Own some of Buzz’s stuff

 awesomeness, history, news, rockets, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

This should prove interesting:

Buzz Aldrin is auctioning off the NASA jacket he wore to the moon, other items from time in space

The jacket is estimated at one to two million dollars. One could hope it’ll go to someplace like the NASM. One could backup-hope that if it looks like it’ll go to a foreign bajillionaire, someone like Musk or Bezos will step up to make sure it stays in the US.

The link to the auction:

Buzz Aldrin: American Icon

There are 69 items, a number of which are items that flew with him to the lunar surface on Apollo 11. It would be *fantastic* if they all ended up in the same collection… preferably NASM.

 

 Posted by at 8:04 pm

Oh, sure, blame the stores…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., I'm from the government, news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

… for getting robbed, vandalized, destroyed.

 

And while not directly related, the cognitive dissonance on display here is *astounding,* and says a lot about the current state of society.

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 7:45 pm

Nuclear powered Chinese torpedo?

 Hmm..., news, nukes, politics, projects, ships, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

China’s Nuclear Powered Super Long-Range Torpedo Concept Fits Concerning Pattern

Article concerns a theoretical weapon the Chinese have written a paper about. A torpedo that can be launched from a normal tube, equipped with a reactor of rather inefficient performance but adequate to drive it across the ocean to San Francisco at 30 knots. There it would drop the reactor which would supposedly safely deactivate and sink into the sand; the torpedo would then guide itself to the target under conventional power.

On the one hand: archives are filled with design studies that went nowhere. One the other hand, it would be unwise to assume that the Chinese *aren’t* developing this. And given their recent history of aggression and technical incompetence, I’d fully expect a large fraction of the reactors to melt down en route, some to deactivate then reactivate, some of the torpedoes to wander off and blow up Easter Island or Fiji, or just bob around in the ocean until rammed by a fishing vessel or a deafened whale. Still, it’s interesting to note that the Commies are threatening San Francisco. Gotta wonder how the commies of San Fran and Berkeley would react to the sudden appearance of a radioactive tsunami a few meters high washing into town. I imagine the radiation wards will be filled with plaintive cries of “Trump’s fault!” and “white privilege!”

 Posted by at 7:15 pm

Huh. The Big E just might make it

 art, awesomeness, models, news, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

Tomy’s 1/350 die cast USS Enterprise looked pretty likely to fail… till they dropped the number needed again. Originally 5,000 units, then 2,500, now 2,000. With three days to go, they’re now at more than 94%.

With fewer units sold, these things should become that much more valuable in the future. Imagine the barter value for guzoline or with the bullet farmer! You might be able to trade one of these for an oxen with only moderate radiation sickness. I have doubts that Lord Humongous will have much interest in them, but I bet Master Blaster will.

https://startrek.tomy.com/

Woo.

 Posted by at 4:05 pm

Russia *might* have a problem incoming…

 aircraft, awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., news, politics, russian empire, weapons  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

This may well be pure BS. If it’s not, though… ruh-roh, Russian tankies…

The A-10 is, let’s face it, obsolete. As absolutely badass as the plane is, drones have kinda taken over the role… sure, they’re far more easily destroyed than the A-10, but who cares? They’re cheap and disposable and ain’t nobody on board. The modern battlefield is an unsafe place for something slow and targetable like the A-10. Buuuuuuuut…. the Russians, rather stupidly, have failed to gain absolute air dominance over all of Ukraine. This is the sort of environment that the A-10, properly employed and properly flown, can shine in. Swamp the Russian air defenses with cheap rocks and cheap drones, and then the A-10 comes striding in ten feet tall and lays waste with precision, determination and brutality. *Imagine* those long trains of resupply trucks, miles long, looking up and seeing a few A-10s drawing down on them. Whoopsie.

