This might include the latest atrocity, the latest terror plot, the latest bad thing the President, the government, or the Mayor has done. Maybe your soufflé fell or your great Uncle Rudolf finally kicked off at the age of 104. Thoughts and prayers, right? Or you could just post a lot of pictures of cute and cuddly kittens. Your emotions mean nothing to a machine. It’s just a series of numbers, measuring engagement.

How popular is this?

It doesn’t care why.

It cannot measure, truth, or love, or anger.

It doesn’t have the capacity to ask why, although it may be very clever with the thesaurus and the rules of language.

(Although I would submit that understanding the rules of language is an important first step in asking why.)

Somewhere in the world, there is someone prepared to pay dearly for those little bits of information.

Your wants, your likes and your dislikes. Your fears and pet peeves might be very useful in the right hands.

Either way, you are helping to train those bots, those artificial intelligences that will be shaping your world of tomorrow.

It’s not up to me to tell you how to live your life or what might be the appropriate choices. It’s clear the really bad guys are working their asses off trying to change the fate of the world. 

They're trying to impose the most socially-negative outcomes.

Take comfort in the fact that they represent only a miniscule percentage of the world’s population, over ninety-nine percent of whom are good, decent people not looking to make trouble. All they want is to get by and to live in peace with their neighbours. To raise their kids, to have a home and to make a living.

The silent majority won’t be quite as silent as they might have been in the past.

The influences will change. A new balance will happen because it must happen. It is inevitable, mathematically. The values of a billion people in India will far outweigh the values of thirty-five million Canadians when measured by bots and algorithms. (Think of the sheer spending power.) Most of them prefer cute cats to predicting the apocalypse, which has recently been re-named ‘declinism’. This guy says the idea of decline is dangerous and I tend to agree. I thought long and hard before sharing or linking to his article.

My opinion is that it’s a bit over-blown, although the rise of anti-democratic or anti-egalitarian value systems must always give us pause for thought.

That’s the funny thing about the world, besides change being a constant.

We’re not always in the majority.

This time, I would say that we are. And that's what they're against. They are against rule of the majority, by the majority, and for the benefit of the majority. No, ladies and gentlemen. The bad guys don't like that one at all.

Ultimately, the artificial intelligences will be able to measure that. Right now, all they know is that you’re browsing for white cotton shirts, or a grappling-hook, or a pair of size seventeen wingtip shoes.

They never think to ask why, but then they never cared in the first place.

END

...hey. check out my new book, Tactics of Delay, on Smashwords.

Thank you for reading.

The Real Science Behind Louis Shalako's Tactics of Delay.

Louis Shalako

The real science behind my new novel and online serial, Tactics of Delay, is interesting, and yet I can only put so much info-dump into a military science fiction novel, which is a genre already tending in that direction. Quite frankly, it happens or it’s just too vague, with nothing scientific at all on which to hang the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

(This is why they always show an engine room, even though it’s just a bunch of lights on a panel and a dull hum in the background, with people standing around talking technical mumbo-jumbo. It gives readers or viewers something to relate to which has some familiarity in their everyday life.)

There’s a great deal of information to be put across, only so much of which can be conveyed by action, or exposition in dialogue. In a novel, I can’t just show them a picture or two and move on.

Even in this little blog post, I can only scratch the surface.

Explaining things in a military briefing, or working it in, bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph, as the story goes along, has its limitations.

You can only put so much in a ‘bit’, right? It is, by definition, just a tiny little bit of information mentioned in passing.

One of the technologies involves ‘tight-beam’ communications. This involves data encoded in a very short, relatively high-powered laser pulse. You don’t want the enemy to catch that, even if they can’t decode it. It is a piece of ‘predictive’ information. It can be analyzed, compared to other such bits of data, and, extrapolated into the future, it can give you away to predictive technologies. It’s fired at a receiver which for the sake of discussion is very much like a McDonald’s drinking straw with a sensor or pickup at the bottom of the tube. The transmitter is equally directional. You don’t want that signal going anywhere else but at your target. Assuming ship-to-ship or planet-to-planet communications, the signal is sent from one moving target to another moving target at vast distances. As an example, at billions of miles, a signal sent at noon from one location would be intercepted by another moving target at six o’clock that evening. This is ‘transit time’ at high-planetary/low-stellar distances. This requires predictive mathematics of the highest order. It requires perfect synchronization of the chronometers aboard both ships or on both planets. You have to know when and where the other guy is going to be. It also requires some scheduled interval for communications, in other words such long-distance communications would be planned ahead of time.

