Hopefully, I’m within a week of being done with the Base Ship master parts. A bit of trimming, blending and massaging of these parts, and they’ll be ready to go. I understand that the model kit is set for a release in late summer/early autumn.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. Give him a script, and he could knock it out of the park. However, he could also think on his feet. It seems the current President, though, is glued to a teleprompter.
From Sky News:
Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.
It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.
Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: “That’s your speech.”
A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.
Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.
Had Bush made this sort of slip-up, it’d be Big News for days, and Final, Clinching Proof That Bush Is A Moron. But in the, uh, case of 0bama, I’m sure this’ll get a pass.
A 1941 design for a 20,000 pound GTOW two-seat pursuit aircraft witha single “Tornado” engine. Top speed at sea level = 326 mph; at 25,000 feet, 416 mph. Ceiling = 37,800 feet.
From Boeing:
“The F-15 Silent Eagle is designed to meet our international customers’ anticipated need for cost-effective stealth technologies, as well as for large and diverse weapons payloads,” said Mark Bass, F-15 Program vice president for Boeing. “The innovative Silent Eagle is a balanced, affordable approach designed to meet future survivability needs.” … The Silent Eagle will be able to internally carry air-to-air missiles such as the AIM-9 and AIM-120 and air-to-ground weapons such as the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) and Small Diameter Bomb (SDB). The standard weapons load used on current versions of the F-15 is available with the traditional CFTs installed. The aircraft’s canted vertical tails improve aerodynamic efficiency, provide lift, and reduce airframe weight.
The biggest visible changes are the otward-canted vetical tails and the conformal weapons pods. These conformal pods have been used before, but as fuel pods, and attachement points for external ordnance:
Not seen in the two photos are the jet engine exhaust nozzles. There *may* be something interesting going on there… perhaps thrust-vectoring nozzles like on the F-22?
UPDATE: More photos here. Still no clear shots of the nozzle,s but there is one kinda-overhead view where you can see back to ’em; and from this angle they appear to be pretty normal. The vertical tails, however, look “broken.”
Turns out the Canadian science minister is anti-science. BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!
Canada’s science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won’t say if he believes in evolution.
“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
Now, where have I heard that sort of thing before? Oh, yeah, here:
TD: Right. For you to talk to me, you as somebody who is not a Scientologist to talk to me about what my beliefs are or to ask me to explain any core religious belief, that’s an offensive concept. Nobody should ever be asked to do that.
Translation, in both cases: “You’ve caught me in something where I can’t tell the truth because I’d look like a friggen’ retard, and where I can’t lie because it’d be too easy to find the truth. So instead, I’m going to claim that any attempt to ask me a relevant question is religious bigotry.”
Believe in Creationism? Hey, great, whatever. But to be a Creationist *and* a “Science Minister” is akin to being an Atheist *and* a “Baptist Minister.” Creationism, despite the insane bleatings of groups such as the Dishonesty Institute, is about as scientific as Flat Earthism (and generally “supported” by the same “evidence”).
So now there’s a new threat in the universe: Canadian Creation Science. Canuckreationism?
What a Canadian may look like:
Where it gets even funnier:
Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge…
I know a few guys who might have something to say about chiropractors.
… it’s stampeding fascism. A few tidbits from CNN:
Senate committee to explore taxing AIG bonuses
Senate Democrats want to tax the controversial bonuses doled out to AIG employees who work for the division that led to the company’s downfall.
Obama tries to stop AIG bonuses: ‘How do they justify this outrage?’
President Obama said Monday he will attempt to block bonuses to executives at ailing insurance giant AIG, payments he described as an “outrage.”
Translation: AIG had long ago written “retention bonuses” into it’s contracts with employees, preceding the bailout. The language of the bailout explicity points out that companies are supposed to honor their existing contracts. But… Seneate Democrats and President 0bama nevertheless want to use the power of government to negate existing contracts.
Regardless of your views on AIG or the bailout, having a government come along and arbitrarily crap all over employment contracts is a disastrous notion. What will that do the the business climate if businesses can’t be certain that the contracts they’ve signed are actually going to be worth the paper they’re written on?
But he (0bama) said the impropriety of the bonuses goes beyond economics. “It’s about our fundamental values,” he said.
You’re damned right it’s about our fundamental values. Specifically, our fundamental values of living up to the contracts we agree to. And fascist governmental decrees are *not* fundamental American values. We tried that once before… it was called the New Deal, and it greatly extended the Great Depression. Let’s not try it again, hmmm? To get out of this mess that Congress worked so hard to get us into, we’ll need the biusiness community to be as ready and willing to invest in ideas, people and property as they can be. And a government bleating about 90% tax rates or arbitrarily negating contracts is *not* going to bring those businesses running.
