I’d posted this YouTube video a few years ago, but I’ve found that not only was the video yanked, the whole account associated with it was nuked. Hmmmph.
A film about NERVA (Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications), 1968.
Provides a basic description of nuclear rockets, plus some art, animation and diagrams of nuclear propelled space vehicles along with footage of test firings.
And that job is “history.” You know, to actually know what happened or, failing that, to make some minimal effort to look it up. Seems simple enough…
So there I was, minding my own business, watching the latest thrill-packed episode of “Hunting Hitler.” For those who have somehow missed out, this is the latest iteration of the “Ghost Hunter” and “Bigfoot Hunter” phenomenon… overpaid idjits use hyperbole and fairy tales to go run around in the woods and poke around in some abandoned properties looking for mythical entities. in this case, Our Heroes are stomping around Argentina attempting to prove that Hitler survived WWII and wound up there. The most recent episode was focused on the bullcrap notion that the Nazis actually got an atomic bomb up and running and set it off in Thuringia during the war, and then attempted to set up another A-bomb program post-war in Argentina to further the aims of the Fourth Reich.
Yeah, I know. “I’m not saying it’s Nazis… but it’s Nazis.”
Shows like this are really only good for two things: background noise while you’re working on something, and hate-watching. Now, I don;t know a whole lot about Argentina, so I don’t throw things at the TV when they undoubtedly make howleriffic errors about that country and it’s history. But there are a few things I *do* have some knowledge of. Some things I recognize right off the bat. And they trotted one of these things out and repeated a decades-old lie about it.
Early in the episode, someone who I guess is supposed to be one of their researchers pulls out a page from a German document, a piece of evidence meant to show that the Nazis were planning on nuking Manhattan. This page right here:
I bet there are more than a few reading along who saw that and went, “Hey, I recognize that.” And of course y’all should… I’ve brought it up before. It’s from Eugen Sanger’s 1944 report on his global-range rocket bomber. And, yes, it shows the bombardment of New York City. But *not* with atomic weapons. It’s simply a bell curve… a statistical representation of the distribution of bomb damage if a *lot* of bombs were dropped on a target and the bombs had the usual sort of circular error probability. There’s not a single damn word in Sangers report about nuking New York, very likely because Sanger probably didn’t know a single thing about atom bombs. If there was one thing the Nazi system was good at, it was compartmentalizing programs. If there was another thing the Nazis were good at, it was screwing up atomic physics, what with their hatred of Jews and their reliance upon Werner Heisenberg who either wholly misunderstood what is needed to make an A-bomb or who spent his time on the German A-bomb program busy designing faulty exhaust ports in it.
Way back in 2009 I posted about this map and how it has been misrepresented by charlatans and lazy authors for years. The abuse continues, it seems.
A reminder: the 1/48 scale “Men Into Space” kit that I mastered for Fantastic Plastic is available for purchase.
Fantastic Plastic also has several copies of the SHIELD Helicarrier and Space Station V that I mastered for ’em…
This is an interesting article, not at all filled with craziness:
It tells the story of how a few people kept data that NASA planned to toss, in the form of old, unreadable videotapes with Lunar Orbiter imagery, and how those tapes were eventually re-read and re-processed to bring out much more data and vastly better imagery… images that rival the best of modern lunar photography.
It is described in greater detail at Wikipedia:
And the official, though now no longer updated, website of the project:
And at last, the image gallery :
Note: I keep getting a “high rez files are being migrated to a new repository” message…
Short form: Really Good.
Longer form: it’s a very different Star Wars movie. It is indeed quite it’s own thing; it’s a one-shot, and there will be no sequel to this. And under the circumstances… that’s good and proper. There is no “opening crawl,” it launches right into the show (with a shot of a ship passing over the ring plane of a terrestrial world with a decent set of rings… for those who care, it looks a *lot* like the Asgard from my own yarns). There is no John Williams music, a first for a Star Wars movie. There are no Jedi (unless you count Vader), “force powers” are not employed, there is no “chosen one” or “child of destiny” or any of that sort of crap.
So, some largely spoiler-free observations:
One of the “good guy” characters is, like Han, a straight up murderer. But unlike Han who shot Greedo, in this case, the hero shoots dead a non-bad-guy. It’s a “yeah, I guess that makes sense” in terms of this being a war and espionage situation but still… dayum.
Tarkin appears, thanks to CGI. He *mostly* works. But whoever they got to do Peter Cushings voice… well, I don’t think he was all that close.
Princess Leia is in the movie for precisely the right amount of time.
I *think* they recycled a lot of snippets of X-Wing pilot shots and dialogue from the original Star Wars. There is a substantial space battle at the end featuring a lot of the same rebel fighters that would take on the Death Star a few days/weeks later in Star Wars…
Darth Vader hired Saurons architect.
