Recent Posts

91

The Reality of Apollo / Gene Kranz living up to Andrew Chaikin's description...

« Last post by Kiwi on October 29, 2025, 04:13:27 PM »

..."as sentimental as they come". A Man on the Moon, page 170.

When I bought the DVD of Apollo 13 (the movie) in 2005 I was lucky to get the 2-DVD version, and at an excellent price. Disc 2 has three excellent documentaries. The first is "Lost Moon: The Triumph of Apollo 13" duration 0:58:07.

At 0:57:05 Kranz is talking about the time when the Apollo 13 crew arrived on the aircraft carrier Iwo Jima.

Gene Kranz:  "It's again tradition that you wait until the crew gets on the carrier deck, at which time cigars, and the world map lights up.  And... Oh shit!"  He pauses, goes silent, looks away, his face quivers, and he struggles get out, "It was neat."

Some people might complain about a moment like being made public, but I admire it because it reinforces for me that I'm not only watching and listening to a great man and a brilliant Flight Director, but also a kind and caring man. The world can do with more people like Gene Kranz.

My only real complaint about Apollo 13 is that they made such a botch-up of the timing of the Saturn V's ignition and liftoff. I was surprised and wondered how they managed to do that.

92

General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency

« Last post by ApolloEnthusiast on October 29, 2025, 08:46:52 AM »

And a welcome from me too when you get here.

Thanks!

Got any thoughts about where exactly you might be settling?

We'll be starting just outside of Auckland, and we'll probably be there at least a few years, but I think our long term plan is Hawke's Bay.

I'm on the coast, west of Palmerston North, and always keen to meet any other Apollo enthusiasts.

That's a bit far for spontaneous meetings, but I'll have a couple weeks off between each school term, and I'll be eagerly exploring the country in those intervals, once we've settled in, of course. So I'd definitely love to arrange a meet up!

Depending on where exactly you live now, you might find that our night skies are a bit clearer

We currently live in New Jersey, so the NZ skies are a huge upgrade. When we visited a couple years ago I was very excited to show the southern hemisphere starscape to my wife.

Plus there are fairly good reasons why they call NZ "the Shaky Isles". You might have to become accustomed to the odd earthquake.

Much more preferable than the political earthquakes happening here, and from what I understand, at least in the Hawke's Bay area, the more frequently the little shakes happen the better. It's relieving the pressure and preventing the type of tension from building up that causes a big one.

93

General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency

« Last post by Kiwi on October 29, 2025, 07:33:45 AM »

I realize that because I don't post much none of you really know me at all, but I've been lurking for years.

I just wanted to share that my visa was just approved, so my wife and I will be moving to New Zealand in January. While I feel bad about abandoning the people here who aren't fascist collaborators, I honestly feel like the USA is irretrievably gone. It will take generations to rebuild what's already been torn down, and I have to take care of my, and my family's safety first.

I'm looking forward to joining the Kiwi culture!

And a welcome from me too when you get here. Got any thoughts about where exactly you might be settling? I'm on the coast, west of Palmerston North, and always keen to meet any other Apollo enthusiasts. Just a few days ago I asked on our local Facebook page if there is anyone in our community who would like to learn more about the manned moonlandings and posted a few details about what materials I have. I watched Sputnik 1 pass over here at 8:06pm on 9 October 1958, although I now know that we would have actually seen the rocket that put it up, rather than the tiny satellite in its highly elliptical orbit.

Depending on where exactly you live now, you might find that our night skies are a bit clearer, and I'm pretty certain you'd be able to view the green flash of the setting sun more often too, due to NZ being surrounded by water, instead of land with all the smoke, dust, insects, birds, pollen and other pollutants in the air. Mind you, our Aussie neighbours send as a fair bit of the smoke from their forest fires at times. Plus there are fairly good reasons why they call NZ "the Shaky Isles". You might have to become accustomed to the odd earthquake.

94

The Reality of Apollo / Re: Need some help, critique required: Apollo photos of Earth from moon

« Last post by BertieSlack on October 25, 2025, 03:22:31 AM »

It's unlisted at the moment, so I would appreciate some feedback before I hit 'public'.

Nice work - make it public now. In the video description, you could mention that the TV camera on the rover on the later missions also captured the Earth (and maybe challenge the hoaxnuts to find the clips). There's also a video by Sir Mildred Pierce which demonstrates that the UV photos of Earth from Apollo 16 could only have taken from the surface of the Moon.

