I think that everyone over there is probably being had by a couple of 9th graders. There's no point whatsoever taking any of it seriously.

Maybe it's time to stop playing into their juvenile game and give the thread a rest.

It looks like IDW may be giving up and moving on. He's starting all the same arguments over again on this other thread.

Here is the post captioned:
Interdimensional warrior
User ID: 9277
3/4/2005
6:24 pm EST

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Can't ... take ... much ... more ...

Please guys, either come and help me or drag me out of there.

My brain is getting ready to explode.

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So, after posters here have battled over countless pages at GLP, and put up with all sorts of nonsense, I must ask - was it worth it?

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What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

For entertainment value, yes. As far as actually making headway against irrational paranoid belief?

No siree bob

Debating-- if you can call it that -- can be good practice. I took on such personages as IDW and RBH over there, and it can help you practice honing your logic, your debate skills, and your patience, all three of which I need to have handy when I go on C2C and other places, sometimes.

Was it worth it? I hope so. We got our message out. I think that if someone sees the truth laid out next to the paranoia of IDW, the differences will be clear and that's a point in our favor.

Dealing with extravagant personalities like IDW who demonstrate depths of irrationality can be helpful, but usually not in a logical or factual way. It simply helps you deal with people like that whom you might meet in other contexts. The most valuable lesson you can learn from IDW is patience. Keeping your head when emotions run high is a useful skill.

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Interdimensional warrior
User ID: 9277
3/4/2005
6:24 pm EST

There are many problems with space travel by a manned crew in 1969...

There are many problems with space travel by manned crews in 2005. The presence of problems does not imply impossibility. Nor does the answer lie in some supposedly comparative or absolute assessment of difficulty. The answer lies in comparing the problems to be solved with the solutions that were claimed to be applied. If you aren't willing to invest the appropriate effort into understanding how the solutions were achieved then you can't use your own sense of misunderstanding as evidence.

...and with the actual physics involved that NASA cannot answer and does not attempt to.

Hogwash. NASA published loads of information on the physics, engineering, astronomy, mathematics, and other aspects of the mission, and continues to publish widely on the science between aerospace. Moreover, this information is still used by aerospace professionals and historians, who have found nothing wrong with it.

Often the accusation that questions are not being answered neglects the absurdity of the question. The conspiracist often takes it for granted that his question makes sense and raises a real issue. Questions based on the presumption, for example, that heat cannot be rejected in space, or that the energy of docking two spacecraft is horrendously large (i.e., computed incorrectly) require no refutation that takes the question at face value. There quite definitely is such a thing as a stupid question.

There are specific questions about apollo 13 that have not been answered satisfactorily. like how did the astronauts manage to power the craft back to earth...

The vehicle did not have to be "powered" back to Earth. The energy required to return to the point where Earth's gravity took over was already provided in the trajectory. By omitting the lunar orbit insertion manuever, which in a normal mission would have taken away that energy, the crew activated the contingency plan for just such an outbound emergency: the free return.

IDW never provided any orbital mechanics computations to demonstrate his problem, and in fact made statements that indicated he really didn't understand how transfer orbits work. He tried to argue that the LM DPS didn't have enough power to do what the Apollo 13 crew did. Bob B. was kind enough to compute (correctly) the overall delta-v capacity of the docked spacecraft. To argue that the DPS was insufficient requires comparing that number to be compared to an actual number derived from what orbital mechanics says was required. Handwaving does not suffice.

...with a vehicle that was attached to it by a docking collar

IDW does not care that the Apollo spacecraft were designed so that the DPS could be used to thrust the docked stack. He does not care that the docking collar was designed to take those stresses. He does not care that a docked DPS burn was tested on Apollo 9.

What he does correctly allude to is the uncertainty of the guidance under LM control. The contingency plan called for the SM RCS to handle the guidance for a docked DPS burn. The SM RCS and the SPS were entirely isolated, separate systems so that failure of both was considered sufficiently implausible. The complete loss of SM functionality was not considered a survivable scenario.

