Bad Weather

Except Not The Way You Expect
Ha!  You were expecting this to be a ranting screed about the utterly dismal weather here in the Allotment of Eden, weren't you?
     You can't live in this country and not notice how dismal the weather can be, which is a great ice-breaker at parties, though it can get a bit wearisome (unless you're clever and witty and inventive like Conrad).  However, the bad weather I'm talking about comes in the shape of -

     - the Hawker Typhoon, a brutish thug of an aircraft as used by the RAF during the Second Unpleasantness, which you see here bristling with 20 m.m. cannon and which usually mounted eight 80 pound HE rockets as well.
     For Lo! We are back to "The Guns Of War" by George Blackburn, and the later stages of the campaign in Normandy.  After the ferocious, attritional slogging from Eterville onwards ends in the huge Teuton defeat at Falaise, his 4th Field Regiment proceeds in fits and starts towards Belgium and Holland.  Along the way there are various fortified garrisoned towns held by the Teutons that have to be taken or otherwise neutralised.  Art?

Case in point - Boulogne

     Ol' Geo describes the brief siege and assault on Boulogne, where one cannot fail to feel sorry for the unfortunates under bombardment, especially since their orders from Herr Schicklegruber were "Fight to the death in defence!".  There were 10,000 defenders who had 90 guns ranging from 75 m.m. up to coastal artillery of 16" calibre, sitting under defences of reinforced concrete, yards thick.

Boulogne defensive coastal artillery

     This is where you see the Allies use of 'Materialschlacht', modern technological warfare involving firepower and technology in three dimensions, rather than the Third Reich's distinctly dodgy strategy of Cross-Fingers-Hope-For-Bad-Weather-Grin-And-Die.  To wit:  the 49 pin-point strikes carried out by Typhoons (known, somewhat inaptly, as "Tiffies"), who delivered 392 HE rockets on target - ten tons of terror in total.  That's pin-point because lurking Canuckistanian artillery marked those targets with red smoke.
     On that same subject, there were 328 Allied artillery pieces firing on targets in concentrations, to be backed up by 3,000 tons of bombs from RAF's Bomber Command (who probably had to have their arms twisted to provide tactical support like this, instead of bombing Germany flat).
     Nor is that all.  Art?

Meet "Winnie", here being visited by some Canadian MPs

     Big British guns on the South Coast also joined in, namely "Winnie" and "Pooh", which scored several hits on the Teuton coastal batteries, their fire being directed by FOOs flying above the battlefield.  Thus the Teuton coastal batteries were distracted, if by "distracted" one means "hit repeatedly by HE shells that weighed half a ton".
     Unsurprisingly, it was a short siege.  The assault went on September 16 in and in six days the whole business was over, with just over 600 Canuckistanian casualties.  And that Fuhrerbefehl of "Die!  Die!  Die fighting!"?  More honoured in the breach - 9,500 prisoners went into POW cages.
     Phew!  High-intensity modern warfare of the kind that we have not seen since, and thankfully so.  David French put it well when he said that the British (and therefore the Commonwealth, so the British Americans, too) " - decided that they would be soldiers, not warriors."

An excellent analysis

     Wow, that was kind of heavy-duty.  Let's have something a little less intense!

     Dog Buns, I still cannot remember what that gaping plot hole is, in a film we were chattering about at work.  I didn't write it down, so it vanished into my mental ether.  All I remember is that I knew there was a plot hole. This is SO annoying!

Retro-Metabolism
No, sorry, that's the thing that the Mysterons do, isn't it?  When they kill someone, which I think amounts to Destructive Testing, since only afterwards can they recreate that person perfectly.  There is also the somewhat blurry case of Captain Black.  Art?

Captain Black: to port - before being taken over; to starboard - after

     Somewhat worryingly, Captain Black's first name is <pauses for effect> Conrad.
     There is considerable debate amongst afficionadoes of futurologist Anderson's depiction of Black; he was never killed, and so is not one of the Mysteron moulage duplicates.  Is he, then, a human being under the control of the Mysterons, who would revert to his normal self if their control is neutralised?  Or - not?  And, is he conscious of his acts under Mysteron control?  Because if he is, then if that control is removed, would he have a mental breakdown at what he's been made to do?  Once free of said control, could he be prosecuted for mass murder?

What an AMAZING COINCIDENCE that the baddie just so happens to wear and be called "Black"

     Okay, so that's Retro-Metabolism.  Metabolic, as in living things.  What about the numerous physical objects that the Mysterons reconstitute?

Like this monster

     Being inanimate artefacts, there's no metabolism at work here.  Mysterons - you need a lexicon!

Retro-Tech
Sorry about the long tangential detour.  This is what I meant, because on several websites that I frequent a particular image has been going the rounds.  If Art can stop sucking the insides out of that nuclear fuel rod and do his job -

Presto

     This, gentle readers, is the latest from that modern Renaissance man, Elon Musk: Starship.  This is obviously a title with a bit of swagger built into it, as it would take thousands of years at best to reach our nearest star.  He intends it to take off and land, presumably with an important bit in between, within a couple of months, which sounds ambitious, but - hey, what do I know!
     Anyway, the thing that I wanted to bring your attention to was the design of this beast, since the first thing I thought of on first viewing was a hearken back to the days of the distant Fifties, and Dan Dare.  Art?

A brace of space
(ships)

     I think you can see the commonality of design here.  Looking forward in order to look back!