Old ordnance is not a specialty of mine, so I’m having trouble identifying a rather large aircraft-deliverable bomb. It appears in a number of late 1940’s aircraft diagrams, but none that I’ve seen have defined it. As you can see it bears considerable similarity in dimensions and tailfins to the M109 “Tallboy” bomb, but is notably thinner. At first I thought it might be simply a theoretical placeholder, but it appears in diagrams from at least two different aircraft manufacturers. Thoughts?
A comparison of canonical Trek – TNG and DS9 – with the JJTrekish STP. Make sure to stay till the end…
The North American Rockwell proposal for the Space Shuttle Orbiter. It is clearly *close* to what actually got built, but there are important differences. The airlock is in the nose and the OMS pods are lower on the sides of the rear fuselage and the rear portion of the cargo bay could be fitted with a pod that includes flip-out turbofan engines for range extension and landing assistance.
The full-rez scan of this diagram has been made available to all $4 and up APR Patreons and Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers. It has been uploaded to the 2020-02 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for Patreons and subscribers. If interested in this piece or if you are interested in helping to fund the preservation of this sort of thing, please consider becoming a patron, either through the APR Patreon or the Monthly Historical Document Program.
As is the ground when you run into it real fast because your steam-powered rocket suffers an apparent parachute failure *immediately* upon launch:
The frak is it with manned steam rocket stunts and early parachute deployments???
One reason why I collect aerospace historical documents and diagrams, scan them and distribute them is because when things are held in a single place, a single event can destroy history. This happened when the San Diego Air and Space Museum burned to the ground in 1978 as a result of arson, destroying its collection of aircraft, artifacts, books and documents. The aerospace community promptly rallied around the ruined museum and contributed more aircraft, artifacts, books and documents to help build a brand new less flammable museum… but a whole lot of things were just simply gone. I’ve seen the current SDASM archive (at least as it existed around a decade ago), and can only imagine what it *might* have been had the original contents not been lost.
The video below comes from the SDASM YouTube account. It’s hard to watch… for several reasons.
Fingers had surgery yesterday to deal with dental issues. This kinda came out of the blue (the last six months or so have seen a *LOT* of issues that just seem to arrive out of nowhere with little to no leadup, just… BAM). I should have seen it at least a few days earlier; starting about a week ago she became surprisingly friendly with me. She is typically pretty aloof; she was only ever really friendly with Raedthinn, while she sees me as, at best, a somewhat terrifying roommate. But it seems that the old girl was in pain and the only way she had to communicate it was through the appearance of affection.
Those who’ve been around this blog long enough might remember that 11 or so years ago she was badly wounded. It was the sort of damage that, had she been a human, said human would do little more than writhe on the floor and wail incessantly until pumped full of morphine. But Fingers… she just seemed to ignore it and get on with things. So either she’s grown soft in the years since, or she *really* hurt. In any event, I got her in to the vet as soon as I figured out there was a problem (I had about a 1/10 second glance inside her mouth, and had to struggle to get that; it was enough to tell me there was a problem) and they performed some dental work. Two teeth were to be extracted, but apparently they just sorta… fell out. This problem is not new; Koshka also had dental issues that resulted in two teeth just popping right out.
Fingers was unsurprisingly loopy when she came back from the vet. But once the anesthetic wore off, she went right back to ignoring me. Which would seem to be a good sign that the pain is gone.
Best way to pet Fingers is to catch her asleep.
The other cats have reacted to Fingers with complete nonchalance.
In 1985, Rockwell International thought there might be a business case for commercialized space solar power systems. This could be akin to a miniaturized version of the Solar Power Satellite… while it looks like the normal approach would be a more or less conventional solar power systems simply attached to a customer payload, the possibility existed of remote systems that beamed energy to customers with microwaves.
“Beforeigners” is a Norwegian-language series about what happens after people from the past (stone age, Viking age, Victorian era) mysteriously start popping up in the present day and have to be integrated into modern civilization.
Doubtless this will be some sort of morality tale about those Poor, Poor Migrant Refugees currently overwhelming Europe. But I can’t help but think that a major influx of Viking culture and bloodlust into modern day Scandinavia might do some interesting things about Scandinavia’s apparently deeply rooted self-hatred. Unleash a tribe of Vikings into Malmo and things will get *interesting.*
A group calling itself Pigeons United To Interfere Now – PUTIN – decided t0 protest the Democratic debate by way of birds.
The subtleties of the messaging evade me.
See, if parents had been on the job for the last fifty or so years, the Democrats wouldn’t be facing the nightmare of having Berni Sanders as their nominee.
Democrats 2020, you seem to have two options if Bernie is your nominee:
1: Losing to Trump, AGAIN.
2. Being personally responsible for bringing communism to the USA, and the famines and pogroms that will inevitably follow.
Dems: do better.