Expansive Discovery Netflix ...

Hello,

Still here. Although it feels like I'm still under the influence of some of those bugs from last week. I only had Monday as working from home (bug quarantine), although I did also take Friday off to burn some of my flexi leave credit and to get some overdue chill out.

It's not been a properly serious bug, actually quite mild outside of the broken voice, chesty cough and bunged up nose but I suspect it's hit harder because I'm lacking energy again. I plan to do something about that with a pre Xmas break not this week but the week after. Should be good.

I suspect there might be a lot of Netflix watching while I chill out .... (Yes, I know what Netflix and Chill is ! This will be just chilling out with me and my pooter and various things on the Netflix).

Yep. I've signed up to it, tempted in by the new Star Trek Discovery series. I'm going to be very careful what I say about Discovery because there is massive potential for spoilers but I'm intrigued. What they've done with the Klingons is a disgrace though and it almost sucked all of the life out of the pilot episodes. Klingons are supposed to be pure fire. These were on tranquilizers and perhaps filmed with the speed turned down. They were rather different to the Klingons we know and almost wrecked the pilot.

Yep. Still intrigued by where they plan to go with it though. I'm a sucker for everything Trek or space scifi related, as long as it's done decently. (It was a real struggle to finish Independence Day 2 and I've turned off scifi B-movies before due to them being properly dire). The effects were definitely done well.

However .... I've been watching another series called The Expanse and that series definitely has my attention. I've watched up to season 2 episode 4 now and I'm very impressed with both the quality of the writing (I'll be checking out the James S A Corey books soon) and the effects on screen. When they do space battles, it's utterly gripping.

It's a near future book without many silly scifi tricks up its sleeve. There are no inertial compensators for G forces and they're throwing bits of metal at each other at speeds that easily puncture spaceship hulls ... and then go all the way through and out the other side. Yep. I'll be keeping watching this one. Might even watch it again from the start.

So that Netflix sign up has already been worth it for me, not for the Star Trek but for The Expanse.

It hasn't all been that though. I was thoroughly crashed out (and with poorly feet again) on Friday so thoughts of heading to the cinema to watch Kingsman and after, to stock up on munchies were shelved. (I had enough to last until ... erm ... tomorrow !) Instead, The Expanse and Stellaris.

Opening Stellaris yesterday might have been a mistake. And starting a war with a neighbour at midnight was definitely another mistake. (Cue a 4am session) But I did manage to not stay in there too much today. Just a couple of wars.

That's where we are at the moment and my machine race of exterminators (I'm playing with the new expansion) is steadily spreading its red mist across the galaxy. It's difficult playing as the single minded purpose destroyer races like that .... you can't be a friend to anybody. And everyone knows you're out to get them. It's a good start though.

I haven't been in Elite much lately. Just a couple of sessions trading the rare goods. Going for the rares might have been an error because I think it was killing my enthusiasm for the game with my previous character. I may go back to the old way of letting missions guide my path instead. Missions are a bit odd at the moment though, it keeps trying to give you missions to go to Colonia, 22,000 light years away. I'm not planning to do that again for a while.

Keeping myself busy though in my diminished state. Hopefully I won't be diminished for too much longer though, it seems like these latest bugs have really kicked me in the energy centre. I think it's connected to the state of my outsides (which have been better today as I've left them alone). The damage there can be really draining, in a fashion that it's a struggle to understand.

Low level pain can be very draining but that's not it in this case. It's more the constant sensation of Stuff coming from the bad areas. The feeling akin to a spider walking over the skin. The knowledge that a small flaw in your outsides is just itching (so to speak) to turn into much wider damage. The frustration when damage that should heal in a few days just .... lingers. It doesn't help there when I redamage it constantly by attempting to tidy it up.

I'm doing better than my TV remote though. It ded.

It ded past the ability of new batteries to cure it too. I'll have to take it apart at some point to see which part is ded but ... For now I'm using my amplifier's all in one remote to do the limited amount of TV control I need.

So :

Discovering Netflix, discovering Discovery on Netflix, looking into the Expanse and liking what I see and occasionally losing time into games like it was a time dilating black hole.

Back to work next week, hopefully with my voice back to how it should be !

Kitty Car

Another away trip this weekend.

