This Week at ADB, Inc., 23-29 July 2017
Steve Cole reports:
This was a
week of steady work on current projects, although the intensity of the
Shapeways project meant that Jean and SVC did little else. We had 30
ships turned in by sculptors at the nominal deadline of 25 July, but
this climbed to 40 the next day and 50 by the end of the week. A power
outage shut down 800 homes and business (including ADB) for two hours
on Wednesday, the first such this year.
3125 Scale Lyran Leopard Scout coming August 1, 2017 to
our Store on Shapeways
The Starlist Update Project moved forward with
one new entry and one update.
Steve Cole worked on Shapeways,
blogs, countersheet reprints, and other projects.
Steven Petrick
worked on the Star Fleet Battles Module R3 update, quality control assembly and shipping, and
the Gorn and Kzinti Master Starship Books.
Leanna kept orders and accounting up
to date.
Mike kept orders going out and rebuilt the
inventory.
Simone did website updates, sank a few
pirates, and did some graphics including the cover for Klingon Armada
Unity.
Wolf guarded the office,
chasing away a xylophone. Wolf was happy that SVC was able to take him
to the park twice to check on his trees.
Jean worked
on the Shapeways store, managed our page on Facebook (which is up to 3,857
friends), managed our Twitter feed (230 followers), commanded the
Rangers, dealt with the continuing spam assault on the BBS, managed
the blog feed, proofread some marketing materials for Shapeways, took
care of customers, and did some marketing.
Progress Report on Master Star Ship Books
This is Steven Petrick posting.
The Lyran Star Empire and Lyran Democratic Republic Master Star Ship Books have joined the Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and Hydran Master Star Ship Books as released products.
Work continues apace on the Kzinti Master Star Ship Book.
All external reviewers have completed their reports on the Main section and, as of yesterday, the Ships in Captain's Log section, and are currently working on the Fighters, Ground Forces, and Fast Patrol Ships section.
Jean Sexton has the corrected versions of the Kzinti Main and Captain's Log sections so that she can do her review.
A complete file of "requested graphics" has been prepared for SVC to complete the book.
Even while the Kzinti Master Star Ship Book moves forward, work has advanced on the Gorn Master Star Ship Book.
Currently the Gorn Master Star Ship Book has had all of its parts assembled, and the Main, Captain's Log, Early Years, and Advanced Technology sections have all been updated.
The Gorn Fighters, Marines, and Fast Patrol Ships section is something of a mess, surprisingly so since the Gorns are not a major fighter empire. That is actually the problem. Because the Gorns were not a major fighter empire, a lot of the data on their use of fighters was given short shrift in Modules J and J2, and for their Master Star Ship Book needs to be expanded and better explained.
The Gorn General section has been assembled, and has at this juncture been updated for the employment of Gorn fighters (and bombers) where needed, and the landing forces have been defined for those units carrying troops, but an SSD by SSD review has not been conducted as of yet to make sure the weapons and other differences are accounted for. The Gorn Early Years bases are also at issue in this section since the Gorns (like the Romulans) actually followed a somewhat different track than other empires (and theirs is also somewhat different from the Romulans, so it is not a case of simply revising the Romulan data).
The upshot is that the Kzinti Master Star Ship Book is on track to be released later this year, and the Gorn Master Star Ship Book may see release early next year. I am not, at this juncture, sure which empire will be next up for a Master Star Ship Book, but the format for most of the remaining empires will require "tweaking." (The Orions have their different cartels and different "operating zones," the Tholians need to account for both their Milky Way and Home Galaxy ships and etc., the Andromedans need some thinking about including Module C3A data, etc.).
This Week at ADB, Inc., 16-22 July 2017
Steve Cole reports:
This was a
week of steady work on current projects, but the third batch of
releases for the Shapeways store consumed most of the available work
time. We did receive the first production shipment of metal heavy war
destroyer miniatures, probably the last new metal miniatures in that
line. There was a glitch with the BBS but Simone had backed it up only
hours before and it was restored fully. Retired Staffer Mike Calhoun
passed away much too young.