Considering the small size of the receiver tube, the shortness of the burst and the coding of the signal, such communication would be fairly secure from outside interception. This is simply unnecessary, even undesirable for civilian ships operating in peacetime, but utterly vital for war-craft, whose movements would be confidential, perhaps even in peacetime.

That depends on the current diplomatic situation. More on ‘soft science’ below.

If two ships were in close proximity, other methods of communication would be used minute by minute, including good old fashioned low-powered radio, or even flashing lights using something very much like Morse code. It doesn’t have to be in the visible spectrum, and the systems would be electronic. If you’re close enough, you can look out the window and wave at the other guy.

One of the things that sets space opera apart from ‘proper’ science-fiction is of course Faster than Light Travel, (FTL).

The general consensus among scientists is that FTL is, and always will be impossible.

This makes life a little more interesting for writers of science-fiction and space opera.

Readers love FTL, and that’s a consideration too. However, Chinese scientists have recently ‘transported’ a particle from Earth into Low Earth Orbit, and quantum science is advancing. 

What we once thought to be an immutable truth may turn out to be mistaken after all.

So that’s all I got to say on that subject.

Okay, somewhere in the story, I mention that Denebola-Seven has an orbit that is a bit egg-shaped. This is by no means impossible if one imagines a massive planet in an outer orbit, one that is going at such a speed that the two planets are in conjunction for long periods. 

Massive Planet-B will always be pulling Deneb-Seven outwards, even as both free-fall around the star. This only takes two bodies into consideration, and there may be others, including a couple of small moons of the planet itself. As they go around the planet, they will exert a force. This alone makes an orbit wobble. In this particular case, the narrow end of the orbit lies closest to the star Deneb. I also think this sort of orbit would be periodic. This is certainly true in geologic or systemic time-scales. That other planet would be unlikely to match speeds for all of eternity, for other bodies are also acting on it. Simply put, all orbits decay over time.

This is what we call 'entropy', the tendency for disorder to accumulate.

The fact is that all orbits wobble to some extent, with every single body in the system affecting every other body in the system to some degree, however great or small, depending on mass, velocity and orbital distance. Once the outer, more massive body had caught up to and passed Deneb-Seven, the orbit would revert to what would be considered a more ‘normal’ orbit.

Not unexpectedly, the troops are using Virtual Reality headsets and goggs, the Confederation has a surveillance satellite and both sides have battlefield drone aircraft. They have armoured vehicles, but it’s not steel armour anymore—it’s a tungsten-ceramic of the author’s own invention…(snork). And of course it’s sloped at the proper 60-degrees.

There are the softer sciences. While the latest in technology would undoubtedly be used in any conflict involving the wealthy, Home Worlds, with tens of billions in population in some cases, out on the fringes of human expansion, the planet Denebola-Seven has barely a million inhabitants. That’s not much of a tax base, and so they have contracted with The Organization, a private mercenary outfit, also associated with the Confederation, (a member planet in their own right). The Confederation is a political entity. But on such a planet, robotic soldiers, tanks, large numbers of ships and aircraft, massive space-based actions are insupportable because it all has to be paid for.

(I’ve been wracking my brains for a name, for the planet or group of planets where the Organization stems from, but really haven’t come up with anything good. Call it an intra-stellar commercial entity of mysterious origin, one with offices on fifty planets, and we'll leave it at that.)

If war is always a gamble, the gambler with the biggest wallet has a distinct advantage.

This is true because they can afford to take losses, for longer than their opponent. With their ten-to-one advantage in manpower and equipment, the Unfriendlies fit into this category. This is because the stakes in any game are only so big, this is, oddly enough, by mutual agreement  between warring parties. 

There is much soft science here.

They call it gambling because there is nothing guaranteed and you can always play so badly as to lose…the real skill lies in starting off with a smaller wallet, playing very well for as long as it takes, and then going home with some of that other guy’s money.

What’s interesting about this story is that the participants only have so much information.

They don’t always know everything that’s going on, and yet they’re facing, and coping with, information overload.

There will always be the battle for the hearts and minds of the people. This is one battle the Unfriendlies probably can’t win and they know it—more soft science.

As far as genetically-engineered super troops, humanity is expanding into the stars, money is hard enough to come by at the best of times, and resources are spread thin enough that it really isn’t necessary. A book is only so long and chemical, biological and nuclear warfare are mentioned only in passing, but then, they are hardly necessary considering the small size of the forces involved.

The Organization relies on training, and Confederation troops are some of the best-educated in the Galaxy.

END

Oh, look, I’ve got all these books on Kobo. (Sorry. Almost forgot the plug.) Some are science-fiction, then there’s mystery, fantasy, horror, a WW I memoir, all kinds of crazy stuff.

Thanks for reading.