...a machine that did not have navigation programing for a earth return.

What "programming" is required? The free-return trajectory, in the words of Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell, "puts Sir Isaac Newton in the driver's seat." The onboard computer does not do the detailed orbital mechanics computations. Those are done on the ground on mainframes and radioed up to the spacecraft. The spacecraft computer is told when to turn the engine on, when to turn it off, and where to keep the spacecraft pointed for the burn. After that, it's a pure ballistic problem. Comets, for example, don't have onboard computers. Yet they manage to "solve" orbital mechanics problems quite easily.

The two major manuevers -- the one to restore the free-return trajectory and the PC+2 burn -- were done under LM computer control, with data radioed up from Earth. The LM computer didn't have to do anything that it hadn't already been taught to do, because that's how all the burns were done normally.

The other burns were done under different types of manual control. The crew took the place of the computer, timing the burn with their watches and using visual references to maintain orientation. This, obviously, was not the preferred way to fly in space. But to minimize the effects of the "sloppiness", the DPS burn was done at 40%. That minimizes pitch and yaw rates induced by off-axis thrust, giving the crew more time to correct the orientation with manual inputs to the RCS. The final RCS burn was a low-thrust manuever, again giving the crew time to manually correct the orientation.

How did they contol this thing, with the center of mass way forward of the control jets...

IDW implies that the only way RCS systems can work is if the RCS jets are somehow "balanced" around the center of mass. That's just not how real spacecraft are designed, largely because it's not possible to design spacecraft where the RCS and the center of mass keep the same relationship to each other. In most spacecraft you have a shifting center of mass due to depleting consumables. And in most spacecraft there are mechanical design constraints on where the RCS can go. All RCS systems must deal with "residuals" -- unwanted rotations in unintended axes due to sub-optimally placed RCS jets.

The LM RCS, for example, had to be designed to steer the LM with ascent and descent stage docked and fully loaded, the docked spacecraft with the LM fuel 95% depleted, the ascent stage alone fully loaded, and the ascent stage nearly empty. There is no possible placement of the RCS that optimizes manuevers under those four major modes. The space shuttle and the Gemini spacecraft and Apollo command module all have shapes dictated by aerodynamics needs. That means you can't put RCS jets in the optimal places to execute "pure" manuevers -- i.e., without residuals. A roll will give you a little pitch or yaw, for example. You have to "null the residuals" or "trim the manuever" in each case.

All that said, using the LM RCS to manuever the docked spacecraft is indeed difficult. That's why you send test pilots, who are used to flying equipment that might break at any time. What do you do in an airplane when the rudder jams hard over? Once you learn a little bit about how an airplane works, you might think that's not a survivable condition. And perhaps under the command of some pilots, it would not be. But the extreme yaw and roll you'd get from a rudder in that condition can be counteracted by a skilled pilot. A test pilot is someone who can reteach himself in seconds to fly an airplane that has suddenly invented a new flight mode for itself.

Normally it would be wrong to require superhuman skill in order to make a scenario plausible. But in this case it's justified; the Apollo astronauts were arguably the couple dozen most skilled pilots in the United States. We don't have a problem believing that Lovell, Swigert, and Haise learned the new flight dynamics of their wounded spacecraft and found a way to apply some control.

Roll isn't a problem. But roll isn't necessarily an important manuever. You're more interested in pitch and yaw because those are the ones that will keep your main engine burns oriented. Normally the RCS would achieve pitch and yaw by firing forward-facing jets on one side of the spacecraft and rear-facing jets on the other. There are two problems that specifically affect Apollo 13. First, the RCS is indeed most effective when the line between the jet and the center of mass, and the line representing the direction of thrust form a right angle. That wasn't the case with the docked CSM/LM. Second, the LM conventional axes are different from the CSM's, and the LM controls are designed with its own directions in mind.