New on Warehouse 23, DriveThru
RPG, and Wargame Vault this week were Star Fleet Battles Module C3 - New Worlds III Rulebook and SSD Book (in both B&W and color).
The Starlist Update Project moved forward with
seven new entries and an update.
Steve Cole worked on Shapeways, countersheet reprints,
Federation Commander Scenario Log #2, blogs, and other projects.
Steven Petrick worked on Captain's Log #53,
quality control assembly and shipping, and the Gorn and Kzinti MSSBs,
and the Star Fleet Battles Module R3 update.
Leanna kept orders and accounting up to
date.
Mike kept orders going out and rebuilt the
inventory.
Simone did website updates and some
graphics.
Wolf guarded the office, chasing away a
bald eagle.
Jean worked on Shapeways, managed our page on Facebook (which is up to 3,852
friends), managed our Twitter feed (230 followers), commanded the
Rangers, dealt with the continuing spam assault on the BBS, restored the BBS, managed
the blog feed, took care of customers, uploaded PDFs,
and did some marketing.
The Shapeways Road: A Second Mile
When we opened our store on Shapeways on 20 June, we
had said we would add more ships on the first of every month. That
meant that the next uploads would be on 1 July, only 10 days later.
Given the problems we had, obstacles we found, and lessons we learned
I made a command decision to delay the second batch to 10 July, which
would split the time between 20 June and 1 August. I told Jean, who
said that she had been meaning to talk to me because the week of the
fourth of July is a retail dead zone when people are spending time
with family not money on hobbies. She changed my plan to 11 July
because sculptors would be working over the weekend and she would need
a day to upload whatever landed on her desk Monday morning. The
sculptors didn't care why we made the delay; they were just glad to
get the extra time. That paid off with a huge 30-item release.
The first stage of
developing the second release batch was a combination of expanding the
current empires and using models already on file. Will McCammon easily
turned his D7B into the D6S (or so he thought), and we asked him to
upload his existing two-pod freighter. Matthew Lawson already had
Omega, Seltorian, and Frax ships on file so he just had to tweak the
existing models to account for things we had learned and upload them.
Steve Zamboni had been scheduled to provide the two small civilian
tugs, and we loved his Tholian Web Tender so much that we assigned him
to do other Tholian ships as well. Gary Pollock had already done
several Hydrans, and Chris Nasipak was working on the Lyrans.
Many lessons had been
learned, some of them not quite well enough, as it turned out. Nothing
is as easy as it seems. The freighter Will did for us in metal had to
be modified to print in plastic. Endless small details like stand
holes and phaser bumps had to be checked and re-checked. The D6S that
was simple to create failed again and again in pre-checks, even when
it was a combination of already approved elements. Will pushed hard,
learned a lot of lessons about sensor dishes, and got the D6S to work.
A ten-minute job had taken over four hours.
Jean said she wanted a monster, and Matthew Lawson had
one already done, the incredibly dangerous Igneous. We decided to
offer this in three sizes to give price options, then coordinated with
Steven Petrick to have him create alternative rules for the SFB
scenario to account for multiple monsters of various sizes.
The big thing we learned
was the concept of a "new start" such as a new empire
(Tholians, Hydrans, Lyrans) or a new ship type (fighters, gunboats).
Any new start requires that a lot of work go into the first ship and
the overall concept, including work by Will McCammon (who as chief
engineer set the scale), Jean Sexton (marketing), and Steve Cole
(universe background, sculptor coordination, and production). It
turned out later that Leanna Cole (accounting and finance) also had a
major part to play in each "new start" that would leave us
waiting hours for her input (because that's how much work we had to
ask her to do getting answers).
Jean decided that since
almost every Hydran ship had fighters, the fighters had to go on sale
with the ships. That caused a major uproar (and cost us the Klingon C8
which was pushed back into August because of the extra work this
caused Will McCammon). Starting fighters required lots of research
with the existing metal miniatures, what materials would work on
Shapeways on such small pieces with smaller points and bumps, the
sprue design (and the number of pieces). In a very real sense, we had
to stop and get a pretty good grip on the Federation and Klingon
fighters before we could finish the Hydrans. The same thing happened
with the gunboats. The parts had to be designed, as well as the sprue,
and that took a lot of hours. Then for reasons nobody understood the
gunboat sprue worked on the Tholians but not the Klingons.
