A little bit of Whimsy

To H.G. Wells

You are why we are here
With our steam engines, balloons, and improbable contraptions
Making the Present into Yesterday's Future

Happy Birthday, sir!

The Greatest Lie

As a culture, we have swallowed whole this idea that "The Dreamer Must Die." Look at the stories that litter our cultural heritage, and you see a common theme, wherein someone finds "A New Way" and is either killed for it, must sacrifice themselves mortally, or are too delicate for the world's cruelty.

These make great fiction, yes, but the trope is inherently dishonest. It does a disservice to those minds that burn bright to the last, to those who move aside for the next "New Way," and to the reader, who comes to associate genius with early demise.

Certainly there are many of those sparks that burn out all too soon, but looking at their lives, do not confuse genius and recklessness.

To be certain, everyone dies. However, that is not license to fetishise the dead dreamer to satisfy your need for an idol. Especially considering all the perfectly good, low mileage dreamers we have laying all about the place.

Improbably Large Aircraft or The Trouble with Cavorite

Cavorite is an amazing mineral, and provides us many freedoms when designing homes and airships. Not only does it allow lighter-then-air flight without the difficulties of attaining Helium, the hazards of Hydrogen, and the weight issues associated with the traditional Steam engine.

However, Cavorite comes with its own design problems.

If you look around our fair land, you will notice two obvious issues:

1 Cavorite is not readily damped. The lifting effect of cavorite is itself a damping effect, as it is "opaque" to gravity.

2 Cavorite purity is variable. Some veins, such as those in Moors and Stormhold have produced specimen so pure as to have rocketed skyward before being assayed, whereas Morgaine's cavorite is mostly in-matrix, and many of the largest boulders from the mountain can be lifted by a grown man.

The most common approach at this point is to build your structure or vehicle, find an appropriate quantity of Cavorite to bring the structure to a neutral or slightly positive bouyancy, and use rotors for maneuvering.

While this approach is the most elegant of current arrangements, it requires a fair amount of guesswork.

However, My thinking is, there must be a way around one or the other of these limitations.

We shall see.

The Sky's the Limit now has a difinitive meaning

Let it be known that none soar higher than I, Vivito Volare.
For tonight, I reached the highest altitude possible by known conveyance:

-2147483648 meters high