The Blade Runner “Blaster” water pistol I mentioned back in April is now available. When originally announced, it was supposed to cost about $12… and if you’re in Japan, that’s about right. But in the US, it costs about five times as much, at least so far. Numerous copies on eBay, one on Amazon.
Looks reasonably accurate. Not sure about the charging handle on the right side, but I suspect it would only require minimal effort to paint and otherwise dress up this piece into a pretty good replica.
The GBU-43A/B “Massive Ordnance Air Blast (aka Mother Of All Bombs)” is dropped from a C-130. It sits on an aluminum cradle and rolls out the back of the plane, pulled out by a parachute. The question is: how does that chute work? If you watch the video below, you can see the parachute pack “drop” from the upper part of the doorway. This looks like either the pack was attached to the ceiling of the cargo bay (or the inner portion of the aft door that hinges upwards) and simply dropped, or perhaps it’s hurled out by a catapult of some type. Does anyone know? I’ve looked but so far I’ve failed to find any photos, diagrams or videos depicting the setup prior to deployment.
This afternoon a “human caused” fire in the mountains blew up into an 800-acre wildfire. Somebody’s in a bit of trouble.
Photos taken from my place just after sundown began to unveil the fires, but were nevertheless unimpressive shots.
This dark blue unrevealing photo provides some more info with a little bit of “fade correction” added…
But more impressive photos were to be had by hopping in the car, driving closer and waiting for the sky to darken.
Photos after the break…
So, turns out that James Fields is, you guessed it, a Big Government, Anti-Capitalist Socialist:
Ahem:
“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,”
…
he was a member of Vanguard America, which bills itself as the “Face of American Fascism.”
So, he has a fondness for a system that made a big deal out of economic collectivization, of the welfare state, of racial preferences, of disallowing wrongthink and wrongspeak.
So, Dane Peter Madsen built himself a sizable submarine, using crowdfunding to raise the money (around $200,000). He took it for a spin with a Swedish journalist on board, it sank, she disappeared, and now he’s been arrested for her murder as the Danish authorities believe the sub was intentionally sunk.
I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of this sub until it sank. It actually looks pretty spiffy… but reading up on in on Wikipedia, some concerns began to grow:
It was built over a three-year period as an art project by Peter Madsen and a group of volunteers…
An “art project.” A friggen submarine as an ART PROJECT. Oh, no, who needs STEM…
Madsen took the sub out *alone* with the reporter. How is it ever a good idea to pilot a submarine alone?
It seems really unlikely to me that Madsen sank the sub in order to kill the journalist. But maybe he sank the sub for some purpose (Insurance scam? Drama? Art?) and the journalist died in the process. He claims that he dropped her off on shore before the sub sank, and her body hasn’t been found. Could this be some sort of ill-conceived hoax/joke thing, where the authorities are going to spend a whole lot of taxpayer money investigating this only to have her pop up and shout “Ta-Da!’ months down the line?
Late Friday night I went outside to photograph the meteor shower and was presented with a sky full of clouds. While that’s terrible for meteors, it had compensations.
I wound up taking hundreds of shots of lightningbolts. Most were pretty meh, but some were pretty good. I’ve cropped and resized some of the better ones, a small batch after the break. Click to view.
As a followup to the photos of the H-33 display model, here’s a Grumman report from July, 1971, giving a pretty good and well illustrated description of the H-33 orbiter.
The abstract on NTRS can be seen HERE.
The PDF file can be directly downloaded here:
Alternate space shuttle concepts study. Part 2: Technical summary. Volume 2: Orbiter definition
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light!
Country music legend Glen Campbell died a day or two ago. While the tributes are rolling in from the sources you’d expect, here’s one you might not: Alice Cooper.
Additional “HUH?!?!” worthy stuff is Alice here discusses his Christian faith. Huh.
The H-33 orbiter was designed in early 1971 to be launched atop a reusable manned flyback booster, a truly giant supersonic vehicle. The orbiter itself was similar in configuration to the Shuttle Orbiter as actually built, but it differed in that it had internal liquid oxygen tanks and expendable external hydrogen tanks, rather than a single large ET. The NASM has some good photos of a display model of the full system.
The H-33 was a popular design, at least at Grumman. A number of display models were made of it, including this detailed “cutaway” model made – seemingly – of plexiglas.
I have uploaded the full-rez images to the 2017-08 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4 and up APR Patrons. If interested, wander on by the APR Patreon and sign up. Lots of aerospace goodies available.
