Woo!
This is it: we’ve just wrapped up one of the most challenging steps of our journey to #UnfoldTheUniverse.
With all five layers of sunshield tensioning complete, about 75% of our 344 single-point failures have been retired! pic.twitter.com/P9jJhu7bJX
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 4, 2022
More photos needed.
Four years after first unveiling its hypersonic airliner concept at #AIAASciTech 2018 @Boeing has revealed a refined, more realistic Mach 5 reusable air-breathing design targeting military and space launch roles at @aiaa San Diego event pic.twitter.com/CtpxA5OJGn
— Guy Norris (@AvWeekGuy) January 4, 2022
Weep, people, for the fact that nothing in your life will ever make you as happy as Prodigy’s “Firestarter” makes Lex:
The Lockheed Skunk Works A-12 was the immediate predecessor of the SR-71, a single seat recon vehicle in some ways a bit superior to the SR-71, in others not as good. One of the odder ideas put forward was to use the A-12 to carry a modified Polaris missile with a recon satellite on a once-around mission… a way to turn the Mach 3+ A-12 into a global range hypersonic, nearly orbit-capable recon platform. It was bonkers, but the math checked out; nevertheless it was not built. It is described in greater detail in:
Available either directly through the publisher or through Amazon.
Is it any wonder that much of the fandom is PO’ed about the direction Star Wars has gone under Disney?
The High Republic Adventures: Galactic Bake-Off Spectacular
Torban “Buckets of Blood” Buck and Kantam Sy face off in a brutal, intense, ruthless… bake-off!
Lightsabers and Jedi robes are put aside in favor of whisks and aprons as the two competitors bake Master Yoda’s special pastry recipe. But the recipe requires one extra special ingredient: a story! “Buckets of Blood” and Kantam recount the tale of an epic battle as they whisk away, both hoping to win the prize of Padawan approval.
Daniel José Older and Vita Ayala team up in this heart-warming one-shot. Plus, bake Master Yoda’s pastries yourself, with the recipe included in the back!
For ᚠᚪᛣᚳᛋ sake. Who is this *for*?????
It comes complete with a partial reading of a Chuck Tingle-esque bit of fan fiction *and* by far the superiorest rendition of “Diamonds are Forever” that will ever drip into your ears.
A scene from the 2019 Japanese movie “The Great War of Archimedes” showing the battleship Yamato getting sent to the bottom. The added subtitles really help to sell it.
US Navy nods in Arizonan.
It’s a possibility. it’s not a popular possibility in Finland, apparently, with more of the public opposing it than supporting it; and of course Putin doesn’t like the idea of a nation that the USSR attempted to put under its bootheel standing up to him. Given that Russia continues to occupy a fair amount of Finish territory, it’s not unsurprising that the Finnish government is not terribly fond of Russia.
A mere 8 years ago I posted a question… does anyone know of a Thompson submachine gun that was chopped down to pistol-size back in (I think) the thirties? Many, many years ago I saw a magazine article showing just such a weapon. It didn’t look like a hack job, but like a shiny nickel-plated piece of art. And it may have *been* art, not actually functional, it just looked cool. When I posted about it, nobody seemed to know it.
Turns out something much like what I remember has shown up in a video game along with a bunch of other mutant/mutilated weapons. So, once again: does this look familiar?
My memory of the article says that the pistol looked like this photoshop, just shinier.
In Goldfinger (1964), the villains plot was to set off a dirty A-bomb in Fort Knox, irradiating the US gold supply. The claim was made that the gold would be radioactive for 58 years, which would be… 2022. Well, here we are.
As an aside, I can’t say as I think too highly of the math here. Cobalt and iodine were mentioned as part of the bomb being “particularly dirty;” bombs “salted” with those substances were proposed back in the day because they would indeed make bombs dirty. The fallout would be *nasty.* But the half-life of cobalt 60 is 5.3 years; that of iodine 131 is 8 days. This means that 58 years gives cobalt 10.94 half lives and iodine 2,650 half lives. This means that cobalt would have decayed down to 1/(2^10.94) = 0.00051 of it’s original radioactiveness; iodine would be essentially nonexistent. It’s the less radioactive, longer-lived components of the bomb – the uranium, the metal bits of the casing, etc. – that should be more worrisome long-term.
I often wonder sometimes if Hollywood types even care about simple accuracy.