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The Amazing F-111

 aircraft, art, history, Patreon  8 Responses »
Jun 122016
 

In May, 1968, Popular Science ran an article about the then-current F-111. The article, illustrated with a painting by Bob McCall, described both the USAF and USN versions in generally glowing terms, but also points out the problems (and corrects surmises that the Navy might ditch theirs, and build a whole new plane). I’ve scanned in the article and posted it up at Dropbox for $4 and up APR Patreon patrons. There is a two-page spread of the McCall painting; I’ve stitched it back together and tried to patch it up. The full-rez version of that is included as well. For patrons, it’s in the 2016-06 APR Extras folder.

If interested, check out the APR Patreon.

centerfold

 

 Posted by at 9:00 pm

Mayhem averted?

 Crazy, dumbassery, Hmm..., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  9 Responses »
Jun 122016
 

KINDA INTERESTING UPDATE:

Ahem:

Greeson said that Howell harbored no ill will toward gays or lesbians and added that Howell was bisexual.

And from last year…

Two of them referred to an incident earlier in the day in which Howell had pointed his gun at his boyfriend.

So, it seems the overly armed feller from Indiana wasn’t likely going to the LA Gay Pride Parade to blow the place up. He was going there for… well, some other purpose. And he just happened to be hauling his guns and explosives along with him, because he’s apparently none too bright.

—————

After events earlier today in Orlando, police in Santa Monica, CA, arrested *another* guy *apparently* bent on causing havoc at a “Pride Parade” in Los Angeles. This guy, one James Howell,  was from Indiana and had an “arsenal” of guns and a bucket of explosives, and apparently told the police that he wanted to “harm” the event.

You don’t often hear about “buckets” of explosives, but in this case it’s Tannerite. To me this seems a dubious choice for bomb making purposes… it’s a simple mix of aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate, used for exploding targets on a gun range. It’s not a particularly impressive explosive, and setting it off is a chore. Set fire to it? It doesn’t go off. Zap it with electricity? Nada. Whack it with a hammer? Snore. To get it to go off you have to hit it with a relatively powerful supersonic shock, such as you’d get with a rifle round. A pistol round probably won’t do it.

Since it’s a binary explosive, it’s brisance (shattering force) is not particularly good, but it’s heaving force is pretty good. As such it can be used to Blow Stuff Up Good if you use enough of it and shoot it with a high power rifle. Still, to make it really effective as a bomb you’d want to make a pipe bomb of it… which is a problem, since you have to actually shoot it. The pipe *might* play hell with the bullets ability to set off the Tannerite.

This seems like sloppy bomb making. Couple this with the fact that “James Howell” is a perfectly bland euro- American name, this doesn’t seem to indicate that this incident was ISIS inspired. If the bomber-to-be really was intending to set off a bomb  and *isn’t* a Muslim, then things could get politically pretty interesting.

 Posted by at 3:50 pm

Terrorist attack in Orlando

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Jun 122016
 

Twenty are dead after someone – identity as yet undivulged – opened fire in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The FBI is investigating this as terrorism, which certainly seems reasonable. So, get ready for your new media obsession for the next week or three, at least until Trump opens his yap and says something stupid.

About 20 people dead, more than 40 taken to hospital after shooting at downtown Orlando nightclub

So, since there is as yet no data on the shooter, speculation will of course run rampant. The top four, as it seems to me:

  1. Run of the mill whackjob
  2. Some whackjob with a problem with the club (former employee) or someone there (former boyfriend)
  3. Religious whackjob, tweaked about teh gheys. Note: reports are the terrorist *may* have been wearing a bomb vest, *may* have been strapping bombs to hostages. I leave it to you to decide if that sounds like any religion in particular.
  4. Conspiracy Theory Wildcard: Umm… lessee. Ah, got it. The gunman was brainwashed by Obama to shoot up a Protected Class in order to gin up outrage among the electorate to help ram through new gun control measures and/or divert attention away from Hillarys upcoming indictment

UPDATE: The Daily Fail is already reasonably certain of the motive…

UPDATE 2: And we have a winner. Multiple news outlets including CNN are ID’ing the terrorist as one “Omar Saddiqui Mateen” from Port St. Lucie, Florida, American born to Afghani parents.