The CSM is flown as if it were a stubby, wingless aircraft with the SPS thrust pushing forward. Roll, pitch, and yaw are defined as they would be for that "aircraft". The LM is flown in the orientation it's in when it lands, with the main engine exhaust directed downward. Roll in the LM's system corresponds either to pitch or yaw in the CSM system. So standing in the LM and trying to think your way through yaw, pitch, and roll, you'd have to do a 90-degree conversion in your mind. That's not a problem in the purely intellectual sense, but flying -- like driving -- becomes very instinctual. If the controls in your car suddenly do different things (say, for example, the steering wheel accelerates you if you turn it to the left and brakes you when turned to the right), you'd still be able to get to work in the morning, but you'd take a bit of time to figure out how the car worked now.

To add to the scenario, now the LM's translational controls (the other joystick) actually become better methods for pitching and yawing the docked spacecraft. The old rule of making the angle beween RCS jet location and thrust direction as close to a right angle as you can means you have exhaust near one end of the stack directed perpendicular to the combined ship axis. So the crew discovered that the T-handle joystick that they had spent months learning to use to shift the spacecraft left, right, up, down, or back and forth (without turning it) would actually turn the ship now.

...using the descent stage joystick?

This statement just makes no sense. The LM descent stage had no RCS of its own. The LM had a joystick -- two, actually: one for rotations and the other for translations. But it was for the entire LM, and arguably for the ascent stage since that was the stage that had the RCS and the control system; the descent stage was just along for the ride.

The official story tells about severe vibration, how did the docking mechanism survive it?

Why is it being assumed that such an assembly wouldn't survive? The docking system would routinely have to undergo flexural and torsional stresses under the normal operation of the docked spaceship. If you want to roll the stack, the roll impulse comes from the CSM and is transmitted to the LM through the docking system. Similarly roll and yaw originate in the CSM and are transmitted as flexion stress through the docking system.

When you look at the design of the docking system, you see it's connected -- in each spacecraft -- to the main structural elements of the vehicle through stiffeners that convert the stresses in the each half of the docking cylinder to "linear" forces: torsion is converted to tension and flexion is converted to tension and/or compression. This is standard mechanical design procedure; the geometry of the docking mechanism would be familiar to any engineer designing fittings intended for similar applications.

IDW maintains that these structures are flimsy, but provides no analysis to support this.

The nature of the vibrations suffered during the early stages of the Apollo 13 accident are not specified other than that they are "severe". We don't know whether this is "severe" in terms of the structural limits of the system, or "severe" compared to what was normally expected. Simply saying that there were dynamics in excess of what normally happened is not proof that the structure was overloaded.

How did they land three miles from the target using manual controls flying from the moon, then reenter precisely where previously planned?

IDW implies that the Navy went to the recovery zone and just waited there, and that the spacecraft was "miraculously" flown to that point. In fact, exactly the opposite occurred. After the final correction burn, the vehicle's trajectory to entry interface and splashdown was essentially finalized right then and there -- many hours before the event was to occur. The Navy simply went to where the spacecraft was now known to be headed.

It doesn't matter whether those manuevers were conducted under precise computer control, or whether they were sloppily executed by exhausted astronauts. The manuevers -- whatever their actual nature -- resulted in a trajectory that could be observed and empirically determined from the ground.

In my opinion there is no way the apollo 13 official story is what really happened...

And we have shown that IDW's opinions not based on anything scientific, although he says they are.

He has a fairly predictable pattern. First he makes his claim. Then when asked for proof, he claims it is obvious or that it derives from his expertise. When asked for details, he either offers his typical layman's attempt at computation. But sometimes he skips right to the next step, which is a laundry-list of what he thinks he needs others to provide to him so that he can compute the substantiation of his findings, and if no one can provide it then it's an admission that he was right all along. In other words, it's clear that he draws his conclusions first and then thinks later about how to prove it scientifically.

I can prove it to the person with a reasonably open mind and minimum of pig headedness.

In other words, as long as no one questions his findings in the least, he can "prove" his point. The strength of an argument is not in how well it stands up to the absence of meaningful scrutiny, but how well it weathers the most severe storms of well-founded criticism.

