I can’t *imagine* why this topic might be on my mind these days…
Mar 312022
Mar 312022
One where the sort of toys you can buy at WalMart or Best Buy can help you dial in your mortar gunnery:
Mortars aren’t my field of specialization, so I’m curious about the little cloth bags they’re tying to the mortar rounds. My *guess* is that these are smoke charges of some kind to help the drone spot where they’re landing?
Bonus: Now it can be told… the reason why Putin is in such a foul mood.
Mar 312022
Just Some Guy’s take on it. He’s not wrong.
Mar 312022
I’ve just made the March 2022 rewards available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:
Art: A poster of the 1990’s German Sanger II two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane
Document: Bell-Boeing “Pointer” brochure… full color brochure describing the proposed tiltrotor UAV
Document: Cessna EV-37E STOL: 1964 presentation on battlefield recon/surveillance version of the T-37
Document: History of the Juno Cluster System: conference paper on the early satellite launching system
CAD diagram: work-in-progress layout of the Aerocon Wingship. General arrangement diagram with brief description of how much trouble I have to go through sometimes…
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Mar 312022
OK, now for something completely different: insanely high speed footage (up to 40,000 fps) of vary large bubbles being popped. Cool and all visually, but there’s enough weird there that it looks like the physics could be used as the basis for visual effects showing, say, the popping of a membrane that seals a portal between worlds or dimensions. Oooh, booga booga…
Mar 312022
Seems to be running a little fuel rich.
Mar 312022
Bruce Willis *used* to be a Big Movie Star. He used to star in giant films, making buckets of money. But in recent years he’s largely kept himself to low-to-no budget terrible films, usually showing up for only a few minutes of screen time (long enough to end up on the DVD box art as a major selling point). And even then, his acting has been lackluster in the “I don’t give a crap” or “just phoning it in” variety.
Well, I guess now we know why:
Bruce Willis diagnosed with aphasia, ‘stepping away’ from acting, family reveals
Aphasia affects a personas ability to communicate and understand communications. People can start throwing unrelated words into sentences, sometimes gibberish words; and sometimes they lose the ability to communicate entirely. It sounds awful. And it’s the sort of thing that would make an actor… no longer a *good* actor.
Aphasia usually pops up after a stroke or other brain injury, but perhaps it can also sneak up slowly. If that’s the case, perhaps that’s why he’s been in so many films that honestly didn’t demand – or get – much from him. Looking at his IMDB page, he still has a lot of these Z-grade movies in development; the last major films he was in with sizable roles seem to be “Death Wish” from 2018 and “Glass” from 2019. Curiously, the last movie on the list, “Paradise City,” currently in post-production, had a respectable $20 million budget and Willis is the lead.
Mar 312022
There’s a lot stupid about Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The fact that it happened in the first place, of course. The fact that there are so many people in the west who think Putin is anything but a cheap villain. The use of inadequate weapons. The lack of preparation. The lack of logistics. The failure to dominate the skies first. And on and on and on. But this… this is on a whole new level of mind-boggling stupidity.
Russian Troops Suffer ‘Acute Radiation Sickness’ After Digging Chernobyl Trenches
And…
Workers at Chernobyl site say Russian soldiers drove through the highly-radioactive ‘Red Forest’ with no protective gear
Is the Russian leadership *trying* to destroy the Russian military?
Forty years ago, when Soviet missiles were pointed almost directly at my head, I would have cheered on Soviet soldiers being abused and wasted in this fashion. Now it’s just freakin’ sad.
Mar 312022
Hubble spots most distant single star ever seen, at a record distance of 28 billion lightyears
The star had (a very long time ago) a mass something like 500 times that of the sun. it was only visible thanks to gravitational lensing; the galaxy it occupied was smeared into a long arc due to an intervening mass. The star of course only appears as a single pixel (likely less than that); a fair question is “how can they tell it’s a single star rather than a small galaxy or cluster?” The star has a simple spectrum, where a number of stars would have a much more complex spectrum.
A second valid question: “How can something be 28 billion lightyears away if the universe is 13 or so billion years old?” The complication is that the Universe has been expanding for all of those 13 billion years; the furthest visible extents are expanding at just about the speed of light. The actual *things* are not moving at the speed of light… space itself is expanding. The universe *beyond* what’s visible is expanding at *beyond* the speed of light. This video helps explain this feature of the universe.
The star has been named “Earendel,” the Old English word for “morning star.” To compare with the character of Eärendil from the Silmarillion.
Mar 302022
The two aircraft are unrelated, apart from the fact that I have uploaded scans of each to the 2022-03 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up patrons/Subscribers. The first is a brief magazine writeup showing illustrations of the Boeing and Ryan designs for the Compass Cope unmanned recon vehicles from the early 1970s; both of these would end up actually being built, though not quite in the configurations shown in the concept art. The second is a Convair inboard profile/plan view of the B-58A bomber, because why not.
The full-rez scans are, again, available to $4 and pup Patrons/Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.