ApolloHoax.net
Apollo Discussions => The Hoax Theory => Topic started by: DAKDAK on May 26, 2012, 04:16:11 AM
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I have been told by the extremely biased members of this site that I do not reply, to the explanations given to me regarding what I personally think about THE OFFICIAL APOLLO RECORD,and that I just move on to another APOLLO conspiracy subject,and disregard the posts disputing the uneducated ideas that I originally posted.I have also been called a Seagull Poster. I don't know what a Seagull Poster is,but I don't believe that I am one.
I have also been criticized by members who say that I use poor grammar and punctuation,this is true remember I dropped out of High School in the 9Th grade,and English was my worst subject. I truly don't know about fragmented sentences or where to start a new paragraph.
A few replies said that I should either go away or dig in to the debate,at first I was going to go away,but since I am positive that I am right and the extremely biased members of this site are wrong I have decided to dig in.
I believe that there are LITERALLY THOUSANDS of inconsistencies and even FLAT OUT LIES in the official record of APOLLO 11. I also believe that I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt if given enough space to fully explain my arguments.
It doesn't seem fair to me to have to limit your responses to a few lines of text and a few attachments with a maximum of
4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB(which by the way is more than THREE TIMES THE REPORTED TOTAL MEMORY OF THE ONBOARD APOLLO 11 COMPUTER SYSTEM!!
In order to set the record straight and hopefully start a true FAIR debate on the subject of the OFFICIAL RECORD OF APOLLO 11. Here is the topics that I have previously posted
I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time. I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
Below are numbered reasons that I have already posted, as to why I believe that the official record of APOLLO 11 is completely untrue. I have many more reasons to believe this, but these are the ones I have mentioned so far in order to the best of my recollection. I will respond in great detail as the extremely biased members of this site do to any reply. REMEMBER ONLY APOLLO 11
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
The Apollo 11 record is a complete fairytale from beginning to end told to the American public to steal tax dollars and forever change are since of reality
I set up a 50 gigabyte drobox so that I can put a complete reply to include Print, Pictures, Eyewitness Accounts and Videos without using this sites resources or having to use YOUTUBE links.
I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
LETS DEBATE
[Post restored by LunarOrbit]
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Point 5. Pick up a copy of "Live TV From the Moon". It explains every aspect of the TV camera and its development. You can take that as my explanation, as I wrote it. When you believe you have any questions, even going down to who supplied the cable, post here.
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I have been told by the extremely biased members of this site that I do not reply, to the explanations given to me regarding what I personally think about THE OFFICIAL APOLLO RECORD,and that I just move on to another APOLLO conspiracy subject,and disregard the posts disputing the uneducated ideas that I originally posted.I have also been called a Seagull Poster. I don't know what a Seagull Poster is,but I don't believe that I am one.
If you don't know what it is, how can you can say that? Oh yeah, it is precisely your lack of knowledge that makes you extra qualified to pass judgement, just in the same way that justice is at its best when the jury doesn't hear the evidence.
For information, a seagull poster is one who arrives, dropped an argument, then leaves it and often goes on to repeat with another argument. To be fair to you, while you thrash around a bit, there have been far worse seagull posters in the past.
I have also been criticized by members who say that I use poor grammar and punctuation,this is true remember I dropped out of High School in the 9Th grade,and English was my worst subject.
I don't know. From what you've demonstrated, science and maths are making a good play for that title.
I believe that there are LITERALLY THOUSANDS of inconsistencies and even FLAT OUT LIES in the official record of APOLLO 11.
Given the "inconsistencies" you presented so far where misunderstandings on your part, which you admitted, don't hold out too much hope for the rest.
I also believe that I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt if given enough space to fully explain my arguments.
It doesn't seem fair to me to have to limit your responses to a few lines of text and a few attachments with a maximum of
4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB
You can make multiple posts in a thread. But in fact, it is probably better not to as it allows the debate to happen in a much more digestible format.
I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time.
That's a simplification that doesn't bode well for your understanding of the fundamentals of logic. Many issues cannot be compartmentalised into a single mission. That's why Jay has organised his website by category.
I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
I recommend Apollo 8 since most of what you list below what apply equally to that mission. Tell us what happened on Apollo 8 first.
Below are numbered reasons that I have already posted, as to why I believe that the official record of APOLLO 11 is completely untrue. I have many more reasons to believe this, but these are the ones I have mentioned so far in order to the best of my recollection. I will respond in great detail as the extremely biased members of this site do to any reply. REMEMBER ONLY APOLLO 11
Since what you list below are just hubristic statements without any justification for them, we can't respond at this point. We're not going to get into a nu-uh, uh-huh style of debate. If you want to us and anyone else reading this forum to take your statements seriously, you need to explain why you believe them so.
But it is pointless doing that all in one thread as it will make debate hard to follow. Do a thread for each one, but do it in turn.
So start a thread for one, giving your explanation, then we discuss. Once that's done, you can move onto the next.
But you don't need the first one, since we've already done that and you even conceded the point. No backsies!
I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
LETS DEBATE
You need to provide an argument first. We await that.
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BEFORE you proceed...
WHICH (if any) of the claims you have already made, have not been sufficiently explained?
IN ORDER OF MERIT, please.
Anything you do not list, we will have to conclude - and you will have to concede - were INCORRECT claims made by you.
I would suggest that no new topics be posted or responded to, UNTIL YOU DO THAT. But that's just my biased opinion...
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I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time. I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
You may want to talk about one mission at a time but that is not a requirement that makes sense. The entirety of the Apollo program from its inception to its conclusion is relevant and an artificial imposition of one mission is not reasonable. For instance, which crewed flights before A11 were faked? A7 - A10
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6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
I do really want to know about this claim. Can you explain the phases of the moon with respect to your idea of a moon that emits light.
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DAKDAK, please first explain why you think anyone is less qualified to discuss this after actually learning about the subject.
Especially when you are typing your posts on a computer designed by people with advanced degrees in solid-state physics (a branch of quantum physics), computer science, metallurgy, chemistry, etc. over a network built by similarly highly-educated people, which uses timing signals from GPS satellites built by similarly-educated people, plus aerospace engineers, and which themselves use general relativity to work right.
Please note, I am not saying that your claims are wrong because you're a 9th-grade dropout and I have degrees in physics and engineering and a couple of decades' work in this field. Your claims are either right or wrong depending on whether they match reality. But you're telling me you're better equipped to understand the subject, and I have already asked you to justify that statement, and I will keep on asking you until I get an answer.
Edit to add: I need to point out that I am not by a long shot the most knowledgeable about Apollo on this forum. I'm just speaking from my direct experience.
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It doesn't seem fair to me to have to limit your responses to a few lines of text and a few attachments with a maximum of
4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB(which by the way is more than THREE TIMES THE REPORTED TOTAL MEMORY OF THE ONBOARD APOLLO 11 COMPUTER SYSTEM!!
The Apollo computers didn't store digital photographs so that line of reasoning fails right out of the gate.
How much memory is required to calculate a spacecraft's position, velocity, and acceleration in 3 axis? Why am I asking you? You can't even figure out the volume of a simple cone.
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You need to provide evidence to back up your claims:
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
How much space was needed? What was inner volume?
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
In what way was it not sufficient? What did the computer have to do, and how much computing power and memory was required to do those tasks?
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
What is the problem with the trajectory?
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
Is the part in parenthesis an example of the inaccuracy? Please provide context.
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
Again, you need to provide examples of what is inaccurate.
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
You haven't explained the process of the moon emitting (visible) light.
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
Examples are again required, with your explanations of what is wrong.
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
Why would the astronauts freeze? Isn't water cooling used for the cooling, not heating? What aspects of thermodynamics and heat transfer specifically are dominant on the moon, in the sense that they need to be accounted for when you are planning your thermal control?
I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
Well, as you haven't provided a single piece of evidence yet, there's nothing that isn't rebutted by a single word (try "incorrect") at this point.
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I have also been criticized by members who say that I use poor grammar and punctuation,this is true remember I dropped out of High School in the 9Th grade,and English was my worst subject.
SO tell us again why those of us who did not drop out of school and who went on to obtain qualifications and professional experience should take your claims seriously?
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
There is a whole thread devoted to just this subject. Why don't you explain to us exactly what it is about the difference between total volume, interior volume and habitable volume you are not getting?
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
How do you know?
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
How do you know? And what about EVERY SINGLE OTHER SHOT TO THE MOON that used the same trajectory? It is only very recently that alternatives for low powered unmanned probes have been used.
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
How do you know?
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
How do you know?
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
How do you know? Prove to us the moon emits light rather than reflecting it, and square that with observations of shadows and phases.
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
How do you know? You dropped out of school in the 9th grade, so what makes you qulaified to judge the scientific results of the mission?
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
How do you know? And do you know that the design of the suit was not developed for Apollo but was an existing design adopted for the purpose?
This is not a debate, this is a bunch of unsupported assertions. Back them up or withdraw.
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I have been told by the extremely biased members of this site...
...says the Fundamentalist Christian.
I believe that there are LITERALLY THOUSANDS of inconsistencies and even FLAT OUT LIES in the official record of APOLLO 11.
But you aren't qualified to judge that record now, are you? You lack the appropriate knowledge. Hence what you believe to be "inconsistencies" are more likely to be examples of your ignorance.
In order to set the record straight and hopefully start a true FAIR debate...
There can be no fair debate with you as long as, in the end. you'll just continue to celebrate your colossal ignorance and wave the Bible.
I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time.
I don't agree to that. If you're going to debate the validity of the technology, then it's fair to debate from all the examples of it, not just the ones you cherry-pick. I reject your application in limine.
...as the extremely biased members of this site do to any reply.
No point in debating someone who starts out the debate in ignorance and merely accuses his opponents of vague bias.
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
Wrong. You can't correctly compute the volume of the spacecraft. You can't even comprehend the difference between interior volume and total volume. You provide no estimate for the volume of equipment you believe in contains. And on the contrary, you keep mentioning equipment that was installed outside the crew compartment. You fail to establish even the slightest factual basis for your belief.
No debate possible on this point until you provide evidence.
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
Where's your proof? I have a degree in computer science and taught the subject at a university. I have built and operated literally hundreds of computers. I find absolutely nothing wrong with the design and operation of the Apollo guidance computer. You are ignorant of the principles of design and operation of computers, hence your belief is unsubstantiated.
No debate possible on this point until you quantify what the computer was expected to do and what its design as stated could reasonably accomplish.
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
Nonsense. You are ignorant of orbital mechanics, while others here have correctly and completely explained the design of the orbit and the reason for it.
No debate possible on this point until you describe what exactly about the translunar trajectory made it improper and why.
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
Asked and answered. No further debate possible on this point until you address the rebuttal already on the table.
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
What proof do you plan to copy from some other web site? What is your training and experience in the forensic authentication of photographs?
No debate possible on this point until you substantiate your credentials and provide examples to discuss.
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
Asked and answered. You are patently ignorant of the principles of radiometry, despite their having been laboriously explained to you. The Moon is only a reflector of visible light.
No further debate possible on this point until your ignorance on the basic physical principles has been alleviated.
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
Asked and answered. You wrongly believe that all scientific findings must accompany the data collection.
No further debate on this topic possible while you remain ignorant of scientific method and practice.
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
You were asked to provide the heat-transfer computations proving this, which you did not do likely because you have no idea what "heat transfer" is and how it is reckoned. Until you can do something of this ilk, you have no evidence for your claim.
No debate possible on this point until you show evidence.
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I have been told by the extremely biased members of this site...
In what way are we biased? Is it because we let those darn facts get in the way of a good ol' conspiracy theory?
...that I do not reply, to the explanations given to me
Obviously you don't acknowledge the replies you have been given if you still believe the Command Module is too small or that the Moon emits light. Those have been thoroughly debunked.
I have also been criticized by members who say that I use poor grammar and punctuation,this is true remember I dropped out of High School in the 9Th grade,and English was my worst subject. I truly don't know about fragmented sentences or where to start a new paragraph.
It's never too late to learn. Your problem is that you are proud of your ignorance. You don't want to learn.
A few replies said that I should either go away or dig in to the debate,at first I was going to go away,but since I am positive that I am right and the extremely biased members of this site are wrong I have decided to dig in.
Stubbornly taking as stance that has been overwhelmingly proven wrong is pointless. If you're wrong (and you are) it's better to just admit it (if not to us, at least to yourself) than it is to continue to make a fool of yourself by clinging to your wrong claims.
I believe that there are LITERALLY THOUSANDS of inconsistencies and even FLAT OUT LIES in the official record of APOLLO 11.
You have shown us that you understand very little about the Apollo 11 record, therefore it is more likely that what you believe are inconsistencies and lies are really just the result of your misunderstanding the information.
Does it really sense to you that over the last 42 years millions people from around the world studied Apollo but somehow missed all of these supposed inconsistencies and lies that you discovered? Doesn't it make more sense that you are simply wrong?
I also believe that I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt if given enough space to fully explain my arguments.
Give it your best shot. Many before you have tried and failed... but good luck anyway.
It doesn't seem fair to me to have to limit your responses to a few lines of text
There is no limit to how long your posts can be. Just keep in mind that people will get bored and stop reading if all you do is post big walls of text. And proper grammar and punctuation might not seem important to you, but it does make it easier to read your posts and understand what you are saying. That should be important to you.
a few attachments with a maximum of
4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB(which by the way is more than THREE TIMES THE REPORTED TOTAL MEMORY OF THE ONBOARD APOLLO 11 COMPUTER SYSTEM!!
I don't mind you (or anyone else) posting pictures, but I want you to keep in mind that 1) I have a limited amount of web space, and if you fill it up with pictures I will have to pay for more; and 2) the more pictures you post the longer it takes for the forum to load.