We met up at the sister's place, objective : Stoneleigh. The National Kit Car Show is hosted there, definitely the mecca for kit cars in the UK, possibly the mecca for kit cars in the world. Most of the attraction is seeing the cars built by tonnes of owners as they come together at the show. It's a chance for them to hear the adoring words of the public.

First car we saw - a Lamborghini Countach replica, all in white. And not just the bodyshell, the pristine whiteness was continued within to white leather seats and white backing for the instruments. Absolutely beautiful. Not a car I'd be interested in having but gorgeous nonetheless.

There's a few different classes of kit car, which accommodate what your taste is in body shell type, the intended role of the car and how ambitious you want to be with the mechanicals. Here's a few of them :

Firstly, the ubiquitous Cobra replica. The AC Cobra was a car born in 1962 and was built until 1967. It had a 289 cubic inch (4.7 litre) V8 and later, a 427 cubic inch (7 litre) engine. Truely a muscle car but wrapped up in lovely curves. The replicas repeat that wonderful bodyshell but hide within engines like the old Rover V8 (3.5 litre), Jaguar V12's and big V8's from America.

There will also be Cobras with more modern 4 cylinders like you'd see in road cars, just rather heavily developed to get performance out of them. The 4 cylinder Ford Zetec engine will be in a lot of kit cars. It would start out with maybe 130bhp in a 2 litre Focus or Mondeo and can be tuned up to maybe 200bhp ish. And that's on a modern design with all that extra reliability. The Cobra shell has the advantage of lots of room to add things like superchargers and/or turbochargers for extra likelihood of Brown Trouser moments.

Here's another :

Hmm - another couple !

The two above are both Seven Style cars, which are about as simple as you can get. They're the lower end of the market, although that term "lower" is misleading. They're cheap and simple to build and use lower spec engines. Something like that 2 litre Zetec might be a bit large for these, although the Rhocar Robin Hood Engineering car up top has had a 6 litre Jaguar V12 squeezed into it (I've seen it, there was barely room for a shoehorn in there!).

The Seven is simplicity itself, it's just an engine in that tubular bay up front, there's a couple of seats behind and four wheels bolted on at the corners. Depending on the kit, there's not much provision for creature comforts. Some don't even have a windscreen. This is where the intentions come in :

The Locost and Robin Hood were both aimed at getting something fun on the road within a very tight budget. The Robin Hood did that through being mass produced, the Locost did it by depending on the skills of the builder. That frame of metal on the bottom left ? Welded from plans by a craftsman.

There's also the higher end 7's from Caterham and Westfield. You can get turn key kits from these that have everything in, it just needs you to put them together. No sourcing of bits and pieces from scrapyards.

And there's the track cars from people like Sylva and Tiger. They're built to go round race tracks fast.

Another pic ?

These are based around old vintage cars. They look great don't they ? It would be awesome turning up at a Grand Prix or Le Mans in one of these. Again, not much with the creature comforts but that's what funny hats with lots of ear muff padding are for :-). The car above is the type that my dad might enjoy putting together.

Hmm. I think this weekend may have given him ideas. Uhoh !

Oh - one advantage of the kit cars over vintage cars is the chassis. We owned a Triumph Spitfire, which I refused to have much to do with. One of the reasons was its chassis ... It was dangerous. Kit cars tend to be more race bred with suspension that will keep the wheels parallel to the ground (where intended), instead of tucking under like with that Spitfire. But yeah, instead of renovating something that's partially rotten (and how do you know how much is rotten ?), you're working with good steel with modern anti corrosion techniques.

But what would I actually build ? I like :

Curves
Simplicity
Lightness

Here we go :

They're Minari Road Sports. It has an engine at the front from an Alfa Romeo, mated to a unique chassis. Oh ! Oh ! Oh ! It's still available ... I thought this design died ! Here's a link. It might be hard to find a donor car to rob bits from though.

What would I actually look for ?

Yellow one. In the middle. Me Want.

Actually - why would you go kit car ?

For me, it's uniqueness. Yeah, you could go and get a Mazda MX-5* and have a lot of fun with it. But. Tonnes of other people have them and they don't have that magic "I made this" factor where you know every nut and bolt. If I was to build one of these, I'd want to pick a theme to build the look of the car around. To make it uniquely mine. There'd be wood, there'd be electronics fitting in, there'd be shinies.

