Jan 042021
 

Let me get this out of the way: flying cars are a COOL IDEA that, when the rubber meets the road and the math hits the calculator, generally doesn’t make much sense. You end up with a car that isn’t that good married to an airplane that isn’t that good. More expensive than either a car or a light airplane should be, with the performance of neither.

Nevertheless, it remains an evocative notion. And from the standpoint of an aerospace engineer, an interesting engineering exercise. And one of the more recent, more interesting flying car concepts is the “Firenze Lancaire.” This design says “to hell with making a flying car for the masses” and goes straight for the “hypercar” market. The end result is a carbon fiber bodied vehicle with Tesla motors and batteries for getting around on the roads, and two turbojets for getting around in the air. The car is quite large and would be difficult to park, but if you’re paying five million dollars for a car you’re probably not taking it to WalMart.

The website is filled with snazzy images. It just looks sci-fi-cool. But it also looks… kinda incomplete. There are no control surfaces; the wing structure is largely undefined. The wing folding mechanism is interesting and all, but the wings do not appear to have a good structural attachment to the car. They look like a modest G-load and they’ll snap right off.

Is this for real? Is it a serious engineering effort… or is it just someone’s demonstration of their ability to make spiffy CAD models? I don’t know, though I have suspicions. There are enough moving parts on this thing to get it legally qualified as an Autobot, and that worries me some.

 

 Posted by at 1:32 pm
Jan 042021
 

This will be of interest to American males in a certain age bracket…

Tanya Roberts Dead at 65

If you were alive and had HBO back in the 80’s, you remember that they played “Beastmaster” the way a rapper uses expletives. And Tanya Roberts was one of the more watchable aspects of that… well, let’s call it a “movie.”

UPDATE: No she ain’t.

Actress Tanya Roberts is still alive, according to her publicist

 

You’d think that “dead” or “alive” would be straightforward enough determinations for medical professionals to make.

UPDATED UPDATE: Yes she is.

Tanya Roberts is dead, partner says after premature death declaration

Someone’s got some splainin’ to do.

 Posted by at 1:38 am
Jan 032021
 

Well, *THIS* didn’t happen…

 

Some of that was a bit prophetic. A lot of it is downright silly. But all of it denotes an era willing to think bigger and better. Back when the American populace was actually expected to feel pride in America and look forward towards a better and more prosperous future, I guess that sort of thing was possible. But if you want progress (*actual* progress, what with improved quality of life and all) today, you’re kinda SOL.

 

 Posted by at 10:04 pm
Jan 022021
 

Data scientists analyzed the voting in Georgia. Their results are… interesting.

Will anything be done about it? Pfff. Don’t be silly. All that will be done is that the system will be tweaked to be slightly less obvious. or perhaps… it won’t be changed at all, because it hardly seems to matter if people look at the data and realize that chicanery was afoot.

“Yeah? What’re ya gonna do about it?”

 Posted by at 12:57 pm
Jan 012021
 

Some years back the “Haynes Owners Manuals” publishing company branched out into books about airplanes and NASA missions and Death Stars. All kinds of stuff, normally running in the twenty to thirty dollar range. Some very clearly fluff, some quite interesting. There are a few I’ve looked at, and having once looked at them, Amazon feels the need to keep reminding me “hey… hey… lookit this…”

Haynes published a book on the WWII-era British aircraft the Westland “Lysander.” While I’m interested, I don’t think I’ll buy it. See if you can guess why:

Books are worth having. Consequently, I have from time to time spent insane and unwise sums of money to procure a book that I really wanted. This… is not that time.

 Posted by at 7:28 pm
Jan 012021
 

This bit of whackadoodle nonsense dates all the way back to March… almost to the Before Times. But it is worth looking at and laughing at… and perhaps wondering about.

Welcome to Equiterra, where gender equality is real

It is a description of a fictional land of cliches and leftist talking points, illustrated with a particularly childish image of a “city” populated with a bunch of badly rendered people. At a half-hearted count there seem to be about 82 individuals shown. Of that 82, six are shown in wheelchairs (approximately 1% of the US population uses wheelchairs), one (possibly two) are shown as blind, one shown with an artificial leg. Hard to tell how many others are deaf or retarded or crazy or loaded down with STDs. But it is pretty clear that in order to attain their “gender equal” society, a whole lot of people had to be broken.  And of course there will be more: the article points out that in “Equiterra,” nobody questions the wisdom of a girl becoming a professional football player. When she gets plowed over by the 400-pound opponent and snaps her neck… one more for the wheelchair.