All I ask is that you only post pictures if they are absolutely necessary to make your case.
I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time. I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
This seems unnecessary. All Apollo missions used the same technology and techniques to achieve going to the Moon.
Below are numbered reasons that I have already posted, as to why I believe that the official record of APOLLO 11 is completely untrue. I have many more reasons to believe this, but these are the ones I have mentioned so far in order to the best of my recollection. I will respond in great detail as the extremely biased members of this site do to any reply. REMEMBER ONLY APOLLO 11
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
This has been explained to you in great detail here (http://www.apollohoax.net/forum/index.php?topic=83.0). We aren't going to waste our time repeating ourselves over an over again. Abandoning an argument in one thread because it's been debunked and then repeating the same argument as if it is new in a different thread is not going to work here.
Your problem is that you don't seem to understand the difference between "total volume" and "habitable volume". Habitable volume is what is left of the total volume after you add all of your equipment and food etc.
But since you only seem to understand pictures:
(http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4205/images/c170.jpg)
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
What specifically was the Apollo computer required to do that the technology wasn't capable of?
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
What trajectory should the spacecraft have followed? How do you explain the fact that people from all around the world were able to track the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon and back?
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
Do you even know what the roll program was? Explain it to me.
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
Show us some examples.
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
This is idiotic. It really is. There are shadows on the Moon and that would not be possible if it was emitting light. Why don't you understand that very simple fact?
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
The Apollo 11 record is a complete fairytale from beginning to end told to the American public to steal tax dollars and forever change are since of reality
Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
I set up a 50 gigabyte drobox so that I can put a complete reply to include Print, Pictures, Eyewitness Accounts and Videos without using this sites resources or having to use YOUTUBE links.
I will not waste my time reading your arguments if they are made anywhere except in this forum.
I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
All you have done is make baseless claims like "the Moon emits light" without anything to back them up. Just saying it doesn't make it true. Prove it.
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Forget the Apollo stuff DAKDAK...you are clearly out of your depth when it comes to discussing basic principles (such as the volume of cones) let alone more complicated subjects such as Lunar trajectories and computers.
The bit that I find interesting is this statement:
I don't know what a Seagull Poster is,but I don't believe that I am one.
If you don't know what one is, then how can you say whether you are one or not? Surely the correct course would be to ask the question "What is a seagull poster?"?
This alone tells me more about you than you would realise.
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Wait! We haven't even asked the important question.
Okay, DakDak, if it was a hoax, then what exactly did happen?
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I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time.
I think to avoid confusion we should probably debate only one CLAIM at a time.
How about this one?
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
I don't see any point in debating anything else until you respond to the explanations already provided about this claim.
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OK, I'll bite - let's take one topic only. Let's choose the trajectory of Apollo 11.
Your main objection seems to be that it was a figure 8. Why, exactly, is that less believable than any other possible trajectory? Because to me, it seems a quite intuitively logical method of switching from one gravitation center to another.
Please show your calculations for this. I'm sure your Grade 9 math will be adequate to do so.
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I think to avoid confusion we should probably debate only one CLAIM at a time.
That certainly makes a lot more sense, yes.
I have no problem with ignorance per se, and two of my dearest friends are high school dropouts. One of them is even also dyslexic, meaning his spelling and grammar can be all over the place. But that's why he respects my education (and, you know, not-dyslexia); he knows that I have a skill that he doesn't, and he values it. Why should we waste our time with someone who doesn't value what we have to offer?
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3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
There is no such thing as a "crazy eight" trajectory. All spacecraft follow trajectories that are one of four conic sections - circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola. The circle and parabola are special cases that are virtually nonexistent in practice, thus we are left with elliptical and hyperbolic orbits. An elliptical orbit occurs when the spacecraft is traveling at a velocity below that necessary to escape the gravity of the body about which it is orbiting. Examples include the Moon's orbit around Earth and Earth's orbit around the Sun. A hyperbolic orbit occurs when a spacecraft is traveling at a velocity exceeding escape velocity. In this case the spacecraft will follow a curved path past the planet (or moon) and then fly off into space, not to return.
The trajectory flown by the Apollo spacecraft started out as an Earth-centric elliptical orbit with an apogee (the part of the orbit farthest from Earth) that was about 1.5 times the Earth-Moon distance. A spacecraft in such an orbit will reach the distance of the Moon in about three days. If the orbit was not timed to encounter the Moon when it reached the appropriate distance, the spacecraft would have continued in its elliptical orbit. However, the orbit was timed so that when the spacecraft neared the Moon's orbit, the Moon was approaching so that it and the spacecraft arrived at the same location in space at the same time. As the spacecraft drew close to the Moon, the Moon's gravity began to dominate over Earth gravity, thus the spacecraft transitioned from an Earth-centric elliptical orbit to a Moon-centric hyperbolic orbit. The Moon-centric hyperbolic orbit took the spacecraft on a path that flew behind the Moon, as observed from Earth.
On a normal mission, the spacecraft would fire its engine when it reached its closest distance to the Moon on the far side from Earth. This would slow the spacecraft to below lunar escape velocity so that the orbit would transition from Moon-centric hyperbolic to Moon-centric elliptical. However, if the engine wasn't fired, the spacecraft would continue on its hyperbolic trajectory and fly past the Moon, eventually to escape its gravity. Had the spacecraft entered orbit, to leave orbit it would again fire its engine, but this time to speed up. Adding velocity would cause the Moon-centric elliptical orbit to transition back to Moon-centric hyperbolic. As the spacecraft flew away from the Moon, Earth gravity again began to dominate over lunar gravity. As this occurred, the spacecraft trajectory transitioned from Moon-centric hyperbolic back to Earth-centric elliptical. The spacecraft was now on the inbound part of its elliptical orbit heading back to Earth.
What you consider to be a "figure 8" trajectory is actually three different trajectories that are patched together. The spacecraft simply transitions from one to the next.
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2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
Another guy with a CS degree here. Worse, not only have I been educated, I program embedded systems of similar capabilities to the Apollo computer professionally and for personal pleasure.
So, I would also be interested in knowing what specific tasks the record says the Apollo AGC performed that could not be done by the hardware. There's copious amounts of documentation available about the hardware, enough for various people to have built simulators and actual physical replicas of the machine, as well as source code listings for the software, so you should be able to point out exactly what parts of the system fail to work as advertised.
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
What specifically is inaccurate about it?
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3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
What was 'crazy' or 'inaccurate' about it?
It is very easy to calculate the force of gravity. You just evaluate the formula GM1M2/r2, where G is the gravitational constant, M1 and M2 are the masses of the planet and spacecraft, and r is the distance between their centers of mass. The force is always attractive along the line connecting their centers of mass.
When you have multiple masses you just compute this formula for each pair of masses to find the forces between them, and then find the vector sums of all those forces.
So all you have to do is to program a computer to repeatedly compute this formula for the forces of earth and lunar gravity on the spacecraft, and using Newton's basic laws of kinematics, show the trajectory the Apollo 11 spacecraft should have taken given the rockets that launched it. If that significantly differs from the reported trajectory, and your program checks out as correct, then you could make a claim that something was wrong with the NASA story.
Otherwise you're just waving your hands and spouting meaningless drivel about things you don't understand and don't want to understand.
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8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
Funny, I've been told just the opposite on another forum, that the astronauts would roast inside the suits.
I've done the heat flow calculations. There's actually a layer in the middle of the thermal/micrometeoroid garment that is totally unaffected by heat from the sun AND by the heat from the astronaut. Zero solar heat gets in, zero body heat gets out.
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I've done the heat flow calculations. There's actually a layer in the middle of the thermal/micrometeoroid garment that is totally unaffected by heat from the sun AND by the heat from the astronaut. Zero solar heat gets in, zero body heat gets out.
There was a small allowance for heat leakage through the suit; a few hundred BTU/hr (100 btu/hr = 29.3 watts) but the actual flow seems to have been well within that limit.
Insulating the suit solved the problem of getting too much heat from the sun or lunar surface or radiating too much heat into deep space, but it created another problem: getting rid of the astronaut's metabolic heat. Originally this was to be done by cooling the gas stream circulating through the suit, but at the higher workloads this would have required an unacceptably powerful blower. Hence the liquid cooling garmet, which could transfer more heat with less power and presumably less noise -- the same reasons that liquid coolers have become popular on high-end CPUs.
Getting rid of the heat thus removed from the suit isn't all that easy either. Apollo allowed water to evaporate into a gas that carried the heat away in water's heat of vaporization, but that was acceptable only because the lunar stay was so short. Even so, the cooling water tanks were the largest components in the PLSS. Although water has been discovered at the lunar poles, it will probably remain far too valuable a commodity to be used for something as simple as cooling so some other method will have to be found. A simple radiator won't work as it would have to be much too large to get rid of the heat load at below body temperature. One interesting scheme I saw in a NASA writeup used two different metal hydrides and shuttled hydrogen gas between them, essentially acting as a rechargeable heat pump. During an EVA, hydrogen flowing from one end of the device to the other would pull the heat out of the astronaut's suit and pump it to a high enough temperature for a radiator to be practical. You'd recharge the unit after each EVA by heating the radiator end to a very high temperature, e.g., with concentrated sunlight, driving the hydrogen back to the other compartment of the device.
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LETS DEBATE
OK. Let's take a line from your previous thread regarding the testing of Einstein's/Newton's theories. Specifically, what are your objections to those theories?
Let's debate... ::)
<edit: spelling mistake>
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I think someone is just using a giant wooden spoon.
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Having a fair debate on technical issues with someone who is completely uneducated, and refuses to learn, is like having a fair fight to the death between a Navy SEAL team and a newborn baby, still attached to the placenta.
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I'd like to know what these people who demand a 'fair' debate actually think constitutes a fair debate. When they lack the technical knowledge necessary to examine the evidence properly, are they expecting us to avoid getting technical and essentially admit that yes, the world really does conform to their expectations and understanding?
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I'd like to know what these people who demand a 'fair' debate actually think constitutes a fair debate.
I'd like to know what he thinks constitutes a debate. All he's doing is re-stating his initial assertions, with absolutely no supporting evidence, completely ignoring every response to those claims already given. He seems to think if he just repeats himself enough times, we'll just give up and declare him right.
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And so us is another thing he doesn't understand.
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I'd like to know what these people who demand a 'fair' debate actually think constitutes a fair debate.
Having all the cards stacked in their favor, of course. Hence the ground rules designed to limit their responsibility and the complete abrogation of any burden of proof. Bart Sibrel even goes so far as to say that NASA has had 40 years to tell their story, so he doesn't need to spend any of his precious time addressing their rebuttals.
When they lack the technical knowledge necessary to examine the evidence properly, are they expecting us to avoid getting technical and essentially admit that yes, the world really does conform to their expectations and understanding?
In a word: yes. Originally DAKDAK praised his critics for their credentials and understanding. Now he's taken an entirely new position, claiming that we're so over-educated that we lack common sense and any practical grounding. These, he says in contrast, are his strengths. We, on the other hand, are so hopelessly "biased" by textbook education that we don't see the simple truth. Therefore any attempt we make to introduce real science into the debate will be dismissed as "over-educated" sorcery.
Yes, I'm very well aware of how the Fundamentalist mind works when confronted with science.
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I'd like to know what he thinks constitutes a debate. All he's doing is re-stating his initial assertions, with absolutely no supporting evidence, completely ignoring every response to those claims already given.
Yes, most people with this background have absolutely no idea what it means to prove something, or what it takes to do it. The Fundamentalist hears the clergy say "Thus saith the Lord," and so becomes accustomed to truth established solely by edict. Therefore this type of person often really believes that just because the statement has been made, it has also been proven and is now suitable for belief.
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In fact, here's what I say--there is no debate possible. A debate is weighing two matters of opinion. What we are weighing here is fact and the ignorant opinion that it's wrong. Ignorance always loses. You can couch it in the language of Christian Fundamentalism. You can couch it in the language of New Age hippies. You can couch it in any language you want, but the ignorant person does not have a reasonable expectation of convincing an educated person that their education was completely wrong, because the ignorant person doesn't have the knowledge to counter it.
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So all you have to do is to program a computer to repeatedly compute this formula for the forces of earth and lunar gravity on the spacecraft, and using Newton's basic laws of kinematics, show the trajectory the Apollo 11 spacecraft should have taken given the rockets that launched it. If that significantly differs from the reported trajectory, and your program checks out as correct, then you could make a claim that something was wrong with the NASA story.
I've done all that and I'm happy to report the Apollo trajectories were neither crazy nor inaccurate. The trajectories were a beautiful solution to the Apollo problem.
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I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
LETS DEBATE
It's been 24 hours since you posted this, with three pages of comments/replies.
Are you planning on some follow-up here?
How can you say they didn't go to the Moon when you can't even comprehend the basics of how they claim they accomplished it? You can't determine the volume of a cone to determine how much it could hold. You call a trajectory to the Moon a "crazy eight" without understanding the orbital mechanics that went into it. You talk of astronauts freezing on the surface without acknowledging the vast amount of information available that discusses the challenges involved and the technical solutions.
You need to get on the stick and start defending your claims with hard data, something you've failed at quite miserably thus far.
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2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
This is cheesy basic lunar landing program I wrote years and years ago one night when I was bored on duty. It's only 2d (altitude and horizontal distance) and only had controls for pitch and throttle. I originally wrote it in GW-basic on a Zenith computer with a green screen CRT monitor. The other guys in my division played it so much when they had duty it fried black spots into the screen. The goal was to land as close as possible to zero horizontal distance. At first it gave you a score based on your distance from the target but after a little practice we all could land within .1 foot of the target, so I had to change the scoring system to include the amount of fuel remaining.
