December 2010 – Page 9 – The Unwanted Blog

One of the more advanced and interesting designs put forward in the early days of the LHX program was the Bell BAT, the Bell Advanced Tiltrotor (thus the “Bell Bell Advanced Tiltrotor”). This was a single seat design, essentially a scaled-down version of the highly successful XV-15, and a hoped-for stablemate to the V-22 tiltrotor transport. The BAT had a gross weight of 8,000 pounds and a max speed of 304 knots at 14,000 feet, and would have carried its weapons internally. It could hover at up to 10,000 feet, and had a ferry range of 2,100 nautical miles. Length was 33.3 feet.

Unlike a lot of the other LHX designs, the BAT got as far as a mockup, which got some fair amount of press at the time. The mockup was apparently on display for some years at a small aviation museum near Amarillo, TX, but got sold when the museum closed up. What happened to it after that… dunno.

One book I wholeheartedly endorse is “Secret Aerospace Projects of the U.S. Navy: The Incredible Attack Aircraft of the USS United States, 1948-1949,” by Jared Zichek. If you are, like me, an afficionado of aerospace might-have-beens, this book is a treasure trove of amazing designs from the late 1940’s, many of which look ultra-modern or downright sci-fi today. It’s wall-to-wall awesome, with a vast pile of designs and drawings, scanned directly from archival diagrams (not, as so often happens, rather cheesy, simplified three-views). Photos of factory models and artists concepts also illustrate the book.

The only problem I have with this book: it’s not *mine.* Some of the designs in the book I had seen bits and pieces of before, but nothing like this.

Get if for someone for Christmas. Get it for yourself for Christmas. Drop entirely unsubtle hints to someone else that they need to get it for you for Christmas. And tell them to use this link…

Note: you can also start your Amazon searches right here…

When I did my cross-country travelling a month ago, the cats stayed largely silent, still, and curled up and hidden as best they could. The idea was raised that perhaps one or more of them might suffer from motion sickness, which would cause them to be pretty inert.

While Raedthinn spent the entire time the car was moving *in* his litterbox, Buttons stayed out of his… but stayed really near it. Like a drunken fratboy, he passed out draped over his altar to expulsion.

Well… kinda.

So, history quiz: what did aeronautical engineers do when they wanted to get a good understanding of a new configurations flight characteristics over a wide range of speeds and altitudes in the days before computational fluid dynamics made the process complex, expensive and prone to error? Why… sometimes they’d just build a model of the thing, jam it on the nose of a big solid rocket, and shoot it into the sky. Take, for example, these NASA-Langley photos of a rocket-model of the Convair “Pogo” tailsitter turboprop fighter from the early 1950’s.

The instrumentation boom sticking out the nose would provide information on angle of attack, roll, yaw and such forth. If they found the model lawn-darted into the beach, they’d know that the natural glide slope of the vehicle is kinda steep.

In a way, NASA continues to do this… witness the X-43, launched atop a Pegasus. But with the relatively easy availability of high power rocket motors and supplies, it would seem that tests such as this would be fairly easy at the university level. It would give the students not only a check on their designs, but would also give them experience with actual construction, and with the rules, regs, and practices involved with rocketry. Plus… it’d be a hell of a lot more exciting that CFC runs.

A little while ago I challenged one of the socialist trolls to name a few Hollywood movies that featured fictional Republican politicians as the hero of the movie. As expected, there was no intelligible reply. Largely due to the fact that in Hollywood, Republicans are considered *evil,* while Democrats are the clear good guys.

When this point is raised as evidence that the is a leftist bias in the Hollywood media, often the response is to point out that Hollywood is run by corporations looking to make a buck, and that somehow this means that Hollywood must therefore have a right-wing bias. But the problem is… this is rubbish. Hollywood movie studios are more than happy to crank out movie after movie that they have got to *know* are going to tank, but since the movies feature a left-wing slant… out they come.

A recent example of this is the Sean Penn flick “Fair Game,” which is apparently an alternate history story about how the Bush administration outed Valerie Plame as revenge against her heroic husband providing proof that the Iraqis had no WMD program. Of course, actual facts are that Wilson, by his own admission, sat on his ass and did no real investigating… and Plames identity was outed by Richard Armitage, a career civil servant, not Bush or Cheney. But as Hollywood so often does, reality can’t stand up to the screenwriters.

