R34 explained · 10:06pm Mar 6th, 2015
A lot of comments and posts on fimfiction use the term 'R34' without explaining what it is. I just received an email titled "R34: what is it?" from the National Institute on Aging. It links to a blog post by Ron Hohanski, Deputy Director of the Division of Aging Biology, which explains everything about R34.
Ron Kohanski
(not Kurt Vonnegut)
R34: What is it?
There are a handful of run-of-the-mill 'R' grants offered by the NIH that are familiar to most investigators: everyone knows the R01. Ever heard of the R34? Not one of those that most people know.
The R34 is a "planning grant."
What do you plan in an R34?
You plan a clinical trial, or you plan a research project. The R34 is now a versatile grant mechanism that could be used for planning of basic research projects, complex epidemiologic studies, in addition to its original purpose of planning clinical trials.
Where can I get more information about the nuts and bolts of planning grants?
Read more from about the NIH R34 Planning Grant Program. NIAID also has some great resources on planning grant application preparation, though their process may be slightly different than NIA's.
One final tip: It's especially important to be sure you speak with the Program Officer before applying. (You can find the right contact person in the Scientific/Research Contact(s) section of the Funding Opportunity Announcement.) Because planning grants are less common, you will want their input. We can't tell you the likelihood of getting funded, how many other applications or inquiries are made, or who is your competition--but we can offer suggestions about responding to the announcement.
For more information on R34, see the link to the full blog post. Also, let me know if you're interested in participating in an R34 clinical trial.
images1.tickld.com/live/633486.jpg
Some people just don't know what they're really saying.
Wait, that's what it meant?!
But grant funding is an important thing. I can't believe I was avoiding R34 this whole time!
*Enables Mature fics*
So that is why "R34" fics are rated mature. Teenagers have no business messing with grant planning after all.
Oh dear.
Lost it right about there.
And this Writeoff.me is the 34th. I sense a theme...
This pleases me.
airshipsonline.com/airships/r34/images/R34Shed.jpg
I win.
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I am now imagining a bit of Terry Gilliam animation featuring that blimp being tugged out of and put back in its hangar on endless loop.
2855547 No NSFW content in blogs!
fimfiction-static.net/images/story_images/6608_r.jpg
2855547
Holy shit.
2855479
This actually explains a lot about the current thread.
I would love to see their reaction to the sudden uptick in page views from FimFic...
2855818 Who are we kidding? With the high quality of people who read Fimfiction, we probably have more than one who works there.
2856164 I was thinking the same thing. The graveyard tech probably has several FF accounts and a dedicated network drive filled with pony, using the network ops monitoring wall as a big-screen.
They're probably watching us... right... now.
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Excuse me but my proposals are perfectly fine, thanks.
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That airship there has an interesting history: it's British, and made the first aerial round trip over the Atlantic as well as the first east-to-west crossing, in 1919 (America had just barely beaten them out for first aerial Atlantic crossing earlier that year).
Here's a photo of R34 moored in Long Island New York after her first crossing:
blimpinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/The-R34-arrives-in-Long-Island-in-the-United-States-after-crossing-the-Atlantic-in-1919.jpg
Can you imagine being, say, nine years old, and your parents taking you to see that sight? I expect you'd remember it many years later--say, when you were fifty-nine years old, and men landed on the Moon.
2856932 I wonder if airships are currently more cost-efficient than airplanes. The fuel costs would be very low, I'd think. I wonder when we'll be able to produce blimps strong enough to contain a vacuum. A submarine hull is more than strong enough to contain a vacuum, but is of course very heavy.
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I'm very fond of lighter-than-air travel (so thanks, 2856932!). As I understand it, the problems facing airship travel include:
• We never figured out a better way to moor them to the earth than having a whole bunch of guys pull them down with ropes, so they need large crews.
• Even so, we don't have the infrastructure ready to go (the spire on the Empire State Building was originally intended for zeppelin mooring, which is cool, but I doubt you could just fly up to it today). We'd need even more investment if we want to work around the crew problem with some sort of new docking technology.
• Helium is impractical; it might be possible to engineer a safe hydrogen airship (the Hindenburg's sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, flew a million miles safely), but it's not feasible to do that and overcome hydrogen's fairly justified image problem. Helium is plenty buoyant enough -- both Graf and Hindenburg were originally designed for helium -- but it's non-renewable and in short supply; our reserves are predicted to run out soon even without an airship industry, and it's only affordable because of government subsidies.
(Speaking of government involvement in the helium supply: the reason the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin weren't filled with helium is that essentially all the helium in Earth's crust is in a few mines in Texas and the surrounding states. Even in the mid-30s, the US government wasn't interested in dedicated American resources to anything with a giant swastika on the tailfin.)
• They're not as much safer than airplanes as you would want; even helium airships had a tendency to crash during storms. All that surface area doesn't deal with heavy weather well, and engineering them to either survive it or fly above it adds to the expense.
• Between all of the above, people dismiss them as more dangerous or impractical than they are.
• And what is probably the basic problem: they can haul a lot fast for cheap, but not as fast as airplanes and not as cheap or as much as ships. There's just not space in the market.