For nearly forty years there’s been the question of “how could the Empire have been so stupid as to design that flaw into the Death Star,” coupled with “how could the rebels analyze the blueprints and find the flaw *that* *fast.*” Rogue One answers both of these in a perfectly cromulent fashion.
Death Star on full power? Planet goes “bang,” as we’ve seen before, and really not that impressive of a visual, just an explosion. Death Star firing on just one reactor? Freakin’ *spectacular” imagery. Think “best parts of ‘Trinity and Beyond’ on the big screen and on methamphetamines.”
Tarkin doesn’t just cameo, he’s an important character… and he’s the vicious badass he was in “Star Wars” and the supposedly kids show “Rebels” (where he had two of his men beheaded and nuked a communications tower just to shut down a broadcast). Still… “We want to send a message, not a manifesto” is a damn good line.
Speaking of “Rebels,” there are at least three “Easter Eggs” that hearken to “Rebels” and the prior “Clone Wars” shows. Forest Whitakers character Saw Gerrara is taken straight from “Clone Wars.” The main ship “Ghost” from “Rebels” or at least one of the same class, is seen briefly and at some distance in the space battle at the end. And the rebels make good use of a “Hammerhead” cruiser… which is also from “Rebels.”
Best use of kinetic energy as a destructive force so far in “Star Wars.” The rebels shove something into other stuff. Something you really don’t want to get shoved into you.
When you reprogram a droid, sometimes you remove all its filters. And it becomes *awesome.* The droid K-2SO will tell you exactly what it thinks, and then it will shoot you in the head. And it becomes the best character in the movie.
On another matter: I’ve heard people claim that the writers said they’d inserted anti-Trump stuff into the movie. If they did, I sure didn’t catch it. I was expecting some villain to spout something about “making the galaxy great again,” but, nope.
Here’s the thing: for *decades* I never had much use for the Star Destroyer from Star Wars. It just seemed “meh” as a design. But for reasons at best unclear, a few years ago the design started to grow on me. And the timing has been pretty good.
For most of the last 39 years, if you wanted a model of the Star Destroyer, you had one option, the MPC kit. And it, in a word, kinda sucked. It was pretty much what you’d expect from a 1970’s sci-fi model… it more or less replicated the shape of the thing, but completely cheaped out on accuracy and details. And even so, for many years the only way to get one of these things was to shell out a bucket of money on EBay.
But no more. There are several good options if you want a nice Star Destroyer to display. NOTE: you *should* be able to see illustrated links to Amazon items. But some browsers /ad blockers don’t show them, so hopefully the text links work.
First up: Disney has had a diecast metal Star Destroyer available for a few years now. It’s quite good in terms of accuracy and detail, and is a good size for a die cast replica – about 9 inches long.
—
Bandai, a Japanese model kit company, has a nice if almost microscopically small (well… three inches or so) snap-together kit available. It seems to be pretty accurate and is about as detailed as practical for something of its size. And it’s cheap.
—
Revell has released a large-ish (about 16 inches long) snap-together Star Destroyer kit. Like the other Star Wars models they’ve released since The Force Awakens, this comes with some toy-like features and a built-in electronics module that provides sounds and LED lighting. That said, it’s really pretty good. The accuracy overall seems pretty good and detail – except for the irritating “landing gear” on the underside that takes the place of a proper display stand – is excellent. t has been a number of years since I’ve put together a model kit, but this came together just in the last couple days in spare moments. I spent substantially more time in painting it than assembly… the parts come bagged rather than on a sprue, and there are essentially no issues with flash. The kit can be assembled straight out of the box with no glue or trimming and produce a respectable replica… except for reworking the “landing gear,” I put mine together in perhaps half an hour.
—
I admit to admiring the Revell Star Destroyer I’ve put together and painted. I think it looks Damn Good. But as I looked at it, it seemed to me that the bridge module looks like it might be a bit wide, so I looked it up online to see if there was any discussion of that. In short… it seems that the bridge module *is* a bit wide (the hypothesis seems to be that the model was based not on the filming miniatures or a CG model made for Rogue One, but the CG models made for “Battlefront” which have the wider bridges). But more importantly, in looking this up, I found several references to yet another Star Destroyer model kit on the horizon. This time it’s coming from the Russian model company Zvezda. It’s not out yet in the West, but it seems to be available in Russia itself. It’s unclear if it *will* be released in the West, and if so, for how much (I saw numerous references to $80-$130 dollars).
