Astronyms, part 1: Soviet/Russian Condoms

This is part of this series of posts on the history of spacecraft naming.

Way back in February 2012, I started working on a post intended primarily for my friend Jordan, after we'd had a brief exchange about the naming of the Mercury capsules, because of a thing he'd posted about the 50th anniversary of John Glenn's first orbit. I set out to write a brief summary of the history of spacecraft naming conventions, examining how changes in names have reflected changes in goals and attitudes, but it got out of hand and so it still isn't finished, even though I'm really only looking at names and even though there have  been less than 200 human-crewed spacecraft, most of which have not been individually named. Now I've decided I'd better break it into smaller chunks and release them once a week or so as I learn more.

I should possibly explain right from the start my personal system of categorising spacecraft. I recognise 5 categories: Space Condoms, Space Planes, Drop Ships, Space Ships and Space Stations. These are defined primarily according to how they land on the surface of a planet or moon. I'm also only interested here in vessels that have an onboard pilot and crew, not drones, probes, satellites or automated/remote-controlled tourist carriers.

• Space condoms are single-use, disposable vessels; you use them once, hope they protect you, and then you throw them away (or put them on display in a museum). It's a perfect analogy, and most of our spacecraft so far have been of this type.

• Space planes are reusable vessels designed to fly and land like conventional aircraft using some sort of wings. Pretty obvious. We've had some success with these, but they come with a lot more complications. Vessels that land as helicopters, which haven't been successfully tried yet, would also fit in as a subtype here.

• Drop ships are reusable vessels that can't keep themselves flying aerodynamically, but can still safely land and get launched again. The Apollo LM was arguably an example of this, arguably, and some future designs like the Dragon V2 are supposed to be able to operate like this one day. (Hypothetically, the Intrepid class, relying on antigravity generators to stay airborne, would fit in this category.)

• Space ships are those intended to get you from A to B, so long as neither A nor B involve landing on a planet. You could sub-divide these further into interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic, etc. But we've never had any of these at all. (Hypothetically, the Galaxy class, unable to land or fly atmospherically, fits this category. Its emergency-landing saucer section may be considered a space condom.)

• Space stations also don't land (on purpose), but are different because they're not supposed to leave A (where A is some constant orbit), with only minimal thrusters to support station-keeping. We've had more of these than space planes so far.

With those basics cleared up, let's look at some Mother Russian spacecraft. Today we'll be limiting ourselves to space condoms, which make up the bulk of Soviet- and Russian-produced spacecraft.

In the Soviet/Russian system, each class of vessel gets a name (e.g. the Soyuz class), each mission gets a name-number combo (e.g. Soyuz 11), but there is (almost) never any unique vessel name, and the radio call sign is attached to the crew members, not the vessel, with each cosmonaut assigned a personal call sign (often something bland like a type of stone or constellation, e.g. Almaz, meaning diamond, or Antares, a star), and with each vessel referred to by its commander's call sign (so, also Almaz or Antares in this example). The other crew members are known by both their own personal call sign and as subordinates of the commander's call sign (e.g. Antares-1 on one flight can be the same guy as Eridanus-2 on another flight; on yet another flight, Eridanus-2 can be someone else, but Eridanus-1 will always be the same cosmonaut and Antares-1 will always be the same, other cosmonaut). Russian call signs stick with each commanding cosmonaut until retirement, and are then recycled to a new cosmonaut, so there can be a few called Almaz are not [were never] recycled, [until Misurkin took over the Altair callsign from Padalka on the Soyuz MS-06 mission].

[EDIT: There's also the GRAU index, a standardised coding and recording of all Russian military equipment. Soviet and Russian spacecraft and rockets fall under this system, and so all have GRAU numbers, which would make looking them up super easy if you have a copy of the GRAU index in a language you can read. GRAU numbers usually start with a number and then a letter, and then there can be further numbers and lettes after that to tell apart sub-variants and sub-sub-variants. The Vostok spacecraft was designated 3KA, while the latest Soyuz TMA-M is 11F732A47.]

