OK, so I wrote about the “Have Sting” orbital railgun, and produced some provisional diagrams of it, publishing them in US Space Projects #3. A blog article was written for War Is Boring discussing “Have Sting,” based in no small part on my diagrams. OK, so far so good. But then other blogs start writing about Have Sting, and an error is introduced.
Whenever a blog post links to my blog, a “pingback notification” is sent to my blog dashboard. I’ve just glanced at these, haven’t given them much thought. For the most part they seem to be just parroting the verbiage from the War is Boring piece. But with one change: “Have Sting” has become “Have Sling.” A “T” became an “L.”
Examples:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219718-exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built
In September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General Electric design for a gigantic orbital railgun.” Have Sling was never built, of course.
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
September, the Aerospace Project Reviews Blog published some fascinating diagrams depicting “Have Sling,” which aerospace historian Scott Lowther described as “[a] General …
http://www.usaspeaks.com/news/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
http://www.viralnewstrend.com/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
And a bunch more, all seemingly the same post over and over.
And if you Google “have sling” and some other terms, some seriously wacky stuff appears, which I’m guessing is the result of some weird auto-translation:
http://www.bbtechnonews.com/index.php/2015/12/19/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
In September, the Aerospace Task Reviews Blog site released some remarkable layouts portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther
“Aerospace Task Reviews?”
And:
http://journalfocus.com/2015/12/exploring-the-death-star-space-gun-america-never-built/
Exploring the ‘Fatality Celebrity’ space gun America never built
UNITED STATE protection coordinators did at one time think about constructing a huge Fatality Star-like gun in space as component of the “Celebrity Wars” rocket protection program, as Warisboring’s Steve Weintz advised us this week in the middle of the hullaballoo of the position of The Pressure Awakens.
In September, the Aerospace Job Reviews Blog site released some interesting representations portraying “Have Sling,” which aerospace chronicler Scott Lowther…
… the styles explain a space tool the dimension of the International Space Terminal, each Lowther.
Buh?
So now when people try to research orbital railguns, there’s every chance that they will be presented with the fallacious designation “Have Sling.”
I just did a Google search on “railgun” and “have sling.” It spat back 741 results. “Railgun and “Have Sting” only produced 321 results. The lie traveled around the world while the truth was still putting on its boots.
Ahhh. I love the intertubes!
You still quite early in time for the best and worst of “The Myth of Flying”. A few years from now there will be solid evidence on how Kubrick and Clarke helped US government faking the Moon landings (and how they even made some money out of it). A hundred years from now we will discover that Korolev died in the Gulag and von Braun was accidentally shot by a GI while surrendering, consequently all rocket stuff was made up. Two hundred years from now we find that Roswell was indeed a masonic portal which sent the Holy Grail (and Indiana Jones) to another dimension, so no flying here, even for aliens and saucers. And 500 years from now we will be sure that all was fake, even Wright brothers and Zeppelin’s balloons, all product of wishful thinking and world conspiracies. In fact the Earth is flat and the skies belong to birds and angels…
I gave up doing “whack-a-mole” on these kind of errors, like the F2H-1 was a foot shorter than the F2H-2 (the XF2D-1 was a foot shorter than the F2H-1, which was the same length as the F2H-2).
You mean the moon landings were real..?…
This is granted for real. Goebbels said “a lie repeated 1,000 times becomes a truth”
You know just relax get a cup o’ tea and wait for the error to be set in stone i.e. put up on Wikipedia. After all if there are soooo many sites calling it that (and as per Wikipedia’s rules of *only* accepting secondary sources, never ever, under no circumstances primary ones) it has to be the ‘real’ truth, now isn’t it 😉
Mind my words – get some popcorn and wait for it to happen …