Of course, there are lots of problems with this idea. The A-10 is not in production, nor, I expect, are most of the spare parts needed to maintain the fleet. A Ukrainian A-10 gets damaged, repairing it might be quite problematic. Ukrainian pilots have, to my knowledge, zero training time on the A-10. Russian air defense has been kind of a joke; this might spur them to actually get on the job. And every A-10 sent to Ukraine is an A-10 that can’t be sent to the US Army (the Army should have fixed wing ground attack/support aircraft: fight me). The USAF has wanted to rid itself of the A-10 for decades, and, honestly, I guess I’d rather see them lost in combat shooting their way to Valhalla than in a scrap yard getting turned into nails and pop cans. At this point, losing airframes over enemy territory no longer holds the fear of “oh no, they’ll learn our secrets from examining the wreckage” that it might have 40 years ago.

A-10’s appear in the skies of Ukraine, the Russians will make taking them out a priority. That will certainly make for an interesting clash. And if the American plane and Ukrainian pilot put up a good showing of survivability… the Russians will probably bend themselves over backwards to take them out. The A-10s could thus be useful simply as a way to throw the Russian war effort into chaos, devoting effort and funds to some new goal, while now getting stingier on other more practical goals.

 Posted by at 3:01 pm

The pizza delivery guy we need

 art, awesomeness, blather, news, politics, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 202022
 

It would be fantastic if the media and the culture would raise up the heroes in society with more enthusiasm than it tears them down and props up the villains.  Eli Dicken and Shay Goldman should have a movie made of their actions at the Greenwood Park Mall. Hell, the mall could do worse than to erect a bronze statue in the food court. We don’t erect statues to heroes anymore; we tear them down and erect statues of dirtbags who died due to their dirtbaggery.

But Dicken isn’t the only young hero worthy of note. Take, for example, the story of Nick Bostic:

Man saves 5 from house fire; jumps out window to save girl

Bostic was out delivering pizzas for Dominos when he happened across a house on fire, ran in and saved five kids. Four were able to be hustled out – because Bostic notified the 18-year-old babysitter what was going on – and he ran himself back into the fire to save a 6-year-old girl, receiving injuries in the process.

“You did good dude, OK?” an officer tells Bostic.

Damn straight.

I fear that a few days of news coverage will be all that comes of this… well, that and the currently half million dollars being raised on his Gofundme.

I’m all for Dicken and Bostic – not to mention Rittenhouse – walking away with financial windfalls (curiously a Gofundme set up to cover the inevitable legal fees Dicken will accrue has only gathered 23 grand). Good for them. But for *society,* they should be made into role models. Make ’em mythological role model if need be. if it turns out that one of them is actually kind of a dirtbag… the movie can either gloss over that, or show how he has overcome that and become a better person. Would that be historically accurate? Well… dunno. But given how Hollywood doesn’t give a crap about historical accuracy anyway (witness the forthcoming “The Woman King” which looks like it’s going to glorify the objectively evil kingdom of Dahomey), why not do these things in a way that makes culture *better?*

The US used to make cultural icons of war heroes, cowboys, explorers. You know, people who actually did good stuff. A lot of the stories were overblown hagiographies, true enough… but it helped craft national myths that brought us together. In my lifetime, that sort of thing has pretty much all fallen away.

 Posted by at 10:00 pm

Even more impressive

 awesomeness, news, weapons  No Responses »
Jul 202022
 

I had noted that Good Guy With A Gun Eli Dicken was reported to have shot the wannabe mass shooter from a range of forty yards. It gets better:

Update: Eli Dicken stopped the mall shooter in 15 seconds flat, landing 8 out of 10 shots from his 9mm at 40 freaking yards!

Yup. From forty to fifty yards, he took the bad guy down in less time than most of us would take to register just what the frak was going on. The coroner report says that the badguy had 8 bullet wounds, which *may* mean he got shot eight times, though it might include both entry and exit wounds as separate, dunno (which would still mean four hits at least).

 Posted by at 1:30 am
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