Depends on your gender, I think. I'd ask Charming but (s)he is no longer with us.
Posted on 07/18/2007 5:22:46 PM PDT by charming_harmonica
No gym for home, work out floor with 30, but is it for 20 like 30 lb when you no lift it to be for men, for 30 lbs instead? or half is 10 for 20 pounds?
No, candidates are still being accepted (the Admin Gods have been leaving me choices this month) but preparations are on the ToDo list for the afternoon.
Depends on your gender, I think. I'd ask Charming but (s)he is no longer with us.
I've been considering posting a tale of a short journey to an asteroid, in search of raw materials, and what it would entail in the form of personal sacrifice and privations.
More and more, such stories remind me of the diary of Robinson Crusoe.
I've also thought about describing the mining and exploration of our captured asteroid, and what it could mean to our overall structure and capabilities.
Then again, a review of the layout would be of service to our more recent arrivals. Most of them don't know where in space we are.
You might even want to join in. The Habitats A and B are open to entrepreneurship. Many people have set up shops there for handmade items and small restaurants. A good interhabitatnet café would be a charming way to entertain the rest of us. I'd have to warn you that the selections of coffee beans is pretty limited, since we have to grow our own, but spices of all kands abound for adulterating various types of beverages.
Cheese and wine are also possibilities. We have a lot of time on our hands; it takes four years to make an orbit out here.
Agreed.
(And that said, I am away for a while.)
I could use some cheese and wine.
Maybe that’s what the baby lizard is holding out for :-).
I had some leftover cricket for you, but I couldn’t figure out how to get it to you.
I appreciate the thought.
Agreed.
.
History of the Flying Castle:
Well, it started with the castle, of course. And at first, it didn’t fly. It was just a castle.
We had a moat, a courtyard, a great hall, magnificent rooms, a tower, and of course, dungeons.
Actually, they weren’t really dungeons. They were caverns and tunnels and excavations under the castle, usually ending where the fractured rock gave way to more solid substrate.
You see, we happened to build the castle upon the site of an old meteor crater. Based upon the strange phenomena that attend this location, I suspect it wasn’t an ordinary meteor, but an interstellar craft of some type.
Of course, nothing of the original ship would have survived a fiery reentry and collision … except possibly some nano-structures, with their own alien instructions and purposes.
And the influence of those alien devices may have contributed to the instability of the founding troll, j.j.fate. Certainly, something did.
Anyway, after the troll was accorded his appropriate fate, and the asphalting was completed, we didn’t want to give up the partying, so we sorta set up camp.
That our shoddy construction was inadequate was made abundantly clear by the arrival of an adolescent with a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex. We needed a bit more room for both of them.
Accordingly, we started construction on the castle, excavating the moat and the underground areas, and just stacking up the building stones until we had a castle.
One thing about the castle is a little different. The walls of the courtyard are extremely thick, and they house a double row of stacked, cozy rooms rather like monk’s cells. Each has a bed, a bathroom, and an entertainment/communication kiosk. They also have a delivery system that supplies packages of no more than about six cubic feet.
This makes the tiny rooms sufficient for workers, students, artists, single visitors, and friendly folks who need a bit of solitude. I’ve estimated that with eight levels of these rooms, and the size of the courtyard, we could house about three thousand guests.
And then of course, the main castle has more spacious accommodations; swimming pools, theaters, libraries, dining halls, kitchens, bars, and so forth.
And that is just the castle. But why did we make it fly?
In the original Undead Thread, we were running out of space. Not physical space, but mathematical space.
We were limited to a thread length of 65,535 posts. We started worrying about it.
The only option seemed to be that we would have to pick up everything and relocate.
But how do you move a castle?
We moved the “Flying Castle” to Loch Ness, and sent a “beer truck” over to Scotland for a large quantity of Guiness.
Then we flew to the Norwegian Sea, where we picked up the Thrust Ring as part of our new ambitions. We carried it across the North Pole, and on to Kauai, Hawaii for a bit of rest stop and refitting procedure.
It was there that we began the process of replacing our jet engines and hot air balloons with Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactor/Rocket Engines. You see, we were preparing to go into space.
Why? I’m not sure I can even answer that question. It was suggested, and apparently voted on by acclamation, so here we are.