UPDATE 3: Latest number I’ve heard is 59 dead, confirmed as 50 or more. Worst mass shooting in the US since at least the 19th century.

UPDATE 4: Omar pledged his loyalty to Islamic State on a call to 911 during the shootout.

 Posted by at 5:52 am

Transonic Transport

 aircraft, art, history, projects  3 Responses »
Jun 112016
 

An early Boeing concept for the 767. This was designed for cruise at high subsonic speeds; the unusual “wasp-waisted” fuselage was to give the configuration the area ruling needed for low-drag transonic flight. This concept, studied by Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed, NASA, Bell and others, arose after the spike in oil prices in the early 1970’s and the demise of the SST program. The goal was to create a jetliner that could fly just as fast as possible while still being economical with fuel. But production costs of the curvy fuselage and wings doomed the effort.

This scan is from a print currently on ebay.

m05857b

 Posted by at 5:20 pm

Minuteman on the go?

 awesomeness, history, Hmm..., nukes, rockets, Utah  3 Responses »
Jun 112016
 

I drove past this truck yesterday, north of Brigham City. To me it sure looks like an old Minuteman ICBM transporter truck; if so, it almost certainly wasn’t actually transporting an ICBM, or I’ve expected more of an escort.

truck2 truck1

Screenshots from my craptacular $35 dashcam.

A bit of googling finds that that’s almost certainly what it was…

Minuteman III ICBM Transporter Erector: My former office on 32 wheels

What you don’t want to do with one of these things:

Missile accident blamed on poor training

Whoops.

Now, a thought occurs to me. I suspect that these transporters just aren’t used as much as they once were. I suspect most of them have been recycled. But if – *if*, mind you – you had excess money *and* you were able to get one of these surplus… imagine what an *awesome* RV you could make out of it. Heck, design it to keep the “erector” function, with necessary amenities either properly locked down or able to rotate so that it’s functional either horizontal or vertical. And way up front, that’s where you’d put your combination bedroom/observatory, complete with telescope.

 Posted by at 5:00 pm

Rail-launched ME 163

 aircraft, history, Hmm..., rockets, youtube  5 Responses »
Jun 102016
 

This one is new to me… apparently the Germans used standard railway tracks and RATO-bottle-boosted sleds to launch replica Messerschmitt Me 163’s, with variable success. Given the fuel-hoggishness of the rocket plane, anything that would get them up to speed and into the air quickly would seem to be an advantage.

 Posted by at 5:15 pm

Whoopsie!

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  7 Responses »
Jun 092016
 

It’s not uncommon that the authors of a scientific paper have to publish a correction at a later time. Even ignoring the occasional bit out outright fraud, it’s neither unexpected not unforgivable for there to be errors in math or problems in data collection or interpretation. What is a little unusual, however, is for the data to be *reversed.* Take, for example, a study from Virginia Commonwealth University, published in 2012:

Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies

The takeaway from this study was that there seemed to be a correlation between psychopathy and political conservatism. This study got some press and is undoubtedly still being used to whop conservatives over the head… “See? The science says you guys are not just nuts, but bad guys!”

Ah, but then there’s this:

Erratum to “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51

Ahem (bolding mine):

The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.

Whoops.

Admittedly this is not really news… the correction was first published months ago. Still, it’s interesting. Ya gotta wonder what happened with the authors… were they teased mercilessly by their fellows? Were they met with rounds of “happens to all of us?” Or, just possibly, “hey, you got a lot of people to think that conservatives are psychos, so, well done?”

 Posted by at 5:33 pm

I’ve seen worse

 art, Crazy, Hmm..., science, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Jun 092016
 

What we have here is a short sci-fi film that the makers claim was written by an AI. The result is… nonsensical. Incoherent. Literally politician-like in it’s gibberishness. Still: if it’s true that this was written by a machine, I wonder if I should be a bit miffed that this screenplay got picked up before “Mass Disappearance” did…

Assuming that it is indeed machine-written, it’s not very good (if it was written by humans, trying to emulate a machine, then huzzah… y’all certainly have a future writing art-house blockbusters about gay cowboys eating pudding and other such Socially Important Works). But if it is machine-written, how long before a machine writes a *good* screenplay?

 Posted by at 2:49 pm
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