Shooting Down Nay Sayers

I have just found a website called the Velvet Rocket via a Google Image Search of images of nuclear pulse spacecraft like Orion and Daedalus.  I added that website to my links and I will outline the artificial barriers to starflight set up by nay sayers and the opposite problem, FTL believers.

Nay Sayers' roadblocks:

1. A starship must complete its mission within a few decades: Not necessarily the case, it can take many decades and spend decades studying the target star system.  Special Relativity sets a cosmic speed limit known as the speed of light.
2. A starship must carry all of its reaction mass: Nonsense, make use of the interstellar hydrogen, light sails, interstellar ramjet, electrostatic drag, mag sails for deceleration, and so on.
3. A starship must always accelerate at 1g: This is wasteful, as you approach the speed of light, mass increases, and takes more energy to accelerate.  Just cruise when at target speed.
4. An interstellar mission must have one massive starship with a payload the size of like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier: Bollocks, it can be an interstellar probe.  Even if it were a habitat ship mission, broken up into multiple smaller spacecraft, mass is your enemy and many smaller things are way better suited for colonization than just one big thing.
5. The reaction must be contained in a rocket engine: Bollocks, think about my favorite propulsion concept, Nuclear Pulse Propulsion where you ride the reaction like a wave, thus saving energy and reducing stress etc.

Nay sayers are not the only obstacle to starflight, there is the opposite which is equally a problem, people who believe in FTL drive, despite the validity of Special Relativity and the Lorentz Transformation equations.  A barrier set up by the FTL fans is that we need FTL to go to the stars, similar to one of the roadblocks set up by the nay sayers about mission time span.  Once we admit the silliness of these barriers to starflight, we will be able to better solve the engineering problems of interstellar travel.

Orion II Starship Vs Death Star

NOTE: The following is classified as fan fiction and never intended to be canonized.  No copyright infringement is intended or desired; this is for non-profit purposes only, free of charge.  I am doing this from the heart to face a fear that has eluded me for over two decades.

IMPORTANCE:

One thing that has bugged me is that it takes an X-Wing instead of a spacecraft that I like to destroy the Death Star that I fear; this is the importance of this post, and let me explain.  I lived for nine months from late 1989 until May 25, 1990 in an abusive group home; I was beaten with rods, had my toy airplanes taken away without even knowing it, and a series of nightmares set in dark bedrooms with thunderstorms outside.  There was one of these nightmares in particular, where I saw a stormy gray circular light on a wall across from me.  In that light was a hot-air balloon silhouette that suddenly turned into an eerie fat wiggling line with a bulb at the top, the basket remained intact.  This was subconsciously why I have feared the Death Star, even before I knew what it was or what it was designed to do!

You may ask why I fear the X-Wings; this is not easy to understand, not even for me!  It took me many years of intense out-patient therapy with doctors and self examination to figure out why the X-Wings scared me, so let me explain.  After I moved in with the loving Juleene and Bob Hebbler and their son, Garth, my dad took me to ride the Giant Dipper Roller Coaster in Belmont Park in the summer of 1991 when I was 7.  He did not check for or did not know that they had a height requirement and I was too short at the time to ride the roller coaster.  I had a fit all the way home in my dad's truck and he abandoned me after returning me to the Hebblers, we had no contact with him ever since.  This abandonment by a dad that I revered for being an airplane pilot was a painful loss and I thought that it was all my fault.  I thought that my royal hissy fit caused the abandonment, but as it turned out and I realized since 2007, it was my dad's irresponsibility as the adult of the matter that caused the problem.  Taking an X-Wing instead of a vehicle that I am comfortable with to destroy the Death Star when I want the Death Star destroyed reminds me of the early childhood abandonment.

The 190m Orion II Starship that I came up with in the morning of Thursday, February 18, 1999 reminds me of what I enjoyed in early childhood such as the good times that I had with my dad and Bob exposing me to astronomy.  Orion II reminded me of other good memories and activities that I enjoy as well as my hopes.

