Less A Train Of Thought -

- More Like A Traffic Jam Of Thought
First off, I shall have to establish some Space Opera chops here, as I've posted a link to BOOJUM! over on the Facebook Space Opera group's Official Marketing Thread.  They take their self-promotion seriously on that group; break the rules and you get officially Nuked From Orbit.
     Anyway, I've just finished "Tiamat's Wrath", book 8 in "The Expanse" series and the penultimate one, and now you're going to ask who this "Tiamat" is or was.  Hang on -
     Ah, right.  A goddess from Persian mythology.  Art?
                     

     I shan't give away any spoilers, just letting you know that the situation established in "Persepolis Rising" has changed utterly, and in ways that couldn't be more dangerous for the whole human race across all 1,300 settled systems.  The stakes are literally whether Hom. Sap. survives or not.  They will have to tie up all the loose ends, the next book, out in 2020, is the last one.
     "How will you last, Conrad, O Aged And Impatient One?" I hear you burble.
     Pausing only to nod approvingly at the lack of the usual insult, I shall explicate:  Season 4 of "The Expanse" is going to be on television from December this year, so that will tide me over into 2020.  Plus, I've just got Seasons One and Two on DVD and am enjoying them immensely - it's been long enough since I first saw them that I've forgotten just enough to be reminded how good they are.

Captain Jim Holden - a man who simply oozes painful sincerity

     That's one of the lead characters right there.  Okay, I think that's enough establishing work, time to challenge the motley to a speed-eating contest with hard-boiled eggs!*

     There will now be a short pause as I go pour some tea and get some lunch.

     I'm back!

Thanks For The Tanks
For Lo! we are back to the armoured oddities of the 79th Armoured Division, which were collectively known as "The Funnies" or "Hobart's Funnies" after General Percy Hobart, who was a brilliant trainer of tank divisions, and who was then sacked.
     However, he had come to the attention of that canny Ulsterman, Field Marshall Alanbrooke, who equally promptly put him to raise the 79th Division, which was to consist, as we have seen already, of specialist armour able to cope with battlefield fortifications and obstacles.  We've seen the Bobbin and the Crab, now meet the Ark:

"Armoured Ramp Karrier"

     As you can see above, the Churchill is able to mount a concrete wall ten feet tall by having the Ark deploy in a couple of minutes, rather than the hours that would be required for a bridge to be built, or the equally lengthy process of blowing an enormous hole in the wall with enormous amounts of explosives.
     Then there was the AVRE - Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers, another converted Churchill that mounted a petard mortar rather than a conventional gun.  Art?


     The mortar fired an HE bomb nicknamed "The Flying Dustbin" and was used to destroy or crack open fortifications, because once cracked open another Funny would trundle up and, since this Funny was the horribly unamusing Churchill Crocodile, that was the end of the matter.

Petard bomb with puny humans for scale

     There we go, I think that's enough Funnies for one day.  More tomorrow!

That Car-Crash Of Thought -
An interesting over-view of how Your Humble Scribe's mind works.  Or doesn't, either will do.
     Okay, so I was reading my latest "Skeptoid" e-mail about reactionless space-drives, and Brian (the author of the e-mail and not just a name I made up randomly) mentioned one particular scam invented by one Norman Dean in the Fifties, whose "Dean Drive" operated on a fourth law of physics he'd invented.  Inventing new laws to explain why your invention works is a MAJOR RED FLAG, all the more so as Dean wouldn't let anyone examine his supposed "Drive".  When asked if he wanted to sell it, he wanted payment first; oh, and a Nobel Prize.  Surprise: no sale.
     There things might have ended had not the editor of the sci-fi magazine "Astounding" been duped by this fraud.  John W. Campbell, whose name Brian avoided using, was convinced the DD was real, and insisted authors submitting stories to the magazine used it as part of their fictions.
     Conrad had vaguely heard about this, and remembered a cover picture.  Art?

Thus

     This is a USN submarine re-purposed as an interplanetary spaceship, as you can see by the added radar dishes and that big ball hanging off it must be the <ahem> Dean Drive.  It appears that the story's title is "Crash Program" and I endeavoured to see if I could find out more about it, via teh interwebz.
     Well, no, I couldn't; it seemed that the only things I could locate were all to do with arch-miserablist J.G. Ballard's "Crash".  Art?

This cannot be JG - he's smiling!

     I wouldn't recommend reading "Crash" if you expect sci-fi stories to feature rockets and rayguns, but it's right up your street if you're into pervy sex shenanigans and cars crashing.
     I did notice another Google result mentioning that the commentator had first come across JGB in a short story called "Track 12", which sounds like something to do with trains (see?  See how everything links together?), until I read a short Wiki article about it.  "Aha!" I realised.  "The one about microsonics and getting poisoned as revenge for cuckoldry, yes, I remember."

That's better, much more scowly

     At which point I broke off to get a bottle of beer, before resuming "Tiamat's Wrath", which is where we came in -



*  For new arrivals: I used to regularly torment the motley, until the World Council of Motleys served me with an injunction.  Who knew there was a World Council of Motleys!

Very possibly a motley.
(Then again, perhaps not ...)