[EDIT: The designation Kosmos, followed by a number, occasionally comes up with Soviet/Russian spacecraft too. It's their generic term for anything they put in orbit, a catalogue of things they put in space that aren't important enough (or which they don't want anyone to assume are important enough) to get special names of their own. It's unusual for this to apply to something intended to carry humans.]

The class names are all quite interesting and political. They are:

[EDIT: In hindsight, I noticed I'd put a lot more detail into the write-ups of the spacecraft in parts 2 onwards than I did into these ones, so I've come back to add stuff.]

Vostok
(Space condom. In space service 12 April 1961 19 August 1960 to 19 June 1963)

Vostok 3KA

Meaning 'East', or more accurately the Vostok 3KA variant, as the Vostok 1P, 1K and 2K versions didn't carry people, the 2K satellite version later being renamed Zenit ('zenith'). [EDIT: It's since been revealed that the design was actually intended as the uncrewed Zenit from the start, and the crewed Vostok was actually considered a variant of that.] This name was a pretty explicit "Fuck you!" to the West, shouting ""Hah hah! The East got to space first AGAIN!", after the initial headstart with Sputnik 1. The whole series of unpiloted missions preceding Vostok 1 were known in the ignorant West as Sputniks 4 to 10 (meaning 'satellite'), while the Soviets dubbed the Vostok 1P, 1K and unpiloted 3KA missions as Korabl-Sputnik 1 to 5 (meaning ship-satellite). Some of these also carried dogs, but unlike and like Ham and Enos of Project Mercury, they had zero control over their craft.[EDIT: To keep this post consistent with the Mercury post, I'm counting the non-human occupied Vostok missions as much as I count the Mercury chimpanzee missions; all of these had the capacity, in principle, to carry humans, and both condoms were equally capable of operating uncrewed. The full list is as follows:

• 1K #2: Korabl-Sputnik 2, carried the dogs Belka and Strelka, a rabbit, 2 rats, 40 mice and an unspecified number of flies into orbit
• 1K #3: Korabl-Sputnik 3, carried the dogs Pcholka & Mushka into orbit, but was intentionally destroyed to keep it from landing outside of the USSR
• 1K #4: unnamed, carried the dogs Zhemchuzhina & Zhulka on a suborbital trajectory, due to a third stage malfunction. This was the first successful use of a launch abort system on an occupied vessel
• 3KA #1: Korabl-Sputnik 4, carried the dog Chernushka, several guinea pigs, mice and "other specimens" into orbit. Some of the mice and guinea pigs were placed inside a humanoid dummy, which was ejected and landed separately
• 3KA #2: Korabl-Sputnik 5, carried the dog Zvezdochka and a dummy
• 3KA #3 to #8 were Vostoks 1 to 6, with one human crewmember each]

As a neat bit of convenience, all of these Soviet/Russian space condoms are launched on rockets - all part of the R-7 rocket family - that approximately share their name, so the Vostok 3KAs were all launched on Vostok-K rockets and the latest Soyuz TMA-Ms MSs get launched on Soyuz-FG rockets. Unlike the US system of naming rockets and spacecraft separately, this makes it really easy to know what pairs up with what, and it streamlines the entire naming process, but it does slightly obscure the relative differences between rocket variants. I don't think it makes a massive difference either way, though.

The design of the 3KA was very simple and practical. The dude inside was seated in a spherical descent capsule, probably the most solid pressure-vessel shape, which contrasted with the US's cone-shaped re-entry modules (which have the advantage of not needing a second cone-shaped adaptor around them to streamline them during launch). Attached to the back of this was a second, jettisonable module made up of all the equipment that would only be needed while in orbit. This modular vessel design stood in contrast to the all-in-one-hull Mercury design, but after Mercury this splitting became a completely standard feature of all subsequent space condoms. If you're going to dispose of the whole thing anyway, then you might as well make the landing parachutes' job easier.

Three occupied 1Ks were launched, only two successfully, and one of those two was intentionally destroyed by mission control before landing. Eight occupied Vostok 3KAs flew once each successfully.

