Rolling The Stones

Not What You Think
No, this is nothing to do with that seminal music publication "Rolling Stone" - actually is it still around? - oh I see it is.  Art?

Close enough

     Presumably, as you still have to pay for it, you purchase more than a sequence of adverts with a few lines of text IN A VERY LARGE FONT (NME I'm looking at you).
     Nor is this article to do with those Zombies of Rock The Rolling Stones, whom Conrad has never cared for, especially not that were-walnut Mick Jagger.  Go on, look at him and tell me he's not been resuscitated from beyond the grave by Arts That Man Was Not Meant To Know.

That's Mick on the operating table, right there

     In fact that title is a bit of a misnomer, which is pretty much - what's that?  No!  You cannot have a picture of The Rolling Stones.  
     As I was saying, a misnomer, or pretty much Business As Usual round here.  You could argue that the "Rolling" part refers to sling-shotting rocky material (which is quite close to stone, if you stop to think about it) around the rim of a gravity well, by virtue of high-velocity acceleration, as we transit seamlessly to Danger Astronomy and -

A Tending Mass
Yes, back to how we can avoid death on the streets, by keeping it safely in the skies.  More on how to keep your average Near Earth Object safely far away.
     Method The Fifth:  this is where we start to get speculative, by using a mass driver.  No!  Nothing to do with those desperately trying to get to church whilst stuck in a traffic jam.  A 'Mass Driver' in this sense is a kind of robotic mining mechanism, which excavates - and here the relevant bit - ejects mined material at velocity, usually portrayed by something akin to a railgun.  No!  Dear me, no, not an armed member of the NTSB.  

Throwing stones

     The idea of the mass driver is that the excavated rock is driven away from LV-462 and because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - Newton, baby, Newton - that relatively small amount of mass ejection also affects LV-462.  On a very small scale, true, yet if the mass driver fires off a ton of rock every 10 minutes, then over 5 years it will have shot off over a quarter of a million tons of rock and made over a quarter of a million "nudges" to the NEO.  Which is now guaranteed to miss Earth, and if it's mass is less than the cube root of 250,000, there won't be anything of it left.

And Now For Tanks: The Pike, The Dentist And The Chieftain
I really do not like change.  It stretches your pockets and the jingling it makes prevents you from sneaking silently up to your work colleagues and scaring them.
     Nor do I like the default display on Facebook, which hearkens back to the very early days of the blog in describing what BOOJUM! is about.  Okay, I've covered astronomy, now let's deal with tanks.
     The "Pike" in this title is not very tasty, unless you're an oxidising microbe with a fondness for ferrous metals.  I refer, of course, to the Josef Stalin III tank, the possessor of a pronounced hull prow that earned it the nickname "Pike" from it's crew members.
     Those wacky Sinisters, eh?

In Russia, the fish hunt you.

     By anecdote, an abandoned JSIII was found beneath a collapsed house in the Allied sector of Berlin after the Second Unpleasantness was over.  Allied tank experts were impressed with the hull design, less so with the shoddy workmanship.
     Here an aside.  The Sinisters would have drunk poison rather than admit it, but their tank crews absolutely loved the Sherman tanks they got free from the Allies.  It might not be able to slug it out toe-to-toe with a Tiger tank, but Oh My!  were they reliable and comfortable compared to a thrown-together Ruffian tank.
     Jump forward 20 years to that mighty mobile metal mastodon, the Chieftain tank*. This beast was armed with a whacking great 120mm gun and very thick armour, which hull variety was angled almost horizontally.

What the average Sinister tankie least wanted to see

     Shades of the Pike, eh?  This very low angle means that any round hitting it is likely to simply bounce off, and if it does penetrate, it has to get through an awful lot of armour due to that angle.  You've effectively increased the protective thickness without an increase in weight, which is a good thing as these items weighed 55 tons.
     "We are impressed, Conrad!" I can hear you acclaim.  "Go on, how's it done?"
     Pausing for a moment at your entirely unaccustomed praise**, I shall continue.
     The low angle was made possible by having the driver recline in a seat akin to a dentist's chair, getting in a very prone position.

The best photo I can find as proof

     Inspired by a fish, designed by orthodontist and propelled by tea***.  Very VERY British!


* The BRITISH Chieftain tank, just so we're clear.
**  Have you been drinking?  Tut! if you have.  I've been sober for 14 days running.
***  The Boiling Vessel.  Go Google it.

"Hooray for tea!"