DAKDAK, copy and paste it into Notepad, save it, then look at the size. This is the bare bones version without a lot of the original error checking lines but you get the idea. There is a lot of extraneous characters, remarks, print commands (which, as you accidentally discovered through your improper reference to image size, was not applicable to Apollo), and long variable names so it could radically be reduced in size.
CLS
scale = .0003
q = 180 / 3.14159265#
massmt = 7567
fuel = 8873
'specific impulse 311 s
alt = 50000
hv = 5591.08
g0 = 5.53
pitch = 90
PRINT g, cf, cf - g
vv = 0
thr = 0
pitch = 90
100 a$ = INKEY$
IF a$ = "x" THEN END
IF a$ = "+" THEN thr = thr + .01
IF a$ = "-" THEN thr = thr - .01
IF thr <= .099 AND a$ = "+" THEN thr = .1
IF a$ = "/" THEN thr = 0
IF a$ = "*" THEN thr = 1
IF thr < .099 THEN thr = 0
IF thr > 1 THEN thr = 1
IF a$ = "8" THEN pitch = pitch - 1
IF a$ = "2" THEN pitch = pitch + 1
IF pitch > 180 THEN pitch = pitch - 360
IF pitch < -180 THEN pitch = 360 + pitch
dr = dr + hv * scale
haccel = SIN(pitch / q) * thr * 4477 * 32.2 / (massmt + fuel)
vaccel = -COS(pitch / q) * thr * 4477 * 32.2 / (massmt + fuel)
fuel = fuel - thr * 4477 / 311 * scale
hv = hv - haccel * scale
vv = vv - vaccel * scale + (cf - g) * scale
g = 5.53 * (5702400 / (5702400 + alt)) ^ 2
cf = hv ^ 2 / (5702400 + alt)
alt = alt + vv * scale
LOCATE 10, 10: PRINT USING " ######## #######, ####.# ####.# #### "; dr / 5280; alt; hv; vv; pitch; thr * 100
LOCATE 15, 40: PRINT USING "fuel ### "; fuel / 8873 * 100
GOTO 100
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The AGC was actually more sophisticated in many ways than many embedded systems used today. It actually had a tasking operating system, for example, rather than a simple executive loop performing a fixed sequence of operations. 4 kB RAM (2k 16-bit words, actually, with one bit set aside for parity) and 72 kB RAM (36k words) or program memory is pretty typical for small embedded processors now.
For another example...
http://dmitry.co/index.php?p=./04.Thoughts/08.%20uM0
An ARM emulator (specifically a Cortex-M0, a small 32-bit embedded processor) written for the AVR (an even smaller 8-bit embedded processor). Built to 3464 bytes total program memory on my system, and only 61 bytes of RAM required by the VM. Built for a modern 8-bit microcontroller with 8 KB program space and 256 bytes of RAM.
The AGC didn't even have a text interface...user interaction was via numeric commands and readouts, toggle switches, etc. It's not at all unbelievable that it did what was claimed...particularly since, as mentioned, there's enough information available about it to build replicas and simulators.
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I honestly don't understand why someone who only has 9th grade education could possibly begin to state why *any* proposed orbit around the moon could be wrong. I have a Master's degree in math and I have no idea why an orbit to the moon and back should be the way it is.
I've been to Bob's website to try to figure some of it out but I'm at a total loss. I would probably need hmmm.... to STUDY orbital mechanics to understand it.
BTW Bob your website is really cool. I showed it to my physics class a couple of years ago
Pete
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It defies common sense apparently. To be honest I'm not sure why. I don't know what a common sense transfer orbit would look like.
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I didn't know people had built replica AGC, so thanks for inspiring me to Google that people; that's some fascinating stuff. :)
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I didn't know people had built replica AGC, so thanks for inspiring me to Google that people; that's some fascinating stuff. :)
What a fascinating project, and one heck of an achievement! http://agcreplica.outel.org/
@DAKDAK: Can you please have a look at the above link and let us know where the builder went wrong? His version does run the Colossus software, yet you maintain that the original AGC could not run software of this type.
And by the way, your failure to respond makes you look increasingly like a seagull poster....remember you were adamant that you were not one??? :P
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Yes, several people have replicated the Apollo Guidance Computer and are running the actual software that ran on the real Apollo missions.
Yet there's at least one Apollo denier -- Youtube user 'hunchbacked' -- who continues to maintain that the AGC design was unworkable.
Most people agree that when reality conflicts with their expectations, then their expectations have to change. Hunchbacked actually seems to think that his expectations trump reality.
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Most people agree that when reality conflicts with their expectations, then their expectations have to change. Hunchbacked actually seems to think that his expectations trump reality.
The old "I've said it, so therefore it must be true" routine...
Or, increasingly, "I believe it, therefore it must be true" or "It's my faith, therefore it must be true"...the use of the words "belief" and "faith" makes them feel that that the view cannot be challenged or proven incorrect.
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It defies common sense apparently. To be honest I'm not sure why. I don't know what a common sense transfer orbit would look like.
"Common sense" would just say go in a straight line -- none of these time-wasting crazy curves ::)
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It defies common sense apparently. To be honest I'm not sure why. I don't know what a common sense transfer orbit would look like.
"Common sense" would just say go in a straight line -- none of these time-wasting crazy curves ::)
There is something to that which leaves me wondering, what is the fundamentalist doctrine of a theologically "correct" way to the moon? In other words a path that does not violate the religious conceptions of how the universe is constructed. While I prefer not to speculate on the state of mind of debaters on this forum, DakDak is not debating. My knowledge of theologically based constructs of the universe is minimal, but I wonder if he is a biblical flat earther.
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Yes, several people have replicated the Apollo Guidance Computer and are running the actual software that ran on the real Apollo missions.
Yet there's at least one Apollo denier -- Youtube user 'hunchbacked' -- who continues to maintain that the AGC design was unworkable.
Most people agree that when reality conflicts with their expectations, then their expectations have to change. Hunchbacked actually seems to think that his expectations trump reality.
Yes, I made the mistake of looking at some of his videos a couple months ago. What a nutcase. "Intentional incoherence's" left by the Apollo engineers as clues to show how fake the program was. He's supposed to be a computer engineer on top of it all. Funny how the CIA was able to coerce hundreds of thousands of people into silence yet they let him post away without any consequences.
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There is something to that which leaves me wondering, what is the fundamentalist doctrine of a theologically "correct" way to the moon? In other words a path that does not violate the religious conceptions of how the universe is constructed. While I prefer not to speculate on the state of mind of debaters on this forum, DakDak is not debating. My knowledge of theologically based constructs of the universe is minimal, but I wonder if he is a biblical flat earther.
I reckon that they'd just jump in a rocket, point it straight up and pray that god gets them there. ;D
If they were strictly going by the bible, then they'd be in trouble:
Psalm 104:5 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+104%3A5&version=NIV) He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
Psalm 93:1 (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2093:1&version=CEV) You put the world in place, and it will never be moved
I think that they'd struggle with orbital mechanics if the Earth is fixed...
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But who wrote those poems?
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I've been to Bob's website to try to figure some of it out but I'm at a total loss. I would probably need hmmm.... to STUDY orbital mechanics to understand it.
There was a time I didn't know much about it either. Although I have an engineering degree, I consider my physics education to be pretty rudimentary (six credit hours in college as I recall, and I wasn't especially interested in it or did particularly well). But when I decided to apply my talents to a hobby that really interested me - space flight - I was determined to learn. I've been able to absorb it little by little over what has now been about 17 years since I first started to study it. One certainly needs an aptitude for math and science to fully understand orbital mechanics, but just as important is perseverance.
BTW Bob your website is really cool. I showed it to my physics class a couple of years ago
Thank you. I hope your physics class got something out of it.
BTW, I just put on line my new page about Interplanetary Flight (http://www.braeunig.us/space/interpl.htm). I intend to add a couple more parts: Gravity Assist Trajectories and Lunar Trajectories.
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OK, DAKDAK, you proposed a debate. That means you have the floor to start.
But simply making a list of points is not debating. Saying "the computer wouldn't work" or "the orbital mechanics were wrong" is not debating. If I say "the Moon is made of green cheese" in a debate, I have to follow that with "and here's why we know that".
If you want to debate people, please go ahead and do so. But if you planned on merely making these pronouncements, and having everyone go "ooooh, he's right!", I think you misunderstood what debating really means.
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The AGC was actually more sophisticated in many ways than many embedded systems used today. It actually had a tasking operating system, for example, rather than a simple executive loop performing a fixed sequence of operations. 4 kB RAM (2k 16-bit words, actually, with one bit set aside for parity) and 72 kB RAM (36k words) or program memory is pretty typical for small embedded processors now.
For another example...
http://dmitry.co/index.php?p=./04.Thoughts/08.%20uM0
An ARM emulator (specifically a Cortex-M0, a small 32-bit embedded processor) written for the AVR (an even smaller 8-bit embedded processor). Built to 3464 bytes total program memory on my system, and only 61 bytes of RAM required by the VM. Built for a modern 8-bit microcontroller with 8 KB program space and 256 bytes of RAM.
The AGC didn't even have a text interface...user interaction was via numeric commands and readouts, toggle switches, etc. It's not at all unbelievable that it did what was claimed...particularly since, as mentioned, there's enough information available about it to build replicas and simulators.
I just wanted to jump up and say "AVR freak here!"
I think it is informative that an 8-bit chip running at 16MHz, with under 64K of program space, can not only run a quad-rotor UAV autonomously, station-keeping and attitude holding in real time, and not only run both inertial nav and GPS to fly either under command or autonomously from waypoint to waypoint, but it can do this with enough accuracy to be used inside a lecture hall full of people.
(Well, okay...Cris doesn't try to run the GPS waypointing inside, but it is still impressive to see that large a machine hovering in place to an accuracy of a few cm of slippage, all running on one little arduino-compatible).
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(Well, okay...Cris doesn't try to run the GPS waypointing inside, but it is still impressive to see that large a machine hovering in place to an accuracy of a few cm of slippage, all running on one little arduino-compatible).
It is sad that the simple joy of seeing something so remarkable yet simple and understanding its elegance is lost on some people.
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Bob, I recall seeing an animated orbit on your website before, but can't seem to find it again. Am I thinking of your website or am I thinking of another? If it's there, can you point me in the right direction.
Pete
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Yes, I made the mistake of looking at some of his videos a couple months ago. What a nutcase. "Intentional incoherence's" left by the Apollo engineers as clues to show how fake the program was. He's supposed to be a computer engineer on top of it all.
Yeah. The strangest thing is that he professes a love for science, yet he really does seem to honestly believe the nonsense he spouts.
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BTW, I just put on line my new page about Interplanetary Flight (http://www.braeunig.us/space/interpl.htm).
Good page. One minor nit: you say that the heliocentric ecliptic coordinate system isn't quite inertial because of the precession of the earth's axis. Actually that's the reason that the earth-centered equatorial coordinate system isn't inertial; that's where you see references to epochs like B1950 and J2000.
The ecliptic plane is much more stable than the earth's equatorial plane, but it too wobbles a tiny bit due to out-of-plane perturbations from the other planets, mainly Jupiter. If you want a truly inertial coordinate system for interplanetary travel, use the barycentric invariant plane of the solar system. The origin is at the solar system's center of mass, dominated by the sun, of course. The reference plane is normal to the total angular momentum vector of the entire solar system, dominated by Jupiter's angular momentum but the other planets do contribute some tiny bits. Technically even the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud would have to be included, and since it contains many undiscovered objects the invariant plane is still somewhat ill defined. But probably not by much.
I'm not sure what you use as a longitude reference, probably the location of some distant quasar at the edge of the visible universe.
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Bob, I recall seeing an animated orbit on your website before, but can't seem to find it again. Am I thinking of your website or am I thinking of another? If it's there, can you point me in the right direction.
The animation is from a separate webpage that is just a collection of Apollo related stuff that I've done. Here's the link:
http://www.braeunig.us/apollo/
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Good page. One minor nit: you say that the heliocentric ecliptic coordinate system isn't quite inertial because of the precession of the earth's axis. Actually that's the reason that the earth-centered equatorial coordinate system isn't inertial; that's where you see references to epochs like B1950 and J2000.
The heliocentric-ecliptic system is also affected by precession because zero degrees longitude in this system is defined as the direction of the vernal equinox, just like it is in the geocentric-equatorial system. Precession causes the line of equinoxes to continually change, therefore both coordinate systems are affected.
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The heliocentric-ecliptic system is also affected by precession because zero degrees longitude in this system is defined as the direction of the vernal equinox, just like it is in the geocentric-equatorial system. Precession causes the line of equinoxes to continually change, therefore both coordinate systems are affected.
Ah, I see. The ecliptic plane itself remains relatively stable but the defined coordinate axes rotate within it.
I suspect that the way to get a really stable coordinate system is to define one by reference to the most distant radio sources we can detect.
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Ah, I see. The ecliptic plane itself remains relatively stable but the defined coordinate axes rotate within it.
That's correct. If you look at a star map you'll see that the points where the ecliptic and equatorial planes cross are defined 0o and 180o longitude in both planes. Precession causes the equatorial plane to move, therefore these crossing points change position. So, although the ecliptic plane remains fixed, the direction of the zero longitude point changes over time.
(Edit) Of course, in the geocentric-equatorial system, celestial positions are usually given in hours of right ascension and degrees declination. This makes the direction of the equinoxes in the equatorial plane 0 and 12 hours right ascension rather than 0o and 180o longitude. Same thing though, just a different name.
