British citizen Mohammed Emwazi, who shot a number of videos for Islamic State where he beheaded westerners with a knife, has apparently been killed in a drone strike in Raqqa, Syria.
Say what you will about President Obama, the man knows how to use robots to assassinate people.
A new “furthest thing in the solar system” has been announced. V774104 is between 500 and 1000 kilometers in diameter and sits 103 AU (astronomical unit – the distance from the sun to the Earth) out. In comparison, Eris is currently at 97 AU and Pluto is about 33 AU out.
For the past few months, companies have been cranking out “Star Wars” branded merchandise. While I am kinda by definition the target market for the new Star Wars movie, having seen the original Star Wars in the theater three times at the age of seven, the vast, vast bulk of the Star Wars merchandise means precisely *nothing* to me. Plates and dishes and underwear and cups and soap and sex toys and breakfast cereal and board games and pop-up books and hats and socks and napkins and posters and whatnot, all plastered with the image of Kylo Ren or Finn or any of the other characters I know squadoo about? Meh.
On the other hand… toy spaceships. Those occasionally cause me to pause and take note. Probably shouldn’t come as too much of a shock. As money-sucking vices go, I imagine picking up the odd five-dollar toy spaceship is pretty minor compared to getting regularly likkered up or smoking like a chimney. So… new Star Wars spaceships. Woo!
The spaceships for the new Star Wars movies look like they follow in the best Star Wars design tradition… they look cool and don’t make a lick of sense. One of the craft featured in several toy formats is the “Kylo Ren Command Shuttle,” which is apparently a personnel transport for the main bad guy. The Shuttle, like the Imperial Shuttle from Return of the Jedi, features inexplicably large wings (what does a spacecraft equipped with antigravity need with wings of *any* size?) that fold up vertically for landing (just when wings might be most useful). The oddity is that all of the Command Shuttle toys or models I’ve seen any reference to all feature the wings in the vertical, landed configuration. I’ve not seen any with the wings in the “flight” configuration, which you’d think would be most interesting to the kiddies.
The die cast Disney Store toy.
—–
—-
The tiny Micromachines toy
—
The Revell model kit
—
And here’s the Hasbro “Titanium Series” toy. These are small, but reasonable quality part-die-cast, part-plastic toys:
Oddly, these are painted white, while every other available depiction of the ship shows it black. Hmmm.
Starting as a kid, I found enjoyment and even a little income making models; I have a little talent in that area. But in recent years I’d started ramping back on working on models of all kinds; hobbies are less important when you’re trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage. And at the end of 2013, an attack of bronchitis truly trashed my lungs for several months; chemicals and dust seemed like *really* bad things to be around. So for going on two years now I’ve not really spent any time working on something I’ve long loved to do.
Some time back I picked up one of the Hasbro Command Shuttle toys. I was disappointed at the fixed-landing-configuration, but it seemed to me that with some effort it could be modified to show the vehicle in flight configuration. So far, there have been few clear images of the shuttle, so it’s unclear just what angle the wings are at in flight. The best bit of video so far shows the wings already in the process of folding up, so all that can be said is that the wings fold down *at* *least* this far:
So, I thought I could replicate that at some point. Never had any hard plans… like many modelers, it was one of those “one of these days I’ll get around to it” sort of things. Well… then came this last Sunday and Monday.
Sunday Raedthinn was injured and taken to the vet. Didn’t get to sleep until ridiculously late that night, and woke up relatively early, so I was a tad tired Monday. I spent the day sort of puttering around waiting to hear something, trying to be productive. But creative writing proved impossible. CAD modeling proved disastrous. CAD diagram work proceeded with some success… couldn’t draw worth a damn, but some make-work projects of scaling up some images to go on 11X17 pages proceeded well, because it required no real thought. And at some point during the first part of the day, I converted one of the Command Shuttles into flight configuration.
The weird thing: I’ve no recollection of actually doing that. Later in the day Monday I picked up Raedthinn from the vet, brought him home, took care of him for a bit and then collapsed on the couch… to find the Shuttle sitting there, completed. Nothing magical about it; it was surrounded with the tools and epoxy and such I used to make the mods, I just somehow failed to install any of the relevant memories into long-term storage. It is, I suppose, a bit of artistic creativity, but it was clearly so straightforward that I did it without putting a great deal of hard thought into it.
A little odd. But… shrug.
I’ve a few more that I’ll convert the same way, and then likely paint black. Then… probably put ’em on ebay, I suppose. Anybody interested?
Hmmm…
A Kremlin-owned TV network broadcast footage of a meeting with Putin, with the camera looking over someone’s shoulder and getting a clear image of a page in a report detailing a design of a submarine-deployed “dirty bomb” designed to reduce American coastal cities to radioactive wastelands. Supposedly the Russian government had a conniption and censored the image from later airings.
The question is:
1) Is this what it presents itself as, with the Russians developing such a weapons system and somehow mistakenly letting it slip onto the air?
2) is it disinformation, intentionally aired in order to… what? Make people in coastal cities freak out for some reason?
