A Weighty Matter

No!  Nothing To Do With Parramatta
That was yesterday, do keep up.  No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of multi-turret tanks.  Yes yes yes, I did mention "Hovertanks" and we'll get on to that subject matter in due course, patience the best virtue.
     Anyway, I thought I'd lead you through the vexatious subject matter of multi-turret tanks by illustration, using the designs of Perfidious Albion.  Art!

Taking the air, because it must be pretty cramped in there

Safety in numbers

     This is the A9 Cruiser, which, as you can see, had two small sub-turrets perched on the front, each containing a Vickers machine-gun.  This means more complexity and machining and power wiring, and having 6 crew instead of 4.  I know what you're thinking: "Wow how awesome is it, having turrets that can point in 3 different directions at once!"
     Well, how often do you see pictures of British tanks with more than one turret?  Yup, not very often.  So it can't have been that awesome.  
     Here an aside.  Yes, I do have four of these in 6mm scale, painted up in desert camouflage to represent those that served in the Western Desert Force.  True enough, they only built 125 of them, but you see wargamers with umpteen Maus on the tabletop and they only ever built 2 of them.
     I was going to make a point by including the A10 Heavy Cruiser - hi there Gene Roddenberry! - and if Art can put down his fork and coal scuttle - 

In Caunter desert camo scheme

     As you can see, no sub-turrets in the front.  It was actually heavier than the A9, because it had much thicker armour, which they could manage having subtracted the weight of those sub-turrets.
     Anyway, we now skip lightly along to the A15 Crusader Tank, Mark I version thereof.  Art!

Note the sub-turret

     That's not a brilliant picture.  Art!

Somewhat better

     There we go.  This design came out before practical experience with the A9 showed how essentially useless sub-turrets were, and the Crusader's sub-turret was so poorly ventilated that the gunner would choke on cordite fumes if he ever fired his weapon.  They were omitted on the Crusader Mark II altogether.  Art!

Taking the air, again

     You don't find multi-turret tanks being designed after the start of the Second Unpleasantness, which should clue you in on how ineffective they were for all the extra bother involved.
     There you go, another pub-quiz winning subject matter thoroughly explored for you, and at no added cost.

Proof, Were It Needed -
That Your Humble Scribe is a very sad man indeed.  Back at the beginning of BOOJUM! one of our stock-in-trades was taking pictures of chocolate bars and punning around the title.  Having exhausted what was not a large field to begin with, we have in recent years (Ooooooh I love being able to say that, plural "years") gone down the same route with canned or bottled beers*.  Thus shoppers in Morrisons will notice a large, bad-tempered looking elderly male scowling at the range of alcohol on sale, because there's nothing he can joke about.  Aha!  But - what's this?

     Quite apart from the comedy potential of a "One Star Beer", this can's title triggered a vague recall from the depths of Your Humble Scribe's memory.
     " 'Big Wednesday'?  Isn't that the title of a film associated with <thinks> John Milius?" I mused to me, it being a public area and one doesn't like to worry other shoppers.
     Correct, Conrad!  Have fifty brownie points for being clever, attentive and a pedantic hair-splitter of the first magnitude.  Art?

One for the ladies

     Of course, you realise that this means we can promote today's blog on Facebook with mention of "Topless -" and still retain our SFW status.
     Conrad: sad, bad or mad?  Only you can tell!

Conrad Quivers Uncertainly
I have noticed that it's getting more and more problematical to load photographs into Blogger, which I associate with the current iteration changing at the end of June.  Normally I load up the photos I'm going to use en bloc and then add them into the blog as I go along, which isn't working any more; once any are used the whole lot vanish <moderately sad face>.
     Since Conrad is a positive fleshly endowment of that quote from Garth "We fear change", he isn't going to start using the new Blogger until he has no choice.

     Which is just me keeping you informed.

Bottom Of The Flops Part 2
Okay, yesteryon we did the dirty deed on "The Adventures Of Pluto Nash", a ghastly misfire of a film that lost tens of millions of pounds.  Today we look at a list TopTenz put out for cinematic bombs that cost their studios boatloads of cash, the first one being "Cats".  Art?

Conrad, for once, is lost for words

     There is 0% chance of Your Humble Scribe ever seeing this celluloid crime against the eyes, because i) It's a musical and ii) It's by that ghastly LLoyd-Wibble chap and iii) It's still a musical.  The studio realised they had released a cinematic stinker and tried to compensate with a £60 million advertising campaign, which FAILED <points and laughs>.  It ended up losing £44 million at the box office, and Conrad has to take the critics word for why it failed: the "Uncanny Valley" effect; not having any plot; not having any idea of what's going on; being adapated from a crap musical (okay, that last was all me).  Hopefully the tanking this got will prevent any other Lloyd-Wibble musicals from getting made ever again.  

Finally -
We have hit the Compositional Ton and I want some lunch, so goodbye for now!



*  Cider or spirits, too, we're neither fussy nor proud