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"Common sense" would just say go in a straight line -- none of these time-wasting crazy curves ::)
Must be the same "common sense" that tells DAKDAK
- to start his "fair debate" by calling everyone else "extremely biased"
- insult those that disagree with him to be "too educated"
- that "I say so" is a valid claim outside kindergarten
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"Common sense" would just say go in a straight line -- none of these time-wasting crazy curves ::)
Must be the same "common sense" that tells DAKDAK
- to start his "fair debate" by calling everyone else "extremely biased"
- insult those that disagree with him to be "too educated"
- that "I say so" is a valid claim outside kindergarten
- to complain about being called a seagull and then spend the next few days acting like a seagull
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"Common sense" would just say go in a straight line -- none of these time-wasting crazy curves ::)
Must be the same "common sense" that tells DAKDAK
- to start his "fair debate" by calling everyone else "extremely biased"
- insult those that disagree with him to be "too educated"
- that "I say so" is a valid claim outside kindergarten
- to complain about being called a seagull and then spend the next few days acting like a seagull
- to say education is useless on an extremely sophisticated international computer network.
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- to complain about being called a seagull and then spend the next few days acting like a seagull
Indeed. This "debate" has generated four pages of discussion without the input of its instigator. Clearly not interested in a serious debate.
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But at least the rest of us are learning...
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The most interesting thing (to me) is trying to "limit" the debate* by saying "only Apollo 11" and then a) flinging a whole bunch of claims at the wall and b) making half those claims not particularly specific to Apollo 11.
(* which in itself is not a bad idea if it's about focussing on some aspect so it can dealt with properly)
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Yeah, clear, consistent, and effective writing is something one learns at school/university/(whatever it's called in your country). But who needs education, eh?
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Clear, consistent, and effective writing was something I learned in high school. But of course, that was mostly after ninth grade!
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The most interesting thing (to me) is trying to "limit" the debate* by saying "only Apollo 11" and then a) flinging a whole bunch of claims at the wall and b) making half those claims not particularly specific to Apollo 11.
(* which in itself is not a bad idea if it's about focussing on some aspect so it can dealt with properly)
It was informative that request because it revealed a lack of understanding of the fundamentals.
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Yeah, clear, consistent, and effective writing is something one learns at school/university/(whatever it's called in your country). But who needs education, eh?
Not sure to which country you are referring, but if it is the one I have in mind (and which I was very glad to leave a few years back), then learning about writing and many other things does occur, sometimes at very high levels, in the schools and universities. However, it is strictly optional. University graduates who can barely read and write are quite common.
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But at least the rest of us are learning...
Yep. I'll have to 'thank' DakDak for his few comments. Many of them resulted in overwhelming answers and explanation on a myriad of things. I guess it's a bit like the hoax theory on YT; it made me look deeper and deeper into Apollo and the massive amount of scientific data, documents, pictures, film and engineering.
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But at least the rest of us are learning...
Yep. I'll have to 'thank' DakDak for his few comments. Many of them resulted in overwhelming answers and explanation on a myriad of things. I guess it's a bit like the hoax theory on YT; it made me look deeper and deeper into Apollo and the massive amount of scientific data, documents, pictures, film and engineering.
And also to Lunar Orbit for allowing us to use the seagulling as the spark for greater debate.
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The most interesting thing (to me) is trying to "limit" the debate* [...]
* which in itself is not a bad idea if it's about focussing on some aspect so it can dealt with properly.
I agree here. When I first started reading his proposal, it sounded like a good-faith effort to debate. I completely agree with focusing on one topic until a concession or impasse is reached, then (and only then) moving on to a new topic.
But no, I don't agree with trying to limit it to a specific mission. That serves only to artificially limit the domain of information that can be brought to the debate, which makes it not a fair debate. A claim fails if valid information exists anywhere to refute it. Saying that exculpatory information can only come from some arbitrary domain in order to be valid is just a thinly-veiled attempt at muzzling your critics. Shame!
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And also extremely common among the Apollo Deniers (if rarely presented so nakedly.)
"Why are you talking about the ISS? I asked why the astronauts didn't burn up from the temps on the Moon."
"What do Harrier jump jets have to do with the lack of a crater left by the LEM (sic)?"
* Not real quotes.
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Not sure to which country you are referring,
It was a general your, referring to the reader.
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I don't know what a Seagull Poster is...
A "seagull" poster is one who posts "crap", then fails to respond to any criticism
...but I don't believe that I am one.
Well, you obviously ARE, since you haven't bothered to respond to ANY criticism in this thread in the last 5 days.
If you don't want to be "labled" a seagull, then stop behaving like one.
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T
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You only need to click on Quote when you're quoting someone else's post in your reply.
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[
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I'm growing impatient, DAKDAK. Answer our questions, or I will ban you.
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If you've only completely and totally studied one mission, how do you know you can prove inconsistencies on any of the missions? This seems a little overconfident to me. Apollo 11 is probably the best-known mission for obvious reasons, but as far as I know, most legitimate space historians look at Apollo as a program, which means learning about all the missions (and Mercury and Gemini, for that matter).
PS: If you only want to talk about Apollo 11, why did you post a video with Don Pettit? He wasn't even selected as an astronaut until 1996, so what on Earth does he have to do with Apollo 11?
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DAKDAK, just get on with it. You said you had a written argument to post 'in a few minutes'. That was some time ago. Just post it and get on with the debate you claim you want to have.
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I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time. I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
You may want to talk about one mission at a time but that is not a requirement that makes sense. The entirety of the Apollo program from its inception to its conclusion is relevant and an artificial imposition of one mission is not reasonable. For instance, which crewed flights before A11 were faked? A7 - A10
The only Mission that I have completly and totally studied was Apollo 11. Since Apollo 11 was the first manned moon landing why couldnt I start there. I can prove inconsistencies on any of the missions Pick one. You do realize this will only confuse the issues but I am game.
Then you don't know much. You can't truly know about Apollo 11 without knowing the programme as a whole.
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I can prove inconsistencies on any of the missions Pick one. You do realize this will only confuse the issues but I am game.
I doubt that you can prove anything beyond your lack of understanding, but await your attempt. This is your claim, so make your statements and give your arguments and if you want to focus on A11, that is your business. But don't try to limit us because you don't know about the full program. In fact it is a lack of knowledge of the full program that will get you into trouble.
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The only Mission that I have completly and totally studied was Apollo 11.
I reject this claim. You have clearly not "completely and totally" studied any of the Apollo missions, nor the program as a whole, nor the underlying technology. You have made numerous claims demonstrating wide-ranging ignorance of the program, and you don't seem to even grasp what kind of documentation is available.
Since Apollo 11 was the first manned moon landing why couldnt I start there. I can prove inconsistencies on any of the missions Pick one. You do realize this will only confuse the issues but I am game.
You're in plenty of trouble with your claims on any given mission, but you also have to account for the sum total of the evidence for all the missions. You're nowhere close.
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This is getting so tiresome. When is he going to answer some of the questions addressed to him?
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This is getting so tiresome. When is he going to answer some of the questions addressed to him?
I was a bit loathed to too quickly chuck out seagulling accusations as I don't presume that everyone is going to be checking in every evening here.
However, now it is irrefutable. After a week's sabbatical he comes back makes a bunch of really irrelevant posts avoiding the issues and then disappears again.
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This is getting so tiresome. When is he going to answer some of the questions addressed to him?
He's not going to. He seems to just be here to string everyone along and insult them for actually having finished school.
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The only Mission that I have completly and totally studied was Apollo 11.
No. If you can't speak intelligently about the 10 years of development that preceded Apollo 11, then you can't speak knowledgeably about Apollo 11 or any other Apollo mission.
Since Apollo 11 was the first manned moon landing why couldnt I start there.
Because the missions that preceded and followed it were equally important and relied equally upon the principles upon which you have shown yourself to be completely clueless.
I can prove inconsistencies on any of the missions.
No, you can't. You have proven that you lack the knowledge and skill. And given your sporadic commitment to the debate you started, I daresay you also lack the willingness. You've been asked a bushel of questions on what you've already said, and you haven't bothered to answer any of them, or even acknowledge that they've been asked. Clearly you can't do anything you say you can. What separates you from any other uneducated troll?
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Please tell your BOSS to delete the post
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
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Please tell your BOSS to delete the post
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
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Please tell your BOSS to delete the post
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
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Please tell your BOSS to delete the post
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
Coward.
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I'm growing impatient, DAKDAK. Answer our questions, or I will ban you.
BAN ME DELETE MY POSTS
NO HARD FEELNGS
PLEASE
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PLEASE UNLOCK OR DELETE THIS !! ALL DAKDAK
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PLEASE ASK MODERATOR TO UNLOCK OR DELETE THIS !! ALL DAKDAK
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
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Please ask the moderator to delete
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
And any and all things posted by DAKDAK
Please ask the moderator too ban DAKDAK
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Please ask the moderator to delete
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
And any and all things posted by DAKDAK
Please ask the moderator too ban DAKDAK
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You can ask all you want ... the chances of LunarOrbit agreeing to delete your posts lie somewhere between "incredibly slim indeed" and "totally non-existent". You are not allowed to simply expunge the evidence of your presence on the board. If memory serves, one of the issues that finally prompted LO to move from Proboards to host the board on his own was a previous seagull poster giving up and getting Proboards to delete all of his posts without reference to the board administrator.
You don't get to come on here, throw some crud around, make a fool of yourself and then cover your tracks when you slink away.
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seagull
Well, this ended up in a predictable way.
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Please ask the moderator to delete
Topic: Videos of the vehicle that took (supposedly) took Apollo 11 to the moon
And any and all things posted by DAKDAK
Please ask the moderator too ban DAKDAK
Absolutely not. It is important that your stupidity is hung out to dry for all to see.
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Please tell your BOSS to delete the post.
DAKDAK, LunarOrbit is not our "boss". He runs this forum, and we - including you - get to participate on it if we choose, at no cost. That's it.
And, no, no one is going to delete your posts and cover your tracks for you. You came on here of your own free will and did the following:
1. Made a lot of ridiculous claims which showed you not only knew nothing about Apollo, or spaceflight in general, but you also had absolutely no clue as to the most basic facts about anything, really, to do with the observable world. Dropping out in 9th grade is no excuse; any elementary-school child should know, for example, that the Moon does not shine by itself.
2. You failed to pay any attention to knowledge already available to you. You say you observe the Moon and take pictures of it, which necessarily means you see shadows cast by the mountains and crater rims, which should immediately tell you that the Moon is illuminated by something else.
3. You then arrogantly told everyone they were right and you were wrong, and touted your Christian worldview as justification. I am a Christian, and while I don't pretend to be a better Christian or better person than anyone else, I do seem to remember some lessons about humility.
4. You told people who actually had studied the subject that they were wrong, and claimed you had made an extensive study of Apollo 11 - but you clearly had done nothing of the sort, and in fact it is painfully obvious you don't even have any idea how much information is available on the subject.
5. You told people that actually learning about the subject was inferior to your common sense, which is arrogance slopping over into delusion. You also told people who actually do this for a living that you knew better.
6. You never addressed most of the challenges put to you.
7. The few answers you gave were vague and mostly wrong, and showed you had not extensively studied the subject as you claimed.
8. You turned and ran, and tried to get the forum administrator to cover your tracks for you.
If you wish to reapply for access to the forum, I will support that, provided you apologize to LunarOrbit (the forum administrator) for your childish behavior and actually attempt to learn something next time. Otherwise,... frankly, I think you need professional help.
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Here is DAKDAK's original post as titled on this thread, reconstructed from others' quotes.
*****
I have been told by the extremely biased members of this site that I do not reply, to the explanations given to me regarding what I personally think about THE OFFICIAL APOLLO RECORD,and that I just move on to another APOLLO conspiracy subject,and disregard the posts disputing the uneducated ideas that I originally posted.I have also been called a Seagull Poster. I don't know what a Seagull Poster is,but I don't believe that I am one.
I have also been criticized by members who say that I use poor grammar and punctuation,this is true remember I dropped out of High School in the 9Th grade,and English was my worst subject.
I believe that there are LITERALLY THOUSANDS of inconsistencies and even FLAT OUT LIES in the official record of APOLLO 11.
I also believe that I can prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt if given enough space to fully explain my arguments.
It doesn't seem fair to me to have to limit your responses to a few lines of text and a few attachments with a maximum of
4 per post, maximum total size 192KB, maximum individual size 128KB
I think to avoid confusion that we should debate only one APOLLO mission at a time.
I think that it would be appropriate since APOLLO 11 was supposedly the first time man landed on the moon,and supposedly mans greatest science and technological achievement that APOLLO 11 would be a good mission to start this debate.
Below are numbered reasons that I have already posted, as to why I believe that the official record of APOLLO 11 is completely untrue. I have many more reasons to believe this, but these are the ones I have mentioned so far in order to the best of my recollection. I will respond in great detail as the extremely biased members of this site do to any reply. REMEMBER ONLY APOLLO 11I have started many replies already and will answer your rebuttals quickly
LETS DEBATE
1. The APOLLO 11 Command Module was not large enough to fit what the official record says was inside.
2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT
4. The Apollo 11 audio record is also completely inaccurate(HOUSTON WE HAVE A ROLL PROGRAM)
5 The Apollo 11 videos and still pictures are completely inaccurate(FAKED)
6. That the moon emits light and would have blinded the APOLLO 11 astronauts if they went which I don't believe they did.
7. That the scientific findings of APOLLO 11 are completely innacurate(FALSE)
8. That the APOLLO 11 water cooled SpaceSuits were completly inadequate (THE ASTRONAUTS WOULD FREEZE)
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DAKDAK, I will gladly have a fair debate with you. If LunarOrbit likes the idea, we can set up a thread just for the two of us to have a structured discussion and debate.
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I don't know if Dakdak would, even leaving aside that he's been banned. But it doesn't matter, because that's a terrible idea.