Voskhod
(Space condom. In space service 12 October 1964 to 16 March 1966)

Voskhod 3KV (top) and Voskhod 3KD (bottom)

Meaning 'Sunrise', and again should properly be called Voskhod 3KV and 3KD in full, to distinguish between the first vessel (which is pretty much a Vostok 3KA with a different interior for more seats and a back-up retro-rocket stuck on the front) and the second (which is the same, plus a jettisonable, inflatable airlock for the first ever spacewalk). The name is in the same theme of giving the West the finger, cleverly sounding as similar as it looked to the Vostok class, but with a slightly more nuanced and poetic touch.

The Voskhod spacecraft was launched on a Voskhod rocket.

Only one of each Voskhod variant went up [with humans], once each, both times successfully. [EDIT: Another 3KV, named Kosmos 110, went up successfully with the dogs Veterok and Ugolyok, after the human flights had ended.]

Soyuz
(Space condom. In space service 23 April 1967 to present)

Top row: Soyuz 7K-OK(A), Soyuz 7K-OKS, Soyuz 7K-T, Soyuz 7K-TM
Middle row: Soyuz-T, Soyuz-TM, Soyuz-TMA, Soyuz-TMA-M
Bottom row: Soyuz-MS

Meaning 'Union', there are actually 8 9 [main] variants of this long-serving super-class: Soyuz 7K-OK [in both (A) and (P) sub-variants, for active and passive docking partners, [plus a one-off observer variant with no docking capability for Soyuz 6]], Soyuz 7K-OKS [also known as Soyuz 7KT-OK], Soyuz 7K-T [which included a one-off solar panel sub-variant for Soyuz 13, as well as the 7K-T/A9 sub-variant for docking with Almaz stations], Soyuz 7K-TM, Soyuz-T, Soyuz-TM, Soyuz-TMA, Soyuz-TMA-M, and Soyuz-MS. Frankly, it's not much of a cataloguing system, but I don't think it was planned so much as gradually evolved, as plans fell away and new requirements emerged. There are probably more major differences between the earliest 7K-OK and the latest TMA-M MS, than there are between Vostok 3KA and Voskhod 3KV, and yet I've still lumped the Soyuzes all into one big pile instead of splitting them apart as I did with Vostok and Voskhod. The name 'Union' was less of a West-shaming one and more of a Soviet-boosting one, referring quite plainly to the Soviet Union, since it was pretty clear they weren't referring to the Union that beat the Confederacy.

[EDIT: I'm trying to gradually translate all the letters attached to each Soyuz variant, and my rough guide so far looks like this (if a knowledgable Russian-speaker wants to steer me more accurately, please do):
OK - Orbitalny Korabl - orbital vessel, orbiter
S - Sistema - system (in MS; not sure about earlier variants with S in)
T - Transportnyi - transport, or sometimes inaccurately ferry, indicating primarily station service
M - Modifitsirovannyi - modified (I'm not sure if this also applies to the second M in TMA-M)
or M - Modernizirovannaya - modernised (in MS)
A - Antropometricheskii - anthropometric, because of a NASA request for expanded crew limits]

[EDIT: I count two Soyuzes where the vessel itself received a name of its own. Soyuz 19 was called Soyuz (to match the American Apollo of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project), and this was in place of the usual crew call sign. Soyuz TMA-21 used the crew call sign Tarkhany, but was also named Gagarin, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Yuri's flight.]

[EDIT: In a naming policy shift that I don't yet know much about, the crew of Soyuz MS-04 were permitted to name their own vessel for the first time in Russian spaceflight. So while their crew call sign remained Olimp, their vessel got the unique name Argo, which they have explicitly stated is named after the vessel from the myth of Jason and Argonauts.]

The basic design was a 3-module hull, with the spherical re-entry module of Vostok replaced with a bell-shaped one in the center, with a much longer equipment module (with solar panel 'wings') behind it, and a spherical orbital module in front of it, to give the crew more room to work in and to serve as a docking point with other spacecraft. There are also a bunch of Soyuzes that were never put into service (including ones for their aborted Moon-landing project) and an unpiloted cargo version, the Progress class, is pretty much exactly a Soyuz minus the people facilities. It's generally agreed that the Chinese Shenzhou class is another Soyuz variant. There have been several different subtypes of the Soyuz sub-family of rockets that have carried the various Soyuz space condoms into space.