*(I picked MX-5 cos they are the best example of a mass produced car that shares most with a kit car)

Will I build one ? I hope so. But there's a few things that need to be in place :

New house with facilities to build one. A garage is essential and I don't have one.
Money ! Most of my cash is tied up with my Lexus ;-)

And that Lexus got lots of admiring drooling at it this weekend too. But kit cars are way more charming. I've not mentioned cars like the Sebring which is based on the Austin Healey 3000. It smiles. As does the Sprite, of which there was one smiling away at the show today. There's fast car replicas too, like the ones turning fast road cars into Lamborghini's and Ferrari's. But those fail that uniqueness test.

Gimme the Fury :-)

One small step ...

Yey !

Kerbals on the Mun. And back again.

I've watched a few more videos, learned a few more things, observed what was happening (often with horror for the poor Kerbals), trusted to luck and crossed a few fingers and toes.

This is the latest rocket in the assembly hall, before a few modifications. Like those yellow fuel pipes moving from the top of the tanks and down to the bottom where they actually do Stuff. Lots more struts too to keep the thing from flying apart.

One mistake I'm making is to build too much into the rocket. The best designs (watching the Scott Manley videos) are very simple. The rocket above has lots of boosters and engines down low which will :

Make the rocket topple over on the launching platform
Unbalance it so it doesn't fly straight
Collide with each other
Flex hugely (which doesn't help with the collision thing)
Overaccelerate (it's possible)
Squish the rocket in the middle

All of the above are bad and tend to have hilarious disastrous results.

Anyway - after one incredibly nervous launch, where bits of the rocket were threatening to harpoon other bits of the rocket, it's up in orbit around the planet and I'm next sending my rocket the way of the Mun.

I have to say here, I'm very lazy and have been making extensive use of autopilot features. I'm pretty confident that I could fly the rockets myself but the autopilots make things so much more efficient. They provide in game calculators to give you that precise time to make manoeuvres. That's possible to do by eye but fails the "you're making this way too hard for yourself" test.

Games are supposed to be fun, not hard work. If I need to use a few autopilot or calculator mods to increase fun and decrease tedium, I'll use the cheaty mods.

Soapbox over ! More screenies !

Kerbals on the Mun :

I was just on the day side of the Mun, which let me get that great shot of the Kerbin home planet and their sun in the same view. I was down to just the lander and return home stage at this point, with less fuel than I wanted because the ascent stage hadn't done all that I needed it to.

And home time - I've cut here to where I'm thinking about setting up how to get my guys home :

I've left the Mun behind, with my capsule being the little grey icon in the middle. I'm heading towards the planet at this point with lots of time to go until I can do the next manouevre. Orbital mechanics have 2 important points : Periapsis and Apoapsis. Periapsis is the closest point of approach, Apoapsis is the farthest point. To change one, the most efficient way is to make the manoeuvre at the other.

Plan - drop into the atmosphere to burn off speed. To do this, I have to change that 194.2km periapsis down to below 70km (the edge of the atmosphere). And I have to do that with only 93m/s delta V left. Delta V is the way fuel remaining is measured - it takes into account :
Acceleration (as a Thrust divided by Mass thing)
Actual fuel remaining (time the thrust is available)
And tells you the amount of change of velocity you can do.

93m/s works out to 209mph. It's the same as being able to accelerate a car up to 35mph and stop it again, 3 times. I bet you've done that in traffic, it's not that much. (3 stops for the bus). At the mid point in the orbit, the ship was doing 350m/s, at periapsis it's doing around 3000m/s.

Scary. But the braking is still possible ... The screenie above shows me manually setting up a manoeuvre at apoapsis, which led to :

That's a move that skips the ship off the atmosphere and scrubs some speed off. The periapsis is dropped from 194km to 61km by just using 19m/s of delta V. After a few more orbits and braking using the atmosphere (and a reentry that would have been extremely toasty) :

Kerbals on the ground, home and safe.

Yey ! Dunno how much more I'll do with this game. I traditionally don't stay long with open sandbox games as I run out of objectives quickly. I will keep following the Scott Manley videos though.

Can't close this post without showing this one though :

Next time - I'll ignore the "3 points of contact = best" theory and put a few more legs on the lander.

PS - I'm watching the Le Mans 24 hours today. There was a crash at the start which I thought was fairly ok. Motorsport safety has improved so that injuries are rare and fatal crashes, at this level at least, are now unheard of. But not today. Thoughts are with the family of Allan Simonsen. Shocked to hear that a crash I thought he'd walk away from has actually taken him from us.

