Now up for $10-level patrons to look through and vote on. If interested in getting aerospace goodies (this month there will be *three* documents, one sizable diagram and one original CAD diagram) for as little as a buck and a half, check out the APR Patreon.
All ya need to know:
Ah, university kids…
In short, someone at Emory University did something dastardly… wrote pro-Trump slogans (such as “Trump 2016”) on the sidewalk with chalk. So rather than doing something radical like writing “Somebody Other Than Trump 2016” on the sidewalk, or doing something truly revolutionary like ignoring the messages, the whiny Junior Fascists on campus have gone crying to the university, demanding that political opinions they don’t agree with be banned.
Nothing especially new here; same ridiculous gibberish was going on when I was in college, a quarter century ago. But it never ceases to amaze me just how fragile some people openly claim to be… and how loud they are in demanding that the world be made into Nerf for them… and how willing so many people who should know better are to accommodate these nattering nincompoops.
If there are any students with a full set of nards on that campus, they’d be liberally plastering the joint with pro-Trump slogans. And I say this as someone who thinks Trump is reprehensible.
So I was flipping between news channels a few moments ago. Everyone seemed to be headlining some variation on “Terror In Belgium” or some such. But then I landed on Al Jazeera, which was going on about “Islamophobia in America.”Because, sure, some people being unfriendly is certainly more newsworthy than nail bombs.
Anchor Joie Chen ramped up the hilarity by pointing out that Islam is a faith practiced by more people than any other.
The Third Reich was jam-packed full of ridiculous notions. Genocide. Invading Russia. Declaring war on the US. Superstitious claptrap. Dreams of world domination. Government programs that favor one ethnic group over another. Collective economics. But perhaps the *goofiest* idea was one of Hitler’s favorites: the P1000 “Ratte,” a 1000-ton *tank* packing the turret from a battleship, with two 280mm cannon and diesel engines from U-boats. There is zero chance that it would have worked worth a damn,and had one popped up on a battlefield every tactical bomber in a 500 mile radius would have competed to bob it into oblivion.
I’ve often thought that what the world needed was a good scale model of the Ratte, but I’ve never gotten around to it. But it seems someone else has; TAKom Models has recently released a 1/144 kit of the P1000. It includes two “Maus” tanks for scale. I would have preferred 1/72 scale, but I imagine that would have been a bit spendy.
The box art is fairly epic. Not only does it showcase the ridiculous scale of the Ratte… it also includes Nazi flying saucers because, hey, why not.
The Ratte kit is available on Amazon.
What can science *not* improve? Nothing, that’s what.
A Ryan Aeronautical Company ad from a 1957 issue of Aviation Week, touting the wonders of the VTOL aircraft. An aircraft that turned out to be a technological dead-end. Shrug. Still, it’s some pretty art.
A pair of suicide bombers have killed at least thirty in the Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station in Brussels, Belgium. The bombs were packed with nails. Reports also of “chemicals,” but that doesn’t mean a whole lot yet.
Go ahead and guess what’s behind the bombing. Was it the Amish? Donald Trump supporters? Is it too late to blame Sarah Palin???
The airship is a paradox: an obsolete piece of technology for a century ago that has nevertheless been the face of the future for the last fifty or so years. And it looks like it’s on the cusp of a comeback:
The multi-lobed British craft is helium-filled and 300 feet long. It will be able to carry 48 people, and the company is hoping to make a dozen a year by 2018. The cost and upcoming end of availability of helium might be tad problematic
A decade ago DARPA and the US Army were looking at a similar, but larger, heavy-lift airship under the “Walrus” program. Sometime around 2005-2006, ATK and NASA were looking down the road towards the post-Shuttle future for the Shuttle booster rockets, including five-segment rockets for the Ares I and Ares V. Some of the redesigns for the booster segments would have weighed a bit more than standard Shuttle booster segments. The problem there was that the existing road transport system – needed to haul the segments from the Promontory facility down I-15 to a the railhead forty or so miles south – was already at the limit theDepartment of Transportation would allow on the highway. So… NASA wanted alternate ideas. I proposed the obvious: use a Walrus heavy-lifter to carry segments straight from Promontory to Cape Canaveral. It would have had more than enough lift capacity and would have been faster than the truck & train. Plus: I just wanted to see a thousand-foot-long airship floating over my house. Who wouldn’t? Obviously that didn’t happen; ATK management looked at me like I was insane. Something about “you want to fly millions of pounds of solid rocket fuel through the sky over populated areas potentially though storms” or some such whiny nonsense. I understand the final solution for dealing with the highway overloading issue was something along the lines of “la-la-la I can’t hear you.”
Shrug.
A while back Horizon Models, a new injection-molded model kit company in Australia, sent me a copy of their first kit, a 1/72 Mercury spacecraft in return for a review. So, here goes.
The kit includes parts to build not only the orbital capsule (with abort tower) but also the earlier “boilerplate” test articles. The results are small… but then, the Mercury capsule wasn’t exactly a Winnebago. Also included are photoetched steel detail parts, and stands for the two kits. The engineering of the parts seems to be quite well done, with the corrugations nice and clean and fricken’ tiny. On the whole this looks like a spiffy kit.
As an engineer, there is one aspect of the kit that makes me scratch my head a tad. The sprue as shown below includes the parts for one complete Mercury capsule, one incomplete Mercury capsule and one stand. In order to make this a “two capsule kit,” Horizon used the simple expedient of including two copies of the sprue. It seems to me that it would have been more efficient to include all the necessary parts (for one flight and one boilerplate) on a single sprue; but in doing it this way the kit builder winds up with a bunch of extra bits to be used for other projects.
The Mercury capsule kit is available from the Horizon Models website for $35.
Horizon has also just released a companion kit, a 1/72 Mercury-Atlas. I haven’t seen that, but it seems promising. And it’s available through Amazon.
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If you have a product you want me to review… hey, why not. Feel free to send me a copy or two. I’m particularly interested in reviewing gold bullion and the like.