Starting a new empire, on the other hand,
requires developing a look and feel, as well as the design of each
greeble (bump or other detail), and establishing a scale for the ship.
The sculptors learned to build a hull but not populate it with details
until the size was established. Since we hadn't learned this quite
yet in late June, lots of ships had to be essentially done over, but
the sculptors quickly learned to keep the size-critical feature
details separate and add them only once the hull was
sized.
Some things we had considered doing got delayed. Will was
going to do the Klingon C8 but pushed it back to make time for the
"new starts" in this product cycle. Steve Zamboni had done
the Kzinti dreadnought that it turned out we didn't need, but rather
than release it as the only Kzinti ship in the range we held off to
have additional ships done for a later release date, perhaps September
or October. Matthew Lawson had some Federation fighters done, but we
had so much trouble with the Hydrans that we decided to hold the Feds
until we could design, scale, and release all of the drone-armed
(Klingon, Kzinti, multiple Fed) fighters together. Chris Nasipak got
his Lyran destroyer finished and delivered four more ships to us at
the last minute (leaving us no time for public comment), but we
decided that enough crazy things had happened that the Lyrans deserved
a thorough cross-fleet review before any of their ships were released.
They'll be along on the first of August.
We learned that lots of things we
knew were not true. For example, it's easy to scale-up a 3788 ship
to 3125 (just increase it 21%) but then you have to go back and update
the stand hole, which needs to be the same size in both scales. When
you upload a ship to Shapeways there is an automatic check, but in
some cases a ship that was uploaded a few minutes earlier will change
from approved to not-approved as the computer grinds through all of
the details. One sculptor uploaded a green-light ship only to watch it
change from green-light to yellow-light to red-light before his very
eyes. (One would assume that approved is going to stay approved, but
that ship didn't work that way.) In other cases, ships were "as
green as Kermit the frog" but failed the manual checks that are
only done when a customer actually orders the first copy. That
resulted in a couple of upset customers having to reorder ships once
we fixed them.
Meanwhile, I
struggled through the process to keep track of which sculptor was how
far along on which ships and what did he need to finish it. Because we
were learning the system, that shoved a lot of work onto Chief
Engineer McCammon who had to design the fighter and PF sprues, and
check everybody's ships and scale, all while trying to finish his
own ships. Every day it seemed we added and/or dropped a ship from the
process. The original company policy was not to put on Shapeways
anything we were selling in metal, but after Leanna spent a day
reviewing sales figures she (24 hours before the upload time) cleared
us to upload several of the 3788 ships we were holding. The
sculptors worked quickly to get the extra files to us, files that in
some cases took extra work.
It was not over
when it was over. Hours after we uploaded one item, word came from
Shapeways that sample copies the sculptor ordered a week earlier (for
his own amusement) had failed to print. We would have expected that
report to come much earlier than it did. So we had to jump through
hoops to get that item replaced the morning after the release. Then it
wouldn't print again, and then again.
We have learned a lot, but we have
the team trained and we're trying to set up a system that runs like
the Department of Agriculture doing the month's crop reports, not
like NASA doing a one-time heroic Mars shot with crisis
management.
The Tholian Patrol Corvette is available
on ADB's store on Shapeways.
This Week at ADB, Inc., 9-15 July 2017
Steve Cole reports:
This was
the week we released 30 new products on our store on Shapeways and tried
to maintain some progress on the ongoing projects.
Steve Cole worked mostly on Shapeways but did manage to do
some blogs, the two newsletters, and make progress on other
projects.
Steven
Petrick worked on Captain's Log #53, quality control assembly and shipping, the Star Fleet Battles modules R3
and C3 updates, and the Kzinti and Gorn Master Starships Books.
Leanna kept orders and
accounting up to date.
Mike kept orders going out and rebuilt the
inventory.
