Gotta give props to a supervillain who is good at what he does. Witness what’s going on in formerly great Britain:
Dec 262021
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…
Buy my books!
Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird – Origins & Evolution.
B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress: Origins and Evolution.
Subscribe to the Monthly Historical Documents Program!
Dec 232021
Democratic congresswoman who sponsored police ‘reform’ bill carjacked in crime-surging Philadelphia
I can quit for the day, go back to bed, try again tomorrow. Nothing will surpass this.
Dec 232021
I watched it tonight on HBO Max. My review:
Glad I didn’t go to a theater to see this.
Shrug.
Back to CAD drafting. Woo! Reconciling ancient diagrams that disagree about panel lines!
Dec 212021
But now I do:
The full interview:
UPDATE: Watchign it now. There is substnatial uncomfortableness on display… the culture of Elon Musk is clearly different from that of The Babylon Bee. Musk is autistic, the BB guys are outgoing; there is some clash there. And Musk loves him some expletives; not only do they censor that, you can *feel* them cringing away. Heh.
UPDATED UPDATE: Blast. This isn’t the whole interview; it looks like some of the best bits are tucked behind a subscription paywall. Bah.
UPDATED UPDATED UPDATE: The Babylon Bee posted the fully full interview; I’ve replaced the truncated one above with the full version. The second part starts about 49 minutes in. I’ve started watching again… it starts *right* off with Musk making a point I have before that humanity is the only species that can make spaceships and spread life elsewhere. he then promptly goes on to smack-talk the story of Noah’s Ark, which joke goes over like a lead balloon with that group. Heh.
“Entropy: the ultimate enemy. You thought the Devil was bad? Try entropy. Try getting away from that.” Ha!
“… maybe what we have here is a very, very rare situation, a brief flickering of consciousness, like a little candle in a vast darkness. And we should not let that little candle go out.”
Dec 212021
Little known today is the Northrop MX-334 rocket powered flying wing. Originally designed (circa 1942) without a vertical tail, wind tunnel testing showed that such a tail was needed. Three aircraft were built and flown at Muroc dry lake bed (later known as Edwards Air Force Base), towed into the air behind a Cadillac and then a P-38; once in flight a liquid propellant Aerojet rocket engine would provide thrust.
The MX-334 (as it was known as a glider… when rocket powered, it was known as the MX-324) was intended as a technology testbed and proof of concept vehicle for the Northrop XP-79. This was, like the MX-324/334, a smallish flying wing with a prone pilot. As originally designed the XP-79 was to have a liquid rocket engine; it was eventually built with two turbojets. Unfortunately the single XP-79 crashed on its first flight.
The MX-324/334 was painted in high visibility colors and must have made a striking sight at the time.
The much larger full rez scan of this photo has been made available to $4 and up patrons/subscribers in the 2021-12 APR Extras Dropbox folder. 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.