Angrboða

 Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, religion  No Responses »
Sep 102021
 

The forthcoming video game “God of War: Ragnarok” features this Scandinavian character:

Uh… huh.

It should be noted that Angrboða was the mate of Loki and the “mother of monsters.” She birthed Fenrir the wolf, the Midgard serpent Jörmungand and Hel, the half-dead ruler of the land of the dead. So… one wonders if this is just straight-up unthinking woke cultural appropriation, or if someone in the background might be doing some counter-programming by making this character the evil mother of evil monsters that sow destruction and devastation.

 Posted by at 6:47 pm

“ATMOM” Volume 2

 art, awesomeness, books, Crazy, history, science fiction  No Responses »
Sep 102021
 

At last, volume 2 of Baranger’s illustrated “At The Mountains Of Madness” is up for pre-order on Amazon. If you are even *remotely* interested in Lovecraft, get it (and Volume 1, and “Call of Cthulhu”). The artwork for the earlier books is extraordinary and IMO really captures the story and the feel.

So if you have any money left over after buying a supply of “SR-71” (because you never know, the first print run of that may end up being the most sought after book in human history), get you some copies of Baranger’s works.

 Posted by at 5:59 pm

L-2000 exploded view

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects  No Responses »
Sep 102021
 

An exploded view of the Lockheed L-2000 SST project from the 1960’s. This was the second-place finisher in the contest to develop a US supersonic transport, losing to the Boeing 2707. The 2707 won in part because it had variable-sweep wings, giving it better low speed performance… but after the contest was won, Boeing’s design shed the overly-heavy variable geometry for fixed wings not unlike those of the Lockheed design. In the end that couldn’t save the 2707 from the chopping block. Many have wondered over the last half-century what might have happened had Lockheed won the contract instead. Perhaps the sky would be filled with SSTs. Perhaps the L-2000 would have been a failure of historic proportions, with prototypes crashing or exploding in flight. Or perhaps it would have turned out just like the 2707… once detailed development began costs would have ballooned, performance suffered and Congress simply walked away.

The full article this came from has been scanned at 300 DPI (the image above was scanned at an additional, higher rez) and provided to all above-$10 subscribers and Patrons. 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.



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 Posted by at 3:40 pm

Strategic Air Command Museum photographic trip

 aircraft, blather, books, history, Hmm..., Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Origins and Evolution, photography, SR-71 Origins and Evolution  No Responses »
Sep 092021
 

Some time during the next month or so I plan on taking a trip to the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska. I have visited that museum many times over the years, but always while traveling back and forth, thus never able to spend more than an hour or so. I wanted to get there during the work on the SR-71 book so I could properly over-photograph their SR-71, but schedule, cost and a little thing called a “global pandemic” kept me home.

I still want to excessively photograph their SR-71 in order to perfect the large format print diagrams. And additionally, a potential future book (in discussion with Mortons, but nothing certain yet) would be aided by excessively over-photographing another aircraft in the SAC museum collection. I plan on taking a *lot* of photos (likely in the thousands) covering several aircraft in painful detail.

I had hoped that the release of “SR-71” would bring in increased business (the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program, USBP’s, etc), but as has been all too common, business has actually *dropped* since the book came out. One of these days I swear I’ll figure out how every time I try my hand at advertising business actually collapses. I suspect that the truth of it will help open doorways into research in practical time travel, faster than light travel and popularity with women.

So, once again, I’m grubbing for funds to support this trip. If interested in helping out, just below there’s a drop-down menu of PayPal options, from “moral support” to “large sums.” The “Best Of” option will get those who chose it, as the title suggests, a selection of the best photos, probably over a hundred. The “All the Photos” option gives the funder just what it says, all the photos taken at the museum, including any panoramic shots I stitch together. The photos will be provided by way of a Dropbox folder or a ZIP file with all the photos.

I *may* extend the trip another day down the road to Denver to hit up the Wings Over The Rockies Museum for the same purpose, but only if there’s enough “investment.” If that happens, those who go for the full set of photos will also get the full set of photos from the WOTR Museum as well.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the draw-down PayPal menu. It didn’t have the prices on there initially.


SAC Museum photo trip




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 Posted by at 10:29 pm

2021 continues to suck

 AARRRGH, news, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Sep 092021
 

Well, here’s terrible news:

I have no further info.

In case this is mystifying, Winchell Chung is the creator of the Atomic Rockets website that anyone even vaguely interested in hard sci-fi should be fully familiar with.

UPDATE: Bad news continues:

 Posted by at 11:27 am

Kleopatra

 awesomeness, Hmm..., science  No Responses »
Sep 092021
 

Bizarre ‘Bone’ Asteroid Is Even Weirder Than We Imagined

It orbits between Mars and Jupiter (never getting closer to Earth than 120 million miles and is 168 kilometers long along its long axis. That’s big enough that I would not have expected this great of a divergence from a sphere.

it appears to be two oblong asteroids closely orbiting each other, with a bridge of dust and rubble connecting them. A close flyby past a planet would seem likely to tear the thing apart. Kleopatra is spinning fast enough that the far ends are probably experiencing “negative” gravity due to centrifugal forces. Kleopatra also has two small moons, the details of which remain murky due to the difficulty of seeing them at this distance.

 Posted by at 8:39 am

RIP L. Neil Smith

 art, history, news, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Sep 072021
 

Sonofa…

L. Neil Smith (1946-2021)

Author L. Neil Smith, 75, died on August 27, 2021 in Fort Collins, CO.

Lester Neil Smith III was born May 12, 1946 in Denver, CO. He was a former state candidate for the US Libertarian Party, ex-police reserve officer, and a gunsmith. Smith created the Prometheus Awards in 1979 to honor libertarian science fiction.

Smith began publishing science fiction with “Grimm’s Law” for Stellar 5 (1980). He wrote 31 books, including 29 novels, and a number of essays and short stories. Titles include The Probability Broach (1980), which won him his first Prometheus Award in 1984. He won twice more, in 1994 for Pallas (1993) and in 2001 for Forge of the Elders (2000). He has been nominated 17 times for the Prometheus Award for Best Novel. Nominations include Their Majesties’ Bucketeers (1981), The Venus Belt (1981), The Nagasaki Vector (1983), The Gallatin Divergence (1985), The Crystal Empire (1986), Brightsuit MacBear (1988), Bretta Martyn (1997), The American Zone (2001), Roswell, Texas (2008), Ceres (2010), and Blade of P’Na (2016). He also wrote a trilogy of Lando Calrissian novels, all published in 1983. In 2016, Smith received the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement for his contributions to libertarian science fiction.

Smith is survived by daughter Rylla Smith and wife Cathy Smith. Full obituary and appreciations will run in the October issue of Locus.

Smith was something that would not be allowed today: a science fiction author who skewed distinctly Libertarian, and included libertarian messages in his novels. The Message was usually about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but he was also usually just about correct, at least when describing the nastiness of leftists and other collectivist monsters. His characters tended towards the Competent Man, and did not waste a second listening to anyone who would deny them the right to keep and bear arms.

“The Probability Broach” was certainly entertaining. The US public educational system could do well to include it in high school English courses.

 Posted by at 11:54 pm

Bally’s Bomber

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, history, youtube  No Responses »
Sep 072021
 

A one-third scale manned B-17 bomber replica. practical? Seemingly not. Cool as hell? Definitely.

It does not seem to be over-powered. Kinda lumbers reluctantly into the air. Still… I gotta wonder if there might be a market for this sort of thing.

 

 Posted by at 6:29 pm
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