That said, I do think airships could serve a role (although, again, I'm biased). They need less fuel than airplanes, and probably that's going to matter a lot more in the coming decades. They're also generally cheaper once they're up and running -- as long as you can get helium, the cost per pound of freight per mile is low. I'm unusual for wanting them for passenger use, but they could, for example, haul freight over land with insufficient rail access. I suspect if you could just snap your fingers and have all the initial investment done -- a working design, good places to land, etc. -- running the fleet would be profitable until the helium ran out.
One proposal that's gotten some attention is lifting-body "hybrid" airships that don't actually need to be lighter than air -- they're shaped to provide lift, so they have to keep moving like an airplane, but they're still buoyant enough to get the efficiency bonuses of airships. Obviously this overcomes the mooring problem. John McPhee wrote a book on this design in the 70s called The Deltoid Pumpkinseed, but I haven't had the pleasure of reading it.
As for your vacuum-hull idea: that's the justification for airships in retro-future SF novel The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. The conceit behind the title is that nanotech has made diamond incredibly cheap -- all you need to synthesize it is carbon and the nanoassemblers that every home has -- so airships with stiff diamond vacuum hulls are incredibly cheap. (Disclaimer: it's been a while since I've read it and I don't have a sense for how dense diamond is, so the airships might have actually been some other nanotech-based material.) At one point it's mentioned that nanotech allows for materials so thin and strong that even trash is often lighter than air, and the airships regularly have to endure the flying equivalent of the Pacific garbage patch.
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I tell this story a lot. I guess once more won't hurt:
My grandfather lived in Chicago in the 1920's when the airship Graf Zeppelin came through on its round-the-world tour.
It flew right down State Street in the middle of a weekday, and my grandfather says everything stopped--pedestrians, cars, trucks, busses, trains on the El, everything--and everyone looked up.
You know in the movies where the giant alien spaceship appears over the city and all the humans can do is stare, dumbstruck, as the enormous shadow falls across them? Yeah. That.
And he says the strangest thing about it was how quiet it was.
Oh yeah this. Yeah, any vacuum vessel large enough and rigid enough to float through the air on the displacement effect would be--too heavy to float. Stephenson gets around this with his nanobalonium, there, but he neglects a reason why even that wouldn't work:
Air in its natural state on Earth varies widely in density, far more so than water, and decreases drastically in density with altitude above the earth. This variation in air density is of far greater concern for airships than variation in water density is for regular waterborne ships (though even there the problem is not negligible*).
So, basically, a magical rigid vacuum vessel that could float on air at sea level, wouldn't naturally rise much above that: the volume of air it displaced to make it float at sea level wouldn't be big enough to make it float on the thinner air at higher altitudes (and you can't just make it bigger--it's rigid, remember?). And any other such vessel that would float at any other altitude wouldn't be able to rise above that level either, unless of course you used propulsion and aerodynamic effects as in a hybrid airship. In which case, why not just use your magical diamond fabric to make a straight-up airplane?
"...magical...diamond...fabric? SQUEEEEEEE!!!...."
images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120206160608/mlp/images/7/74/Rarity_ideea_S1E14.png
Lighter-than-air craft get around this problem by simply using a flexible gasbag that expands with altitude. Greater volume = greater displacement, which compensates for thinner air (In dirigibles, the gasbags are inside the rigid airframe, or envelope, and can expand or contract independently of it). This is why high altitude balloons look so thin and starveling when they're first launched-- the balloon has to have room for the gas inside to expand as the balloon rises:
The Stratos ballon you remember from high school: The Stratos that just sent you a Facebook friend request:
i630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/Leskid/beforeandafter_zpsecb4859d.jpg
Bottom line: airships are the second best way of doing everything except looking awesome.
* That's Plimsoll's line and he's sticking to it.
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No; vacuum is always lighter than any atmosphere around it.
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A conventional ship is of fixed volume. When you put a load of timber in her, she will sink lower in the water until equilibrium is reached. However, for a fixed load, when the ship passes to water of lower density--say from salt water to fresh, in transiting the St. Lawrence Seaway--she rides lower in the water. That is, she sinks until equilibrium is again reached.
This will also happen even if you have no timber, or anything at all, in her hold. Air is always lighter than wood, and both float on water, but the displacement effect still works the same way.
Unless of course she's a witch...
EDIT: aha! We're not factoring in the weight of the vessel holding the vacuum. That is nonzero, and even balonium is always heavier than air.
Unless of course it's upsydaisyum...
cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/222269.jpg
s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/18/1e/88/181e8829f93bfd5f9c8b805262ac9423.jpg 2858167 Airship hulls were ribbed with steel, so I doubt they expanded noticeably.
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Ribbed with duraluminum, actually (early aircraft aluminum) and that's not the gasbag, remember: just the envelope:
stephenbiesty.co.uk/jpegs/bigAirshipItalia.jpg
See how the gasbags are just that--bags of gas held in place by the envelope? Also, see how there's volume at the bottom for them to expand with altitude?
2858230 Huh. I'd always imagined the whole thing was a gasbag.
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That would be a blimp. A dirigible has a rigid envelope, as the name implies. The "R" in British airship designations stood for just that-- Rigid (airship).
(This is me resolutely making single entendres, by the way
)
I was eating while reading this blog and was unsuccessful in swallowing while laughing.