The page in question:
Apparently this is a translation:
“Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6” and “Developer—Rubin Design Bureau.” And, below that, some explanatory text and illustrations.
“Purpose—the defeat of the important economic facilities in the area of the enemy coast,” the text reads, “and causing unacceptable damage to… the country through the establishment of extensive zones of radioactive contamination, unsuitable for implementation in these areas of military, economic, business or other activity for a long time.”
The design appears to be a large torpedo with a large nuke in the nose. It appears that it’d be slung underneath the carrying sub rather than carried within it.
Whether or not this is a real project or just the usual Putinesque disinformation, it does point out an important difference between the US and Russia: the US has a *lot* of it’s industry, economy and population in coastal cities, Russia does not. This means that America is more vulnerable to attack from the sea; a cargo ship with a nuke in the hold, or a nuclear “mine” lurking offshore big enough to make a good tsunami, can trash a city… but only a coastal city.
He spent last night under a bed, but he’s been out and about today. Last night his chin was pretty badly swollen, but it has come down substantially today. His pain pill was ground up and added to his soft food; apparently it wasn’t nasty tasting, because he ate it down without complaint. On the whole he seems to be healing.
I released a two-part tale in the Pax Orionis series back in September, but nothing since. Partially due to travel, partially due to stress not being terribly conducive to creative writing. nevertheless, I’ve been writing, and am within spitting distance of finishing the next yarn, “The Blast from Jackass Flats.” The earlier two-parter told of an incident during the Great War of 1984 from the viewpoint of civilians on the surface, with Orion spacecraft way off in the distance; this next story deals explicitly with an important incident in the history of the Orion program. It will almost certainly be a one-parter rather than two.
Most of the Pax Orionis stories will be in different styles. This one is in the style of an author trying to tell the story from some time later. The author is perhaps overly interested in technical details…
If interested, please take a look at and consider signing on to the Pax Orionis Patreon. Only a buck!
Here’s a process I was previously unaware of… the use of easily available hydrogen peroxide-based consumer products and ultraviolet light (or just sunlight) to restore the original bright white color of old plastic. While the guy doing the video focuses on old computer equipment, this process might be of particular interest for old unpainted display models and the like that have turned yellow or brown due to UV exposure over the years or decades.
Something I don’t know: does this process restore the structural properties of the old plastic? With years of UV damage, not only does white plastic turn yellow, it also becomes brittle. While I really rather doubt it, I suppose it might be just barely possible that this process will reverse that embrittlement. And if it works on plastic, what else might it de-yellow? Paint? Paper? Hmmm…
The JetPack Aviation JB-9 jetpack uses actual turbojets for lift, rather than the horribly propellant-hungry hydrogen peroxide monoprop Bell rocket pack we’re more generally familiar with. This flight was about five minutes. Still pretty sad compared to the dream, where you strap on a jetpack and go fly to work, but still way better than the thirty seconds available with the rocket pack.
Would have been better if the drone had actually followed the jetpack through its paces, but oh well.
Here’s some PR footage of the jetpack as it was flown near the Statue of Liberty:
A recent online discussion on a wholly different subject went kinda sideways and ended up in the topic area of “should we threaten to nuke the ‘holy city’ of Such-and-Such world religion because a whole lot of the adherents of said religion are backwards murderous psychopaths driven to that by their crappy Surt-worshipping death cult of a religion.”
One side of the argument holds that threatening to nuke that city would be not only evil but counter-productive. We’d cheese off the rest of the Surt worshippers, the ones who today are merely “moderate” in their religious beliefs. There is validity in this point of view.
But on the other hand… there was this example from the mid 1980’s. Any Americans my age and older will no doubt remember the national shame of fellow Americans kidnapped by backwards savages in Lebanon and held for a *really* long time. What is less well remembered is that the Soviets *also* had some of their people kidnapped in the region. But unlike the Americans, the Soviet kidnappings were few and brief. And it wasn’t because the Soviets were nice to the kidnappers:
This piece, originally published in the January 15, 1986, issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, tells of four Soviet embassy staffers in Beirut who were kidnapped in September, 1985. Demands were made that the Soviets pressure pro-Syrian forces to stop shelling pro-Iranian forces in northern Lebanon. When there was no forward progress on that, two days after the kidnapping one of the Soviet staffers was shot in the head and left in a trash dump.
Within a month, the other three kidnapped staffers were released unharmed, and no further Soviets were kidnapped. So what did the Soviets do different from the Americans?
Well, first off the KGB was unleashed. As goes the story, the KGB promptly determined that Hezbollah was responsible and located a nearby leader of that fun organization. And then located a close relative of the Hezbollah leader. And then the KGB kidnapped the relative. And castrated him, sending the severed junk to the Hezbollah leader, followed by shooting the relative through the noggin and sending the body along with the message that the KGB knew where more relatives were to be found.
Now, this sort of action is *massively* illegal. But the point is, it apparently worked.
There may be a lesson there.
After a couple downer days, here’s something to lighten the mood a tad.