So, how is “Fair Game” doing? According to Box Office Mojo, as of this writing it has made $6.3 million domestic, $6 foreign, for a total of $12.3 million… with a production budget of $22 million. By any usual standard, after a month in release, “Fair Game” is a flop.

And it’s hardly the first. The movie theaters have seen their share of “Iraq/Afghanistan War Movies” since 2003. How have they done? Let’s take a look at the numbers from some movies that cast the US as the bad guys, the Bush administration as the bad guys, the soliders as either bad guys or victims of the Evil Republicans:

“Rendition” (2007) Dom: $9.7M For: $17.3 M Budget: N/A ($27.5 M, IMDB)

“Lions for Lambs” (2007) Dom: $15M, For: $48 M Budget: $35M

“Valley of Elah” (2007) Dom: $6.7M, For: $22.8 M Budget: N/A

“Stop-Loss” (2008) Dom: $10.9 M, For: $0.3M Budget: $25M

“Home of the Brave” (2006) Dom: $0.05M(!), For: $0.5M Budget: N/A ($12M, IMDB)

“Redacted” (2007) Dom: $0.065M(!), For: $0.7M Budget N/A ($5M, IMDB)

“Green Zone: (2010) Dom: $35M, For: $59.8M, Budget $100M

Now, it could be said that perhaps the reason why these movies all tanked was because the public just ain’t interested in “War On Terror” movies. Alright, it’s a worthy hypothesis. Let’s take a look at some other “War On Terror” movies that *don’t* preach about the evils of the US/the Republicans:

“United 93” (2006) Dom: $31.5M, For: $44.8M, Budget: $15M

“World Trade Center” (2006) Dom: $70.3M, For: $92.7M, Budget: $65M

“A Mighty Heart” (2007) Dom: $9.2M, For: $9.8M, Budget: $16M

“From Paris With Love” (2010) Dom: $24M, For: $28.7M, Budget: $52M

“The Hurt Locker” (2008) Dom: $16.4M, For: $32.2M, Budget $15M

“Generation Kill” (2008) OK, a TV Miniseries, so budget numbers are kinda irrelevant. But I understand it got really good ratings.

Now, I may be no lightnin’ calculator, but to my eye it looks like there’s a bit of a difference… the movies that *don’t* wield a leftist agenda like a club at least tended to make their money back. Those that did… didn’t. Or at least tended to do dismal business in the States.

Hollywood is not run by a pack of idiots, despite what some of the evidence shows. The studio heads who sign off on these flicks *tend* to have some idea of what the movie-going public is actually interested in. Take, for example, some relatively non-political Blow Stuff Up flicks:

“Red” (2010): Dom: $86.4M, For: $67.5M, Budget: $58M

“The Expendables” (2010): Dom:$103M, For: $163M, Budget: $80M

“The A-Team” (2010): Dom:$77.2M, For: $99.7M, budget: $110m

“Skyline” (2010): Dom: $20.5M, For: $26.3M, Budget: $10M

People *do* like to watch stuff get all blowed up, so that’s no excuse for Iraq/Afghanistan movies tanking. And when HolLywood does a straight “war movie,” like “Generation Kill” or “Hurt Locker,” it tends to do pretty well.

The point? Hollywood has flushed a vast sum of money down the sewar in order to produce “message movies” with leftist messages. And with evidence that a war movie set in Iraq/Afghanistan (or at least set agains the backdrop of Islamic terrorism) *can* make buckets of money… Hollywood has made shockingly *few* movies of that kind.

Now, back to the challenge I mentioned at the very top of the page: anyone know of a recent (last 20 years or so) movie or even TV show where the hero is explicitly a modern Republican? A bunch can be rattled off where a Dem is the hero… “An American President,” “Dave,” “Independence Day,” TV’s “24” (all featured heroic – or at least positive – Dem Presidents), “The Contender” and “Shoot ‘Em Up” feature heroic Dems standing up against evil right-wingers. There are numerous others, but I’m bored.