Two of the earliest Soyuz flights ended horribly, with their crews killed. Soyuz 1 crashed to Earth with a faulty parachute, because of incredibly stupid engineering short-cutting. Soyuz 11 had successful docked with Salyut 1, making it the first occupied space station, but on their return to Earth, the Soyuz suffered a fatal decompression when the orbital and descent modules separated. Since then, the Soviets and Russians haven't lost a single person in space, though there have been a couple of Progresses lost recently. [EDIT: Two Soyuzes did have launch failures, but both capsules with both crews actually survived. A Soyuz 7K-T, known by the informal, unofficial mission code of Soyuz 18A or Soyuz 18-1, had a staging failure when it was already in space, so the mission was aborted. Later, Soyuz T-10A (or T-10-1) suffered a fire on the launch pad and the escape system launched the crew capsule free shortly before the launcher exploded. The T-10A re-entry module was later re-used as part of Soyuz T-15, probably the only Soyuz to fly twice, though only once to space.] [EDIT: I keep finding more bits. Apparently, Soyuz 5 experienced a dangerous re-entry incident, but survived.] [EDIT: More bits. Soyuz TMA-1 had a somewhat dodgy re-entry, but then both TMA-10 and TMA-11 both experienced similar near-disasters to the Soyuz 5 re-entry fuck-up. It's hard to judge if the TMAs were just abnormally lucky to have no fatalities, or if it's a compliment to the Soyuz design that even with such major malfunctions, it still brought everyone home.] [EDIT: Soyuz MS-10 had a launch failure, as yet unexplained. Both crew escaped and survived. Details pending.]

Combined, the Soyuz class vessels are by far the most numerous Earth has produced and yet, flying only once each, still flew 21 missions fewer than finally got as many missions into space as the 5 space shuttle orbiters, in September 2017.

By variant, they flew:
Soyuz 7K-OK (23 April 1967 to 19 June 1970): 8 flights, 1 fatally destroyed.
Soyuz 7K-OKS (22 April 1971 to 30 June 1971): 2 flights, 1 fatally destroyed.
Soyuz 7K-T (27 September 1973 to 22 May 1981): 26 flights, all successful [except for the safely aborted Soyuz 18A].
Soyuz 7K-TM (22 December 1974 to 23 September 1976): 3 flights, all successful.
Soyuz-T (5 June 1980 to 16 July 1986): 14 flights, all successful. [Additionally, Soyuz T-10A exploded non-lethally on the launch pad.]
Soyuz-TM (5 February 1987 to 10 November 2002): 33 flights, all successful.
Soyuz-TMA (30 October 2002 to 27 April 2012): 22 flights, all successful.
Soyuz-TMA-M (7 October 2010 to 7 September 2016): 5 20 flights, 3 all successful.
Soyuz-MS (7 July 2016 to present): 1 15 flights, 13 succesful, 2 still in orbit. [MS-10's launch was safely aborted following a first stage failure, without reaching space.]

So that's 113 143 flights, with 2 3 failures that reached space, 1 major pre-flight failure, 1 failure below space, and 2 incomplete. It seems likely Soyuzes will still be with us for the rest of the decade, serving perhaps beyond a full 50 years in one form or another.

I reserve the right to add the list of cosmonaut callsigns to this post at a later date, but frankly they were chosen for their unremarkableness and they were pretty successful. If the point of this exercise is to explore the motives behind names, then we're done. If we want to look at the meanings of names, we're wasting our time in this case, since the meanings are intentionally of random words.

[EDIT: I finally broke down and did the cosmonaut callsign list.]

Quick and dirty Spelljammer for D&D Next

Spelljammer is one of the more interesting and original setting and rules expansions for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but it hasn't been officially supported for over a decade, since the 2nd edition of the game was replaced with the 3rd. Often summed up as D&D in space, Spelljammer gives a means and possible motives for a standard dungeon-crawlin' adventuring party to fly a ship (like, literally, a boat, though often an oddly shaped one) out into space by magical means to have nautical-themed space adventures.

