Oolite Bulletins

ffutures wrote: ↑Sun Aug 23, 2020 10:30 pm

The Babylon Project series of space stations - numbers 1-4 lost in various mysterious ways, each replacement was bigger than its predecessors and presumably a lot more expensive, culminating in Babylon 5 which was supposed to prevent war and failed abysmally.

Isn't Babylon n part of the Star Trek universe? No, it seems not, from Wiki. Never seen an episode myself - it fell into the decade and a half when I didn't have a TV, and I've never been inspired to catch up on it, despite multiple recommendations from nerds of my acquaintance.
(I'd actually thought of it's shenanigans with a black wormhole or whatever it's McGuffin is as being one of the constant blowings-up of RedShirts that moved Star Trek towards the comedy axis. For me.)
Why the fsck, if they've got FTL up to c^6, do they need a wormhole? Huh?

Not Star Trek therefore that makes it a second.

How about any part of Japan from the Godzillaverse? If you live there you know that it is only a matter of a short time before some giant something or other is going to either stomp or breathe your hometown into nothingness. Why rebuild when you can actively flee to somewhere that is not plagued by a giant monster attack every few months.

Nite Owl wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 2:22 am

How about any part of Japan from the Godzillaverse?

I like the idea ... but somehow I don't think so. Is there a "Flee Godzilla-Infested Japan" Project with a schedule or budget to look, shame-faced, at as it flies out of the window?

Harry Harrison A Transatlantic Tunnel,Hurrah! budget falls short, Her majesty's government coughs up 80% but they are still 8% of budget short....

well digging a tunnel from Lands End to the American colony cant be cheap... and yes it is still a colony. In this reality George Washington lost and was executed as a trator.

The S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier program - all of them increasingly expensive and high-tech but still likely to fall out of the sky if enough parts (probably built by the cheapest subcontractor) go wrong. Repeatedly, in all media. For example, in Captain America: The Winter Soldier three of them were destroyed by two people, which doesn't say a lot for the technology. Another one (probably the one from the first Avengers film) was seen scrapped in the first Deadpool film. They've lost several more in the comics.

This can probably be generalised to cover all flying megastructures of this general type - In Doctor Who U.N.I.T. lost the Valiant the second time they used it, against a Dalek attack, and in Captain Scarlet there was an episode where Cloudbase was shot down, though that turned out to be someone's nightmare.

spud42 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 1:15 pm

Harry Harrison A Transatlantic Tunnel,Hurrah! budget falls short, Her majesty's government coughs up 80% but they are still 8% of budget short....

well digging a tunnel from Lands End to the American colony cant be cheap... and yes it is still a colony. In this reality George Washington lost and was executed as a trator.

One of my favourite authors, but I've never managed to find a copy of that one.
... makes it three.

ffutures wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 6:56 pm

The S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier program - all of them (...)

This can probably be generalised to cover all flying megastructures of this general type

I agree on the SHIELDbase, and the generality of Flying Secret Bases. I always wondered why they didn't just get shot out of the sky ... in the way they evidently do. So that makes it four and we're on the final straight ...

RockDoctor wrote: ↑Thu Aug 27, 2020 10:25 pm

spud42 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 26, 2020 1:15 pm

Harry Harrison A Transatlantic Tunnel,Hurrah! budget falls short, Her majesty's government coughs up 80% but they are still 8% of budget short....

well digging a tunnel from Lands End to the American colony cant be cheap... and yes it is still a colony. In this reality George Washington lost and was executed as a trator.

One of my favourite authors, but I've never managed to find a copy of that one.
... makes it three.

It was also published as "Tunnel Through the Deeps", you might find it more readily under that title. There was a science fiction book club edition so there ought to be plenty of cheap copies around. Steampunk written 15 years before the term was invented...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_Through_the_Deeps

Surely we've not reached the limit of SF's inability to stick to schedule or budget? Now that would be fiction, indeed!

OK... Robert Heinlein's story "The Man Who Sold The Moon" (1950) - The hero, Delos Harriman, wants America (and himself) to go to the moon, and will do almost anything to get the funding needed for the project. Unfortunately the costs and problems rise so much with the weight of the ship and passengers that in the end there isn't room for anyone but the pilot aboard the first rocket - they can't even get a few hundred postal covers aboard, which were supposed to be franked on the moon and sold to philatelists, and Harriman has to sneak them aboard after the ship returns to Earth, so that they can be sold fraudulently. In the end he never gets to the moon, although his flight (and the discovery of lunar diamonds) paves the way for later flights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon

harriman does eventually get to the moon as a very old man and dies there looking at the earth.
forget the title but he hires 2 carnival rocketmen to fix their rocket and fly him there.

EDIT: found it..Requium

ffutures wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 8:32 pm

OK... Robert Heinlein's story "The Man Who Sold The Moon" (1950) -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon

Well, I think you've got the hat back. Harriman clearly had the same approach to budgets and schedules that Douglas Adams had to editorial deadlines ("I love the sound as they go wooshing past!"), but they were obviously a major part of the story, if only in providing an eternal foe.
The Inquisitorial hat is yours.

Ok.... let's try another field of human endeavour - crime! Give me five SF stories / films / whatever where the principal characters are criminals, or have to commit a crime. And to make it harder we'll go with non-violent crime, or at the worst minor injuries - no murders, assassinations, or terrorism.

Usual rules - no two by the same author / set in the same fictional universe / etc., and we'll stick with only one answer per post, with a reasonable amount of time between posts.

Just to annoy everyone I'll use the easy one as my example - the Stainless Steel Rat (Slippery Jim DiGriz), a determinedly non-violent thief. That rules him out, any other characters who are thieves in that series, and everything else by Harry Harrison.

ffutures wrote: ↑Sun Aug 30, 2020 10:27 pm

Ok.... let's try another field of human endeavour - crime! Give me five SF stories / films / whatever where the principal characters are criminals, or have to commit a crime. And to make it harder we'll go with non-violent crime, or at the worst minor injuries - no murders, assassinations, or terrorism.
(...)
Just to annoy everyone I'll use the easy one as my example - the Stainless Steel Rat (Slippery Jim DiGriz), a determinedly non-violent thief. That rules him out, any other characters who are thieves in that series, and everything else by Harry Harrison.

Spoilsport.
OK, I'll try to rule out another biggie. One of the dominant characters throughout the Known Space stories (Larry Niven, as if I needed to add it) is Beowulf Schaeffer, who is introduced to us as a fraudster, living way beyond his means, plans a career in piracy/ spaceship theft/ illicit arms dealing before being forced back onto the straight and narrow(-ish) by a cop acting considerably beyond his powers. That story ends with an incipient career in blackmail ("One million Credits? I'd be fascinated!"). (EDIT: Neutron Star, if anyone needed it.) Later stories detail various other dubious acts including Grand Theft Techno, a wide slew of immigration and emigration crimes and ... (EDIT: The "Crashlander" anthology and it's framing story, "Procrustes")
Long enough rap sheet?
And we haven't even started on the crimes of the three-legged one with a name almost suspiciously unrelated to "Jake the Peg". Who's he trying to kid?

Those pesky icestealers called The Ice Pirates...