Sailing Into The Sunset

Ah, How Romantic!
Lest you think BOOJUM! has gone all Mills & Boone, let me rephrase that title to be a little more accurate: "Sailing Into The Sun".  There you go, not quite so dashingly evocative now, is it?
     The kind of sails I am talking about are not the linen variety as found on Ye Olde Time Sailing Ship, rather they are Solar sails, as found attached to Ye State Of The Art Satellites.  Not that often, although the Messenger probe to Mercury did use them.
     "Enlighten us, oh well-informed one!" I hear you comment.  Hmmm.  Unusual for there not to be a sarcastic addendum to your queries - okay, I shall explicate.

Upholstery, NASA style

     A solar sail, when attached to a spacecraft, takes advantage of the pressure exerted by radiation from the sun.  This radiation pressure is quite small, so to acquire any amount of it, your solar sail needs to be big.  BIG!  That radiation is provided for free - always a good thing when planning engineering projects or spaceships - and is consistent; face it, the Sun as a battery has an expiry date several billion years into the future.  

In it's natural habitat

The usual analogy is that of, indeed, Ye Olde Time Sailing Ship utilising wind pressure on it's linen sails to go scudding forth over the briny deeps.
     So there you go.  We are all better informed about solar sails than we were ten minutes ago.

From Maxi To Mini
I speak of the solar sails there as per the "Maxi".  No!  I am not referring to the skirt - put your salacious tongue back in your mouth - nor the motorised traction vehicle*.  No, instead I refer to Forgotten Weapons (.com) and Ian, the <ahem> Killer Hippy Gunsmith.  Today he has his hot sweaty hands on an M134 Minigun, and he takes the time to inform where the name comes from (as it is anything but miniature).  

Ian, gloating a little.  Don't blame him!

The Minigun's ancestor is a gigantic 20mm cannon mounted on aircraft, where the ammunition drum alone is a big as a Volkswagen car.  The M134 is a scaled-down version of this, hence "mini".
     What's not so mini is this thing's rate of fire - 6,000 rounds per minute or 100 rounds per second.  Ian's version had no sights, which makes it rather awkward to aim, because it fires so fast that you run out of ammo before you can get on target.

O pore old car

     Ian also shows (for him, the cucumberish swine) what is untrammelled glee at having being given the opportunity to fire this weapon.  He also points out that those Hollywood films depicting Our Hero - or, more likely, his Brawny Sidekick - humping a minigun across the battlefield and slaying the alien/zombie/robot hordes are LYING!  Because they would also need to be humping around a couple of car batteries to power it, in addition to thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.  With a few other Brawny Sidekicks to carry around even more thousands and thousands of bullets, too.

A poly-perforated pantechnicon

Heath Robinson
On the principle that British Is Best, which I ought hardly need state as it is magnificently self-evident, I am going to stake the Pioneer Of Pointlessly Polymorphic Pulchritudinity as Heath Robinson.  Because he was born first, I should add, ages and ages before Rube Goldberg, the runner-up in this PPPP contest.
     Heath, for so I shall call him, was responsible for creating bizarrely elaborate machines that laboured mightily to perform amazingly mundane tasks - like using a hundred-ton travelling crane to unscrew the back of a watch, if you want a real-world analogy.

There is always knotted twine somewhere in the frame

AHA!
Being of un-natural height, your humble scribe is often called upon to reach objects from the top shelf for those of shorter stature - as Manisha today, since she can barely reach the bottom shelf on tiptoes whilst wearing high heels.
     This has nothing to do with what follows.  Well, hardly anything.  There I was, walking back to my desk when I espied a paper item atop the lockers, which stand well over six and a half feet tall**.  I hied it down and it was a copy of the Manchester Evening News, dated August 11th 2016.  Art?  Corroborative evidence, please.

Proof

     I don't know if you can make it out from the rather fuzzy photograph here, but the Codeword here has THREE letters as clues, meaning it was ridiculously easy to solve in ten minutes on the bus home, hardly much of a challenge and good reason to reduce the number of letters to a mere two.



*  "Car"  <translation from Pseud to normal courtesy Mister Hand>
**  BOOJUM! - restricting metric measurements to astronomy and NOTHING ELSE!