The X-Wing Ban: An Orion II Blows Up The Death Star!

Some Starwoids like to claim that the Death Star lets out so much interference even to throw off guided missiles that are told specifically where to aim on their targets to make them automatically miss.  They like to claim that only the Force can destroy such a battle station, and the Force is a lazy cop-out. Well let's prove these nasty Star Wars nay-sayers wrong!  The Death Star will be only visible from the Orion II through the telescope, and an Orion II spacecraft has four 5m reflector telescopes arrayed 90 degrees apart in the astronomy deck, so it will be easy to spot that moon like battle station.  More reason for Orion II instead of X-Wings to blow up Death Star is that in my fears stemming from a time shortly after Lion King first came out of the Death Star popping our planet.  There is toxic fan fiction about the Death Star destroying Earth, including on YouTube.

An Orion II Starship named Carl Sagan plots an intercept course for an Earth-bound Death Star, coming at the target from above at a 60 degree angle in relation to the Death Star.  The Carl Sagan carries small 3m long and 1m wide smart missiles that are told to aim at the thermal exhaust port in accordance to the technological readouts of that battle station.  Once one of the powerful 5m on board telescopes spots the Death Star and the small moon is confirmed to be a Death Star, a smart space cruise missile is set on a parabolic course precisely calculated to hit the 2m wide thermal exhaust port.  As the cruise missile approaches its large target, it homes in on its target coordinates.  The Empire is unaware of the small missile until it is only 13 seconds away from hitting the Death Star.  The missile NEVER misses and slips neatly into the thermal exhaust port; therefore, triggering a chain reaction that destroys the station.

The Result, the Death Star is destroyed and the Imperial plot to destroy Planet Earth is foiled, but the Galactic Empire might make another attempt to destroy Earth after this loss of a Death Star to an Orion II spacecraft.

Gnomeo & Juliet Review

Now I am moving away from the negativity of Titan AE onto something positive, on Friday, February 11, this year, the move Gnomeo & Juliet opened in theaters, and from the trailer alone, the movie reminded me of Toy Story.  That is because the garden gnomes, like the toys in Toy Story, stood still when people were present and moved around when nobody was looking.  I knew from the trailer alone, that this movie was anti-war because of the red and blue gnomes being enemies when one male blue and one female red fell in love.  I went to see this movie twice on Tuesday, February 15 and Friday, February 18 and this movie was hilarious and not only that, it is changing my life more than any other film.

For many years, I was for Star Trek and non-Star Trek space things that I like such as the Orion II Starship that I design and against Star Wars, especially the X-Wings, and this movie is putting this feud in my mind to rest.  That is because the blue gnomes remind me of Star Trek heroes and the Orion II while the reds remind me of Star Wars heroes and the X-Wings, and I often saw blue with Star Trek and other things that I like an red with Star Wars.  And that is how this movie changes my life more than any other life-changing movie to date.

This movie is a spin on William Shakespeare's play called Romeo & Juliet, but is about a blue Gnome named Gnomeo (James McAvoy) who falls in love with a red gnome named Juliet (Emily Blunt).  And speaking of William Shakespeare, there is a character who is a bronze or copper statue of William Shakespeare named Bill Shakespeare (Patrick Stewart), the same actor who portrayed Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) and the four TNG films.

The story is set in a red and blue house that is actually two houses joined together, one blue and the other red.  The blue gnomes are lead by Gnomeo's mother, Lady Blueberry (Maggie Smith) and the reds are led by Juliet's father, Lord Redbrick (Michael Caine).  Gnomeo's best friend is Benny (Matt Lucas) and his companion is Shroom, a garden mushroom who is like a dog.  Juliet's best friend is a frog statue that squirts water into the pond named Nanette (Ashley Jenson).  Benny throws a snail into the Reds' garden and it lands in the mouth of Gnomeo's arched rival, Tybalt (Jason Statham), and the reds get all pissed off at the blues.

