I’ve wasted hours this weekend trying to restore the side bar to this blog and my space law site at groundbasedspacematters.com. The sidebar doesn’t show on my home pages. It shows on the other pages, but not on the first one. My google-fu is failing me, and when I get This Close to installing a new sidebar I chicken out. What if I lose the widgets in the sidebar? I set these blogs up two years ago, and am having trouble remembering what I did. It would take me another ten hours to figure out how to restore the widgets.. I went back to YouTube to find the 12 videos that walked me through it all, but they’re now listed as private. I’m about to bite the bullet and actually pay WordPress so that I can get help. I feel wrong complaining about something that’s free, so perhaps I am willing to pay just so I can have a proper basis for whining.
On the story-construction front for LONG IN THE LAND, I’ve plugged one hole, but still have another. FIrst, on the upside, I am all happy about a plot resolution to my aircraft issue. I just got off the phone with a friend who knows about aircraft, and we talked about Nwwwlf’s last airplane. I was talking to him because I wanted someone knowledgeable to speculate wildly but not insanely. Also, I wanted to know if putting the engines on the wings of the aircraft –instead of up against the fuselage–ike they did with the Honda Jet was a passing fad or had any longevity. He assured me it had a lot of benefits and wasn’t wacky.
Then I asked what far future tech he could see powering an aircraft. I had been thinking something nuclear. He suggested I use a plasma jet right away. It would be electric once it gets going, and can operate in space, but it would need jet fuel at first. A hybrid! I was giddy, because I’d been wanting an engine that would burn, as he put it, “dinosaur” fuel because there’s going to be a toadfat hunt, but had been stumped by the fact that this is 2k years in the future and therefore everyone should have moved beyond dino fuel. We’re just not going to be carting it into space. Also, why would companies that terraform barren rock worlds build aircraft that require fuel from old, decayed organic material? The aircraft design would be oriented to the barren rock worlds, not to Nwwwlf. My plot issue is fixed–I get futuristic tech and still need dino or toadfat fuel, but my world building still has a hole.
Since I’m still drafting, I will continue on as if that hole isn’t there. Maybe they start planting corn on the newly terraformed worlds and refine that. That doesn’t sound very intelligent, but that something isn’t a good idea doesn’t mean that someone won’t want to do it. Or, to phrase it without all the triple negatives: bad ideas get carried out all the time. It could be nepotism–an executive giving a friend a favor in the form of a permanent contract for corn-based fuel. Likewise, government regulations are full of bad ideas–a Congressman might be doing a donor a favor or a bureaucrat could be pushing a pet theory. It could be one of those reasons. Ok, that’s the first solution to the world-building hole. I fill the hole with human stupidity and/or venality, unless I come up with something better.
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