"Remember Where We Parked"

Immortal Lines From Everyone's Favourite Canadian
William Shatner, you lummocks! <sighs heavily in self-pity> Ah me the youth of today.  Well, let me qualify that: the human youth of today.  Back on my home-world, the ice planet <SYSTEM INFORMATION REDACTED> the youth do what they're told when they're told, which includes memorising our gl - excuse me - Our Glorious History.  And if they fail on any of those three counts - well, the organ banks are always waiting.
     Which has nothing to do with "Star Trek IV: The Journey Home".  Art?

One of the best in the franchise

     If you haven't seen it yet THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY!  My title refers to the commandeered Klingon ship being parked in a park, whilst invisible.  If Art will pause sucking the innards out of that nuclear fuel rod -

Thus

     And that's Captain Kirk's reminder to his compatriots.  You can see his point.
     Okay, that bit of the Intro has, at the most, a barely tangential reference to what this item is actually about.
     Okay, you remember me going on about an exceedingly daft story I wrote, that featured an aircraft carrier on tracks?  Sparked by the discovery of similar on a Youtube clip by MetalBall Studios.  I did threaten to come back to the subject, and that's what we're doing here.
     Right!  Art, a picture of the USS Forrestal, please.

With barely-visible puny humans for scale

     This shows what a mighty beast she was.  Assuming we swap out her diesels for a nuclear power plant, could she be made land-mobile via tracks?  A little number-crunching has been undertaken -
     Mass = 60,000 tons, or 132,000,000 pounds*.  Length at the waterline is 330 yards, and we will assume that the first and last 15 yards are unsuitable for emplacing the drive machinery for the tracks, so we have 300 usable yards of hull.  The width (called the "beam", I believe, if you want to make a Scotty joke) is 42 yards.  We want plenty of separation between track units, so I am going to say that these tracks are 10 yards wide, with a 20 yard gap underneath the hull width.  We are going to use four separate track units in mutually-opposed pairs, each of 100 yards length, and with two tracks per unit.  Art?

No images with tracks added.  Sorry

     There is a reason for this track arrangement, and it's called the Crawler, it being the enormous vehicle that carried the assembled Apollo rockets from the Vertical Assembly Building to the launchpad.  Art?

With puny fire engine for scale

     So, we know this arrangement works.
     Okay, what we need now is the surface area of the Forrestal's track unit in contact with the ground, and we shall estimate that 50% of it is in contact at any given moment.  Thus we have 1,296,000 square inches of track on the ground.  We divide the total mass by this figure and we get a total of 25 pounds per square inch.  If you think that's a lot, the average family car has a p.s.i. of 80.
     There you go, technically feasible.  Of course, heaving 60,000 tons out of the water and ashore would require a shore-front with no cliffs, which would limit where the USAS Forrestal could drive inland.  It wouldn't be very fast, either, probably not doing more than one or two miles per hour.  Still, it would be able to keep going across terrain which had water features of less than 100 yards width, for days if need be, so if you were a pilot off on a long recon mission, you would have to follow the tracks.  Unless it was night, in which case - today's title.

We shall come back to this, O Yes Indeed

     Wow, this has been a lengthy Intro.  Motley, bring me a bucket of gin and a couple - actually, no, bring me a bucket of Pimm's and a glass of ice-cubes.  Hop to it now.  And make sure the glass is the transparent aluminium one.

Haunted By Holland
There I was, looking up "Dybbuk" in my copy of Brewers, when I spotted (and read, of course) a whole list of things that began "Dutch -", several of which were very uncomplimentary.  Conrad likes the Dutch so I shan't repeat any of them.
     Then, what do I find when looking for "Practical Engineering" on Youtube?  Why, a Dutch chap warbling on in Dutch, yet with English subtitles, which is completely normal, as all Dutch are fluent in English, frequently better than quite a few of the English (the FiveGees spring to mind here).  Art!

     I've not seen one of these in action before; it's a CNC drill.  That's "Computer Numerically Controlled", although it probably smacks of witchcraft to the FiveGees.  If any of you poor confused folk happen to be reading this, don't worry! It will not steal your immortal soul should your gaze linger upon it.
     Not as long as you sacrifice a black cockerel in the graveyard at midnight, any
     NO!  Bad Conrad!  Naughty Conrad!
     Quick, Art, a picture!

     This is what our artisan was making with his digital deviltry carpentry.  When completed he put it to work, "It" being a 'Perpetuum Mobile', or Perpetual Motion Machine.  Art?

     Of course it didn't work!  Mechanically impossible, thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics.  No, our rascal had installed a small electric motor in the base, which is what made it rotate.  Note the English title in upper port.

Finally -
The English and Teutons both believe that the others do not possess a sense of humour.  I can prove that this is incorrect for the Teutons, and this blog ought to convince you that at least one out of seventy million inhabitants of This Sceptred Isle has a sense of humour**.  Art?

Hilarious in Teuton

     It was a satirical magazine that poked fun at Teuton militarism and class, at least until 1914.  There is an hilarious series of cartoons about a hapless British dashund being vilified, arrested and then bravely forbearing being executed, which I might try to dig up at some point.  Amazingly enough the Nazis never banned it; Conrad suspects someone very very senior in their heirarchy had a soft spot for it.

     And with that we are done!


*  To reiterate: none of that nasty metric stuff here.
**  It is mine, however, and - well, you can call it idiosyncratic if you like.