Tybalt and Gnomeo have a lawn mower race and they are told not to cheat, but Tybalt cheats anyway and destroys Gnomeo's lawn mower.  Tybalt's best friend is a concrete deer named Fawn (Ozzy Osbourne) who has a John mouth and bad attitude.

Why I Hate Titan AE

Introduction:

We all have movies that we don't like; usually we should choose not to watch movies that we don't like, but not if the film perpetuates dangerous notions.  I very rarely review a movie that I don't like; and Titan AE, like Ben Stein's anti-reality flick Expelled, is one of those rare occasions.  On Friday, June 16, 2000, a toxic science fiction anime film called Titan AE opened in theaters, and I hated the film with a purple passion because they chose to have a spaceship destroy our planet just to get its points across.  Titan AE perpetuates dangerous notions that fly in the face of everything I spend a lifetime protecting, I'm 27.  Before you accuse me of "missing the point", I do understand that people that enjoy this harmful film get good messages of hope, second chances, finding a home, human spirit, mortality, and father and son.  But such messages do not excuse the horrific means that were used to get them across in this film, because such points can be delivered without the horrors of Titan AE and are really worth while if not for the awful ways of Titan AE.

I have watched Titan AE on VHS even though I did not like it and I was lucky there was a behind the scenes and a music video after the film, we all do strange things sometimes.  I also visited Titan AE websites, and I did all of this so I learn about the topic first before trying to shoot it down.  And yes, I can easily shoot down Titan AE because the handwavium is voluminous and contradictions populate the storyline.  Titan AE does not deserve my suspension of disbelief because its universe has zero heft and zero reality.  Even Star Wars which its creator George Lucas rightfully points out is not even science fiction does not possess this putrid level of handwavium, Titan AE which is science fiction on the other hand is pure handwavium.

Movie Review:

Titan AE opens with the most vile and indecent premise of all time, the race to evacuate our planet just to save a magical spaceship called the Titan Project.  The terrorist group known as the Drej destroy our planet that there is not much care on the surviving humans part of the deaths of billions of other people or billions of other species on Earth.  According to the Titan AE Technology Website that I first visited in 2002, the Crystalline Drej Ship, Alahenena, destroyed many alien worlds as well, killing at least TRILLIONS of innocent lives and TRILLIONS of other species.  The surviving humans did not care how many alien civilizations the Drej also wiped out, this is horrendously genocidal.  The authors give this macabre excuse, "Nobody can defeat the Drej because they are pure energy."  Then if there was "no way to defeat the Drej", why would they feel so threatened by us creating planets as to want to destroy the planet we live on. This premise is utter bilge, it does not make any shred of sense.  I am against this film for reasons I like Star Trek and peace movements like Breasts Not Bombs.  Star Trek teaches us to preserve our planet and to protect others rather than just saving yourself.  Breasts Not Bombs is a women's peace movement where women display their breasts in public to show the vulnerability of our species and our planet.  Titan AE blatantly violates both of these to the T!

Our hero who has to find the Titan; Cale Tucker (Matt Damon), is an unruly thug.  The only Disney character that I can liken Cale to is Gaston from Beauty And The Beast.  Non-Disney characters that remind me of Cale are Biff Tannen from Back To The Future, Anikin Skywalker from the last two Star Wars Prequels, Draco Malfoy from Harry Potter, and Nero from the 2009 JJ Abrams Star Trek movie.  The crew of the Valkyrie is no better, they are dysfunctional and do not make a good team until their captain, Joesph Korso (Bill Pullman) slays Preed (Nathan Lane).  The Drej are finally defeated when Cale uses his ring to activate this Titan and drain the enemy ship as it fires.  Then he creates a New Earth he gives a funny name, "Planet BOB", what kind of a name for a planet is just "BOB", you get laughed at!

