# THE GYROSCOPIC INERTIAL THRUSTER

*UPDATE 14*

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31 August 1997 - Sunday

I've had a rather interesting last ten or so days, having had contact and a day spent with a fairly local fellow Oregonian named JJ. He is a race car builder and driver, though these days he's found fabrication for others to be more rewarding, and doesn't race much these days (an old and wise 23 year old!).

I got to view his proof of concept GIT, a quick and a bit uneven construction, even he admits that. It was hand formed iron rod rings welded into about a 2 to one ratio race, and he used lead shot filled tennis balls as the orbitals.

Like myself and James Hurl's first constructs, his demo model was on it's last legs, and while the thing did show forward movement, the uneven rings tended to pitch the balls out before the motor got up to full speed (a vacuum cleaner motor), and the lead shot had worked his insertion holes open enough to spray us with lead shot as it got up to speed! Lots of fun! Yahoo!

The really exciting thing about JJ's construct is that it's the first (reported to me that is) full contact friction drive GIT, one I began to doubt the validity of, but now that he's proven that version, the simplicity of that model will allow us not so mechanically inclined (and electronics handy) to build working GIT's! Way to go JJ!

He was convinced of the GIT's validity enough to build a rather elegant race of plasma cut steel sheet and assemble the two rings in about a two to one ratio race. He has yet to cast 4 inch solid lead spherical orbitals, but it should be a doozie when he gets it done!

He has a lead smelting setup (along with a bunch of other neat tools like a plasma cutter, I'm jealous!) so Rosalie left us alone for the day to play with molten metal, and we cast my first two attempts of a solid core. While the oxides coated the upper half of the molds and left a ragged top half of the solid orbital cores, and the first mold cracked and had molten lead pouring out the sides of suprisingly tiny lines, it did give me an accurate measure of the volume and shape of lead that I will be casting now in bolted together halves.

The suprisingly heavy, near perfect casting (if you're not too particular on how it looked) of the second casting weighs in at 6 pounds 13 ozs! A helpful but grinning checker at our local Safeway put the dull grey beastie on her scale so I could get something more accurate than putting dents in our bathroom scale.

I figure the half cast and drilled lead assembly should weigh in close to 6 lbs 7 ozs, and close to 13 more ounces of resin and iron cladding will give me orbitals of 7.25 lbs! Heavy for such a small thingie!

With that I can calculate particulars when I get it working, but already some calculations I've done tell me if I get it going over an average orbital rate of 3 orbits per second (rather fast for a 33.5 inch orbital path diameter I have planned, but not impossible with the materials I'm working with), I may in fact have a machine that will lift itself against gravity (outside power source, a LONG extension cord!), which will be a real convincing demo for sure!

I'm taking pictures as I go along, including photos of JJ's constructs, and I hope to get those pictures and additional ones I'm taking as I cast lead and iron filled resin on the site by the middle of September (gotta fill a disposable camera and have it digitized on a payday).

To that end I will be pulling two AVI files from the site to make room (with 90 files on the site now, I'm rather close to my 5 meg limit, and the two biggest byte hogs are my SaucerAd.avi and it will go first.

The rather nice 3D model rendering by James Hurl will probably be replaced as well, hopefully by his next working GIT (real one) in avi format, overdue now for about a week (the folks at his college have been rather unhelpful and wouldn't let him use the industrial radial arm router, so he was going to go it with a jigsaw, last I heard).

So fair warning, if you want copies of those two files, get them now, they will not be available on site in the near future, and unless I can scrub this darn worm from my computer, I won't be mailing ANY active content files from here.

In downloading my site, I noticed all the files had been modified, and the only files I'll send back to the site will be text only, to avoid spreading grief to others.

My browser NOW won't play the animated gifs, the digital beastie is probably using those dll's to do it's dirty work, as I've noticed it moves around, and files that were rewritten in the past are different ones now, but scandisk seems to be one it almost always uses, check the manufacturing date (last modified on) dates on your own system files.

I have pulled 4 floppies full of system files and dll's etcetera that have been re-written and sent them to Symantec, the publishers of Norton's Anti-Virus software for study, and I'm hoping they can give me a lead on killing this monster in my computer, since the thing walks all over both McAfee's AV software and the Norton AV software also has no effect, but then it's probable the infection was not eradicated from the git-go when the software was installed and the "innoculation" proceedure only put a stamp of approval on already rotten files.

One curious thing is that I noticed that Infra-Red drivers were loaded in my system, and I haven't had any IR equipment since the machine was assembled, and one thought of mine that a rather creative use of buffer-stuffing along the lines of what appears to be user input could be one path to system control that, for example locks me out of the Microsoft Exchange and Mail programs (the properties and settings are now unavailable to me, and the darn thing tells me only the system administrator has access to those files, and this from a supposedly flat install with NO passwords used on my machine! Cheeky vermiform!). Fine! I'll use the shareware Eudora mail program for now, and the ability to click on a "mailto:" link will just have to be forgone, and typed in.

I have removed the IR drivers, and they haven't been reinstalled in the system.ini file, but I now have an "extra" mouse that the machine installs over my hollering and carrying on! Nice programming whoever you are out there!

I must admit I will be kinda sorry as I poke you in the face if I ever get to meet you! Talent like yours shouldn't be wasted for this kind of trouble making! I'm hoping the Norton SWAT team can pull out the packet header info on the mailout program, and the FBI will be the first to know after me!

ANYhoo, Things are spooky quiet here, and folks who used to write me on a sometimes daily basis are WAY overdue for a letter to me, but I must admit, I wouldn't want to hug and kiss a deadly diseased aquaintance myself! So all my friends that used to keep my typing speed on the rise, thanks, and I understand. I did lose about 16 letters I didn't get to answer, several first time contacts, and I hope you'll understand I am not ignoring you, I just lost the letters in the battles with the worm (the only way to re-enable my CD rom was to format both drives after what I thought would be a simple re-install of infected files, SURPRISE! No way Jose! The worm punishes me when I try to pluck it out!).

Sheesh, I'm REALLY beginning to talk to the thing, it even left me a note saying please do not delete files! (and the note subsequently has disappeared on my system, but I got a copy of it on the safe-mode DOS file extraction set for the SWAT team), crazy making for sure!

I hope to have some reports soon from three folks who are making utility grade GITs, James Hurl, Sam Smith, and JJ (you know, I never did get his last name, maybe he'll want to be more outgoing with future success!), and my own will be a while in coming, as I tend to be a perfectionist, and I will be simultaneously constructing several variants for testing.

OH! I did get a nice letter from a high school student who was doing an internship at a congressional post, and he will be putting together a pool ball version in California, but the 374 files this month from "nameless.house.gov" can't all have come from him!

A full SIX NASA servers have pulled files this month (a big hello to pinky, renoir, and scooter, fun folks for sure with servers named like that!), a total of 11 .gov servers, and 4 .mil (3 Air Force and one Navy), even 5 Australian government servers have joined in the fun!

A full EIGHTY educational domains have pulled files this month (right on!) that I can identify, and with the 50 thousand files pulled in the first two months, three weeks, adding over 35 thousand files this month, HEY! WE'RE OUTA HERE! The GIT will live for sure now!

At 85 grand out, and the really exciting stuff to come (soon I hope), the magic hundred thousand file mark is soon to be reached, I think I'll celebrate that day in the future as I look back toward earth from my rather mobile home in the asteroid belt!

8:45 pm Sunday night - 31 August 1997 - DavidC - an ominously quiet night on the net.

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