That crash-summary really doesn't do it justice, as this relatively simple mechanical change has a huge effect on the scope and feel of the game, especially with a GM who knows how to use it. It opened up doors for whole new races and gave great new depth to some older ones. And since its core is just a relatively simple rules mod, it should be easy enough to adapt it for a different set of rules. This has already been done (unofficially) for D&D 3rd Ed., and I ran a game a couple years ago that spent a couple sessions toying with that. Or more specifically, this:

The Dragonfly-class spelljammer my group hired from some Githyanki pirates in Sigil to rescue a party member who'd swapped bodies with a time traveller from the Illithid homeworld in the distant past. I thought we'd better start simple.

D&D Next is the public playtest of what is due to become 5th edition, and my group have been taking part in it. I like it so far, it's simple and streamlined and doesn't wank over combat so much like 4th ed. did. But I'd like to see how well it works beyond the standard Tolkienesque medieval setting the developers have (quite naturally) focused on. So I thought I'd try mashing it up with old Spelljammer for a couple of sessions.

A couple rules changes are necessary, and this is my summary of those. I'm only covering the bare essentials of conversion for now, so that it's playable but I don't waste days or weeks of effort making a perfect fit for rules that aren't set in stone yet anyway. I'll post an actual play report once we've had a chance to try it out, and if anyone else tries this, I'd be interested in your feedback too. I'm working with the 13 August 2012 D&D Next test pack.

Casters & Spelljammer Rating
How fast a ship goes, its ship's rating (SR) is derived from the magical ability of the magic caster sitting in its special spelljammer helm. For the D&D Next rules, assume this works the same way it did in the Spelljammer rules of old, with the following modifications:

1. Add up all the caster levels a character has, both arcane and divine, to calculate SR; ignore any levels in non-caster classes.
2. Using a spelljamming helm counts as using all non-cantrip/orison spell slots for the day until you've had a long  (8 hour) rest. Cantrips and orisons, the sub-level 1 Minor Spells, being both weak and unlimited, are still available to the caster. (I think this should keep things balanced, placing a significant cost on space travel, while allowing mages to retain some usefulness in off-ship encounters without having to schedule a long nap every time they stop.)
3. Characters without any caster levels but with a magicky Specialisation (Acolyte, Magic-User, Necromancer) gain an SR of 1 that cannot be increased by any means, while operating within a crystal sphere. They are unable to spelljam in the Phlogiston at all. Characters with one or more caster levels gain no SR benefit for having these specialisations.

Ship Vital Stats
Some of the core ship stats can go unchanged, others need rejiggling, as follows:

Built By / Used Primarily By: Stays the same, though obviously a lot of races aren't available for Next yet.

Tonnage: Stays the same.

Hull Points: Stays the same, I think. Some seem a little low for such large vessels, so this will be something to test more thoroughly. (EDIT: There are a few options for calculating to-human-scale HP here listed under 'Ships in Wildspace', but I feel those are overly complicated for a quick conversion like mine, so I'm going to take a wild swing and offer the following crude conversion formula: New HP = Tonnage x Hardness - see 'Saves As', below. This should keep things roughly in line with the revised heavy weapon damages I suggest below, although it might make the duplicated use of Hardness redundant, especially for metal ships. See Edit to 'Saves As'.)

Crew: Stays the same.

Manuevrability Class: Stays the same. I also think it might be appropriate to give ships with an MC 2 or more grades better than an opposing ship Advantage to at least some combat rolls, but I'm not sure what. I'll have to play with this a bit more and see what goes in testing.

Landing - Ground/Water: Stays the same.

Armour Rating: 20 - old AR = new AR.

Saves As:  No equivalent of item saves in Next, and since the 2nd ed. rule this is based on is totally defunct now (and was a lame rule to begin with), I propose borrowing the Hardness rule from 3rd ed. (see PHB table 9-9: Substance Hardness and Hit Points, and look for the best match to your ship's Item Save material type). For those few who missed 3rd ed., Hardness is basically how much damage is ignored per hit by iterms made from different substances. (EDIT: In this case, only use it for saving against non-combat damage, since Hardness is also already built into Hull Points.)

