The Flying Wire

Some of you may have noticed a few changes in the layout and format of The Flying Cloud, the List of Interesting Things, and the small but plucky Online Writing List. Indeed, it is quite likely that all of you — keen observers that you are — have noticed these things! Why, you may ask, have these layouts and formats been changed?

I originally wrote this site in the rawest of raw HTML, using a template I devised for the Pioneer Plasma Analyzer web site in… ye gods… 1995? (“Gosh, 1995… were there people then?”) Words do not exist to describe how primitive this was… because it dates back to before the invention of language. But things like that can only go for so long. Eventually one notices that members of neighboring tribes are communicating with something more sophisticated than grunts and snorts! And the original design did make it Really Hard to add new classes of material — like the Background and Specifications section I’ve been working on.

If all goes well, there should be one more major change coming up this weekend. Brace yourselves, for it could be rather shocking! And I’ll welcome any comments once it’s in place.

Update, Halloween Eve: The suspense builds! I just finished checking the new layout on IE, Firefox, and Safari, and after fixing the ‘Internet Explorer 5-pixel Row Spacing Bug’, it seems to work. One more round of tests, and if all goes well, I’ll install it when I post Episode 44.

Update, Sunday: It’s installed! It took some fiddling to get the RSS feed straightened out, but now it seems to work on all my browsers. If any of you notice any problems, let me know, and ask Jenkins to fix them. Because that sounds like a job… for a Signalman!

Yes, I admit it, I’ve been setting up the encounter between Sarah and Helga ever since Episode 18. Though that bit about the ‘Oa Ki Coral’ was tricky. (You try searching through all of the online Samoan-, Fijian-, Tahitian-, and Hawaiian-English dictionaries to find some plausible homonym for ‘OK Coral’) In my defense, I offer the principle of Checkov’s Gun, proposed by Anton Checkov (the Russian playwright [1860-1904], not the weapons officer aboard the starship Enterprise) more than a century ago.

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” [Checkov, 1889]

From this, one immediately obtains Gazis’s Corollary to Checkov’s Law:

“One must not introduce two strong female characters into a drama if there is not going to be a catfight.”

This meant I had to bite the bullet (a rifle bullet?), decide what the two principals in this drama looked like — something I’d been putting off ever since Episodes 24 and 27) — and sit down to draw them. This raised all manner of additional questions, such as ”Where should their confrontation take place?”, ”What combat forms should they use?”, and finally… What should they wear?. Readers’ suggestions ranged from traditional (women’s Royal Navy uniform), practical (shapeless overalls), and implausible (flapper garb and a silk Chinese dress), to alarming (string bikinis). The fourth alternative had many advocates, but after weighing the arguments for and against it (beer vs death threats, depending on the gender of the proponent), I decided this would be just asking for trouble…

What happens next? Will Sarah and Iverson manage to get together? And to what new project will Helga devote her very considerable energy now? Stay tuned and some of your questions may be answered!

In a stunning advance that promises to revolutionize… hmm… to tell the truth, we’re not quite sure what it promises to revolutionize, but we’re sure it will revolutionize something… members of my tribe have mastered the use of… RSS feeds! Well, perhaps ‘master’, is too strong a word, but we did manage to add a feed to The Flying Cloud right here, to preserve all those hungry RSSes from starvation. Like everything else on the Flying Cloud site, this is raw HTML and XML, updated by hand, because this seems like the right kind of tradition for a story about airships. So I can’t promise that it will always be 100% up to date. Or even 93% up to date. But I can confidently state that it does not contain any uraninite!

I began with NASA long ago, a fresh new PhD from MIT studying data from the Pioneer Project. I expected to leave when this was over, but instead I remained to study data from other outer solar system missions, develop AI software for autonomous aircraft and potential Mars rovers, co-author the Viewpoints high-performance visualization package, support NASA’s Applied Information Science Research Program, and most recently, help with the commissioning phase of Kepler, NASA’s new mission to search for Earth-like planets around nearby stars. It’s been fun! And I’ve been proud to contribute to NASA’s research effort. But now it’s time to move on.

Where to next? Who can say? But I’ve left the agency to move into industry, and as I’ve promised myself for years, I commemorated this moment by heaping up a great pile of DARC-310 and FF-427 forms — the inspiration for the infamous Viking Raid Page — and setting them ablaze. Irresponsible? Perhaps. Juvenile? Almost certainly!