Simone did website updates and some
graphics.
Wolf guarded the office, chasing away a
very pretty Russian lawyer who said she had valuable information.
Jean worked on the
GURPS Prime Directive revision, managed our page on Facebook (which is up to 3,850 friends), managed our Twitter feed (229 followers), commanded the
Rangers, dealt with the continuing spam assault on the BBS, managed
the blog feed, got the ships uploaded to Shapeways, proofread the two
newsletters, took care of customers, and did some
marketing.
Tholian Arachnid Gunboats
in Our Store on Shapeways
Second Wave of Ships Released!
On July 11, 2017, Amarillo Design Bureau released its second wave of ships in its store on Shapeways.
The
Klingons get some love with the D6S, a heavy scout cruiser and a G1
gunboat flotilla, including the leader and scout gunboats.
The Tholians show up with a web tender, their iconic patrol corvette, and a flotilla of Arachnid gunboats.
The
Hydrans have a strong opening with a Lancer destroyer, Ranger cruiser,
Mongol medium cruiser, and Stingers for you to add to the ships.
The Seltorians have a light cruiser and frigate added to the destroyer and heavy cruiser.
The Frax get a frigate and war cruiser to add to their war destroyer and heavy cruiser.
What are they going to fight? Well, there’s Igneous, a monster that is available in three sizes.
So you need to expand your freighter collection? We’ve added a harbor tug, a salvage tug, and the traditional large freighter.
Spread
your wings and try the Omega Octant! We chose two traditional foes to
open with: the Maesron Alliance and Trobrin Empire. The Maesrons get a
destroyer and heavy cruiser; the Trobrins get their heavy cruiser and
frigate.
Check all these out here: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/amarillo-design-bureau-inc
This Week at ADB, Inc., 2-8 July 2017
Steve Cole reports:
This week was dominated by doing things for the
Shapeways Store, and getting new releases ready for the 11th. We learn
as we go along, but every "new thing we start doing" takes a
big chunk of time to define scale, features, and other parameters.
With the 11 July release we are working on fighters,
gunboats, Hydrans, Lyrans, and Tholians; with each of those we spent an enormous amount of
time doing "the first one of each" thing. A smarter idea
would have been to just try doing two new things a month but everyone
is so excited to get new ships into the store. One of the new ships is the 3125 Scale Klingon D6S Heavy Scout Cruiser.
The Starlist
Update Project moved forward with two new entries and two updates.
Steve Cole worked mostly on the Shapeways store but
did a few blogs and a couple of other projects.
Steven Petrick worked on Captain's Log #53,
quality control assembly and shipping, the Star Fleet Battles Module R3 update, and the Kzinti
and Gorn Master Starship Books.
Leanna kept orders and
accounting up to date.
Mike kept orders going out and rebuilt the
inventory.
Simone did website updates and some
graphics.
Wolf guarded the office, chasing away a
pterodactyl.
Jean worked on the GURPS Prime Directive revision,
managed our page on Facebook (which is up to 3,843 friends), managed our
Twitter feed (229 followers), commanded the Rangers, dealt with the
continuing spam assault on the BBS, managed the blog feed, worked on
the Shapeways store, took care of customers, and did
some marketing.
The Road to Shapeways
Steve Cole writes:
Every time we do a Captain's Log, we
have to go through a decision cycle for several things so that we know
what to announce. When we did Captain's Log #52, there was a lot of
behind-the-scenes discussion of the Starline 2500 line and what to do
with it.
The 2500s (1/3125-scale) had more than their
share of problems from the very start. Tests with resin had been very
good, but actual production of resin ships failed to work so Mongoose
had to shift to metal. That got a lot of people upset. Then a
contractor working for Mongoose could only meet production goals by
shipping everything they made, including ships that customers
considered defective. Those had to be replaced, costing money and
upsetting customers. Even after ADB, Inc. took over the 2500s and
imposed our high standards of quality control, too many players had
already rejected the line, saying they did not trust anyone to do the
ships right, or on time, or as advertised. It didn't help that once
we saw what was going on we found that the ships were too expensive to
make and the only way to keep them on the market at all was as
mail-order-only products. This made things difficult for overseas
customers who bought a far higher percentage of the 2500s compared to
the 2400s.