Open-mindedness does not mean you don't question the conclusion. It simply means that you don't dismiss the conclusion without examining it on its merits. That's all we've done.

The evidence shows that on the second attempt, the LEM/3rd stage was definitly struck OFF CENTER AND AT AN ANGLE TO The long axis at between .4 and 4 meters per second, whoevers story you believe.

Here IDW simply interprets the word "four" as to mean four feet per second, which is clearly far too fast according to the flight plan and according to the design specifications for the docking system.

Now when you deal with the AGC you realize that thing has only three display registers with a fixed number of digits. For each type of data that was displayed, implied formats and decimal points were applied. Further, at each stage in the mission certain standard reports were issued, and certain vocal conventions applied. "Five balls", for example, meant that the register in question was reading 00000. "Four balls" meant 0000x, where the x was some digit whose exact value wasn't important because the value in question only had to have a certain order of magnitude, not a certain exact value. Thus "four" does not necessarily mean four integral units -- four feet per second. In the context of docking, which deals in very small velocities, "four" is more likely tenths of a foot per second.

There is simply no plausable way you can explain how rotation along the short axis would not occur in the LEM/3rdstage...

It doesn't matter. The S-IVB had its own attitude control system and the entire Saturn V instrument unit. Normally the upper stage would be the passive vehicle, so the RCS would be disabled for transposition and docking. But if a bad docking attempt should cause a pitch or yaw rate, there's no reason why you can't back the CSM off and have Houston radio up a command for the S-IVB to null its rates.

And off-axis docking attempt was not unforeseen. The astronauts practiced the manuever until they could dock head-on. But the equipment was not designed to require that. It was designed to maximize the probability of mission success, and that meant being able to null a rate in the S-IVB. IDW's scenario requires that the S-IVB suddenly and explicably no longer be able to navigate, after it had been doing so well up to that point.

So IDW's issues have been answered. If he wishes to discuss them here without his typical puerility, I will be most happy to do so.

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Good to see Jay back in action. It's been quite dry lately with only the occassional illucid obnoxious git on Apollohoax that didn't make for really cool debunkings.

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Freedom For Fission A breath of fresh Iodine-131

I just did a Yahoo search on "Interdimensional warrior" and came up with this little gem indicating the the name "Interdimensional warrior" is from (of all places) "Pokémon". If that really is where he got it from, then I'm guessing IDW has to be a child, or an adolescent at best.

I point this out only to question the accuracy of his claimed biography.

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Well, I gave some of IDW's posts the "kid test"... I had my 16 yr. old read some of them. Basically, my son thinks that he's probably about his age! Hmm...perhaps he should be known as "Interdimensional Adolescent". I have a feeling that his biography may be that of an *Interdimensional Fantasy*.

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An open mind is like an open window...without a good screen you'll get all sorts of weird bugs!

This has been my first trip to the weird and wonderful world that GLP inhabits ... a very strange place indeed.

I would just like to say, however, that even if IDW (and his various alter egos) hasn't learned anything from Jay and BB's patient attempts to educate him - I sure have.

Thanks guys.

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Dave

Anyone seen my marbles? Anyone ... ?

Well, I was pretty patient up to about a week ago. :wink:

IDW's determined and systematic attempts to be difficult are trollish behavior at its best. He no longer deserves patience.

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My pleasure, Mr. Gorsky. And IDW not only doesn't deserve patience anymore, he doesn't deserve attention.

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OMG it's the big dog!!!

I have taken to making useless posts simply to mark where I leave off. Sort of trollish but that thread is pretty useless now.

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You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

I just told him:

I expect this will really frost his corn flakes.

He keeps reinforcing my evidence that he's a kid. The constant reposts of the same old garbage or the same old taunts... He just doesn't get it that that doesn't work. It seems to me like the BB version of "I know you are but what am I?".


Edit to add:
Oh yes, welcome back "Big Dog".

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I can't figure out which poster Jay is over on that thread. What id is he posting under??