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All Dakdak proved when he was here was that he was uninterested (and probably uncapable) in actually learning anything.
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3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
There is no such thing as a "crazy eight" trajectory. All spacecraft follow trajectories that are one of four conic sections - circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola. The circle and parabola are special cases that are virtually nonexistent in practice, thus we are left with elliptical and hyperbolic orbits. An elliptical orbit occurs when the spacecraft is traveling at a velocity below that necessary to escape the gravity of the body about which it is orbiting. Examples include the Moon's orbit around Earth and Earth's orbit around the Sun. A hyperbolic orbit occurs when a spacecraft is traveling at a velocity exceeding escape velocity. In this case the spacecraft will follow a curved path past the planet (or moon) and then fly off into space, not to return.
The trajectory flown by the Apollo spacecraft started out as an Earth-centric elliptical orbit with an apogee (the part of the orbit farthest from Earth) that was about 1.5 times the Earth-Moon distance. A spacecraft in such an orbit will reach the distance of the Moon in about three days. If the orbit was not timed to encounter the Moon when it reached the appropriate distance, the spacecraft would have continued in its elliptical orbit. However, the orbit was timed so that when the spacecraft neared the Moon's orbit, the Moon was approaching so that it and the spacecraft arrived at the same location in space at the same time. As the spacecraft drew close to the Moon, the Moon's gravity began to dominate over Earth gravity, thus the spacecraft transitioned from an Earth-centric elliptical orbit to a Moon-centric hyperbolic orbit. The Moon-centric hyperbolic orbit took the spacecraft on a path that flew behind the Moon, as observed from Earth.
On a normal mission, the spacecraft would fire its engine when it reached its closest distance to the Moon on the far side from Earth. This would slow the spacecraft to below lunar escape velocity so that the orbit would transition from Moon-centric hyperbolic to Moon-centric elliptical. However, if the engine wasn't fired, the spacecraft would continue on its hyperbolic trajectory and fly past the Moon, eventually to escape its gravity. Had the spacecraft entered orbit, to leave orbit it would again fire its engine, but this time to speed up. Adding velocity would cause the Moon-centric elliptical orbit to transition back to Moon-centric hyperbolic. As the spacecraft flew away from the Moon, Earth gravity again began to dominate over lunar gravity. As this occurred, the spacecraft trajectory transitioned from Moon-centric hyperbolic back to Earth-centric elliptical. The spacecraft was now on the inbound part of its elliptical orbit heading back to Earth.
What you consider to be a "figure 8" trajectory is actually three different trajectories that are patched together. The spacecraft simply transitions from one to the next.
Wow! I never knew this, at least not in this kind of way. Thank you for clarifying this - I have always thought of the orbits as one bigger one, but now it helps me understand the term Trans-Lunar Injection (hope I wrote that right).
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2. The APOLLO 11 on-board computer was not sufficient to preform the tasks that the record says it did.
Another guy with a CS degree here. Worse, not only have I been educated, I program embedded systems of similar capabilities to the Apollo computer professionally and for personal pleasure.
So, I would also be interested in knowing what specific tasks the record says the Apollo AGC performed that could not be done by the hardware. There's copious amounts of documentation available about the hardware, enough for various people to have built simulators and actual physical replicas of the machine, as well as source code listings for the software, so you should be able to point out exactly what parts of the system fail to work as advertised.
3. The APOLLO 11 trajectories are completely inaccurate(CRAZY EIGHT)
What specifically is inaccurate about it?
Two questions:
1. Was it truly called "Core Rope Technology" (I hope I am not misremembering the term I heard)?
2. Is this similar to multi-threading (or perhaps multi-tasking) or does it just allow the system to pull in the appropriate program at the correct time? (assuming I am not merely confused by the Hollywood aspect of 'From the Earth to the Moon' - Episode was 'We have cleared the tower' - it was during the interview of the computer technician that I remember him mentioning Core Rope Technology or something along those lines)
Additionally, are the schematics and source code listing available to the general public? I am trying to find everything I can about Apollo (and some WW2 aircraft) for light reading in my off hours. :)
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In fact, here's what I say--there is no debate possible. A debate is weighing two matters of opinion. What we are weighing here is fact and the ignorant opinion that it's wrong. Ignorance always loses. You can couch it in the language of Christian Fundamentalism. You can couch it in the language of New Age hippies. You can couch it in any language you want, but the ignorant person does not have a reasonable expectation of convincing an educated person that their education was completely wrong, because the ignorant person doesn't have the knowledge to counter it.
As Arthur C. Clarke once stated: (rule 3) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - perhaps he believe in Donde Be Sassa ...
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Yeah, I've always thought that Clarke quote was overrated.
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I find it still fits in some cases *cough* DAKDAK *cough*
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Actually, that's a lot of my problem with it. The thing is, if he wanted to learn, it wouldn't be magic to him. He doesn't. Yes, okay, he has to do a lot of catching up, but it can be done. Whereas how does magic work? It's magic!
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"Core rope" is entirely different from multithreading. Multithreading is a common software technique for executing more than one task (logically) at once. If you have multiple CPU cores, then you actually can execute those tasks at the same time. Threading is usually distinguished from multitasking (an older concept) in that each task has its own address space, while threads usually run in a common address space. Both methods are very widely used.
"Core rope" is a long-obsolete hardware technology used in the Apollo Guidance Computer as a read-only memory holding all the computer's programs. It was called "rope" because that's what it physically resembled. It consisted of wires threaded through a series of small transformer cores, forming a "rope" that was folded up and mounted on circuit boards in the computer.
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I thought someone here already had Florence Ambrose's addendum to Clarke's Law as a sig line:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00255.htm
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I have my own corollary to Clarke's law:
Any sufficiently advanced communication scheme is indistinguishable from noise.
This is actually true, when you consider Shannon information theory.
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I thought someone here already had Florence Ambrose's addendum to Clarke's Law as a sig line:
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00255.htm
I certainly use that on CQ/BAUT, not sure if I ever used it here (or the old forum) though, but as you mentioned it I have started using it (and found that the sig limit is rather short)
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I wonder if there are any anti.. whatever you call a strong non-correlary.
Such as; "Any sufficiently wackaloon magic can never be properly described in terms of technology."
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Often wondered about this comment about magic. Say, for example, you showed an educated person from the dark ages a car, I think that would not be too hard to describe to remove the perceived magic. A method of transport etc etc. Maybe even an uneducated person. How far back do you have to go in the ignorance stakes? From my perspective, if an alien landed tomorrow and pointed to the sky and said they were from there, you would assume they travelled it somehow. My first thought would be, show us your engine, four pot or eight pot, where are the carbs etc etc not (insert Monty Python cliché) Burn em, they are a witch.....
PS, just google Shannon information theory. Pass me a couple of tin cans and some string... (actually, some of it rings a bell).
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I think it would be more along the lines of trying to explain the workings of a television, computer, or cell phone to someone from the dark ages. They just wouldn't have the educational or cultural background to understand electronics even at a very basic level.
I note that Clarke used the word "indistinguishable". It's not that we would think a far advanced technology was magic - we would just be so unable to understand the workings that it might as well be magic for all we could tell.
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But I disagree with that premise. Or, more accurately, if it's true, I think it is already true to quite a lot of people. I know a lot more about the practical theories of cell phones than the average, from what I can tell, and it's still a kind of magic to me. (A dark one that tethers people, but magic.) I know it's physics, and I have a sort of grip around the issues that create it, but that doesn't mean I think I understand.
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Often wondered about this comment about magic.
[...]
PS, just google Shannon information theory. Pass me a couple of tin cans and some string... (actually, some of it rings a bell).
As a 12 year old kid I was as fascinated by Apollo's communications as I was by the fact humans were standing on an entirely different world. It seemed like magic. I got a ham license, then an electrical engineering education and a career in communications R&D. And while I understand Shannon now, and I know it's not really magic, receiving bits that have traveled across more than a hundred AU of empty space still has some of that magical "feel".
So don't dismiss the accomplishment too quickly. JPL has made some amazing strides in their deep space telecommunications capability as shown by this famous "stairstep" plot showing their bit rate capability, normalized to Jupiter distance (5 AU), as a function of date:
http://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/PerformMetrics/stairstep.pdf
Keep in mind that radio signals, like light, drop off with distance according to the inverse square law. Maintaining a given data rate between a given pair of radio antennas requires four times as much power when the distance is doubled. The great distances between the planets means that were JPL's capability applied to geostationary satellite distances their data rates would now be way into the terabit/sec range (if they had sufficient bandwidth).
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I know it's physics, and I have a sort of grip around the issues that create it, but that doesn't mean I think I understand.
I do understand how cell phones work; I work in the industry (specifically for Qualcomm). Yet if anything my understanding gives me an increased appreciation for the accomplishment, while still retaining a little of that sense of magic. It was also the result of a lot of hard work that is seldom understood by or even visible to those who aren't doing it.
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I think it would be more along the lines of trying to explain the workings of a television, computer, or cell phone to someone from the dark ages. They just wouldn't have the educational or cultural background to understand electronics even at a very basic level.
I think it would depend on the person. The humans who lived 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago were essentially identical to us living today, and were just as smart. One should still be able to understand modern technology if they are willing to learn. The problem, as we see with many hoaxers, is that cultural, educational (or lack of same) and psychological issues make them unwilling to learn, not unable to learn.
Very few hoaxers are actually stupid. The vast majority are simply willfully ignorant.
Listen to any interview with a Nobel Laureate. Virtually every one will tell you how lucky he or she considers himself to have retained his childhood curiosity into adulthood.
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Very few hoaxers are actually stupid. The vast majority are simply willfully ignorant.
Although I certainly understand the distinction between stupidity and ignorance, I can't help but believe that willful ignorance is in many ways a sign stupidity. I find it difficult to understand how a truly intelligent person could care so little that he/she doesn't what to learn.
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"Core rope" is entirely different from multithreading. Multithreading is a common software technique for executing more than one task (logically) at once. If you have multiple CPU cores, then you actually can execute those tasks at the same time. Threading is usually distinguished from multitasking (an older concept) in that each task has its own address space, while threads usually run in a common address space. Both methods are very widely used.
"Core rope" is a long-obsolete hardware technology used in the Apollo Guidance Computer as a read-only memory holding all the computer's programs. It was called "rope" because that's what it physically resembled. It consisted of wires threaded through a series of small transformer cores, forming a "rope" that was folded up and mounted on circuit boards in the computer.
Awesome! I did not know that is what Core Rope meant and my ignorance showed when I likened it to Multi-Tasking (I knew the definition of that one - just did not know how to compare anything I know to Core Rope).
Thank you for the lesson - I will file this one away with my other Apollo knowledge (some from books and manuals, much from here).
--bobdude11
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I think it would depend on the person. The humans who lived 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 years ago were essentially identical to us living today, and were just as smart. One should still be able to understand modern technology if they are willing to learn.
But, as is evidenced in most science texts and historical items, persons in those eras were ignorant of was actually happening. I believe it is safe to say, though, that should you explain modern technology to the likes of DaVinci, Van Heuk, or similar minds, they would be able to comprehend much of what is known and use the information to understand the rest. This goes directly to your statement about hoaxsters being unwilling to learn even when faced with overwhelmng evidence.
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A couple thoughts, building on each other.
It is easier to explain a cell phone to someone from the modern industrialized world then it would be to, say, Shakespeare (a fairly witty and well-read person of his time) because many of the basic ideas are common and embedded in that later cultural context; electricity, batteries, radio, etc.
In a way, it is like the problem of believing three unlikely things before breakfast; for the modern one has to accept just a few unknowns, such as cellular distribution networks and the generally-unseen grid of cell towers. Poor Will has to accept your explanation on electric current and all the way up to (if he asks), plastics.
But...and here is where it gets interesting...the average modern doesn't actually understand the cell phone any better than Will would after your explanation. What they have, in fact, is not an understanding of electricity, but an acceptance of it, and some experience with it in a variety of contexts. So when you flip the cell phone face-out and say "This is an OLED screen; it's a display technology derived from LEDs" the modern will grasp the concept of "display technology" and "LED" but they don't actually have any idea how they work.
c.f. Clarke, for most people, you could be saying "The goddess Luminatica makes the images. She's the same goddess that makes computer monitors work, and is sister to the goddess that runs stoplights and hazard flashers." Because you are only providing a limited but consistent framework. And, really, very few of us are ever going to need to brew our own organic dyes, grow crystals, draft up micro-fabrication templates, and otherwise understand at that level of detail how a display works. Even for us geeks it is a matter of how much voltage to apply to which lines.
But then we have an even more interesting jump. I'm too tired this morning to put it in terms of common technologies (worked two back-to-back 12-hour shifts with a nasty stomach virus that wouldn't let me eat), so I'm going to reach for an attempted example from the sport of bouldering. So apologies to all.
Anyhow, the idea is that some technology is refinement, but other technology is on entirely new principles. You can grok clockwork very well, and you can model increasingly complex devices are being merely very tight clockwork, but eventually you will run into something that can only be understood by grasping the concept of the electromagnet. Or the shape-memory alloy. Or whatever comes along next. Sometimes these leaps have the appearance of a new thing because they have built so far...I like to think of making the leap from "a lightbulb" to "millions of lightbulbs crammed into a small flat plane so that images could be produced." Or think of Marconi interacting with a cell phone -- his first thoughts are not going to include the concept of a cellular network.
Err, I guess I don't need the bouldering example anyhow. Here it is though; boulderers always watch each other climb, and they learn a lot from that. But it is generally accepted as a truism that you can only grasp what a climber a few grades above you is doing. If there are four grades between you, the typical experience is to go "here's a weight shift, there's a nice little hook, I see the crimp she's using there, and....how the heck did she make that cross!" Some of the moves are simply incomprehensible -- they might as well be magic.