Anyway, we began gleaning Uranium from the ocean currents to fuel our reactors, modifying and improving the process as we went. I won’t describe it in too much detail except to say that it combined aqueous ionic separation using electrical attraction and laser impulsion, with the physical separation processes of mass spectrographs and Hilsch tubes. Essentially, it functioned like a horn of plenty operating in reverse. A lot of ocean water went in the big end, and separated isotopes came out the small end.
We used the process to gather useful materials such as Uranium, Irridium, Gold, Silver, Platinum, and other exotic substances for our engineering projects and processes.
Actually, the gold we didn’t really need in large quantity, but it was easy to pull out of the ocean, and we could exchange it for other useful materials such as the basic structure for the additional habitats, and the steel used to complete their construction.
You see, we needed three structures of equal mass in order to maintain our balance and induce artificial gravity once in space. We also needed the additional room and surface area to supplement our growth of foodstocks and oxygen-producing organisms.
Habitats A and B are designed like large cruise ships, with multiple decks and large open spaces where livestock, grain fields, fishponds, rice paddies, and hydroponics production facilities are spread around, interspersed with synthetic villages, towns, and market places.
Habitat A follows a more or less southern European plan, with meandering narrow streets and stairs linking different levels, while Habitat B is distinctly Oriental in flavor, with crowded markets, and open cafés in glad profusion.
It becomes easy to forget that we have established a world within a world. Essentially, we had to, to make sure that we could provide for ourselves out in the vast loneliness of interplanetary space.
To help with the illusion, each Habitat has its own time zone, separated by eight hours from its neighbors. The Flying Castle Habitat follows West Coast American time. Habitat A is on Greenwich, and Habitat B is set to Hong Kong Time.
Daylight Savings? Forget about it.
But this world within a world has advantages to its smallness. For one thing, one can easily travel from one habitat to the next by means of the spherical elevator cars.
It was realized that as soon as we decided to close up our Habitats, we would have a problem with free movement of people and materials. Accordingly, an integrated transportation system was developed to facilitate such movement. It can be seen that it was influenced by such systems as the Star Trek Enterprise’s turbo-lift system, although that seems to have roughly normal cubical elevator cars.
Our cars have to rotate within their shafts in order to deliver the passengers in an upright posture to the new locations, so the shafts are cylindrical, and the elevator cars are spherical.
Think about it. In space, each habitat is rotating around a central point, and each is one hundred and twenty degrees of orientation different from its neighbor. (Three times one hundred and twenty equals three hundred sixty, a complete circle.)
When you travel from Habitat A to Habitat B, the spherical elevator car, in addition to accelerating and decelerating as it snakes its way through the twists and turns of the arms and structures connecting the habitats, slowly rotates to reorient the passengers to what is “up and down” at the arrival point.
Utility carts and delivery wagons can also be sent this way, although piping and other delivery systems compete with that. Our Castle’s integrated delivery system to the tiny rooms within the courtyard walls is also tied in. One can cruise the equivalent of the internet, which is isolated to the Flying Castle Habitats, and have items packed up and sent into a package delivery system which will bring them right to your room.
Across the literally miles of tubing and interconnections that tie these systems together, that delivery may take several minutes to arrive, but it is all automated.
This is one of the efficiencies that promotes productivity here. Whatever it is you wish to produce or consume, your raw materials or tools are only moments away. If an idea occurs to you to start making something unique, you can be set up and in production within mere moments. It’s fascinating to see the rapidity with which a graphically illustrated tee shirt or other bit of amusement can spread around the Habitats.
Also note that time of day is irrelevant to availability of materials. Someone is always awake.
We were in Scotland, in Loch Ness.
We sent the Beer Truck to Ireland, where the Guiness is.
Where is Conspiracy Guy?
I need him to pick a Loch on the beer truck!
He’s much too busy to waste time here.
I think he’s in the process of taking over a third world country. Nothing’s too good for Laura Earl, you know.
Besides, he wants an air force to play with.
Hiya!
I’m off for the night. I did too much lifting before snd after iI had my mails done, and the heat/humidity did me in.
Tomorrow, all!
Stag was an adolescent? He certainly had a flair for dramatic entrances -- but fortunately none of the others were as destructive as this one.
Woo hoo! After “promising” all day, it finally started to rain.
“Besides, he wants an air force to play with.”
Yeah, I think ours is taken :-)
Hiya sweetie!
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