And 500 injured. A pretty ambitious and co-ordinated set of suicides bombings.
I remain befuddled that anyone thinks this sort of thing is any kind of a good idea anywhere outside of the West. Blow stuff and people up in the modern West, we’ll kowtow. But Sri Lanka? They’ll retaliate.
OK, here’s the final (pending review) Ajax CAD model. Different colors indicate different parts. Light blue indicates clear parts… except for the rectangular hatches on the rear spine. Those won’t be clear. If it looks like I’ve missed something or made a mistake, now’s the time to speak up.
And by “anomaly,” they meant “utterly kerploded.”
Rockets R Hard.
This was the capsule that recently returned from the ISS. It was to be used for an in-flight abort test, but obviously that’s not going to happen. Hopefully they’ll be able to figure out what went wrong. It looked like a friggen’ bomb went off.
Getting close to finished with the Ajax model. Just need to clean up a few bits and do some work on the engine and add some details to the rear of the “spine,” and it’ll be there.
There was some debate about how to deal with the nearly 200 rungs on the side of the vehicle. They are just big enough that simple raised rectangular bumps on the surface would look lame. So the decision as it currently stands is to include two options the builder can choose from. Both build on “troughs” cut in the surface.
1) The simpler option include segments that fit in the troughs and which have molded-in rungs. They simply plug in.
2) The more complex option uses segment plugs with gaps on the side, the end result being that when the plugs are inserted there will be holes in the surface. Into these holes will fit photoetched brass rungs. This will be labor intensive… but the end result should look phenomenal.
Coupled with the clear parts and theoretically easy lightability… this should be a damned spiffy model when finished.
*Something* went wrong during a static test firing of the capsules Super Draco engines. Few details as yet, but this will doubtless set the project back some. Feh.
A piece of Rocketdyne art illustrating something just not quite as possible as they thought at the time: a manned landing on Saturns moon Titan. This dates from prior to (quite likely a decade prior to) 1968 and depicts a terribly 1950’s rocketship standing on its tail in the nicely transparent air of Titan, with Saturn clearly visible in the sky above some modest lower-level atmospheric haze.
This almost certainly does not depict an engineering study, but is simply the result of an aerospace artist at Rocketdyne being let loose to create some PR images.
Razorfist breaks it down for you calmly in ENTIRELY SAFE FOR WORK language*.
*Note: No, it’s not.
After a couple *years* of Democrat party hacks screeching on about “collusion” and “treason,” it has been amazing to watch them pivot not on a dime but on a freakin’ quark to screeching about “obstruction of justice,” with their best evidence being that Trump wants to bring the fraudulent Russiagate investigation to an end…but didn’t actually do anything to make that happen.
One wonders if, after getting the Covington Kids half a billion dollars from the media and celebrities for slandering and libeling them, perhaps the lawyers could go after the people who most vociferously pushed the “collusion” line. I suspect that that would be covered under the 1st Amendment, especially given that Trump is a public figure… but some newly-enriched attack lawyers could tie up Pelosi and Nadler and such in court long enough to impoverish them. I’m usually quite opposed to using lawsuits to simply harass people… but some people just plain suck. Reasoning with them hasn’t worked. Providing evidence hasn’t worked.
Jonathan Frakes describes the Russiagate story for 47 seconds…
The terrorists in question being the IRA.
What’s next? Parachute pants? A-ha dominating MTV? Well… the Russians are getting back into the “threatening the world with nuclear annihilation” groove, so I guess it was only a matter of time.
A model I CAD-mastered for Fantastic Plastic has finally been released… the 1/288 scale Max Valier “Raketenschiff” from 1929. This was a very art deco “rocket ship” designed as a hypersonic trans-Atlantic passenger transport. It was never much more than a notion and some art, but it’s always been a concept I’ve been fond of. Its design is a combination of zeppelin and Colliers Ferry Rocket. Go to Fantastic Plastic and buy a couple.
Well, here’s the entirety of the next few days news cycle…
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2019/images/04/18/mueller-report.pdf
Or…
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
It’s 139 megabytes, if that’s important to ya.
I’ll probably get around to reading some of it; got stuff to do and slogging through hundreds of pages of something that isn’t science fiction seems like a bore. I’m *sure* that the news media will do a fine job of combing through it and summarizing it accurately and fairly. Right?