Power Type: Stays the same.

Ship's Rating: Stays the same, plus new caster rules above.

Standard Armament: Stays the same, I guess, except there are no siege weapon rules in Next yet. GMs should improvise. I haven't seen any official siege weapon stats in 3rd or 4th eds, so my best guess is to borrow damage rolls from FantasyCraft's table 4.24: Siege Weapons. This should be at the right scale for individual character damage, but then the standard Hull Points definitely seem too low, even with Hardness added in. (EDIT: Alternatively, there's this table of weapons, specifically for Spelljammer.)

Cargo: Stays the same.

Keel, Beam: Stays the same.

Crew Rating: A slight simplification, there are now only three ratings, Green, Average and Trained, ditching Crack for now. Green crews give a Disadvantage to the ship's Initiative (and any other ship-handling checks the GM thinks appropriate), Average crews have no effect, and Trained crews give Advantage to Initiative (and whatever else the GM likes).

EDIT: You can read about our initial attempt at playtesting these rules here.

In which I say nice things about my friends

Anyone can be your friend. You just need to hang around them long enough.
 - Will McKenzie, The Inbetweeners

I have some fantastic friends. Loyal, smart, funny, interesting, generous, gorgeous, creative, talented and accomplished: They've all got several of those traits, and a surprising number have them all and more. If I could fake modesty, I might wonder aloud how I managed to gather such a fine collection. But even admitting that I'm a pretty fine fellow myself, I also have to admit that I'm still pretty damn lucky.

My ability to make new friends is about as non-existent as my ability to get laid on purpose, in that I have no idea how it works in practise and can't initiate it on my own. Fortunately, it's much easier to make friends by osmosis and I've met lots of great people without ever setting out to, and even being distant and guarded at first. And once someone's been officially filed in the 'Friend' category of my brain, I have trouble ever thinking of them as anything less, perhaps because I have a bit of a twisted, optimistic, cartoon understanding of how friendship should work, with no sane reason ever enough to want to permanently give up on them.

Reality's gradually taught me that things might sometimes be otherwise. The least unsettling is that sometimes people just grow apart. That's not so bad; I can still have fond thoughts of someone and wish them all the best even if they're far away and we haven't had anything in common since childhood or whenever. David Mitchell has a slightly extreme but more or less valid perspective on this:



But then there are occasionally people who decide they no longer want anything to do with you ever again. I think "forsake" is the right verb for that action. It's taken me decades to get used to the fact that some people don't assume the inherent permanence of friendship that I do. Sure, I have and/or cause fights with people, sometimes very serious fights. But nobody's perfect, especially me, and I can't accept that inevitable, healthy conflict over specific issues voids the value of the good times and the general nice feelings we share. Apparently, there are people who... I don't know. Can't drop a grudge? Aren't willing to risk any conflict? Weren't even invested in the friendship in the first place? I don't know.

One other twist is that I think I might be unusually bad at judging how much to invest in active friendships. Sometimes I lean towards Cable Guyian over-enthusiasm, sometimes I worry unreasonably that my very existence might be too much of a bother to burden someone with, and sometimes I'm just negligent, for various reasons. I suppose everyone strays into those things, especially the over- and under-enthusiasm bits. I just feel, in a very subjective, evidence-free, anecdotal sort of way that I'm extra bad about this. (Huh. Writing it out like this, maybe I'm too harsh on myself. Typical stupid me!) Seriously though, I do sometimes wish people would spell out exactly what my friendly duties are. And I guess I could let people know what I want in more specific terms; let me begin by saying I miss getting thoroughly drunk with fun people and that I lament the so-called "grown-up" turn a lot of my social circle has taken recently. But that's maybe a topic for a later post, if not direct personal communication with the relevant people.