Windy Weighty Fit Women

And of course, the women in question are definitely not weighty, dunno if they've been on the beans jet propulsion diet but they're most certainly as fit as they come.

In reverse order !

Just finished watching the women's road cycling race, which was pretty awesome. After yesterday's men's race was a case of the Brits saying they'd won the race before the start and then all the other teams leaving it to the Brits to chase down the getaways, the women's race today was far more exciting.

The attitude of the field yesterday was pretty disappointing. There'd been an early getaway of a reasonable group of riders. Usually, the field would chase them down before the gap became decisive. However ... due to the form being shown by the Brit men and their declared aim of pushing Mark Cavendish to the win, everyone left it to the Brits to chase down the breakaway. That's like saying : "We're more interested in you NOT getting a medal than we are in getting a medal ourselves". Self inflicted wounds and it made for a not particularly exciting race where most of the field was there just to make up the numbers.

The women's race today was completely different. We were seeing attempts at breakaway attacks all the way through, where small groups attempted to get away from the pack. Each time it was "can they keep the gap, will they stay away?" and that kept on going right until the last climb of Box Hill where a group of 4 managed to make a decisive escape.

Including a Brit girl - Lizzie Armitstead. Go Lizzie !

And you can probably guess that the excitement level here was ramping up considerably at the prospect of us getting our first medal of the games. The gap kept on stretching gradually, even after the group of 4 diminished to just 3. Would they keep the gap ? What order would they finish in ? Would our girl get a gold medal ?

I won't put the result here but I will say - the group of 3 kept their advantage all the way to the finish and Brits have their first medal of the games. Great stuff.

Fit ?

The stiffness and damage from Wednesday are wearing off :-) Legs are still a bit stiff but I'd consider them ready for action again. The back needs a few more days though. Because of the way my body is set up, I'm suited for explosive stuff instead of endurance. My endurance is actually not that great, except when the stubbornness kicks in to let me block all pain and Not Give Up. Anyway - that explosiveness setup means my muscles produce a lot of lactic acid, which is where the stiffness comes from.

If I've not been running around for a while (I blame British Summer!), it can take around 3 days for my legs to get ready for action again. I'm not 100% yet but they're pretty close. At this rate, if the cricket skipper phones me up on Thursday, I'll be able to play :-). Depends on my back and the impact damage on my thumb.

So yeah - damage that meant I was in lots of pain on Thursday and Friday is diminishing to the point where the rational "you're too broken" is struggling to contain the hyperactive "I WANNA RUN" :-)

Weighty ?

One comment from Wednesday's game was that with the heat, I should have lost another stone from being under the helmet all the way through our fielding. Yeah - it was hot and I sweated buckets, so much it was getting into my eyes (ugh). There's a team picture out there with me under the Pink Hat, no way I was getting photographed without a hat having sweated that much !

But - if you're on an exercise based diet and you get on the scales after exercise to find that you've put weight on, Don't Get Discouraged. Instead of losing that 1 stone over the game, I actually gained about 5 lbs. And (I think!) it comes from that lactic acid I mentioned up above. It took a few days for that to get metabolised but now that it has, I'm back down to 12.5st.

Exercise and sweat does not necessarily mean loss of weight. For me, I'm much more careful now with my pre and post match intake so that sweat thing isn't a factor. I've injured my legs a huge amount over the years with cramp, so I make sure my water intake balances the sweating to reduce the potential of damaging cramp.

So - you're trying to lose weight, you do the "right thing" of exercising, you get on the scales to find out you've gained weight. Don't Be Discouraged !!!!! Our bodies work by very rational methods, there will be a good reason why the weight has gone on. With me, it's because the lactic acid gets in my muscles and makes them heavy.

Weight loss is not a battle, it's a long war. If you're exercising, you're helping yourself out in that long war. Keep it going. It'll be worth it. And you'll feel better for the exercise too.

Windy ?

I've switched over to the sailing - at the moment it's a Star race. That's with a 2 man boat, big sail still because they have a keel and the guys appear to be hanging more off the boat than on. I've always been interested in sailing, since reading Anne McCaffrey writing about it in Dragonsong (Julianne Regan is my voice of Menolly). Sailing is a battle of finding best advantage out of something invisible and barely predictable - the wind. Which ever sailor picks the best place to be to gain the most out of unpredictable air currents will win the race.

