You May Not Be Familiar With This Word
In which case shame on you! It's derived directly from the Old French for 'Sailor' and is nowadays pretty much restricted to British usage when referring to the honourable and noble members of His Majesty's Brittanic Royal Navy. It also starts with 'M' and is the reason it got stuck into today's title.
Before we get into the main part of today's Intro, I would like to turn the clock back a couple of centuries, to the Napoleonic Unpleasantnesses. Art!
What you're looking at here is the city of Riga as it was in 1812, when Nappy and his army invaded Ruffia, which overnight turned Great Britain (as we were then) and the orcs into allies, which came very much out of left field. The French laid a partial siege upon Riga, since they couldn't fully invest the city, the defences of which were bolstered by Tsarist gunboats and -
The British Baltic Fleet. Yes indeed, the Royal Navy got it's nose into all sorts of places, even (or especially!) where it shouldn't. Art!
This is one of the author's excellent series of 'Hornblower' novels, following the titular hero across the duration of the Napoleonic Unpleasantnesses, when the map of Europe was very different from today. Ol' Fozzy inserts Hornblower - I am not going to come up with a diminutive for that surname thank you very much - into the siege of Riga. Hornblower's ship-of-the-line is crammed with guns that could inflict severe punishment on the besieging French, except it sits far too low in the water to bring any cannon to bear on them.
The solution, of course - obviously! - is camels. Art!
Yes, Art, thanks, you jellybrain. I mean SHIP camels. Try again and get it right or the Tazer next time.
Better Even better
These particular devices are separate containers, or barges in the case of Hornblower, that are loaded with ballast and then attached to the ship's hull. The ballast is then emptied out and this displacement lifts the ship's hull much higher out of the water. It can then traverse sandbanks or other shallow waters, which is what they were originally used for by the Dutch. Hornblower uses this increased elevation to rain havoc upon the French. In real life one supposes that the orc crews stood and moped at how much better the Royal Navy was at everything naval, just as they are today. Art!
Yes, it's Sal Mercogliano again, whom seems to have been ill recently. Hopefully the chicken soup worked and he's feeling better. He was, at least, good enough to recount the travails of Muscovy and it's Marine Mordancy, because they've had it rough of late. Art!
This is the 'An Yang 2', which is a 56,000 ton bulk carrier carrying cargoes to and from Ruffia. On this journey it was in ballast, not carrying a cargo, and it managed to run aground on the eastern shores of Sakhalin Island. This is bad news, the tides there can rise and fall by 20 feet, and it already appears to have been holed twice in the hull already, thanks to the storm conditions. Art!
It was definitely not constructed to take that kind of punishment and the longer it's left the worse condition it will end up in.
Ooops.
Then there is the 'Koala', a Seuzmax-class 160,000 ton tanker that was preparing to depart the port of Ust-Luga with a cargo of 130,000 tons of oil. The ship is 22 years old, thus very long in the tooth and very probably one of the Ruffians 'Shadow Fleet'. Whilst getting up speed to depart, there were multiple explosions in the engine room and the stern sank. Art!
In happier times
This is bad, yet not catastrophic- so far. What gives cause for worry is that the orcish authorities have loudly claimed there is no risk of an oil leak - which is sufficient to mean there is risk of an oil leak. The stern sank in the relatively shallow waters of a port, meaning that if the hull stays intact then 130,000 tons of crude can be pumped out to another vessel. If it doesn't split in half. Perhaps they could use camels to re-float it?
Note that there are no Ruffian pictures of the sunken tanker, because this has obviously embarrassed them hugely and if there are no photos then they can pretend it never happened, or if it did it was only a minor marine matter.
Tomorrow - hi-jinx in the Atomic Arctic!
More Of The Bottom 10 Films Of 2024
Props to Ol' Jezza, for bearing up under a minor tsunami of celluloid tat so that we, the audience, don't have to, yet which allows us to relentlessly mock and jeer at the odious output.
This time we are onto Number 8. Art!
Once again Conrad hasn't seen this, has no reason to and will instead go polish his brass hand. Jezza dismisses it as a remake of an older film, which at least had the charm of novelty (it gets 3 stars on IMDB so not bad), whereas this is merely a generic slasher, with 'dipstick characters making all the wrong decisions'. Nah. Sorry, Jezz, you're not selling it.
"The War Illustrated Edition 202 March 16th 1945"
Since the Intro is not chock-full of Unpleasantness, we are allowed to have TWI as an item, according to the rules I made up in my head. By the time of this edition the war in Europe had less than two months to run. Art!
These ladies are with the ATS, or Auxiliary Territorial Service, and they have ventured from This Sceptred Isle to Belgium, the cockpit of Europe, but a little more tranquil than it had been earlier that year. They are the crews for anti-aircraft guns, 250 of them in a detachment of 320 total. Here you see them chatting with local Belgian youth, watching the skies, marching through Ghent, building their own quarters and ogling a positive gallery of photographic pinups. Not as martial as usual. Good thing? Bad thing? Only you can tell!
Let's Finish This Off
I refer to John Delaney's vlog about the M4 Sherman, which was not quite the barely-mobile death-trap that various Cassandras would have you believe. He mentions 3 sub-factors to Firepower, Protection and Mobility:
Rate of Fire: The 75 mm shells were relatively compact and handy, making them easy to handle and load. So much so that a Sherman crew could fire between 15 to 20 per minute. A canny crew could fit up to a hundred shells into their tank, meaning five or six minutes of non-stop firing at the enemy.
Rate of Traverse: Or, how rapidly the turret could rotate, because this is how you laid the gun onto targets. For a Sherman a full 360ยบ took 17 seconds; the Teuton equivalent, the Mk IV, took 26 seconds; the Tiger and Panther took nearly a minute. Again, this is not semantics or abstruseness; getting your gun onto a target and firing first was crucial across the Second Unpleasantness.
Gyrostabiliser: A little known gadget present in the Sherman, which kept the gun stable in azimuth, meaning that the gunner and commander knew very precisely where their gun was pointing even after a rough cross-country journey. Which increased the probability of an effective first hit. Art!
Finally -
Watched the first episode of 'Fallout' last night and it was entertaining enough. Ella Purnell's character was a whole lot less annoying and stupid than she was in "Army Of The Dead", although it was a low bar.
Conrad has never played or even seen the game the series is based on and doesn't feel he's missing anything, because computer games are the thief of time, and then some. Art!
Don't tell me, there's a sinister industrial conglomerate working away in the background? How entirely novel and unexpected!
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