Oh, and it gets better:
Obama, Grassley lead charge against AIG
“Obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” said Sen. Charles Grassley during an Iowa City radio interview on Monday. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
I’m damn near speechless.
Still working on the Senior Peg. The fuselage is too rounded & fat.
There’s something screwy going on in western China.
Located at +40° 27′ 25.20″, +93° 23′ 24.00″
And at +40° 27′ 10.80″, +93° 44′ 34.80″
Between these two sites, located at +40° 29′ 9.60″, +93° 29′ 60.00″ is clearly some sort of base with numerous “airstrips.”
The two primary “airfields,” if that’s what they really are, look to have been built to the same plan, just at slightly different angles. It seems the western field is the older one, as it looks like it has been seriously eroded. There appear to be a vast number of either bumps or craters strung across the older field… bombing practice? Trees? Huts? Dunno.
After the effort involved with working out the planform of the Senior Peg RCS model, here’s the end result. Top row shows the evolution of the B-2, from earliest sketch to final product; bottom row shows the two “Senior Peg” configurations. Configuration at left is highly speculative (even more so than the one on the right), based on a vague and essentially unsourced image that made the press some years back.
A single photo has been revealed showing Lockheed’s “Senior Peg” concept. Senior Peg was the codename given to Lockheed’s competitor in the Advanced Technology Bomber program, which was won by Northrop, producing the B-2 Stealth Bomber. Lockheeds design was vaguely similar, but differed in numerous areas, including having small tails, and, apparently, F-117-style facetting on at least the wings and F-117-style inlet “grates.” The Northrop concept, with was all smooth flowing contours, turned out to be better at radar stealth, so the Senior Peg vanished.
The single photo shows a half-scale model of the Senior Peg on a tall pole at a radar test range. No drawings have been released of the Senior Peg. So if a guy, a regular Joe, wanted to make a model of the design, he’d need to cook up his own diagrams, using only this one photo (kindly provided by Tony Landis):
Converting this photo into a reasonably accurate set of drawings is relatively straightforward. The design appears to be pretty planar… the wing, like that of the B-2, has little to no dihedral. Thus the lines that make up the planform – leading edges, trailing edges, wingtips, etc – are all co-planar. First step: import the photo into a CAD program. Then trace the outline, and add in perspective lines:
Looking at the perspective lines, two things are clear:
1) The vanishing points for the lines from the wingtips are not the same as the vanishing points for the wing root lines
2) But they’re close.
Since they’re close, but not identical, simply draw a line connecting the two vanishing points, then adjust the vanishing points to the centerpoint of that line. This averages them out.
The changes are subtle, and probably not overly important at this scale, since things lines up fairly well right off the bat. This provides a new “baseline drawing” to work off of. Make sure that the CAD lines are clearly visible.
Rotate the image 21.5 degrees, so that the centerline is now vertical:
I use Paint Shop Pro… 1997 edition (hey, it works fine. Why upgrade what works?) . Found under “Effects” – “Geometric Effects” is “Skew.” use -17 vertical skew to get the trailing edge line to line up horizontally.
OK, we now have a photo of the vehicle lined up properly. However, the effects of perspective on the planform are visible, so they need to be dealt with. Fortunately, PSP has, under “Effects” – “Geometric Effects” a button for “Perspective – Vertical.” Throw in a “% Difference” of -47, and blammo, all of a sudden those perspective lines are now nearly parallel.
Take the resulting image, and paste it back into CAD and trace the outlines:
Hide the background image, then flip the right half of the lines over onto the left side:
This shows some noticeable differences between the left and right halves of the reconstruction. Without knowing which is more accurate, again the thing to do is average. The easy way to do this is to again draw lines connecting related points:
And then move the planform lines to the midpoints of the connecting lines:
And then mirror the result:
And there’s your planform!
The surface details, such as the inlets, can be reconstructed in a similar fashion. Here the effort is aided by some of the basics of stealth… many lines are parallel. The “top” lines of the inlets are parallel to the leading edges. Exactly where the corners are can be determined by:
1) The vertical axis locations (Y-co-ordinates) are the same as on the photo.
2) The horizontal axis (X-axis) locations are less obvious. But fortunately the design is bilaterally symmetrical; thus the distance of the important points from the Y-axis will be the same for either side. Thus a line drawn on the photo from a left-side point to it’s related right-side point only need to be moved horizontally so that the midpoint of the connecting line is now on the Y-axis.
The other details can be worked out in similar fashions, thus providing a whole reconstruction (which I’ll probably post whenever the hell I get around to finishing it). With a design like this, the biggest problem would be in determining the underside contours… which, since the photo provides no details whatsoever, would be purest guesswork. In this case, though, a bit of B-2 and F-117 sculpting would seem appropriate.