Always been interested but not had the chance to give it a go. I'm looking forward to the next Vendee Globe single handed non stop round the world race too, that was fascinating last time round.

Close finishes

Just finished chilling out to a game of cricket on the telly that was far, far closer than the one sided show that we had on Tuesday.

Somerset vs Worcestershire in a game dominated by the batsmen but where the result was determined by the bowlers. Couldn't have been a much closer finish, even though 20 minutes before the end it was looking like a foregone conclusion. Cricket is like that, unlike football where it's rare that something happens to change the Result State, every ball in cricket can change the Result State.

What do I mean by "Result State" ?

In football, it would be the score changing from 1-0 to 1-1. The Result if nothing else significant happens has changed by the event of someone scoring a goal. In baseball, think of it being a double play to close out an innings where the bases are loaded or a home run that allows a side to catch up. Result State changes don't happen too often in football, which is why I think they are very good for me to have on the telly while I'm trying to finish reading a book.

In cricket though, Result State changes happen almost every ball, especially in the new Twenty20 format which is getting so popular nowadays. I think that's why I love the game so much and is probably why my enthusiasm has infected the rest of the family :-) They're hooked too now. A shame they weren't hooked 15 years ago, they'd have caught a finish and turn around almost as exciting as any I can (barely!) remember.

The scene - it's the village cricket ground and a bit of a murky day. I liked those when bowling because the murky conditions would make the ball swing more. That was my main weapon, if you can find archive footage of one Waqar Younis, that's what I aimed for. Although I was probably more like 60-70mph instead of 90mph. I had the massive boomerang inswinger that made his bowling so devastating :-)

From what I remember, we'd batted well and set a decent target. It was a 40 over game, where bowlers could bowl a maximum of 10 each. Which meant 4 bowlers. I came on after 20, to bowl my 10 off the reel like usual. It was in my first season with the men's team and I was 17 (pre shoulder injury), so at that time I could quite happily do that on the weekends. When I started, the match was pretty well poised. I took 3 wickets in my first 9 overs but when it came around to my last over, the match looked done and dusted :

2 main bowlers finished their 10
3rd main bowler with just 6 balls left (me !)
no 4th main bowler, so easy to hit part timers to come
About 5-6 overs left (plenty of time !)
6 runs required to win (could do it in one hit)
3 wickets left (loads!)
Bloke in and batting well on 48 not out

You add that all up together and even a relative cricket novice would say : 99 times out of 100 the batting side is going to win comfortably. That's probably what 10 of the guys on our team though too. Not me - I was too young, naive and indestructible. Muahahaha - yeah right. I forgot to mention that some time through my first 9 overs I'd tweaked my back. I didn't really notice cos the adrenaline and Game Face were tuning it out.

So what actually happened ? I've given a lot of tantalizing build up but not spilled the beans :

1st ball - oh dear those stumps are going flying - that boomerang inswinger got a result
2nd ball - darn - missed em but it's ok, 48 not out guy is still at the other end
3rd ball - AEROPLANE WINGS ! Stumps are out of the ground again, next batsman please
4th ball - He runs in, He bowls, He screams a millisecond after the ball hits the pads !

And the bowling team win that 100th game out of a 100. We'd won an with an extraordinary final over, with the umpire giving a Leg Before Wicket decision that was probably a given seeing as my other 5 wickets on the night were also bowled out. We were a bit sheepish shaking the hand of the bloke on 48 not out as, by rights, they should have won that game.

Dunno how much of the above is actual memory and how much is reconstruction - but the figures are burned into my brain : 3 wickets for Mr Higginbotham who opened the bowling. Couldn't have won the game without those as my inswingers didn't tend to trouble the better batsmen. I wouldn't have got my 6 without those 3 by the other guy. My figures were 9 overs, 4 balls costing 24 runs for 6 wickets. The 10th wicket was a run out. It wasn't the best I've ever bowled, that was a 10 over spell costing 19 runs but only getting 1 wicket.

I'll be trying to keep hold of the 6 for 24 memory as long as I can, it's the best figures I'll ever get as the state of my shoulder says I won't be bowling again ... Being able to bat too is a blessing :-) Will have to see how many runs I can get when batting and run-outs I can get in the field next year.