All but the first of those are precursor remixes.

I'm going to be pedantic again and point out that Ogg is a container format and that Vorbis is the codec. You can stick a variety of media in an Ogg fle, although Vorbis audio is the most common. You probably knew that.

I am moderately confident that I never knew that.

Ok, this isn't so simple, but it's something I can't figure out.

I'm working on a sci-fi book, hopefully to get published one day. I'll spare everyone the details, but the main setting is aboard a military ship. It's a hard sci-fi series, so all artificial gravity is the result of the outer hull of the ship spinning around a central axis. Only the fore and aft of the ship aren't spinning, and thus have no artificial gravity. The problem I have is that the shuttles are located on the outer skin of the ship, ie: on the 'lowest deck' of the areas with gravity, with their bottoms facing 'out', and the hangar doors 'beneath' them. Obviously the captain won't stop the hull from spinning every time they launch, it would take far too much time and energy, and it's too impractical for the shuttles to be located in the zero-G sections of the ship, because it would make loading tanks and heavy vehicles into them a nightmare.

So the question is; what would be the safest way to maneuver the shuttles out of the launch bays and counteract the spin they were imparted with so they can begin descent towards a planet?

Just drop them. They will shoot down and slightly to the side, which is useful if your drop is hot and you need to hit dirt fast. Similarly, vehicals, aircraft, supplies and troops can be deployed in the same manner, just kick them out of the loading bay with a reentry shield and some manner of slowing their decent so they don't pancake and you're good. Loading them back up again on the other hand is a slightly more difficult proposition.....

Slotted paneling in the sides that they can attach themselves to? Sort of an indentation in the main ship they can settle in that acts as a miniature dock, I guess. Protective shielding slides into place externally to keep them from being damaged in transit. To launch, all they have to do is open the shielding up and detach from the main hull entirely. It's a bit different from launching out of an actual bay, but it could conceivably work for what you want.

Here's an example of a system that was used in Babylon 5. The station that they're launching from is a large (five mile length) spinning station.

Thanks guys! I'm a bit of a visual learner though, so I drew a couple of sketches to see if they made sense. Well they do to me, but I'd like a quick second opinion.

Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
Step 5

Thanks again!

That'll work. I especialy like how you have the dropships facing the direction of rotation, rather then the ships bow. That will allow you to use a trapeze to capture returning ships much easier. I may have to steal that.

Oh, this is what I mean by trapeze:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8a8_1323127984

Some other practical considerations: the sensation of "gravity" imparted by a person's inertia in spinning outer hull will decrease the closer you get to the axis of rotation. So if the inhabitants are able to move closer or further away from the center inside the mothership, they will experience less "gravity."

While they are moving towards or away from the axis, they'll also experience the Coriolis effect. This will result in their feeling a force pushing them towards or away from the direction of spin, and in humans can cause dizziness and nausea due its effect on the inner ear. An angular velocity of 2 RPM or less ought to be slow enough to eliminate adverse effects, but this means that the outer hull's radius will need to be large enough so that its velocity will be sufficient to provide the needed gravitational effect. According to the handy calculator I found here, a radius of about 224 meters would provide 1 G at 2 RPM. Increasing the radius would allow you to produce the same Gs at slower rotational velocities.

There's also the question of how the outer hull's motion is achieved; whatever drives the rotation of the outer hull will have an equal and opposite reaction on the rest of the ship, resulting in a counter-rotation that must be overcome in some fashion. Finally, you have to consider how the non-rotating part of the ship is coupled to the rotating part, and how crew would move between them. The Nautilus-X proposes to have a centrifuge; perhaps there's info on that which may be of use.

Thanks for the info, AT.

Well, the ship is about a mile and a half long and roughly cylindrical, I don't have an accurate fix on the radius yet, but I'll be sure to take Coriolis and radius measurements into account.

To counter the equal and opposite force acting on the ship from the hull rotating, I decided to have one portion rotate clockwise, and the other rotate counterclockwise. This should cancel out the other side's counter-rotational force (or tear the ship in half, I'm not a huge physics buff so let me know if this is a stupid idea). However this does mean that those two halves of the vessel are cut off from one another, (There can't be a set passage between the one side that's spinning to the left, and another spinning to the right) and thus cargo/vehicles can't be easily transferred from one half of the ship to the other. Any travel between the two different sections has to be done through the Zero-G corridor that runs most of the length of the ship. (That'll frequently come up as a plot point, as a matter of fact)

As for how the crew enters this corridor, well rest assured I have thought of how that would proceed and the design and engineering challenges, however it would take an extremely long time to explain. Also, seeing as it's... 2:45 AM here (Damn you Insomnia!) it'd probably just come off as confusing. Aw, heck, I'll give it a shot. The basic gist is that there'd only be specific access points to the corridor, like climbing up a narrow ladder through a hatch into the corridor, and the rest of the interface between the hull and inner corridor would be a complex series of support struts and bearings. Initial thrust would be provided by small booster engines on the exterior, which can also be used to stop the rotation and/or maintain the correct speed due to friction slowly bleeding off some of the velocity. Hope that makes sense, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Okay, music experts, here's a question for you: In Billy Joel's "River of Dreams," at around the 3:02 mark, a rather harsh-sounding voice starts repeating the same 4 syllables over and over in the background. It starts in the right ear, and after four repetitions it switches to the left ear. After that, it's harder to hear because the rest of the composition becomes comparatively louder, but it's still there all the way until the song fades out. What the heck is it saying, and why?

What I can tell, they are saying, "I go walkin' in the, in the middle of..."

I found a karaoke version that has those vocals in the background. Though it is still pretty hard to hear. But there's no other lyrics on top of them.

As for meaning...

No, not those folks. The ones singing "I go walkin' in the, in the middle of..." have been doing that for most of the song. There's another voice behind them that only shows up at the 3:02 mark.

I know the voice you're talking about. It's the one kind of screaming, right? I can't quite make it out.

Maybe you can help me make out what the hell the screaming thing is in The Hazards of Love 1 (the screaming voice is at 4:15).