ADB, Inc.
released many new 2500s, but for all of the above reasons they
didn't sell very well and actually lost money. Players were also
complaining that the Klingon, Kzinti, and Romulan dreadnoughts had
never been released in metal. (We tried, they could not be done
economically and some of them could not be physically done at all.
Considering it would cost over $500 to put each dreadnought into
production and dreadnought sales were usually 1/5 of cruiser sales,
this was not practical.)
We were on the verge of
discontinuing the 2500s and doing the CGIs over as 2450s (in 1/3788
scale) when we decided to at least do some research on Shapeways as a
way to release enough 2500s to keep the line alive. Part of our
research was to ask an expert who had, two years earlier, convinced us
not to do Shapeways because quality miniatures with our details
(specifically the phaser mounts) could not be done at sub-astronomical
prices. He noted that technology was improving and costs coming down
and that Shapeways had become a viable option.
So after consulting with
Mongoose we announced on 10 March that we¹d open a store on
Shapeways and have Mongoose release the missing dreadnoughts there. We
expected this to happen in 10-15 days; it actually took 99 days.
While the project was starting, Will
McCammon asked if he could do a couple of 2500 (1/3125th) ships that
were never going to be available in metal anyway (the Klingon F5S and
Romulan SkyHawk-L). We consulted with Mongoose and they agreed. About
the time those ships were finished, Steve Cole had a bright idea and
asked Will to do a "large freighter with skids and ducktail"
any time he had the chance. Will said that was so easy that he did it
at once and it became a part of the original release plan.
When we were
within days of opening the store we ordered samples (so we¹d have
photographs) and found that it would take three weeks to get them
instead of three days. So the store opening was delayed 18 days.
During that time, Matthew Lawson (who does a lot of cover art for us)
said that his ships (and he had dozens of them) could be added to the
store if we wanted them. We agreed, and the evolution of thought
started to change the focus of the Shapeways store in directions we
never considered.
Meanwhile Mongoose had some
problems. Their sculptor (the beautiful and talented Sandrine
Thirache) had a death in her family which took her out of the office
for three weeks, delaying the opening of the store. When she got back,
she had to catch up on other work, which delayed us two more weeks.
Meanwhile Jean had done a survey of the market and determined that if
we didn¹t have the Federation CA and Klingon D7 in the store (in
both scales) on the first day, we¹d never be taken seriously. So we
asked Sandrine to convert her existing CGIs for this purpose. After
weeks of trying to get those two ships (and the rest of the missing
dreadnoughts) to work, Sandrine officially gave up. Her CGIs were not
originally done to Shapeways standards and could not be made to match
them (other than the relatively simple Vulture). She would have to
start over, and Mongoose said it was doubtful if she could be spared
to start over on every ship in the 2500 range. They bowed out of the
project in late May. We then asked Will McCammon and Matthew Lawson
about doing the Federation CA and Klingon D7. Will McCammon rose to
the task and did them in record time (which still took two weeks).
Meanwhile, Matthew Lawson did some other ships for us including the
DemonHawk. He already had Frax and Seltorians ready and these were
also prepared for release.
On 6 June, Steve Cole noticed a Shapeways ship (the WYN
dreadnought "Nancy") that Steve Zamboni had done for his own
amusement, knowing he could not sell it. Steve Cole was so blown away
that he asked Steve Zamboni to join the sculpting team. Steve Zamboni
said that while the Nancy would take some rework for series
production, he had two dozen freighters ready for us to use
immediately. So we added three of his freighters to the initial
release package. Before the store had opened, we had seen nice work by
two other sculptors and began to talk with them about their joining
the team.
Somewhere along the line all of the
confusion by the sculptors over the Starline 2400, 2425, 2450, 2500,
and 2501 lines convinced us to rebrand everything (for Shapeways only)
as 1/3125-scale, 1/3788-scale, and Omni-scale.