But from what I can see, this is the first Holy Crap model of the Star Destroyer that you can obtain without having to sell your car. Behold this unboxing video:
There appear to be some somewhat inexplicable choices with the Zvezda kit. The Revell kit, for example, has eight separate turbolaser turrets, which snap in and can rotate; the Zvezda kit, probably twice the size, seemingly has the turrets in a fixed position. This was likely done to minimize cost, and is not really that big of a deal given how small they are.
The Revell kit is I think the best deal for the money, even with the too-wide bridge module. The laid-back modeler won’t notice, and may even appreciate the “landing gear;” for the sticklers, I’m sure someone will crank out a replacement bridge in resin or on Shapeways if they haven’t already. The Zvezda kit seems like it’ll be the new benchmark in Star Destroyer Awesomeness, just as the 1/350 Enterprises from Polar Lights reset the stage for Trek. But as with the PL Enterprises, the 60+ centimeter Star Destroyer might prove to be problematically large for many people. Of course, like the Bluetooth Communicator Cell Phones I posted about a while back, having one of those monsters proudly displayed in your home might be just the thing if you want to make sure that the ladies view you as Undatable.
Since I have cemented that status for myself, if I see one of the Zvezda monsters – and if I can afford it – I’m’a gettin’ me one.
A little over two weeks ago I linked to an old Army report on the idea of hand-held weapons for use in space. At *roughly* the same time the Army was pondering the need to kill Commie bastards on the moon, Winchester was looking at a shotgun that kinda was almost exactly what the Army wanted: the Liberator.
The Liberator was a short-lived idea for a four-barreled shotgun “Derringer.” It would be easy and cheap to manufacture, simple to operate, great for dropping into Viet Nam or Cuba or some place else with People We Like who are fighting People We Don’t Like. Shotguns are great for “bush” areas where the line of sight often isn’t that far, and where marksmanship training isn’t that great. DARPA was involved in pushing the idea.
Three Liberator models are shown in the video below. The Mk. 1 is just a wooden mockup, and was intended to use a four-round pre-assembled package of ammo… you put in the one chunk, fire it four time, pop the expended chunk out. The Mk. 2 used conventional shotgun shells and a simple break-open arrangement, like a greatly enlarged Derringer. The Mk. 2 is the design of interest here. It was made of magnesium castings; this would have made it strong and light and cheap, but I just can’t get past the idea of being creeped out about firing a weapon made out of *magnesium.* On Earth, with rough handling and humidity and such, you’d expect the magnesium might not hold up so well, and while it was undoubtedly an alloy of magnesium which was substantially less burny than pure magnesium… still, you wouldn’t want a scuffed-up shotgun to decide Now’s The Time and spark up in your hands.
But in space? Magnesium would be just fine in a vacuum.
Also of note: the Mk. 2 doesn’t have a standard trigger meant to be pulled by a single finger, but a squeeze bar for the whole hand. Just the thing for a Marine in a space suit. Additionally, note that the trigger guard actually folds up so if you have big fat gloves you can get a grip on the thing.
This does make me wonder. It was meant for low-end combatants who didn’t have anything better. Well, in the 1960’s, how often would that description have applied to anyone outside of the tropics? How often would someone need to handle this weapon while wearing mittens? It’s unlikely… but maybe, just maybe, the design features were put in with the thought that this could be used in space (NOTE: almost certainly not). The latching handle is *huge,* again just the thing for use with a spacesuit glove. DARPA could have been thinking about this for use in places just a little higher up than the hills of Cambodia.
America’s first astronaut to orbit the Earth, dead at 95. He was the last of the Mercury Seven.
Not strictly relevant, but…
From the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center, December, 1961: An illustration of the forthcoming Saturn C-5 S-IC stage. This appears to be *mostly* as the S-IC would be built, but there are some detectable differences. Missing are the four small (and apparently superfluous) stabilizing fins that appeared on the outboard engine fairings. And located at the front are the eight retro rockets that would end up inside the aforementioned engine fairings.
This illustration came via EBay. The full-resolution scan (all 15+ megabytes of it) is available in the 2016-12 Dropbox folder for APR patrons. If you’d like to gain access to this and two years worth of high-rez aerospace goodies like this, as well as help out the effort to procure and preserve aerospace goodies like this, please consider joining the APR Patreon.
A late 1980’s concept for NASA by Frassanito & Associates for a “Shuttle 2.” Clearly derived from Space Shuttle general ideas, it features a number of important differences, including:
It’s not certain, but the ET looks bigger than the standard STS ET. Which would make sense given that it needs to be filled with substantially more propellant to take the place of the SRBs.
This piece of art, and two more providing a closer look at the orbiter, are available in high-rez for APR patrons on the APR “Extras” Dropbox folder, under the 2016-12 APR Extras sub-folder. If you’re interested, take a look at the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon page and consider joining!