In the Over My Head music video for Titan AE, the band, Lit, when the Earth blew up, they laughed and thought that it was funny!  I got news for you Lit, blowing up Earth is NOT funny and it is NOT a game, it is bloody serious!

Handwavium & Contradictions:

The first handwavium I will discuss is the Titan Project, a magical spaceship that has the power to create an entire habitable planet within a day.  Give me a break, this cannot work, it violates the laws of physics.  Planet formation requires an accretion disc around a newborn star or around a stellar corpse such as a pulsar or neutron star.  It is a slow process taking at least hundreds of thousands of years, and we know this because astronomers see different new planetary systems in different stages of formation.  On Terraforming, it is not the same as creating the planet, it only means to make an already existing planet such as Mars Earthlike, and would be a process taking a time period that is longer than a century.  The Titan will not work, that spaceship is totally unreal.

There is FTL in this movie, no warping space or taking shortcuts like wormholes, this flat out violates the laws of physics.  Warp drive is theoretically possible as theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre has shown, and worm holes are theoretically possible as people like Kip Thorne showed.  I will return to these two concepts in later posts.  The starships land and take off from plants with ease, this cannot work either, a starship stays in space and uses shuttle craft to ferry crews to and from planetary surfaces.

Now for the greatest handwavium of all, the pure-contradiction based Drej.  The first contradiction is saying that there is no way to defeat the Drej because they are "pure energy" yet you have sucking their power as a means to defeat them.  How can you say there is no way to defeat the Drej yet you depict a way to defeat them, that does not make any sense?  The next contradiction is that the both Drej and their spacecraft are "pure energy" yet they have bodies and their vessel has solid floors and walls for us humans to walk and climb on.  This flat out violates physics because pure energy cannot be tangible, and if there is any real pure energy life out their, it would be without a body and not tangible.  There is a term for life that does not have a body, non-corporeal.

Another asinine aspect about the Drej Mothership is that it contains an entire white dwarf.  A white dwarf is a star with the mass of our sun shrunk down to the size of Earth, and the Drej Warship is 7.62 kilometers long, how can you fit a dense object the size of our planet in a spaceship only as big as a mountain, this cannot work!  Another problem is that the artificial gravity on the Drej Ship is equal to that of Earth despite housing a mass equal to that of the sun.  The gravity would be equal to that of our sun and the ship would turn into a sphere due to the gravity, not retain its crystalline design.

Titan AE's Logical Fallacies:

Titan AE fans who are sensitive to criticism often use Ad Hominem attacks and set up Straw Men.  An Ad Hominem is a logical fallacy in which you reject an opponent's argument and attack the person instead of the argument, like with name-calling or profanity.  This is fallacious because attacking the person does not necessarily prove your conclusion to be correct.  A Straw Man is a logical fallacy in which you distort an opponent's argument and later claim to heroically defeat your opponent.  This is fallacious because distorting an argument does not constitute taking on the argument as it actually is head on.  Titan AE fans do use other fallacies like Appeal To Force (Argumentum Ad Baculum) where they threaten people who disagree with them or Appeal to Numbers (Argumentun Ad Numerum) where they use the greater number of people who like Titan AE and the lesser number who dislike Titan AE to try and prove their point.  These are both fallacious because neither the threat of force or larger numbers necessarily prove the conclusion to be correct.  If you commit any logical fallacy, I will detect it, shoot it down, and point it out to you!

My Personal Fears About Titan AE:

I also particularly dislike this film because it brings up my deepest childhood regret.  Titan AE brings up memories of a dark time when I once hated the characters Timon and Pumbaa from Lion King all because of something that I misinterpreted.  I call this past obsession Anti-Timon & Pumbaa Fanaticism (ATPF) and it lasted for over 706 days from the morning of Saturday, August 26, 1995 until the evening of Friday, August 1, 1997; and yes, this was in a time before Titan AE.  But this alone is not reason to oppose Titan AE, I am against it because it perpetuates dangerous propositions, and would be even if it were not for ATPF.

