A Ryan Aeronautical Company ad from a 1957 issue of Aviation Week, touting the wonders of the VTOL aircraft. An aircraft that turned out to be a technological dead-end. Shrug. Still, it’s some pretty art.
Mar 222016
Mar 222016
A pair of suicide bombers have killed at least thirty in the Zaventem airport and the Maelbeek metro station in Brussels, Belgium. The bombs were packed with nails. Reports also of “chemicals,” but that doesn’t mean a whole lot yet.
Brussels attacks: Zaventem and Maelbeek bombs kill many
Go ahead and guess what’s behind the bombing. Was it the Amish? Donald Trump supporters? Is it too late to blame Sarah Palin???
Mar 222016
The airship is a paradox: an obsolete piece of technology for a century ago that has nevertheless been the face of the future for the last fifty or so years. And it looks like it’s on the cusp of a comeback:
Massive new aircraft the Airlander 10 is unveiled
The multi-lobed British craft is helium-filled and 300 feet long. It will be able to carry 48 people, and the company is hoping to make a dozen a year by 2018. The cost and upcoming end of availability of helium might be tad problematic
A decade ago DARPA and the US Army were looking at a similar, but larger, heavy-lift airship under the “Walrus” program. Sometime around 2005-2006, ATK and NASA were looking down the road towards the post-Shuttle future for the Shuttle booster rockets, including five-segment rockets for the Ares I and Ares V. Some of the redesigns for the booster segments would have weighed a bit more than standard Shuttle booster segments. The problem there was that the existing road transport system – needed to haul the segments from the Promontory facility down I-15 to a the railhead forty or so miles south – was already at the limit theDepartment of Transportation would allow on the highway. So… NASA wanted alternate ideas. I proposed the obvious: use a Walrus heavy-lifter to carry segments straight from Promontory to Cape Canaveral. It would have had more than enough lift capacity and would have been faster than the truck & train. Plus: I just wanted to see a thousand-foot-long airship floating over my house. Who wouldn’t? Obviously that didn’t happen; ATK management looked at me like I was insane. Something about “you want to fly millions of pounds of solid rocket fuel through the sky over populated areas potentially though storms” or some such whiny nonsense. I understand the final solution for dealing with the highway overloading issue was something along the lines of “la-la-la I can’t hear you.”
Shrug.
Mar 212016
A while back Horizon Models, a new injection-molded model kit company in Australia, sent me a copy of their first kit, a 1/72 Mercury spacecraft in return for a review. So, here goes.
The kit includes parts to build not only the orbital capsule (with abort tower) but also the earlier “boilerplate” test articles. The results are small… but then, the Mercury capsule wasn’t exactly a Winnebago. Also included are photoetched steel detail parts, and stands for the two kits. The engineering of the parts seems to be quite well done, with the corrugations nice and clean and fricken’ tiny. On the whole this looks like a spiffy kit.
As an engineer, there is one aspect of the kit that makes me scratch my head a tad. The sprue as shown below includes the parts for one complete Mercury capsule, one incomplete Mercury capsule and one stand. In order to make this a “two capsule kit,” Horizon used the simple expedient of including two copies of the sprue. It seems to me that it would have been more efficient to include all the necessary parts (for one flight and one boilerplate) on a single sprue; but in doing it this way the kit builder winds up with a bunch of extra bits to be used for other projects.
The Mercury capsule kit is available from the Horizon Models website for $35.
Horizon has also just released a companion kit, a 1/72 Mercury-Atlas. I haven’t seen that, but it seems promising. And it’s available through Amazon.
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If you have a product you want me to review… hey, why not. Feel free to send me a copy or two. I’m particularly interested in reviewing gold bullion and the like.
Mar 212016
If you want to find some good evidence – as if it was really needed (but I guess these days it is) – that evolution is a reality, look no further than a mirror.
Mar 202016
… from a while back. Not terribly great, but what the heck, this is the internet, so here’s a cat.
Mar 202016
What we’ve got here are about 200 episodes in MP3 format of 1950’s science fiction radio dramas, “Dimension X” and “X Minus One.” These aided on NBC radio from 1950-51 and 1955-58 and featured stories written by the likes of Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. I’ve only just started listening (having caught part of one episode on the radio late last night… presumably a station broadcasting recordings, rather than a small wormhole that’s letting radio signals from 60 years ago propagate through), and I’ve noticed the same titles popping up several times. I don’t know if those episodes are remakes or re-runs. But hey, they’re free, so do as I did and download ’em all.
Dimension X
X Minus One
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There are also these (so far I haven’t listened to any):
Dark Fantasy
This sounds a bit like the more horror-centric Twilight Zone.
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And then there are these two, which seem like screamingly-1950’s sci-fi fare:
Space Patrol
Planet Man
Mar 192016
The Brits have themselves a new research vessel. Looks like this:
They’re holding open voting to name the ship. Some of the names suggested have been the RRS Henry Worseley and the RRS David Attenborough. But what name is winning the popular vote just now? Hmm, let’s see…
‘Boaty McBoatface’ Is Currently Leading An Open Vote To Name The New £200 Million Royal Research Ship
This is a reminder, as if it was really needed, that democracy isn’t *always* the answer. “What shall we name our ship?” “Engine #2 has burst into flames. What shall we do?” “Should we use the power of government to stomp all over such-and-such ethnic/religious/economic group?” These are the sort of questions it’s often best to *not* put in the hands of the mob.
Mar 192016
Some recent views of the Thatcher area…
And this sure looked like a giant-scale trilobite fossil in the sky. Well, I suppose Cthulhu has to snack on *something*…
Mar 182016
A video explainer of a very unusual shotgun from South Africa. It was designed for 12 gauge shotgun shells that cannot be obtained; the only shells that it’ll run that can actually be purchased are quite weak, with the end result being that the gun… just ain’t that good.