This morning, Raedthinn smooshed up against the window to get as much sun as he could. Damn cat can sleep anywhere…
Mar 072009
Mar 072009
Went to Ogden today (caught “Watchmen,” I thought it was good). While there I hit “Sportsmans Warehouse.” A few notes:
1) They used to have a big, big display of pistols available for sale. They now have maybe a dozen.
2) They used to have a lot of “assault rifles.” Today they had two.
3) They had no 9mm ammo. Almost out of all the other pistol calibers. Shockingly, that had almost no .22.
4) They had hunting shotguns out the wazoo.
I don’t know what things are like in other states, but it’s looking like Utahns are gearing up for a fight. So perhaps Obama really is going to bring us all together in unity…
Mar 062009
OK, take two minutes to geek out at the new Trek trailer on Youtube:
This shows a couple new things, including a desert planet getting destroyed, and the main bad guy (Eric Bana playing a Romulan named “Nero”) saying “James T. Kirk was a great man, but that was another life.” It kinda seems like the desert planet getting trashed is Vulcan.
This would seem to support some of the rumors that Nero comes from the future, post “Star Trek: Nemesis,” and goes back in time to mess with Kirk for some reason. Nero causes all manner of havoc (apparently including trashing Vulcan), but at the end of the movie, he is defeated and the timeline “resets.” Thus, perhaps, allowing for the timeline to create the original “Enterprise” we’ve all come to know and love.
UPDATE: OK, overgeekage: Two further shots showing a big energy weapon being fired at the surface of the planet:
If you look at an earlier trailer, you can see the same landscape… clearly it’s Vulcan:
The implication here is that the long-haired person seen watching the beam weapon strike the ground is Spock’s mom.
There’s a brief snip in this earlier trailer showing Spock apparently beaming down into the same landscape, with the rocks falling apart around him…
And Nero standing on a platform on the weapon looking down as it fires:
So, if the planet shown getting destroyed – by what looks like being eaten by a black hole, so that’s a different mechanism than being blasted by a laser – is actually meant to be Vulcan, then the movie will almost have to end with a resetting of the timeline.
Mar 062009
Screenshots from a mid-fifties USAF Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion film show three conceptual designs for nuclear powered bombers. Sadly, this is the best that can be had from the resolution at hand. Not known who designed these, whether a contractor, the USAF or the Atomic Energy Commission.
The first seems to show a nuclear variant of the B-52 (it’s known that Fairchild worked on a design like this).
The second seems to show a nuclear turboprop. A number of these subsonic, long-duration designs were created back then, as shown here and here.
What appears to be a supersonic aircraft.
Mar 062009
From the Danbury, CT, News-Times:
Police: Arsenal found in Danbury teen’s truck
An arsenal?? Oh noes!!!
What vast collection of arms did this dastardly youngster have? Did he have, perchance, enough firepower to arm a Marine Corps batallion? Dod he have enough firearms to hold off a zombie invasion? Was the truck filled to capacity with arms? Let’s find out…
A search of the truck revealed:
A Bushmaster rifle with a night scope and pistol grip.
Two high capacity ammunition magazines.
A Remington 12-gauge shotgun with additional ammo.
Five knives
Brass knuckles
A bulletproof vest with an armor plate.
Wait. This “arsenal” was two guns, a set of brass knuckles and some knives??? None of these are illegal weapons as set forth by the US Constitution (as backed up by the USSC’s Miller and Heller decisions); only in the minds of some corrupt politicians in some backwards states are these bannable items.
And the topper is that this story, at least as I’m writing this, is the lead news item on the News-Times website. Some kid going to show off some of his toys to his friends is turned into a Major News Item by yellow journalists looking to scare people with claims of an “arsenal.”
Bah.
See, this is one of the bigger reasons why I’m glad I moved away from the east coast. There’s many days when my little econobox would be substantially better armed than that… and I’m just going to get groceries.
Mar 052009
Mar 052009
I’m declaring victory on the wretchedly organic underside, with the exception of the *hundreds* of raider-sockets (not really looking forward to those, though I have some ideas on how to make them less than entirely hellish to create). Need to scribe the upper-surface panel lines and deal with the stand.
Mar 052009
A photo from a few weeks ago showing Stinky and Spot playing in the snow. I must’ve caught Stinky in mid-head-shake… hard to explain the ears otherwise.
Mar 052009
About two months ago I visited the museum and found a diorama on display showing a proposed expansion, which would bring most of the currently outdoor aircraft indoors. Some of the aircraft shown in model form are merely “hoped for” dispalys, but most of them are on-hand or in negotiations. The one problem I have with this is just how tightly packed the displays would be…. decent photography would be virtually impossible.
Still, it’d be good to get them in out of the weather. The largest of the three hangars shown here is the proposed new building; the other two are the current museum, with the current displays.
Mar 052009
Courtesy Robert Bradley of the SDAM, three images from a 1958 General Dynamics presentation to the Navy on a manned spacecraft using inflatable structures. Inflatable spacecraft make a good deal of sense; inflation is a lightweight way to create large lifting surfaces, while being able to be efficiently packed onto launch vehicles. An inflatable spaceplane can have a very large wing area and a very low mass; the result is that on entry, the kinetic energy of the spacecraft in converted into thermal energy (as is done with all re-entry vehicles), but that thermal energy is distributed over a very large area… leading to much lower temperatures. Inflatable spacecraft were looked at for the Dyna Soar and Apollo programs.