Motives:

Titan AE was created by Don Bulth and Gary Wayne Goldman as their revenge attempt against Lion King for Disney overtaking him, by wiping out the World of The Lion King with the push of a button from outer space.  The Drej Planet Buster was ideal for that task, but they got careless as to fill up their story with pure handwavium and contradictions, thus creating a massive Achilles heel.  They also did not think that there would be space-based opposition to the attack on Lion King, boy, were they in for a shock.  That is exactly why I am glad that Titan AE was a FLOP that will never ever stop flopping around!  The Orion II Starship for example did a number on the Crystalline Drej Ship many times and hit many home runs on Titan AE's agenda.  The irony is that Don Bluth helped make the Disney Renaissance possible during his tenure at Disney yet was jealous when Lion King overtook him.  This sounds eeriely similar to a problem that I had in 1998 and 1999 that I will discuss in later posts, most likely multiple posts since it is a long story.

Counter Story:

To shoot down the claim that no one could save our planet from the Drej, let's remember that Titan AE's authors only considered Titan AE tech, which is ironically pathetic yet it is in the 31st Century!  They did not know about the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, unusual uses of deflector dishes or deflector arrays, or interstellar ramjets, all of these are devices that could have stopped the Drej from destroying Earth.  The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that heat can never be destroyed; only dumped somewhere else, and the heat from another starship's radiators could be channeled onto the Drej Ship to the point of overloading and destroying the enemy ship.  To prove this, a Star Destroyer from Star Wars can easily kill the Drej Ship with only one volley, since turbo lasers from Star Wars are NOT lasers, but high yield plasma and high temperature!  The deflector dishes on Star Trek starships such as the USS Enterprise can drain the Drej Ship and boost the warp yield, so can deflector arrays and boost the ships power output.  An interstellar ramjet uses a frontal ramscoop to collect interstellar hydrogen to power an engine, and this could easily gobble up the Drej Ship's energy.  This invalidates the horrendous claim that no one could stop the Drej from destroying Earth.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, Titan AE is stupid, vindictive, illogical, very indecent, and outright toxic.  I rate this movie as piss poor, give it an F, I give it a BIG FAT ZERO, I give it one star, I give it a 1 in a 1-10 rating.  The sad thing is that some parents took their kids to see this ultra indecent and toxicant abomination in theaters as young as FIVE-YEARS-OLD!

Welcome

I am Timothy M McHugh, and I go by the pseudonym Orion II's Chief Designer, that is because I am designing the Orion II Starship for interstellar travel to nearby stars systems (preferably Alpha Centauri).  I have not selected a star system for the Orion II Starship to go to, because we have yet to find as my hero Carl Sagan once put it, a "pale blue dot" around a nearby star.  Alpha Centarui is still promising because those two stars are metal rich and have higher metalicity than our own sun does, but that alone is not enough to prove that it has planets.  Orion II is a Project Orion spacecraft that may the Project Daedalus-style D-He3 inertial confinement fusion (ICF) nuclear pulse propulsion, but it will not use nuclear bombs for propulsion.  I will talk about interstellar travel, outline artificial barriers set up by nay-sayers, outline arguments by advocates for FTL and other forms of handwavium, post against militarism, and review certain movies.  I am a strong advocate for starflight because as my Mars hero, aerospace engineering pioneer Robert M Zubrin put it, we either grow or we die, and interstellar initiative is the best way to beat out the war junkies via world cooperation.  Just about everyone is welcome and free of charge.

Handwavium: It outright violates the laws of physics.  You wave your hand and say pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.  FTL and spacecraft designs that ignore thermodynamics are examples of handwavium.  Many movies contain handwavium, some more than others.  And speaking of handwavium, the 2000 science fiction anime cartoon release known as Titan AE is 100% handwavium and I will be reviewing it in a later post.  As you can tell, I don't like Titan AE.