This. This right here. This is *exactly* why I do not support efforts to make voting easier or to legally mandate that everyone vote. Because not everyone is either smart enough or educated well enough for their vote to be *worth* counting. If you guessed that Iraq is actually Iran… well, you’re wrong, but I guess not too far wrong. But if you guessed Romania or freakin’ *England* or the got-damned middle of the Med is Iran… sit down, shut up, don’t vote.
But it gets worse:
Australia? Kansas? The mid-Atlantic ridge??? This, gentlemen, is how Bernie and AOC gets elected.
Continuing the report into a less interesting section, that of ground based services that in 1985 Rockwell thought might be profitable. these ideas included STS Marketing Services, Consolidated Space Operations Center, DOD “Schedule C,” Payload Certification from NASA, Commercial Payload Software Services, Commercial ASE Services, and Turn Key Launch Services.
A Ukrainian 737 went down shortly after taking off from the Tehran airport, taking 180 passengers with it. It’s not too often that modern jetliners burst into flames in mid air. Getting shot down by twitchy Iranian missile operators seems not unlikely.
Not a whole lot of details yet, but it *seems* kinda halfassed.
An interesting point is raised:
Iranian-backed Iraqi militias have been firing rockets at bases housing U.S. forces on a semi-regular basis for years now. An attack involving 30 or more rockets would be in line with an earlier attack on K-1 base in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk in December 2019. That attack killed a U.S. military contractor and reportedly led to the U.S. government’s decision to kill Soleimani.
Yeah, all those rockets worked out so well before.
The Landmaster is one of the best sci-fi vehicles ever built, from one of the cruddier sci-fi movies ever made. Its unusual wheel arrangement and body articulation were not pure fantasy affect, but were real-world concepts that were tested and shown to have *some* advantages. Behold:
There’s even this RC Landmaster someone built. Performance-wise it’s unimpressive, but it does show how the wheels work, including the passive “crawl” of the Lockheed-patented “Tri-star” wheels:
But then there’s this…. thing. Produced by a Russian auto modifier, that third wheel does nothing useful but get spun around by the other two. It’s… ummmm… yeah.
When I first glanced at the thumbnail that YouTube threw up I thought that this vehicle had a true Tri-Star system on the aft end, but a half-second’s further examination of the rear wheel well showed that that was impossible. A Fiat with a Tri-Star rear wheel would be a ridiculous thing, but potentially cool; the arrangement it actually has baffles me. Adding a second set of wheels, even if unpowered, could be used to spread a heavy load, but adding a third wheel like this that contacts both of the road wheel seems to do little but add drag to the system, on top of added mass and reduced interior volume.
My gast is flabbered.
But hey, in digging up the Landmaster vids I found this guys channel. He made a Landmaster CAD model and then a 1/25 scale resin kit. It looks pretty spiffy, and seems (at least as of August 2018) to be selling them.
In 1985 Rockwell – perhaps half-heartedly – suggested the possibility of a business case for a manned station in geosynchronous orbit. The station would be used to service satellites in GEO. While an interesting notion, satellites in GEO relatively rarely require any actual servicing; the three billion dollars Rockwell expected such a system would cost (and let’s face it, the cost would doubtless balloon) would likely far outweigh the cost of simply replacing the satellites.
For sane people, “cultural appropriation” is a good thing, as it spreads what’s good around while depriving nobody of anything. Still, sometimes cultural appropriation in action just looks kinda hard to wrap your mind around. Take, for example, this:
Where we have a group (Ningen Isu) of old-ish Japanese fellers in traditional Japanese garb rockin’ out to some pretty good headbanging metal. Inspired by the likes of Black Sabbath, they sing not just in Japanese, but *old* Japanese, and use not only traditional Japanese folk tales for inspiration but also Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
Wrong, yet so very, very awesome. It (like “The HU“) shouldn’t work, yet it does.
Iran continues to threaten the most horrific of all possible retributions for the execution of their scumbag, and yet… I’m not too terrified of this. In fact… go on, Iran. Do it. I double dog dare you.
H.J.Ansari Zarif’s senior advisor: “If Europeans stop trading with Iran and don’t put pressure on US then we will reveal which western politicians and how much money they had received during nuclear negotiations to make #IranDeal happen.” That would be interesting.#JCPOA
Amusing notion: if Hillary took bribes, threatening her could well lead to Iran being found after hanging itself in a closet. That would be an interesting way to avoid war: simply make the Clintons feel threatened, and all of a sudden an entire regime gets Epsteined.