When Will McCammon told us that the Federation
CA and Klingon D7 would be ready by 17 June, Jean and Steve Cole
penciled in a store opening for 19 June. Every time they mentioned
this in public they added the caveat that it probably would be a bit
later as there were doubtless issues we didn¹t even know about yet
to be surmounted. Steve Cole named Will McCammon "Chief Engineer"
for the project and asked him to verify the size and scale of every
other sculptor's ships. This made his life miserable as he had to
finish his ships while checking everyone else¹s but he rose to the
challenge.
Leanna Cole
insisted that the store not be opened until the sculptors were under
contract. This happened, taking a few days longer than it should have
due to email problems.
Finally, on June 20th, all was ready. The
ships were uploaded into our private account, all of the contracts
were signed, all of the pricing data established, the sales
description text had been proofread, and everyone had enjoyed a
nourishing lunch. Jean, Leanna, and Steve Cole had cleared their
schedules for the day so that whatever was needed could be done. Jean
then officially opened the store.
And ran into a
brick wall.
Moving each ship into
the public "for sale" area was taking over 30 minutes per
ship (we had allowed five) because there was so much data to enter.
When you start at 1pm and have 21 ships to do and each of them takes a
half-hour, well, you do the math. Things got better, and things got
worse. Jean got faster, cutting down the upload time from 30 minutes
to 25 then 20 and finally doing the last ship in about 15 minutes.
(She also learned that all of that work could have been done before
opening the store, so in future we'll have all of the ships ready to
go on release day and need just a few seconds per ship to move them to
the "for sale" area.) However, we found that two of the
ships had problems, so they came down off sale, then went back up when
we figured out they didn't have problems, then one of them had to be
re-uploaded (which takes at least an hour) because we had the wrong
file. Steve Cole bought Jean dinner in exchange for an agreement to
work to 10pm and get all 21 ships uploaded and the official launch was
complete. We had five orders by 10:15pm, and more the next
morning.
But the launch was not over. When orders
began to arrive, one of the ships failed to print despite having
passed the Shapeways pre-checks. Fortunately, the sculptor recognized
the error message (which was actually reporting the wrong error but he
had seen it before) and he fixed it within a few hours.
Federation Heavy Cruiser
RANDOM THOUGHTS #292
Steve Cole's list of surprising facts about World War II
that few historians, and even fewer regular people, are aware
of.
1. The invasion of Japan was expected to be so bloody that the
US planned to drop eight Hiroshima-type bombs on the invasion beaches
to destroy the Japanese defenses, then land US troops into the blast
zones the next morning. (Nobody at the time understood radioactive
fallout.)
2. Those vertical steel panels on the sides of German tanks
(four or five feet square) did a swell job of causing bazooka rounds
to detonate away from the hull, protecting the tank, but that's not
why they were originally there. In fact, the Germans started adding
panels before bazooka rockets were used on the battlefield. Here's
what was going on. The Russians had deployed tens of thousands of
anti-tank rifles which (from 150 yards) could penetrate the side armor
of German tanks (even the Panther) if they were aimed at the spot
between the upper track and the roller wheels. German experiments
found it was easier to fit the tanks with 5mm steel plates that would
cause the bullets to tumble and lose energy than it was to add 10mm of
armor to the tank body itself.
3. Everyone knows the story. The Germans
tried to build an atomic bomb and gave up because it was too hard.
There is some indication, however, that this is all a cover story and
that they really did try to build a nuclear bomb. A very secret
"synthetic rubber" factory at Monowitz never produced a bit
of rubber but had trucks coming and going all the time and "used
more electricity than the city of Berlin." If it was a
"heavy water" factory, or a uranium enrichment plant, that
would fit. Few know that the bomb the Germans had designed (the
"Heisenberg Device" in The Man in the High Castle) was
actually a hydrogen fusion bomb, not a uranium fission bomb, and would
have been 10 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
4. Everyone
knows about the German V1 flying bomb and V2 ballistic missile. A few
even know about the V3 cannon which had multiple boost chambers to
produce incredible range, enough to bombard London. This cannon
(laying on a hillside) was destroyed by allied bombing. Few if any
know that the SS took over the project and build two smaller cannons
of the multi-chamber type, using them to fire 183 shells into Luxembourg City from a range of 50 miles during the Battle of the
Bulge.