Also:

If you ask a little girl walking along Unstereotype Avenue what she wants to be when she grows up, she could tell you I can be anything: a scientist, an engineer, a supreme court judge, an Olympic champion, an artist or astronaut — not even the sky is the limit when it comes to dreaming big.

Huh. How many of these little girls are just waiting for their chance to join the ranks of the garbage disposal specialists? How many are lining up to be ore miners, sewer workers, construction workers, factory workers?

There is no such thing as femicide, women are valued and respected here.

But men? Screw them, the manicide rate is through the *roof.*

“Equiterra” is the sort of place that can only exist through brainwashing. Everyone has the same opinions and goals, the same views and the same… well, everything. The people of Equiterra are *broken.*

People yapping about “equality” set my teeth on edge. Because people *aren’t* equal. Most people are filler; a few people are at either end of the bell curve, being either extraordinarily horrible (your psychos and thieves and murderers and SJWs) or extraordinarily useful (by, say, building rocket ships to get the hell *off* this planet). And between individuals there are inequalities. Some are attractive. Some are bland. Some are butt-ugly. Some smart, some dumb. There is no shame in this. There is no shame in the recognition of this. Where shame comes by truckloads is the pretense that people can somehow be made equal. Aktion T4 and the Lebensborn tried that crap. Not mankinds finest hour.

The one good thing about Equiterra: it won’t last. It is shown with a fair number of children, about thirteen… two of whom are in wheelchairs. More of the rest doubtless have other severe deformities of body or mind. These kids likely won’t reproduce… hell, from the looks of it they won’t make it past puberty (and many who do won’t make it past puberty in a form capable of reproducing, their reproductive bits having been surgically altered when they were seven in order to conform to the kids – or the parents – preferences of the moment). And will they be replaced? Of the adults, there are shown at least three same-sex couples, with an unknown number of trans. They are unlikely to reproduce except through adoption. It seems the birth rate of Equiterra is likely to be low, with the next generation being a substantial mess about as likely to breed like bunnies as a convention of Japanese anime fans.

If things stay as they are, the next country over, Meriterra, only needs to wait a generation or so and they’ll be able to simply move into the abandoned, empty buildings (given that STEM in Equiterra will be more along the lines of newage than rigorous engineering, care should be taken in examining any physical infrastructure prior to occupation and use). However, in all likelihood the wise leaders of Equiterra will simply import the next generation from Refugeeistan. Sure, the new imports won’t have any use for the “equality” the country is so proud of; “Violence-Free Alley” will likely become a hotbed of grooming gangs, “Climate Action Street” will be littered with flaming garbage, “Education Boulevard” will be the no-go zone surrounding the new religious center, “Freedom Avenue” will be where the bodies land when they are thrown off the rooftops for being deviants. You don’t want to know what will happen in the “Toxic Masculinity Recycling Center.”

But the thing is, the people of Equiterra will continue to believe that they are the Good People because they will refuse to talk about how things have changed for fear of being called out and cancelled.

 Posted by at 7:15 pm
Dec 312020
 

Just released, the December 2020 rewards for APR Patrons and Subscribers. Included this month:

Diagram: a large format diagram of a Lockheed cruise missile. The designation of the missile is not given, but this looks like a SCAD design.

Document 1: Consolidated Class VB Carrier Based Bomber, from 1946

Document2: “Economic Aspects of a Reusable Single Stage To Orbit Vehicle,” a paper by Phil Bono on the ROOST launch vehicle from 1963

Document 3: “Shuttle Derived Vehicles,” a NASA-MSFC briefing to General Abrahamson from 1984

CAD Diagram: XSM-64A Navaho, the configuration that would have been built as an operational vehicle had the program gone forward

If this sort of thing is of interest, sign up either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 Posted by at 1:30 pm