The advent of online friendship is probably also worth writing about, since future generations will probably just take it for granted. It used to be that you had to physically bump meat with people before becoming friends with them, except for the odd and little-respected pen pal hobby. Then, in the early years of the onlineyverse, you could meet interesting foreign people from all over, but probably only if you already had something in common, and if either of you drifted away from the sites you both used (forums, mainly), the odds of keeping in touch plummeted. The main advantage of social networking sites, when they were finally developed into useful and distinct things, is that they gave us somewhere to keep track of all these distant, disembodied people, even when we change specialised online habits and hobbies and hobbits.

I've always been slightly taken aback when I notice that a new and unknown person has started showing signs of becoming a friend. But it's even odder to me when it happens online now, because it's so much more sudden and blatant: "Bob has sent you a friend request." Really? Who the fuck is Bob? Friends are nice, but aren't you supposed to at least know someone before becoming friends? But of course, the old offliney words don't really fit properly, as we never had a word for the act of hanging around someone who seems vaguely interesting, in the hope that mere association will develop into friendship. But my initial surprise aside, I've met some fantastic people online like this. Or rather, they've met me, as I'm still no good at initiating things. But it is easier after that, since friendship is not fundamentally about any of your meat lumps except for the one in your skull, and that's all that shows online. (And I have some lovely skull-meat.)

On review, this post seems a wee bit sterile to me, since I've intentionally left it free of specific examples. I have a million friend-related memories I could have thrown in here, from the distant, fuzzy half-memories of Golliwog Nursery School, through the eternity of subsequent academic settings, to the strange vivid hours rolling polyhedrons for thrills, in a million fictional places in games, on screen and in our imaginations, and ultimately always the best memories that are just of happy thoughts people have stashed in nondescript corners of my mind. But if you were there, then you already know what I'm talking about. And if you weren't, then it won't mean enough to you to matter.

In summary, friends good. Let's all be friends and not be not-friends. The practical prerequisites do bear further discussion, though. Also, more beer.

Consilience #57: Me, a trilogy in five episodes

Call that a mohawk? I had one easily 30cm high,
without needing performance-enhancing gel!

I'm audible for the fifth time. I've heard several sources recommending that the way to make a good podcast is to record five full episodes and then throw them all out, before starting to record any intended for public consumption. So I guess I'm now officially qualified to cast pod in a reasonably un-shit way. Disregard anything I say in this Consilience and all the ones I was in before it, and I'll be super awesomely good in the next one (presumably #63ish, judging by emerging patterns).

As always, Owen and the Meadons were good fun, and I got to meet young Carl too, who seems to be smaller than the average human. I may have to consider getting him stilts for his birthday, in about 10 months' time. It was a little odd not being the one to bring the astronomy/astronautics stories for a change, with the landing of Curiosity being an obvious headliner and the Brahe history segment also out of my hands. I intentionally avoided space stuff to compensate.

Also, travel anecdote: On the way home, I ended up parallel to a high-speed police chase, with a cop car (peculiarly without lights or sirens going) chasing a small, white car, which had reversed out at speed onto the main road in front of me, kicking up dirt from the pavement as it launched off it, then swinging 90 degrees and zooming off, with the cops on its tail. Oddly, a block later I passed a second cop driving serenely in the opposite direction, clearly not interested in participating in any chases, perhaps not even aware of it.

You can find the file and the show notes for #57 here:
 http://consiliencecast.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/episode-57-martian-robots-cellphone-idiots-and-dinosaur-double-whammy/

Podcasts Yews May Enjoy

If there's one thing that's kept my brain from turning to mush since I left varsity, it's podcasts. I was last a full-time student in 2006, and it was sometime in 2007 that my good friend Damon discovered podcasts and started sharing them with me, manually, on a little 256MB memory stick, since the internet back then was like a post-apocalyptic world several generations after the apocalyptic event; it had developed some good places offering good things, but getting between them was still awkward. (This cumbersome analogy sponsored by my dread of how bad Mad Max 4 will be.)

I couldn't tell you Damon's exact podcast genesis, he may not have given things to me in the order that he discovered them. But I do know that the first two podcasts I ever heard are still my favourite two today. They are The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe and The Bugle.