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Good thoughts nomuse - I hadn't really considered that, yes, I have a basic understanding of how cell phones work, but some of the more intricate parts require much more study to get past the "magic" of how they function.
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Often wondered about this comment about magic.
[...]
PS, just google Shannon information theory. Pass me a couple of tin cans and some string... (actually, some of it rings a bell).
So don't dismiss the accomplishment too quickly.
Ah, did not mean it come across as such. More joke on a level for me was the string and tins. But reading what you post with interest. I am a serial abuser of equipment rather than the designer, as always I increase my knowledge on here.
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Two questions:
1. Was it truly called "Core Rope Technology" (I hope I am not misremembering the term I heard)?
2. Is this similar to multi-threading (or perhaps multi-tasking) or does it just allow the system to pull in the appropriate program at the correct time? (assuming I am not merely confused by the Hollywood aspect of 'From the Earth to the Moon' - Episode was 'We have cleared the tower' - it was during the interview of the computer technician that I remember him mentioning Core Rope Technology or something along those lines)
Additionally, are the schematics and source code listing available to the general public? I am trying to find everything I can about Apollo (and some WW2 aircraft) for light reading in my off hours. :)
Bobdude11: If you're interested in the construction of the Apollo Guidance Computer, you'd probably find the Spacecraft Films 2-DVD set Mission to the Moon worth watching.
http://02e5a89.netsolstores.com/missiontothemoon.aspx
It has nine TV documentaries in black-and-white of about 28-29 minutes each, made by MIT for Nasa in about the mid-1960s, plus one shorter colour documentary about Apollo 4.
They are quaint and amusing by today's standards, but full of information. Some of the interviewees are stiff as a board and probably terrified of the TV camera, and they glance off-camera to get a reminder of what they should be saying - perhaps words or hints written in chalk on a blackboard and traced by a finger of one of the film crew.
One documentary has Tom Kelly giving a tour of Lunar Module construction at Grumman. Another is "Computer for Apollo", which I found it so fascinating I did a 7-page transcript of the soundtrack. If anyone who's interested sends me a PM with an email address I can send a copy.
Besides the construction, we are also shown how the DSKY was operated and how the AGC was linked to the navigation instruments.
Some excerpts:
0:00:47 Fitch: Hello, I'm John Fitch, MIT Science Reporter. Today we're at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which has been given design responsibility for this guidance and navigation system, which will direct our Apollo spacecraft on the way to the moon and back.
0:01:04 Fitch: At one time, the direction of the rising sun or perhaps a winding riverbed was all that man needed in his restless search for new land. Centuries later the quadrant and the magnetic compass guided his way, even across the open sea, even after familiar landmarks had long since disappeared.
0:01:23 Fitch: But today we speak of traversing a million miles of empty space, where there is no north nor south, no rising nor setting sun, not even any up or down. It's an extremely complicated path requiring many, many measurements and millions of calculations.
0:01:41 Fitch: As you can see from this Apollo flight plan, there are several critical manoeuvres that have to be performed. After the Apollo spacecraft reaches its earth orbit, it must be injected into a translunar trajectory at just the right place in time and space.
0:01:58 Fitch: Someone has compared it to shooting at a moving target from a revolving platform, which is mounted on a train, which is going around a curve.
0:02:08 Fitch: Then at the half-way point, along about here, the programmed course must be examined for errors and possibly a mid-course correction made. There are many other similar manoeuvres, and to learn about the guidance and navigation system which will make this possible, we talk with Mr Eldon Hall, Deputy Associate Director of the Instrumentation Lab.
0:02:30 Eldon Hall: The guidance and navigation system consists of two measurement elements, controls, the computer, and the computer display and control. The inertial measurement unit, shown up here but normally down at the back, consists of gyros and accelerometers. It measures the angles and velocity of the spacecraft in this fashion.
0:02:56 Hall: The spacecraft rotates and the inertial measurement unit holds the reference, so the angles can be measured. The sextant is an instrument very similar to that used by the sailors to navigate on the surface of the earth.
0:03:10 Fitch: Now what kind of a problem might you have to solve on the way to the moon?
0:03:14 Hall: The most basic problem is to determine the position at any point in time, and that can be illustrated in these charts. The sextant shown here represents the spacecraft, and to determine the position an angle must be measured, between a point on the earth and a star. And you can see that as you move away from the earth, this angle would narrow down, thus giving the distance between the earth and the spacecraft.
0:03:48 Hall: The astronaut first positions the spacecraft so that a point on the earth, a landmark, is visible through the sextant. Then he positions the sextant angle so that the star is superimposed upon this landmark.
0:04:05 Fitch: Now what kind of a landmark might this be?
0:04:07 Hall: This one is San Francisco Bay, as you can see here. However, the Great Lakes, or Cuba, or Cape Cod, the tip of Florida — any of these points make suitable landmarks.
0:04:20 Fitch: Then through some system of mirrors you actually superimpose the star on that feature.
0:04:24 Hall: That's right. The mirrors inside the sextant will bring the star within the field of view so that we can superimpose it on the landmark.
0:04:33 Fitch: Now how is this angle actually measured?
0:04:36 Hall: It's done automatically by the computer. The astronaut must first identify to the computer the star and the landmark he is planning to use. Then, as he's positioning the spacecraft and the sextant, the computer is measuring the angle between the two.
0:04:54 Hall: When the astronaut is satisfied that the star is superimposed upon the landmark, he pushes the Mark button, telling the computer to record these angles and the time of the measurement. From that information the computer can compute the position of the spacecraft in space.
*****
0:13:51 Fitch: The Apollo computers are manufactured by the Raytheon Company in Waltham, Massachusetts. The computer itself consists of two trays, one containing logic modules, the other memory modules.
0:14:04 Fitch: To learn how these modules are put together, we talk with Mr Jack Poundstone, Raytheon's Apollo engineering manager.
0:14:12 Poundstone: In this room, John, we run all of the electrical components through a screening and burning process. You know there are over 30,000 parts that go together to make this machine.
0:14:23 Poundstone: Every part is put through an electrical test and then a series of environmental stresses. Now, as an example, this girl is placing the micrologic units into a fixture that will be used in this centrifuge.
0:14:37 Poundstone: Here the fixture is spun at a very high speed and 20,000 g's of force is placed on each component.
0:14:43 Fitch: That's a lot more than it will ever experience, isn't it?
0:14:45 Poundstone: Yes, that's true, but we put more forces on, more stresses than we really expect, to ensure the high reliability.
0:14:51 Fitch: So this is really sort of a torture chamber.
0:14:53 Poundstone: That's right. In addition, we run all the parts through a leak test, to make sure there is no leaks in the can. The part is put into a high-pressure helium tank, and if there is a leak, the helium will be forced into the can.
*****
0:18:48 Poundstone: This operator is loading the little micrologic elements into the component holder. Note that she takes each one and dips it in a little adhesive before she puts it into the holder.
0:19:00 Fitch: I see. So it's really fastened in place.
0:19:02 Poundstone: That's right, John. Now she's ready to weld the wires to the leads coming out of the can.
0:19:08 Fitch: You don't solder them, you actually weld these wires?
0:19:10 Poundstone: They are welded. Now she takes her little pair of tweezers and properly aligns the wire to the pin of the can. When the alignment is right, she then makes the weld. Now that little flash you saw there was when the weld was actually made.
0:19:26 Poundstone: After that matrix welding is completed, she's ready to place the assembly into the header.
0:19:33 Fitch: It actually does fit in that little space.
0:19:35 Poundstone: Yes, she very gently forces it in, and she's ready now to weld the matrix wires on to the pins of the header. On completion of that operation we now have an electrically completed module.
0:19:49 Poundstone: A test man will now take this module and run an electrical test. He plugs the module into a special test socket, and then this special piece of equipment will electrically energise all of the circuits to ensure that they are properly working. The information for the test is stored on a piece of paper tape.
0:20:02 Chapter 5.
0:20:10 Fitch: After this testing, then, this logic stick is ready for the computer.
0:20:14 Poundstone: No, there's one more stage, John, and that's the potting of the module.
0:20:17 Fitch: What do you mean by potting?
0:20:19 Poundstone: Well, the potting is this plastic coating that provides a covering for the wiring in the component. Now the module is ready to be plugged into the logic tray assembly.
0:20:28 Fitch: That's number 38 and there are all these other modules too. They might be a little different.
0:20:32 Poundstone: That's right.
0:20:33 Fitch: What about the memory module?
0:20:35 Poundstone: Well, the memory modules of the computer are made using a basic component which is a doughnut-shaped magnetic core. Now this core is placed into a component holder like so. Now after the component holder has been completely loaded with cores, we're then ready to do the wiring.
0:20:55 Poundstone: In order to perform the wiring operation, we store about 20 feet of wire in this needle. See how that wire comes out of there?
0:21:02 Fitch: Uh-huh.
0:21:03 Poundstone: Now the operator will take the core-holder and pass the needle through the core, around to the other side, and then weave it back through, in different positions. Now let's watch how the girls do this operation in a little more detail.
0:21:20 Poundstone: Now here we have a pair of girls who are wiring the address wiring of the core module. Now they pass the wire back and forth, stored in the needle, and put it through the cores in a particular wiring pattern. Now each time a wire goes through, they must very carefully wrap the wire around one of those little nylon pins. As you can see, what that does is pull the wire away from the centre of the core to allow room to pass the needle through again.
0:21:49 Fitch: I see. Now these address wires go to every single core?
0:21:54 Poundstone: That's right. Now when the wire is completely weaved into the rope, it must be terminated on a little spudder terminal. Now the girl strips the insulation from the wire and very carefully wraps it around the pin. Then they use a magnifying glass to inspect their work.
0:22:12 Poundstone: Now the fence wiring information or the wiring that contains the program of the fixed memory, is performed by using this machine. The machine indexes to a particular location of the core, and then the girl passes the needle through the aperture and provides the wire to go through the right core.
0:22:34 Fitch: She doesn’t have to think about which core goes through next.
0:22:37 Poundstone: No, the machine does that for her. Now note, each time the wire passes through, that little aperture jogs down and pulls the wire around one of the nylon pins. When she passes the needle through she will trip the switch with the needle, which causes a tape-reader to advance — there's the tape-reader — and that in turn causes the core plane to move its position.
0:23:03 Poundstone: Now after all the wiring is completed, these nylon pins that were used to temporarily hold the wire, can now be removed. Next we must press the wires very gently down into place, so we will be able to fold up the whole assembly.
0:23:18 Poundstone: Now this operator is folding the core plane into a sandwich-type construction and laying them into the header of the module. Now we are ready for a electrical test. We must ensure that every wire in every component are properly located.
0:23:35 Poundstone: The operator puts the module into this piece of special test equipment, and a program stored on paper tape is then used to exercise the module.
0:23:45 Fitch: This is certainly a complicated-looking maze of wiring in here.
0:23:49 Poundstone: It certainly is, John. That module contains 512 cores and over a half a mile of wiring. And it performs the function of storing over 65,000 individual pieces of information.
0:24:03 Fitch: Tell me, you put that potting compound all over this too?
0:24:06 Poundstone: Yes. Now in the final form here's the module potted and it's all ready to be plugged into the memory tray assembly.
0:24:15 Fitch: Tell me, how do you connect one module to the next one in these trays?
0:24:19 Poundstone: Well that's done on the back side of the tray. Let me show you.
0:24:25 Fitch: Oh, I see.
0:24:27 Poundstone: Now here you see a fairly complex wiring pattern. We’re able to interconnect from module to module by running wires from this pin to, say, that pin. Now this pattern is so complex that we've used a computer program to determine the exact layout of each wire. That is, we may run a wire from here to here by going down this way and over here to there.
0:24:51 Fitch: Why is that?
0:24:53 Poundstone: Well, that's to avoid a density problem where the wires could build up if we laid them all in the same channel.
0:24:58 Fitch: Oh, I see. But I should think that'd make it rather hard for somebody is trying to wire from one pin to another to remember all that.
0:25:02 Chapter 6.
0:25:04 Poundstone: Well that's true. In fact the wiring is so complex that a human being just can't do it, so we use a machine to do all of this wiring.
0:25:14 Poundstone: This is the automatic wire-wrap machine. The operator has placed the tray in the machine and is starting the wiring operation. Now this machine has two wire-wrap tools that can be incremented to the proper location on the tray. When it's found the right pins, the wire is stretched out and formed in the right pattern, then the insulation is stripped from the ends of the wire, and finally the two tools drop down and wrap two pins simultaneously.
0:25:45 Fitch: Can you go around corners and things?
0:25:46 Poundstone: Yes you can. And in order to run the wire in a different direction, sometimes the tray is rotated. It can be positioned in four different locations. Now the information to command those wire-wrap tools is contained on these IBM cards. Each card has the information for a single wire.
0:26:12 Fitch: How is the wire actually fastened to the pin? Is it soldered or welded?
0:26:16 Poundstone: No, this is what is known as a wire-wrap connection. The soft copper wire is very tightly wrapped around the pin, and you might see that the pin is a square-cornered pin, and in this fashion the wire digs in to the sharp corners of the pin and provides a good electrical connection.
0:26:35 Poundstone: Now we're entering the computer system test area, John. After the trays have been potted and the modules assembled to the trays, we bring the machine into this area and run through exhaustive temperature tests and vibration tests.
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I can't help but believe that willful ignorance is in many ways a sign stupidity. I find it difficult to understand how a truly intelligent person could care so little that he/she doesn't what to learn.
It's probably what you meant anyway, but I think the stupid part isn't mere wilful ignorance, but ignorance about the subject one tries to discuss.
