This looks like just the thing for home defense:
Dec 272021
Dec 272021
Something ain’t right with the spar…
Footage showing the accident of an Embraer EMB-202A, #Brazil registration PT-UZI (C/N 20001133), that took place earlier today, at a farm near Lagoa da Confusão, in Tocantins. According to witnesses, the pilot survived. pic.twitter.com/9IUuAa2KjV
— The Latin American Aviation Historical Society (@The_LAAHS) December 10, 2021
Dec 262021
A video of a guy messing about with a demo version of a “virtual Titanic” that let’s you wander around something like a quarter of the ship (the rest of the vessel coming later). Seems like a *spectacular* way to blow a bunch of hours.
This project dates back to at least 2016 (I posted a link to a YouTube video of theirs showing a real-time sinking of the ship back in early 2016, a lot of the website doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2017). The demo is downloadable here:
Titanic Honor and Glory
Those of you old enough to remember when James Cameron’s “Titanic” was released in 1997 (yeesh, nearly a quarter century ago) will doubtless recall how a good fraction of the public went bonkers, to the point that at least two efforts were made to produce a “Titanic II” ship designed to replicate the look and opulence of the original… but with a better hull and more lifeboats. Sadly these didn’t come to pass, but I’m pretty sure that if someone were to build a faithful replica of the Titanic, even as a land-locked hotel, people would line up around the block. Shoot, people throw money at Disney for their half-assed “Star Cruiser” Star Wars knockoff, so a Titanic “experience?” A license to print money.
As an aside, a story idea: turns out that the iceberg impact did not produce enough damage to sink the vessel. What caused it to sink was the sudden increase in weight on the ship as tens of thousands of time travellers arrived to witness the sinking.
Dec 262021
Who knows for how long, but Amazon has my SR-71 bookazine in stock again with free shipping and for low cost. Buy now! Buy often! Consume in mass quantities!!!
Dec 262021
Gotta give props to a supervillain who is good at what he does. Witness what’s going on in formerly great Britain:
Dec 252021
Russian Citizens Are Now Being Prepped for Nuclear War
Neato.
In short, Putin is demanding that NATO stay out of former Soviet vassal states like Ukraine and Lithuania, because he wants a buffer. But what buffer do those states have against the Russian military? Perhaps a good compromise would be if NATO stays out of the Soviet states while the Russian military pulls back behind the Urals.
Russian state propaganda somehow feels that Ukraine or Poland being secure is a threat to Russia. Why that would be is not clear. Does Putin think that Estonia is going to suddenly start baying for Russian blood and then sweep across the border? Will Latvian special forces take Moscow?
So, now Russian propagandists are promising to nuke American and European cities if former slave states cozy up to the West. Doesn’t seem a particularly effective way to calm everyone down to the point that Ukraine and the like no longer have a desire to have military backup, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m just glad we have such competent, on-the-ball leadership in Washington.
Dec 252021
The James Webb Space Telescohas successfully launched
There will be no Hubble-like servicing of this when things go wrong. Much of that is due to the fact that it is being launched towards the Earth-Sun L2 LaGrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth (further out from the sun). NASA currently has no manned spacecraft that can reach L2. Eventually such spacecraft will become available… modified Dragon capsules, Starship or even the laughably over budget and behind schedule Orion and Starliner capsules should be able to get there. But even when such spacecraft become available, Webb wasn’t designed to be maintained, so when a part breaks and needs replacement it likely won’t actually be replacable. Consequently, much of the mission risk for Webb remains even though the launch was successful.
It will take about a month to reach the L2 point. While l2 is a stable position, it will still require perhaps 4 meters per second of station keeping per year. Total delta V budget is 150 meter per second, so if all goes well lifespan could still be as short as 37.5 years. Development began in 1996, with an initially planed launch of 2007, so it took a quarter century to actually design, build and launch; any conceivable improvement/replacement using the same bureaucracy could *easily* take far longer than Webb’s actual lifespan. There is cause to hope that if Starship is successful that the whole paradigm that resulted in Webb taking 14 or so extra years could be replaced by a much more rational world of spacecraft development. If it really does become possible to launch large and heavy spacecraft quickly and orders of magnitude more cheaply, then it will be possible to design and build spacecraft more capable than Webb, much cheaper than Webb, because they won’t need to shave off every last milligram like Webb.
Dec 242021
When the pinnacle of demasculated privilege encounters the real world… hilarity results.
These two guys went to Mexico and went off the beaten track without any functional understanding of the local culture and criminal situation, and met people they were convinced were the cartel… but who may have been the local self-defense civilians defending *against* the cartel. Their panic is freakin’ *hilarious,* and fundamentally counter-productive for them had they met the *actual* cartel. I can imagine the meltdown these men would have had had they made the mistake of wandering into downtown Tremonton, Utah, on a day when some ranchers decide to go to the diner with their guns on their hips.
This avoidance of accepting the realities of the world *and* choosing to be passive victims? Yeah, that’s not a good long term survival strategy, although it may have served them well this time… if the people they met were indeed cartel members, they found the Americans to be laughably pathetic and let them go out of pity. Great Odin, man… how are you going to defend your women when the time comes? Yeesh.
Best advice: ᛗᚪᚾ ᛏᚻᛖ ᚠᚢᚳk ᚢᛈ
Or… dunno. Stay hilariously useless. I’m sure there are some in the warlords council who would have use for you…
I had thought of linking to a page I found with a bunch of unedited cartel videos. The State Department would do well to mandate that any American intending to visit Mexico or points south, or regions in the United States with uncontrolled borders, watch a few hours of those videos before being sent on their way. But I decided against directly linking because, holy carp, those vids will mess with your calm. But they will also show you the reality of a “defund the cops” world.
Dec 232021
… but perhaps too much bullet. A 45-70 in a Derringer seems like maybe a wee bit much.
Dec 232021
I’m working on CAD diagrams for Book 3. As with the prior two books, this will be largely filled with diagrams of unbuilt aircraft, but also will have diagrams of real, flown aircraft. The diagrams of “real” aircraft take far longer than those of “project” aircraft for a few simple reasons: “real” aircraft have a lot more information, and a lot more accessible detail… and “real” aircraft are subject to critique by others to a higher degree than “project” aircraft. Couple that with an urge to craftsmanship, and “real” aircraft can be a real chore to diagram.
So the aircraft I’m working on now is pretty well known. Unfortunately, “well known” does not always (or even often) result in “well described and illustrated with official, large, high rez, precise and accurate diagrams” from which to work. I’m trying to reconcile official diagrams taken from blueprints and technical manuals, and it’s a massive pain in my keister: a diagram that at first seemed spectacular – showing the structural frames *and* their fuselage stations – turns out to be a mess, because the fuselage stations aren’t anything like to scale. None of the diagrams agree with each other or photos of the aircraft as far as the exact shape of the canopy. Gah.
So I hope y’all appreciate what I have to go through…
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