Books and Banners

Hello everyone,

Almost Easter ! Hope everyone reading this is well. As well as the games, I've been enjoying going back in to the books lately. Although it feels as though the last one broke my brain a bit.

It was called Ignition! by John D Clark, An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants.

A fun read but it does go quite deeply into higher levels of Chemistry knowledge and you ideally need A-Level equivalent going on to degree level Chemistry to be able to really understand everything going on in here.

That said though, he did a remarkable job of explaining the routes the chemists went to in attempting to figure out the issues around getting the best propellant all round, looking at issues like storage, power and toxicity.

Instead of being a reaction like car fuel or what goes on in gas turbines where the fuel is combined with oxygen from the air, the rocket fuel has to carry its own oxidiser. That's not usually Oxygen either because Liquid Oxygen fails that storage criteria (it boils off if left and these needed to be good for years). The ideal that they were looking for is like :

The idea being that two chemicals on their own would be reasonably benign ... but if you mixed them together, watch out. After all, the intention was to make things go very fast, very quickly so there was a fine line between these being chemicals to make things go WHOOSH and chemicals that went BOOM.

One consistent theme running through is that everything in the chemistry world runs on strict, set rules. Elements, molecules and compounds will only react in certain ways and those ways are set. If you know the rules, conditions and exactly what's occurring, the results are predictable. The problem that the early rocket fuel scientists had was that they had very little idea what the rules were.

It's one difference between computer simulation and the real world. A simulation is only programmed with a certain set of conditions and it only contains the rules that the programmer knows about or is interested in. In the real world, all of the rules get applied and when the results differ from what was expected, you've just discovered a rule that you never realised existed or applied.

Fun stuff. And very Scary too for the more sane of the scientists ...

Oh and the author doesn't hold back with comments on what he thought about some of the more ambitious or foolhardy attempts to get a better rocket fuel. This probably applies :

And some of the after incident anecdotes definitely resemble :

They'd have some compounds which were ok until those chemistry rules satisfied a certain set of conditions and then KABOOM. Even if the fuel had been sitting in a drum apparently inert for a while, the decompositions and ongoing reactions, including the physics behind the solution settling out, would change the overall composition.

Well worth a read and when you're reading about the various stages they went through :

Quite. I could do with grabbing more coffee.

Banners ? Another game that's just come out that I won't be buying for a few reasons* is Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord ... it has a banner editor ...

*Reasons - it's horrendously buggy, it looks like just a graphical update of an 8 year old game and has the same issues, I barely played that 8 year old game and ... expensive. Oh and there's other games I want to play.

However, the same thing applies as for games like Animal Crossing. If someone else is enjoying the game, I'll enjoy watching them enjoy it. Fun is something universal. And I seem to be catching a tendency to enable other people's enjoyment by making things for them. The latest is the M&B2 banner editor ... (link).

2 banners have appeared so far, the first is one for Fuzzyfreaks :

The editor is bound by the rules behind banners in the game and doesn't have many features but ... You can make some cute stuff with it. And the codes it comes out with can be taken by others and refined or otherwise improved.

Here's the other one for Enter Elysium :

That one has worked pretty well and it's not that far off his old logo.

As far as my own gaming goes, I think I'm nearly at the end of Mass Effect Andromeda now ... the follow on game to that is highly likely to be Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Elite is still bringing out the super pretty screenshots but I might be a little burned out on that now. It might be time to look at No Mans Sky, which is similar with the spaceships but much more focused around the exploring of planets. And there's also the last little bit of Motorsport Manager.

There's also Skyrim and Fallout 4 which I've never finished ...

After coffee !

Have a great weekend, stay safe, be well.