Back in the 1980’s, the Army ran the “LHX” (Light Helicopter Experimental) program to come up with the next generation of small “scout/attack” chopper. In the early days of the program, companies produced all manner of neato-bizarre designs… because the requirements were kept vague. However, before too long the requirements were tightened up to define a pretty conventional helicopter configuration, and all the interesting designs faded away. In the end, the LHX program spawned the RAH-66 Comanche, which was itself cancelled. Feh.

Anyway, please to enjoy this McDonnell-Douglas LHX concept for a fast, NOTAR single-seater. A fair amount of art was produced on this design, but I’ve never seen drawings. If anyone knows of such, please clue me in.

Umm… no. It’s a doll with a video camera in it. Whoop-de-doo. It’s not like a shark with a fricken’ laser beam on its head.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/12/fbi_alert_barbie_doll_may_be_u.html

The FBI, however, thinks it could be a ploy exploited by pedophiles to make child pornography.

Errrmmm… ok, I may not be all that well versed in how one goes about making child porn, but it seems to me that a crappy-quality video camera embedded in a crappy toy would be of less interest than an actual video camera. Video cameras embedded in small & cheap point-n-click cameras are bound to be far better than this thing, and just as concealable (rather more so, as some creepy guy wandering around with a Barbie doll is likely to draw more attention than some creep guy wandering around wearing a jacket with a PNC camera lens peeking out a buttonhole).

But, hey, whatever works when it comes to ratchetting up the fearlevel, yah?

Sigh.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/12/obama-aides-republicans-talk-tax-cuts-quietly/1

Republicans are holding quiet talks with the Obama administration. And again we’re staring down the barrel of “compromise,” which in US FedGuv speak means “the government is going to get larger pretty fast, but not quite as fast as if we let the Dems wholly have their way.”

news reports indicate that Obama aides are willing to extend the George W. Bush tax cuts for wealthy taxpayers in exchange for an extension of unemployment benefits and new forms of stimulus spending.

Way to stick up for your principles, boys.

Republicans have neither spine nor negotiating skills. If the Dems want to increase the budget by “only” ten percent this year… counter with a proposal to cut the budget by fifty percent. And then split the difference. And the difference isn’t “we decided to grow the budget by only 8% this year,” but something more like “we decided to cut the budget by only 20% this year.”

Still working the Orion pulse unit & M388 “Davy Crockett” nuclear projectile drawings, but they are now at a point where it’s not embarassing to show ’em. The pulse unit is from the General Atomic design for the 10-meter USAF vehicle, and had a yield of about 1 kiloton. The M388 used a version of the W54 warhead, and had a yield of only 0.01 to 0.02 kilotons. However, other versions of the same basic W54 warhead had yields of up to a kiloton. The Davy Crockett dialed it back for two main reasons:

1) Low yield like this means *really* filthy. The Davy Crockett was designed to make a mass of the foreseen Soviet invasion of western Europe through the Fulda Gap; nuking the bejeebers out of the troops and turning the region into a frighteningly radioactive wasteland was thought to be an effective way of slowing the tide.

2) The range of the M388: pathetic. Down to one slim kilometer. While one can survive a 1 kiloton nuclear blast at a range of one kilometer… one would not want to try.

The Orion was to use existing nuclear explosive designs in the early stages, so it’s safe to assume that the W54 – which, as it happens, was designed by the same guy who designed the pulse units – was the expected basic nuclear explosive. And a comparison of the pulse unit to the M388 shows that they compare quite nicely.

The interior of the M388 as shown here is a bit sparse. Oddly, the DoD is not especially forthcoming with technical information regarding the interior configurations of their nuclear weapons. Strange. Additionally, posted below are three half-ass decent photos… the best versions of ’em I could scrape off the Intarweb tubes. Even with actual units on display at the museums at West Point and Fort Benning (and an oddly painted one at Aberdeen), there are surprisingly few photos of this thing on line.

Anybody near Fort Benning or West Point, and have a camera?

Now, be honest: who *wouldn’t* want one of these hanging from the ceiling, or sitting on the coffee table? Or loaded with a big solid rocket motor and a chute? Or stuck on the end of a big-ass spud gun?