The San Diego Air and Space Museums Flickr account recently added this illustration, showing a Convair “Big Stick” being launched off the back of mobile transporter. “Big Stick” was a Convair concept for a nuclear ramjet powered cruise missile of nearly unlimited range, a less-known competing design against Voughts Pluto vehicle.
A higher rez (though, sadly, not a whole lot higher) version is available HERE.
If you are interested in Big Stick and Project Pluto, I recommend Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N1, which covers both in detail.
A long and detailed video giving the history of Star Trek… not a history of the Federation and the Klingons, but of the various corporate entities and licensing issues that have turned Trek into the mess it is today. One of the more important (for Trek fans, anyway) conclusions is that something we’ve been told for a decade now is false: the “Prime Timeline” ain’t.
Okay. From the 1960’s up until the end of the fourth season of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” everything was assumed to take place in the same narrative universe, same timeline. Even “Enterprise,” which had some definite continuity issues with the Trek canon, did eventually make itself more or less work. This connected, shared universe was not referred to as the “Prime” universe at the time because… why would it be? There was nothing else. But then in 2009 the “Kelvin timeline” or the “JJverse” movies started coming out. This was an obvious, and acknowledged, different timeline.But the source of the break in the timeline came from, we were told, the “Prime” timeline. Some years after the last of the original Star Trek” movies, the Romulan Empire was destroyed by a nonsensical FTL supernova; as a result of that event, Prime Timeline Old Spock and some Romulans got sucked into a black hole and sent back in time. The Romulan emergence and tangling with the USS Kelvin set off this new timeline. OK, fair enough. But as the movies went on, the divergence not only in history but in *everything* from Original Star Trek became more apparent. Then a few years ago CBS decided to start cranking out new Trek for their All Access service. Their first series, STD, was said to be set in the “Prime” timeline, about ten years before the original Star Trek.
But the problem is, there is simply no squaring what we see in STD with original Trek. There is no way in hell that STD could *possibly* evolve into TOS, then TNG, DS9, Voyager. So if this is the “Prime” timeline, then TOS & TNG are NOT the “Prime” timeline. Instead, they are in the “Canon” timeline.
This means that Leonard Nimoy did not play the same Spock we all knew in 2009’s “Star Trek.” Instead, he played the Spock who shows up on STD. The “Prime” timeline and the “Kelvin” timeline that split off from it have *nothing* to do with TOS & TNG. Thus the Picard series currently in development will not feature the Picard known from TNG, but a Picard who lived in the universe derived from STD.
So… current Star Trek isn’t “Star Trek.” “Star Trek” as we’ve come to know and love it ended in 2005. All Star Trek since 2009 is “Trek” in name only. It’s an unrelated sci-fantasy franchise that has appropriated some names and a few bits and pieces of design.
One might argue that some of the hijinks shown here are… unwise.
On the one hand, you’ve got people using fireworks in a way that the manufacturer probably does not recommend. You see people holding on to explosive devices *way* too long after lighting the fuse. You see people not understanding that these things, once out of control, have somewhat randomized trajectories.
That said: fireworks are a manifestation of what seems to be an impulse that’s hard-wired into humans, the desire to see things destroyed. That’s all fireworks are, devices that destroy themselves with a loud sound and sometimes with an impressive visual display. They are supposed to be used all by themselves. All too often people use fireworks to destroy property or to harm animals… and sometimes to harm themselves. But blowing up the ice covering a lake? Here you get all the visceral joy of watching stuff get destroyed, without the actual cost of anything *actually* getting destroyed. Ice on lakes and ponds is a transient phenomenon, of little to no intrinsic value. So compared to blowing up cars and sheds and houses and such, this is a fairly benign outlet for the urge to watch the world burn.
I honestly don’t know if they are putting him down or extolling him or a combination of the both, but that there is some spectacular workmanship. People on Twitter and Reddit and elsewhere are trying to figure out if this is insult or praise; it seems that in the lore of “Warhammer 40K” the God Emperor of Mankind puts the badges and symbols of defeated enemies on his armor, thus explaining the hammer & sickle and such.
In short, a study was made to show test subjects a wide range of images from “nice to “threatening” and “revolting” while giving the subjects brain scans. Along with other studies, the conclusion *seems clear: you can tell someones political leanings based on the way they respond to “disgust:” conservative-leaning folks show more of it, it seems. One study tested taste, and even there there seems to be a difference:
They recruited 1,601 subjects from shopping malls and from the Cornell campus and gave them paper strips containing a chemical called Prop and another chemical called PTC, both of which taste bitter to some people. Sure enough, those who had self-identified as being conservative were more sensitive to both compounds; many described them as unpleasant or downright repugnant. Liberals, on the other hand, tended not to be bothered as much by the chemicals or didn’t notice them at all.
On one hand I can kinda see this. But then… on the other hand I see contrary indicators. For example, a few days ago I drove into town, passing necessarily through farm countries. At one house there was a mobile slaughter truck, something you’re unlikely to see in an urban area. Short form, there was a cow hanging from it, in the process of being butchered. Now, you do this sort of thing out here in the sticks. surrounded by folks *likely* to be conservative, they will pass by and be largely unmoved… with the possible exception of responses like “that reminds me, I’ve got to get them to swing by my place” or “Huh. I’m hungry for a hamburger.” But you do the exact same thing in the middle of a gaggle of liberal cityfolk, they’re likely the freak the fark out. So… disgust” is a variably-definable concept.
It seems to go the other way as well: subjecting someone to disgusting images, scents and surroundings seems to sway opinions in a conservative direction. This would suggest campaign ad possibilities: for the 2020 elections, the republicans can make sure to tie the Democrats support of the “Green New Deal” to Ocasio-Cortez, and then show people images of what happens when nations adopt the economic policies that she – and by extension the guilty-by-association Democrats – are pushing for. Societal collapse, mass starvation, populations in filth and fear often make for some pretty disgusting images.
This is, of course, something everyone who signed on to the Green New Deal would want banned. Even if the guy made it electrically powered, they’d find something to complain about.
Discussions with Fantastic Plastic about model sets of large boosters is starting to focus on the Nova/Post Saturn collection for the initial release. Scale is likely to be 1/700 ( the smaller boosters aren’t *too* small, the bigger boosters are impressive and it will go with any of a number of existing ship model kits), and the current lineup is shown below.
Picking which designs to include and which to exclude is a bit of trick with the Nova/Post-Saturn line, as there were literally *hundreds* of designs worthy of consideration. If anyone has a suggestion for some other design you’re dying to see, let me know. The “inches” scale bar here is for the models at 1/288 scale… which this model set assuredly *won’t* be. Fantastic Plastic has previously released a 1/288 ROMBUS and a 1/288 NEXUS and *may* release 1/288 scale models of some of the others as individual kits… but the Sea Dragon and the Super-NEXUS would be *huge.* Once the collection is finalized a single display base will be sketched out.