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Awesome! I did not know that is what Core Rope meant and my ignorance showed when I likened it to Multi-Tasking (I knew the definition of that one - just did not know how to compare anything I know to Core Rope).
Thank you for the lesson - I will file this one away with my other Apollo knowledge (some from books and manuals, much from here).
--bobdude11
Core rope and erasable core work similarly. We wire up erasable core in a grid on a substrate because it's easier to see where the wires are supposed to go. The grids implement the address mechanism, plus the set-reset mechanism. The little cores magnetize in a certain way if they are "addressed" and a set-reset wire has certain electrical conditions. That causes a signal on a sense wire.
Rope works the same way, except that the set-reset mechanism is absent and the cores are permanently magnetized. The sense wire either passes through each core or it doesn't. Because of this more permanent setup, the entire assembly can be essentially wadded up without loss of functionality, and thereby stored in a more convenient form factor.
The operating system in the AGC actually used a pretty sophisticated job management strategy. It had real-time processing capability as well as pre-emptive multitasking and interrupt-driven processing.
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Rope works the same way, except that the set-reset mechanism is absent and the cores are permanently magnetized. The sense wire either passes through each core or it doesn't. Because of this more permanent setup, the entire assembly can be essentially wadded up without loss of functionality, and thereby stored in a more convenient form factor.
Slight correction...the cores aren't permanently magnetized at all, they operate as simple transformer cores coupling address wires to sense wires. It was a lot denser than rewritable core memory, as adding another word of memory only involved threading another wire through the same set of cores (and then, only for the ones representing a set bit)...you only needed more cores when there was physically no more room for more wires.
The operating system in the AGC actually used a pretty sophisticated job management strategy. It had real-time processing capability as well as pre-emptive multitasking and interrupt-driven processing.
Including the capability to drop low-priority tasks in order to continue running critical real-time tasks, as was inadvertently demonstrated in the Apollo 11 landing.
It's rather ridiculous that there's people claiming the AGC was somehow inadequate, when there's enough information available for people to count the machine instructions and see exactly why the 6400 cycle steals/second from a minor hardware design error (an independent, non-phase-locked clock) in the radar plus the 1668 DELTAH display task were too much for the computer to handle, and what the machine did to continue operating despite this...
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The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation (http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture/dp/1441908765/ref=pd_sim_b_1) is a terrific book on the subject. As the title says, it goes into detail about the how the computer was built and also goes through each step of the mission program-by-program. I learned a lot from reading this.
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Some of the interviewees are stiff as a board and probably terrified of the TV camera, and they glance off-camera to get a reminder of what they should be saying - perhaps words or hints written in chalk on a blackboard and traced by a finger of one of the film crew.
Don't you know the real reason? A CIA hit man kept a gun pointed at the interviewee's first-born child off-camera during the entire interview to discourage any beans-spilling about the whole Apollo project, including the AGC, being a massive hoax. That's why they had to put in all those hidden incoherences that are only now being discovered!
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Slight correction...the cores aren't permanently magnetized at all, they operate as simple transformer cores coupling address wires to sense wires.
Actually the transformer cores coupled a "set/reset line" to the sense wires, which as you say were wired through or around the core depending on the bit to be stored at that location. The set/reset line threaded through all the cores.
Each address wire was threaded through or around the cores in such a way that when an address was supplied to the wires, every core but one had at least one energized address line. (There were two lines for each address bit, one driven by the bit and the other by its inverse. Only one of each pair went through any given core.) The lines carried enough current to magnetically saturate the core, inhibiting it from coupling a subsequent pulse from the set/reset line to the sense line. This allowed a single sense wire to thread through the bits of many locations while having only the desired location respond.
A design optimization had an extra pair of address lines threaded through the cores and driven by the parity of the address such that each deselected core actually had at least two activated address lines. This allowed the current in each address line to be halved.
I wouldn't know any of this if I hadn't read up on Apollo core rope memory while debunking Hunchbacked's ridiculous assertions on the topic. Never let it be said that much can't be learned from Apollo denial. You just don't learn it from the deniers themselves.
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Each address wire was threaded through or around the cores in such a way that when an address was supplied to the wires, every core but one had at least one energized address line. (There were two lines for each address bit, one driven by the bit and the other by its inverse. Only one of each pair went through any given core.) The lines carried enough current to magnetically saturate the core, inhibiting it from coupling a subsequent pulse from the set/reset line to the sense line. This allowed a single sense wire to thread through the bits of many locations while having only the desired location respond.
So, a sort of saturable reactor/mag amp setup. That is clever...the descriptions I found weren't very detailed, and left the impression that each word had its own address line with an external multiplexer. Doing this, the multiplexing is all done in the cores themselves...each address bit saturates half the cores (a different subset each, overlapping with the others), excluding them from being read and leaving one "live" core in the end, with sense lines for each bit either going through or around each core depending on the value stored. Removing the external multiplexer and replacing a wire for each word with a wire for each address bit would greatly simplify things from what's required for ordinary core memory, and considerably reduce the number of components prone to failure.
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Don't you know the real reason? A CIA hit man kept a gun pointed at the interviewee's first-born child off-camera during the entire interview to discourage any beans-spilling about the whole Apollo project, including the AGC, being a massive hoax.
That's how I figure reputable actors end up in disreputable movies, too. We refer to them around here as "grandmother in a basement" movies--someone's got the person's grandmother at gunpoint in a basement somewhere unless whoever-it-is agrees to make a terrible movie.
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So, a sort of saturable reactor/mag amp setup. That is clever...the descriptions I found weren't very detailed, and left the impression that each word had its own address line with an external multiplexer.
There's actually more than one way to make a read-only transformer memory (as I think it's called) and several distinct designs can be found in the Apollo literature. That confused a bunch of us as to which was actually used in the AGC.
I think all were used in various places; e.g., IBM used a different architecture to contain the software for a peripheral controller.
As you point out, the arrangement of the Apollo core rope memory minimized the number of components, and that's highly desirable in hardware designed for space. But this came at significantly increased manufacturing complexity; consider what was required to change a single bit in the memory to correct a software bug. You'd have to unthread an entire sense wire and rethread another one, making the change in just one of the cores it has to traverse. The IBM scheme had a clever book-like structure with pages that were essentially very thin circuit boards that could be individually replaced to change a given word of memory.
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As you point out, the arrangement of the Apollo core rope memory minimized the number of components, and that's highly desirable in hardware designed for space. But this came at significantly increased manufacturing complexity; consider what was required to change a single bit in the memory to correct a software bug. You'd have to unthread an entire sense wire and rethread another one, making the change in just one of the cores it has to traverse. The IBM scheme had a clever book-like structure with pages that were essentially very thin circuit boards that could be individually replaced to change a given word of memory.
I'm reminded of a IC ROM technology that was already available at the time...you could get custom ROM ICs, written by physically scratching out individual bits on the die. Only worthwhile for small quantities...a mask ROM would be used for mass production. Much easier to work with than core rope, though, once you had the chips in production.
And rewritable magnetic core memory and similar technologies like plated wire and thin film memory continued to get denser and cheaper, and one-time programmable PROMs and UV-erasable EPROMs became commercially available shortly after the first moon landing...core rope didn't stick around long.
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WOW! I feel like an elementary school kid compared to you folks - I have been interested in computers for a long time, but I never experienced any of the older style (having been brought up on modern 'digital' computers (the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 being the first). I am going to really have to watch and read to fully understand everything.
Thank you all SO much for the help - I can't wait to learn something new!!!
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I'm reminded of a IC ROM technology that was already available at the time...you could get custom ROM ICs, written by physically scratching out individual bits on the die.
Are you thinking of fusible link PROM, or is this something else I haven't heard of? I was using fusible link PROMs until the late 1970s when UV erasable PROMs took over.
I do know that in the mid 90s Intel developed the ability to program individual chips with unique values with a laser. They used this to implement the infamous Pentium III serial number that triggered so much opposition that they withdrew the feature. (Not that it matters much; modern computers have plenty of unique system-identifying information, starting with network interface addresses.)
And rewritable magnetic core memory and similar technologies like plated wire and thin film memory continued to get denser and cheaper
Yes. I'm not as familiar with the IBM-developed Launch Vehicle Digital Computer used in the Saturn Instrument Unit, but I get the impression that the program was stored in read/write core. Is that so? It certainly would have made software updates a lot easier than in the AGC, but at the expense of a lower density. Maybe the Saturn was easier to fly than the CSM or LM.
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Are you thinking of fusible link PROM, or is this something else I haven't heard of? I was using fusible link PROMs until the late 1970s when UV erasable PROMs took over.
No, a Sylvania system where technicians went at the die under a microscope and physically scratched out metal traces exposed for that purpose. (There were only 256 bits to worry about...think of a 32x8 array.)
There's not much on it out there...it was probably pretty much immediately superseded by PROMs.
Yes. I'm not as familiar with the IBM-developed Launch Vehicle Digital Computer used in the Saturn Instrument Unit, but I get the impression that the program was stored in read/write core. Is that so? It certainly would have made software updates a lot easier than in the AGC, but at the expense of a lower density. Maybe the Saturn was easier to fly than the CSM or LM.
Don't know. The AGC is the only system I know of that used core rope memory. The Mariner probes may have as well, but I haven't been able to find specific details. I've found references to a Mars lander that never got off the ground that used it...I think the Viking landers used plated wire memory for all their needs.
Normal core memory was more amenable to increases in density than core rope. It requires a core per bit rather than a core per word, but the cores can be much smaller and packed closer together. I wouldn't be surprised if it exceeded core rope in density before being replaced by things like plated wire memory.
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That's how I figure reputable actors end up in disreputable movies, too. We refer to them around here as "grandmother in a basement" movies--someone's got the person's grandmother at gunpoint in a basement somewhere unless whoever-it-is agrees to make a terrible movie.
Sounds more exciting than the probable truth of "Money, Dear Boy".
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Sometimes, "money, dear boy" doesn't seem to go anywhere near far enough.
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I have attributed it, at least in part, to the fact that you can't always tell how a movie will turn out when you sign the contract. A good partial script can turn in to an awful completed script or the budding young director can turn out to be a hack when given full control of a major film. Even seasoned directors turn out duds. It is part of the result of reaching for artistic goals amid the need keep within a budget and reach a broad enough audience.
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But why do skilled actors keep appearing in Uwe Boll films?
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Sure I heard Michael Cain on one of them TV chat shows and asked why he appeared in a bad film, he said it paid for his mothers new house with a grin. Not the house with a grin Mr Cain said with a grin.
From memory so it might have been Michael York talking about another film...... nah, pretty sure it was that.
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There was a great line in an episode of Not the Nine O'Clock News:
"Sir John Geilgud has defended his appearance in the film Caligula, saying there was no mention of sex and violence when he read the original paycheque." ;D
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Sure I heard Michael Cain on one of them TV chat shows and asked why he appeared in a bad film, he said it paid for his mothers new house with a grin. Not the house with a grin Mr Cain said with a grin.
Probably Michael Caine about Jaws: The Revenge:
"I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
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Bit of thinking, it involved bees. Looks like the Swarm, mind you, never seen that Jaws one, maybe it paid for the garage....
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I can't think appearing in Uwe Boll films pays for much. And you have to work with Uwe Boll, which makes it not worth it no matter how much it pays.
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Had to google him. I just assumed he was a director of no fame yet. I see what you mean. I suppose you cannot fathom every actor.
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It turns out Raul Julia knew he was dying and wanted to make one last movie--yes, to have one last paycheck--so he could be sure he'd leave enough to support his kids. And then he let them choose what his last movie would be. I often wonder if they're occasionally ashamed of their choice now.
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I don't know, I've derived considerable enjoyment from Street Fighter: The Movie. It's cheesy as all heck, but Raul Julia make it grand.
Very quotable.
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Heard James Earl Jones interviewed on Radio 5Live in the UK while driving through town one rainy Friday afternoon a couple of years ago, and he was asked about why his filmography contained so many bad movies, and his answer was essentially that, in spite of his (poorly paid, as he only provided the voice) fame as Darth Vader, he is still just a jobbing actor. He doesn't get paid millions per movie, and sometimes accepts what he knows are poor scripts because he needs the job and the paycheck.
I also once saw it written about Christopher Lee that he was "the finest actor ever to appear in this much crap" ... presumably he had the same need to accept roles that paid the bills.
Appearing in an Uwe Boll movie would seem to go way beyond that, though.
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Patrick Stewart said the same thing:
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Sir Ben Kingsley is also known for simply stunning performances, and working in utter drek. Heck, he worked with Uwe Boll for freaks sake!
Though his motivrs weren't so much money apparently as much as he always wanted to play a vampire.
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Heard James Earl Jones interviewed on Radio 5Live in the UK while driving through town one rainy Friday afternoon a couple of years ago, and he was asked about why his filmography contained so many bad movies, and his answer was essentially that, in spite of his (poorly paid, as he only provided the voice) fame as Darth Vader, he is still just a jobbing actor. He doesn't get paid millions per movie, and sometimes accepts what he knows are poor scripts because he needs the job and the paycheck.
I can vouch for that. In 1999 I worked on an independent concert video project with portions shot in the Holy Land and other parts shot in a studio. We had long wanted to get James Earl Jones to shoot a 2-3 minute introduction for us, for the celebrity value. While his completely reasonable fee was within our budget, his agent told our exec. producer that he was not available. So we made other plans.
Happily just a week or so before principal photography was to begin, Jones' agent called our producer and said that due to a lengthier-than-expected recovery from surgery, he could be available if certain provisions were met for his medical condition. We gladly accepted the conditions. Jones showed up on the set on crutches, all smiles and cordiality. He had a little Tupperware container with a sandwich his wife had made him for his lunch. He talked about all sorts of ordinary things while we worked with makeup and lighting. He was enormously polite to our director, who had only directed local productions and looked at times like he was about to throw up. In our polite conversation (mostly about Dr. Strangelove) I learned the secret to his justly famous enunciation. But yes, he's simply a working actor and a great professional.