95

The Reality of Apollo / Re: Need some help, critique required: Apollo photos of Earth from moon

« Last post by onebigmonkey on October 24, 2025, 03:09:48 AM »

I guessed that might be the underlying logic

And yeah videos are very time consuming. Even the one I just did on Chang'e-2, which was pretty much just screen captures and is only a few minutes, took a whole day. I've had many ideas but just couldn't face starting!
 

96

The Reality of Apollo / Re: Need some help, critique required: Apollo photos of Earth from moon

« Last post by TimberWolfAu on October 23, 2025, 06:19:49 PM »

Very nice - been meaning to put something like this together for ages! Worth adding the TV shots of Earth?

I thought about it, but I've just kept it to the photos, rather than the TV footage, given it's far easier to drop the photo id with the photo.

That, and it's something i'm just starting out on. Not really sure how serious I want to go into video responses (I do have a rough plan to make one for each of 'Rasa's' 12 Smoking Guns, but that's another story), mostly my plan was just to drop some gaming footage and have some fun.

But then, in about a years time I may find myself with a lot of 'free' time, so who knows.

97

The Reality of Apollo / Re: Need some help, critique required: Apollo photos of Earth from moon

« Last post by Jason Thompson on October 23, 2025, 10:57:20 AM »

Nice work!

It is a frustrating question when HBs ask about photos of Earth from the Moon, when the whole point is that at their feet is a whole new unexplored landscape!

98

The Reality of Apollo / Re: Need some help, critique required: Apollo photos of Earth from moon

« Last post by onebigmonkey on October 23, 2025, 05:11:19 AM »

Very nice - been meaning to put something like this together for ages! Worth adding the TV shots of Earth?

99

General Discussion / Re: The Trump Presidency

« Last post by rocketman on October 22, 2025, 05:39:51 PM »

but I started watching rugby . . . Super Rugby Pacific

I can't keep track of that one, the way it keeps changing every few years.

100

General Discussion / Re: Spaceship design - a hypothetical excercise

« Last post by Peter B on October 22, 2025, 04:52:36 PM »

I'm an avid gamer, having played both table top games and role-playing games over the decades.

Back in the late 1970s the science fiction RPG "Traveller" appeared, and for a decade or two it was really popular. It soon expanded into ship design, and then fleet design. The book "High Guard" provided rules for designing warships, and like some of my friends I wasted many weekends designing all sorts of ships in the (likely illusory) search for the ideal design.

The book's writers had clearly put a lot of thought into the rules (remembering this was before PCs and spreadsheets would simplify the design job). One of the early decisions you needed to make when designing a ship was what sort of hull shape you wanted. That decision affected (a) what percentage of the ships weapons could fire at a single target, (b) the cost of the hull, and (c) whether it could enter an atmosphere (i) always, (ii) never or (iii) sometimes, depending on the atmosphere.

Hull types included:

1. Needle (like a Saturn V);
2. Cone (sort of like the N1);
3. Wedge (like a Star Wars Star Destroyer - the similarity between them and early Traveller artwork is intriguing);
4. Flattened sphere (like a traditional UFO);
5. Sphere (like the SW Death Star);
6. Irregular structure (like the Battlestar Galactica);
7. Dispersed structure (like the ISS);
8. Planetoid (that is, built into an asteroid); and
9. Buffered planetoid (again, built into an asteroid, but leaving more of the asteroid).

When combined with the game's lore on how you travelled ('jumped') between star systems, the game often pushed you into very specific and interesting design choices. For example, if you wanted to maximise your ship's jump range you needed to allocate massive amounts of volume in the ship to fuel, which in turn encouraged the idea of massive jump ships which carried several more modestly sized warships with no jump capability as "battle riders".

= = = =

Then, in the 1990s came the tabletop miniatures game "Full Thrust". Again, in FT you can design your own ships, with a variety of weapons, armour levels and speeds. However, the game also provides preset designs for different fleets, along with the miniatures for those fleets.

The designs of these miniatures are visually distinct, so you can tell at a glance which fleet a ship belongs to. However the appearance of all the ships doesn't bother to take into account the weapons mounted on them; identically-armed ships from different fleets will look different from each other, while differently-armed ships from the same fleet will look similar.

In this case, the purpose is to give the players visually interesting objects (the ship models) to expend their painting skills on, on order to add an aesthetic angle to the game.