I’m not much of a comic book guy. Still, I’ve found the Marvel movies entertaining of late, and was looking forward to tonights “Agents of SHIELD” debut. While I can accept normal guys transforming into one-ton unstoppable green ragemonsters, and fusion powerplants embedded in someones chest, and flying cars and flying aircraft carriers, you know what I can’t accept? Truly bad design.

It appears that Our Heroes will get around by hopping a ride on a C-17 Globemaster. This being a comic book-based series, it’s understandable that the producers wanted to jazz up the configuration some. So they added another set of wings to the rear fuselage, and hung another set of turbofans under that, for a total of six. Adding extra lifting area and more engines… not a totally bad idea, though the placement of the extra wings was odd and would seem to present some stability issues. But what was *really* bad was the placement of the second set of engines: almost directly behind the inboard engines. The inboard engines exhaust straight into the inlets of the new engines. This is not just bad, it’s freakin’ *tragic.* It would waste the thrust of the forward inboard engines, would ruin the performance of the aft engines (by feeding them high-velocity, low oxygen, high CO2&water vapor air), and likely present serious structural problems.

Feh. It’s like they didn’t even have an aerospace engineer on staff.