Let me just say it's really creepy to hear Darth Vader say your name.
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Heard James Earl Jones interviewed on Radio 5Live in the UK while driving through town one rainy Friday afternoon a couple of years ago, and he was asked about why his filmography contained so many bad movies, and his answer was essentially that, in spite of his (poorly paid, as he only provided the voice) fame as Darth Vader, he is still just a jobbing actor. He doesn't get paid millions per movie, and sometimes accepts what he knows are poor scripts because he needs the job and the paycheck.
I can vouch for that. In 1999 I worked on an independent concert video project with portions shot in the Holy Land and other parts shot in a studio. We had long wanted to get James Earl Jones to shoot a 2-3 minute introduction for us, for the celebrity value. While his completely reasonable fee was within our budget, his agent told our exec. producer that he was not available. So we made other plans.
Happily just a week or so before principal photography was to begin, Jones' agent called our producer and said that due to a lengthier-than-expected recovery from surgery, he could be available if certain provisions were met for his medical condition. We gladly accepted the conditions. Jones showed up on the set on crutches, all smiles and cordiality. He had a little Tupperware container with a sandwich his wife had made him for his lunch. He talked about all sorts of ordinary things while we worked with makeup and lighting. He was enormously polite to our director, who had only directed local productions and looked at times like he was about to throw up. In our polite conversation (mostly about Dr. Strangelove) I learned the secret to his justly famous enunciation. But yes, he's simply a working actor and a great professional.
Let me just say it's really creepy to hear Darth Vader say your name.
Share!
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Let me just say it's really creepy to hear Darth Vader say your name.
Did he say, "Jay, I hoaxed the Apollo missions. " :P
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A lot of working actors are very nice people. They pretty much have to be. My cousin's kid is a working actor, and he is well aware that he will not continue to be so if he's rude to people.
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Appearing in an Uwe Boll movie would seem to go way beyond that, though.
Not being a video game fan, I had never heard the name Uwe Boll until it was mentioned in this discussion. So I just read the Wikipedia article on him.
Wow. He's a modern-day Edward D. Wood, Jr. With an attitude. A big attitude. Someday Johnny Depp may play him in a movie about him...
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In our polite conversation (mostly about Dr. Strangelove)
Yes. Everyone knows him for Darth Vader, but this is probably my favorite. This was his very first movie, wasn't it? Everyone in that film had hugely quotable lines, even him. When something doesn't work in the lab, sometimes I'll say
Uh..sorry, sir...negative function...
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You are a better man than I. When I'm trying to trouble-shoot a connection to stage I'll sometimes say, "We get signal!"
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Wow. He's a modern-day Edward D. Wood, Jr. With an attitude. A big attitude. Someday Johnny Depp may play him in a movie about him...
No, Ed Wood loved film. He was also a guy with the powerful charisma which enabled him to get people not only to give him money but to be in his films despite not being able to pay them very much. And honestly, his movies aren't that bad. Oh, they're bad, but Plan 9 From Outer Space isn't even the worst movie I've ever seen. (That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate.) Uwe Boll is a cynic, and Ed Wood was an idealist. Also, I don't think it ever penetrated Ed Wood's brain that people thought his movies were terrible, and Uwe Boll knows they do--and it's your fault that you don't like them. It's not that his films are bad; it's that people have no taste.
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In our polite conversation (mostly about Dr. Strangelove)
Yes. Everyone knows him for Darth Vader, but this is probably my favorite. This was his very first movie, wasn't it? Everyone in that film had hugely quotable lines, even him. When something doesn't work in the lab, sometimes I'll say
Uh..sorry, sir...negative function...
I could not possibly do justice to his voice, but when someone wants my attention and I need to finish up what I'm doing first, I might say "A moment please!" in the Dr. Strangelove voice.
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Oh, they're bad, but Plan 9 From Outer Space isn't even the worst movie I've ever seen. (That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate.)
Manos...made famous by MST3K...Is that the one that led to the catch-phrase "He tried to kill me with a forklift"?
Plan 9 belongs in a very special class of "it's so bad it's good". Mere badness is not enough to be in that category; you need elements that are unintentionally funny, like the alien leader mangling the made-up word "solaranite" and shouting "Stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!" Some (most, even) bad movies don't even have this, so they're simply bad.
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Manos...made famous by MST3K...Is that the one that led to the catch-phrase "He tried to kill me with a forklift"?
No, that was Fugitive Alien.
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Manos...made famous by MST3K...Is that the one that led to the catch-phrase "He tried to kill me with a forklift"?
No, that was Fugitive Alien.
Originally called "Star Wolf," and based (pretty closely, too!) on the golden age Edmund Hamilton story.
When I created the sound effect for the television show MIKE TEAVEE is watching (in a recent production of "Willie Wonka") I put in a reference to the meme. If you listened real closely you could hear a forklift raising the forks as a funky electric guitar plays the "forklift" theme, then a scream. A Wilhelm, of course.
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Plan 9 belongs in a very special class of "it's so bad it's good".
I could never get past the part where the pilot says, "I saw a flying saucer today. It was cigar-shaped."
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The cops in Plan 9 are scratching their heads with their guns an awful lot. Apparently, this was in a misbegotten attempt on their part to force Ed Wood to do a second take of the shot. It turns out that simply wasn't possible.
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Let me just say it's really creepy to hear Darth Vader say your name.
*wheeze* You failed me for the last time, Mr. Windley. *wheeze*
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He could have asked about the riddle of steel...
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He could have asked about the riddle of steel...
... and then changed into a snake ...
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Share!
I'd rather not spell it out in detail in a public forum, as it might be personally embarrassing to him. Those who work with him are naturally apt to respect his privacy. I mention it because it gave me new appreciation for him as an actor and as a person. His professional voice is not his natural voice, and achieves its characteristic import and depth by means of necessary conscious effort. When James is having a beer with Neil, I'll go into detail.
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This was his very first movie, wasn't it?
Yes, his only prior credits were in teleivision.
Everyone in that film had hugely quotable lines, even him.
Thanks largely to Peter George's work on the screenplay, preserving his most lovable characters and the best dialogue from the book. My favorite line is still, "You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" That sort of in-your-face irony peppers the novel.
When something doesn't work in the lab, sometimes I'll say
Uh..sorry, sir...negative function...
Funny you mention that -- it's exactly how our conversation started. I was doing a microphone check for our hired-out sound engineer and I said, "Sorry sir, still ... negative function..." and then I looked over to where he was getting wired for his body mic. He shot back that characteristic toothy grin from ear to ear and said, "Young man, you're way too young to know that reference." And I said, "On the contrary, I'm a big fan of Stanley Kubrick." And it went from there.
Let me just say it's really creepy to hear Darth Vader say your name.
Did he say, "Jay, I hoaxed the Apollo missions. " :P
Obviously not, and this was actually right as I was starting to pay attention to the hoax theories. I wish I'd known then that this would be such a big deal for me because I'd have had a chance to talk with someone who worked with Kubrick. As I said, Tony Frewin (Kubrick's personal assistant for much of his career) has been a wealth of information as well as a genuinely nice guy to talk to.
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"You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
That's just about everybody's favorite line. Mine too, if I had to pick only one. But I couldn't.
I can only imagine how many takes of each scene of that movie must have been done, between Kubrick's well-known perfectionism and the actors cracking up over the dialogue.
He shot back that characteristic toothy grin from ear to ear and said, "Young man, you're way too young to know that reference."
I'm actually surprised he remembered it. Most actors say they forget their lines as quickly as they learn them. William Shatner said during his college appearances in the '70s that it was like cramming for a test. All the Star Trek actors say they constantly encounter fans who can quote every line of dialogue and expect them to remember it as well as they do.
I'm sure Jones knows as well as anyone how enduringly popular that movie has been. I still rank it as either #1 or #2 among the greatest movies of all time.
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And I said, "On the contrary, I'm a big fan of Stanley Kubrick."
Of course you are, he did such a great job faking the Apollo landings.
Right?
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I could not possibly do justice to his voice, but when someone wants my attention and I need to finish up what I'm doing first, I might say "A moment please!" in the Dr. Strangelove voice.
Is a mock Prusso-German voice really that hard? I thought everyone could do one, more or less.
Probably my favorite line from that character (and one I still occasionally use) is Vy didn't you tell the vorld, eh?
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"You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
That's just about everybody's favorite line. Mine too, if I had to pick only one. But I couldn't.
I'd have to go with, "...you'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!"
Or maybe just, "Ya-Hooooo! Yaaaa-Hooo!"
Dang, you're right, it's impossible to choose.
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James Earl Jones' voice is all the more amazing considering his childhood speech problems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Jones#Childhood)
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James Earl Jones' voice is all the more amazing considering his childhood speech problems. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Earl_Jones#Childhood)
Oh, I guess it is fairly public knowledge then. Yes, he had a serious stuttering problem and he still stutters when speaking in his own conversational voice. His professional voice is the calm, measured rate that he has to effect consciously in order to avoid stuttering. I should read Wikipedia more.
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Obviously not
Well, I've seen pictures of both of you, so I'd assumed he wasn't claiming to be your father.
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Like King George VI.
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Like King George VI.
??
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I could not possibly do justice to his voice, but when someone wants my attention and I need to finish up what I'm doing first, I might say "A moment please!" in the Dr. Strangelove voice.
Is a mock Prusso-German voice really that hard? I thought everyone could do one, more or less.
The prior talk was about James Earl Jones in the bomber crew, and it is his voice to which I couldn't do justice.
Probably my favorite line from that character (and one I still occasionally use) is Vy didn't you tell the vorld, eh?
Also very good, although I think I prefer the one where he mentions that it is not a practical deterrent, for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious.
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"You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
That's just about everybody's favorite line. Mine too, if I had to pick only one. But I couldn't.
I'd have to go with, "...you'll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!"
Or maybe just, "Ya-Hooooo! Yaaaa-Hooo!"
Dang, you're right, it's impossible to choose.
I rather like:
"Strangelove? That's not a kraut name."
"He changed it when he became a citizen. It used to be Murkwerdigliebe."
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"You can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"
That's just about everybody's favorite line. Mine too, if I had to pick only one. But I couldn't.
I can only imagine how many takes of each scene of that movie must have been done, between Kubrick's well-known perfectionism and the actors cracking up over the dialogue.
He shot back that characteristic toothy grin from ear to ear and said, "Young man, you're way too young to know that reference."
I'm actually surprised he remembered it. Most actors say they forget their lines as quickly as they learn them. William Shatner said during his college appearances in the '70s that it was like cramming for a test. All the Star Trek actors say they constantly encounter fans who can quote every line of dialogue and expect them to remember it as well as they do.
I'm sure Jones knows as well as anyone how enduringly popular that movie has been. I still rank it as either #1 or #2 among the greatest movies of all time.
Not me ....I have a romance for this one in particular
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The really frightening thing about Brig. Gen. Jack D. Ripper was that he wasn't terribly far from some real life USAF generals, particularly Curtis E. LeMay (who, at age 44, had 3 more stars than Ripper, a mere base commander). And it wasn't because both constantly chewed on a trademark cigar.
From Wikipedia:
In 1949, LeMay was first to propose that a nuclear war be conducted by delivering the nuclear arsenal in a single overwhelming blow, going as far as "killing a nation".
Despite popular claims that LeMay advanced the notion of preventive nuclear war, the historical record indicates LeMay actually advocated justified preemptive nuclear war. Several documents show LeMay advocating preemptive attack of the Soviet Union, had it become clear the Soviets were preparing to attack SAC or the US.
Yes, but how do you know when it's clear the Soviets were preparing to attack? Ask them? Circa 1980 we had several false alerts that indicated the Russians were attacking us. Fortunately, "launch on warning" was not then US policy. A decade ago we launched a preemptive war against another enemy we were sure was about to attack us with weapons of mass destruction. They turned out not to have any at all.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, LeMay clashed again with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary McNamara, arguing that he should be allowed to bomb nuclear missile sites in Cuba. He opposed the naval blockade and, after the end of the crisis, suggested that Cuba be invaded anyway, even after the Russians agreed to withdraw. LeMay called the peaceful resolution of the crisis "the greatest defeat in our history".
Yet Kennedy's relative restraint almost certainly saved our lives. After the Cold War, we learned from the Russians that had JFK followed LeMay's advice, the Soviet commanders were authorized to retaliate with nuclear weapons. That would have been more than a little ugly, and a far worse outcome than the one we got.
I think even JFK was extremely reckless for having precipitated the entire event in the first place. So what if the Russians were amassing missiles on Cuba? We still had plenty to deter the Russians from using them. Within just a few years, the Russians had developed ballistic missile submarines that could loiter unseen even closer to Washington DC and New York than Cuba. So what exactly did the Cuban Missile Crisis achieve, other than risking annihilation and scaring a lot of people for no good reason?
When LeMay passed in 1990, just after the fall of Communism, I remember thinking at the time that he probably just didn't have anything left to live for.
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Like King George VI.
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A stutter I presume he means. There was a popular motion picture on the subject quite recently.
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Like King George VI.
??
A stutter I presume he means. There was a popular motion picture on the subject quite recently.
That was George III, the American Revolution George.
George VI was the guy who followed Edward VIII (It was love, love, love, love, love alone caused King Edward to leave his throne).
ETA: Oops, I was mistaken. George III had a movie too, but it was about his mental health, not his stuttering. It was indeed George VI who was the subject of The King's Speech.