The Skeptic's Guide (or SGU) wasn't the very first skeptical podcast, but it was an early one and it's grown into the absolute, objectively best source of science and skepticism news and opinion that can be poured directly into your ears. The three Novella brothers are all wonderful humans, all very different from each other, but all so well-informed and articulate and fun. Rebecca Watson is equally awesome (if I had been told she was their sister, Rebecca Novella, I wouldn't have been surprised in the least) and she's certainly served her initially intended function of making the show suitable for all genders. Evan Bernstein is less exciting to me, but he's not actually a negative element and I'd be sad (if only due to sentiment) to see him go. And if you go back far enough in the archives, you'll find episodes that include the late Perry DeAngelis, who was a much more aggressive sort of fun. They do an annual meeting and live recording of the show in his name now.

The whole show is expertly made (and it should be, with over 360 episodes recorded so far) and they've found a perfect balance between serious education and reporting, and light fun and silliness. If you don't love listening to the SGU, then I have to reject your friendship and gifts of dangerous animals.

The Bugle ("Audio newspaper for a visual world"; "Fuck you, Chris!") gives me similar emotions and memories, but looked at objectively, it doesn't have much in common with the SGU. The Bugle is a British news-mocking show, similar to the Daily Show or the Colbert Report, but more British. Its two hosts, Andy Zaltzmann and John Oliver, are first and foremost stand-up comedians, though far better suited, I think, to the podcast medium. John Oliver (which was coincidentally the legal name of my matric maths teacher, though he went by his middle name of Tom instead, which in turn was the name of The Bugle's first and most Scottish producer) is also a regular on the Daily Show and carries over a lot of that show's sarcastic, ridiculing style to The Bugle. Andy, on the other hand, is unique. I've never seen anyone who can so effortlessly make up the biggest possible lies, except perhaps the insane Spike Milligan, and his record-breaking puns are masterpieces. I can't easily compare Andy to any other comedian.

The net result is like having the Goons (or the Pythons, minus visuals) present the news to you through performance art. And I don't just mean "funny," because then I could have said it was like having any old comedian read you the news. I mean it's intelligent and insightful AND funny. And being smart makes it even funnier. Their creative numbering system means they're officially on episode 203 now, and yet I have 254 episodes of theirs in my collection.

But apart from those two, there's not much correlation between when I first heard a podcast and how much I like it. Consilience, for example, is still relatively new and yet I can definitely list it in my top 3, and not just because they let me talk about spaceships. They copied the basic model of the SGU, and I think that's worked well. It's not as professional and refined yet, but it's still good to have more of the same, but covering (usually) different topics. The hosts have been a bit varied recently, due to Meadon-spawning season, but the core trio of the Meadons and Owen Swart works well. I feel like I'm the weakest among the guest hosts so far, but at least I don't have Danny Kopping's fucking painful sense of humour. One decision the Consilientists made that distinguishes them from the SGU, and which I approve of, is to be completely open and natural about "naughty" words, primarily fuck. Think of it as a step in the same direction as Penn & Teller: Bullshit. It's the only SGU policy that really annoys me.

Let me also briefly mention Skeptoid and Planetary Radio.

Skeptoid is another old-ish skeptical podcast, but with a very different model. Instead of a longer news and interviews show, its lone host, Brian Dunning, just does quick (5-10 minute) crash-examinations of the evidence surrounding a single claim or phenomenon. It's very useful for getting the basics in a rush, which makes it useful for sharing with random people when you're discussing that specific thing with them, but it's not as "filling" as the longer shows and I find something a little bit annoying about Dunning's manner of speech.

Planetary Radio is the official podcast of the Planetary Society, established by Carl Sagan & friends, and currently headed by Bill Nye, who regularly appears in the podcast. You should now already be completely sold on it. It's very professional and a bit more formal than the SGU, but light-hearted enough, and has probably the most highly-degreed set of hosts, with multiple PhD's and I think only the main host, Mat Kaplan, having less than a master's degree. Unfortunately, I have to admit that astronomy just isn't always the most exciting topic for a purely audio show, and it's not always easy to be as engrossed by it as these excellent, hard-working hosts deserve.