5. Anyone with any
knowledge of World War II knows that the Germans were getting heavy
water from Norway to build their nuclear bomb. This was the world's
only factory making heavy water. Why? I had just assumed that the
Norwegians had found a spring that was heavier than other water
sources, but no, they were making heavy water, which was very hard to
do. Here's the story. When the industrial revolution went electric,
all advanced countries surveyed their rivers for good places to build
hydroelectric dams (which even today are the cheapest and greenest way
to make electricity, but almost all have been built). Vemork was found
to be the world¹s best place to build a hydroelectric dam, with a
major river falling over a thousand feet. The problem was that Vemork
was remote and there were few customers for that much electricity.
Norwegian industry found a solution. They built the world's biggest
hydroelectric plant, then used it to split the water (which had just
run the turbines) into oxygen (sold to hospitals) and hydrogen (sold
to fertilizer companies). The plant used most of its power output in
the adjacent gas factory. The waste water from the process was about
10% heavy water compared to a normal 1/6 of 1%. People had known about
heavy water since 1931 but nobody knew what to do with it. Hundreds of
chemical and physics labs around the world conducted endless
experiments, each needing a gallon a year. Norsk Hydro added a special
seven-stage system to turn the 10% heavy waste water into 99% heavy
water, using electricity the dam produced but no customer wanted. When
the world market for heavy water proved to be too small to make a
profit, the plant was shut down. Then a few months later, atomic
scientists discovered that heavy water could be used to moderate a
nuclear reactor, and suddenly the French, British, and Germans wanted
lots of heavy water, so the plant was turned back on. The Norwegians
decided not to sell any heavy water to the Germans, but the German
invasion (done to protect the iron supply that went through Narvik)
changed that. It then fell to Norwegian commandos to slip into the
country and destroy the heavy water shipments en route to Germans. See
the movie Heroes of Telemark.
6. Even casual historians know that the German type-XXI U-boat
was the greatest submarine invented in World War II. Its greatness,
however, came by accident. The Germans had designed that series of
subs to use hydrogen peroxide engines that would run without air,
i.e., while the submarine was submerged. This would allow subs to
operate submerged much faster than ever before, and for days or weeks
not hours. The engine couldn't be made work in time, but the subs
were designed and in production. They had a figure-8 hull. This
consisted of two tubes each the size of a normal submarine hull, one
stacked on top of the other. The lower hull was to be a huge hydrogen
peroxide fuel tank. Without the need for the fuel, the Germans
suddenly found themselves with a conventional submarine with twice the
internal volume. This allowed them to add more diesel fuel, many more
batteries (type-XXIs could run two entire days on batteries instead of
just six hours), and expanded crew quarters with showers and sinks. No
other submarine had enough fresh water to provide the crew with
full-time showers. (US subs could allow their crews about a minute of
shower time per day and even nuclear submarines today are always short
of fresh water.)
This Week at ADB, Inc., 25 June - 1 July 2017
Steve Cole reports:
This was a week of steady work on current projects. We did
decide to delay Shapeways Batch II until 11 July to avoid the fourth
of July retail black hole week.
Steve Cole worked on the Shapeways store, blogs, and other
projects.
Steven Petrick worked on the Star Fleet Battles Module R3
update, quality control assembly and shipping, and the Kzinti
Master Starship Book.
Leanna kept orders and
accounting up to date.
Mike kept orders going out and rebuilt the
inventory.
Simone did website updates and some
graphics.
Wolf guarded the office, chasing away a mastadon. He wanted to kill and eat it, but Jean said no.
Jean worked on the GURPS Prime Directive revision and the Shapeways store, managed our page
on Facebook (which is up to 3,847 friends), managed our Twitter feed
(229 followers), commanded the Rangers, dealt with the continuing spam
assault on the BBS, managed the blog feed, took care of
customers, and did some marketing.
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