But it was great…

The List of Interesting Things continues to grow. By popular request, the newest item, a hang gliding tale from the Western Sierras, went up last night.

I’ve been tracking these things to see which are the most popular. So far, the all-time favorites seem to be the Real Pioneer Plaque, Windows Enterprise Edition, and of course, those ever-popular Vikings. In contrast, poor Biff Manhattan seems to languish in obscurity. Does this provide some profound insight into human nature? Do people really have a deep an inner need to read about relief tubes as opposed to, say, the early life of the Buddha? Or does this merely reflect some caprice of the great Robot Empires with their mighty search engines?

Life is full of mysteries. What do you think?

A world where airships rule the skies and airplanes were merely a footnote to history — is such a thing possible? Could it really have happened if WW-I had not provided a forcing ground for the development of heavier-than-air flight? Even in our world, airships were the first powered aircraft, a decade before the Wright brothers. Airships flew the first passenger service, the first strategic bombing missions, the first regular commercial flights across the Atlantic, and until WW-II, were unmatched in endurance, range, and cargo capacity. Some of their accomplishments were amazing. The German zeppelin LZ-59 flew more than 4000 miles to Africa and back with 15 tons of cargo… in 1917! In 1926, Roald Amundsen and Umberto Nobile flew across the North Pole in the Italian airship Norge. In 1929, the Graf Zeppelin became the first commercial aircraft to fly around the world. In the 1930s, the US Navy operated two flying aircraft carriers, the Akron and the Macon, each with its own air wing of Curtis F9C-2 ‘Sparrowhawk’ fighters. And the German airship company, DELAG, operated from 1909 until 1937 — almost three decades — flying millions of passenger miles without a single fatality.

Then, with the crash of the Hindenberg on 6 May 1937, it all came to an end. Why?

Some people think airships were doomed to failure because… well… all that hydrogen. But those same people think nothing of climbing aboard an airliner loaded with a hundred tons of highly flamable jet fuel. Others suggest that airships were too slow or expensive, but the price of a modern Zeppelin NT would not be unreasonable for a prototype of a helicopter with the same passenger load.

So what were the problems with airships? One was operations. The Germans routinely assembled up to 200 ground crew to ‘walk’ a ship to and from its mooring. Imagine what modern air travel would be like if airlines had to line up 200 men to drag each jet to and from the gate. And imagine what ticket prices would be like if it took 60 crew members to provide service to 70 passengers. Another was the primitive materials of the day, which left airships so fragile that they sometimes broke up in flight (though this didn’t always lead to a crash, because the ‘wreckage’ could remain aloft). A final problem may have been that manufacturers regarded these vessels as ’ships’, designing and building each one on an individual basis, without any of the immense savings that might have been realized from mass production.

None of these problems seems insurmountable. By the mid-30s, the US Navy had developed mechanized ground-handling equipment that reduced the need for labor. Materials and design were improving, and might have continued to improve if ships had been built in greater numbers. And mass production was most certainly a possibility, for the Germans established crude production lines for their military zeppelins in WW-I. But ‘what might have been’ is not what was, so now the giant airships live on only in memory, aging photographs, and in tales such as this one.

Readers have asked, “Why did you start the Flying Cloud?”. (Actually, what they really said was, “An online serial about a Royal Navy airship in the South Pacific crewed by English gentlemen, French jewel thieves, sultry island maidens, and Viking warrior-women? Right. Yeah. Sure thing,” but I’ll take this as a question.) The answer is simple. Airships are neat. The Royal Navy, the South Pacific, English gentlemen, French jewel thieves, sultry island maidens, and Viking warrior-women are all neat. So why not combine them all in one fast-moving mystery-adventure?

The story itself was my fault. The art was Young’s brilliant idea. And the mouseovers were suggested by TMC, who the world should treat with awe and respect. I’d like to thank all the readers who’ve taken time to sent ideas, suggestions, and corrections by… ye gods… email? That kind of dedication deserves admiration! Now that this blog is running, I’ll see about adding comments and the like to make this process easier.

How long will the saga continue? That all depends on you. But even as Season One draws to a close, plans are afoot for… Season Two…

Ho ho, members of my tribe have finally activated this blog!  Someday, we may also learn how to fashion primitive stone tools and master the use of fire!  In the meantime, we’ll use this site to provide news and information about the Flying Cloud, His Majesty’s Airship R-505, the List of Interesting Things, the Online Serials List, aviation, and life.

There will be plenty of changes over the next few days as I edit features and get this thing up and running, so bear with me…