Hydrampaging Around

I Made That Title Up All By Myself
Aren't I clever?  It's a combination of "Hydra" and "Rampaging" and refers - obviously! - to that fad of the Thirties for having multiple turrets on tanks.
     Sorry but we were eventually going to get round to more TANK, and here it is.
     The subject came up in a thread over on the Space Opera Facebook page, and I did have a rebuttal all ready to go, when I realised that I could instead share it with you lucky, lucky people via BOOJUM!  

Spacey, yet also Opera-y

     The question came up as to whether hovertanks of the future - another blog topic for another day - would bother with having multiple turrets, and they posted a picture of some examples from Earth history.  Art?

Sinister T28 with 3 turrets

     This was a bit of a beast, weighing 28 tons, which was pretty massive for 1933.  You can, hopefully, pick out the two turrets housing machine guns on top of the front hull.  Also - Art?

"Oi!  You pesky kids! Get orf my tank!"

     This is the Sinister T35, with puny humans for scale.  That picture doesn't properly show the bounty of turrets it was bestowed with.  Art!

Here you can see 4 of the 5 turrets

     You can see where the "Hydra" of today's title comes from, in the sense of having many heads.  That T35 weighed in at 45 tons, too, so it was no shrinking violet.
     The big question is, were they any good?  You can't really trust the Sinisters to be honest about anything, as it will always be "fantastic" or "incredibly efficient", or "a wonder upon the battlefield" since they never dared admit anything they built was rubbish, except the Tsar tank and then only because of the name -
     Which is getting off-track a little.  In truth, no, multi-turreted tanks were not a great success and you might gather that by looking around the world of TANK today and not seeing any, bar some in museums.  There's a few reasons for this, which I am going to use Blogger's Numbered Bullet List for:

1. Complexity.  If you have a turret then you need a mechanism to turn it, preferably via a motor, which requires power, which means cabling, and which needs maintenance. 
2. Weight.  Look at that T35.  At least 5 tons of the overall total lies with those four additional turrets, to say nothing of the extra ammunition required.  An increase in weight means more stress placed on the suspension, more load on the engine and a consequent decrease in reliability.
3. Crew.  That monster the T35 needed 11 crew, even the much more modest T28 needed 6.  Imagine what it must smell like when your vehicle is crewed by men whose staple diet is shchi - cabbage soup.
4. Command.  If you're the commander then by convention you sit in the turret and direct the driver, pass on info to the radio operator and pick targets for the main gun.  What on earth must you do when trying to direct five separate turrets?

     Hmmmmm.  So that was Numbered Bullet List.
     Now, I have not wrung all the content that I can from this subject, so rest assured we are going to return to it.  O Yes Vulnavia!

Picher Perfect
Yes, yet more tasteless puns about the unluckiest town in Oklahoma, South Canada.  We mentioned the millions of tons of toxic spoil dumped all around the town, and briefly mentioned heavy metal poisons in the water.  These went unrecognised for years, with townsfolk happily swimming in a chemical cocktail that included the ubiquitous lead, and also the less-familiar cadmium.  For those of you unfamiliar, cadmium is proper nasty stuff, worse in it's effects than lead.

Rush-hour in Picher

     As I mentioned, this insidious poison legacy was only the beginning.  After 20 years people began to notice that the population of Picher was far less healthy and mentally acute than other towns, and whilst they may have been able to subsist on bottled water, there was another problem -
     - they had to cope with an acute undermining problem.  You see, in a paroxysm (not a word you expected to see today, hmmm?) of capitalistic fervour, the 14,000 mineshafts sunk around Picher had undercut the whole town to the extent that any part of it was liable to collapse into sinkholes at any time.  Art?

A sinkhole.
(More like sink, shower and bath hole if you ask me)

     By 2006 a federal investigation concluded that 90% of the town was liable to sinkhole subsidence, and as you can see these holes are easily big enough to swallow a house entire.  Art?

     You have to wonder at the mentality of the mining operators, as they dug the 13,999th shaft:  Say, Hank, is this really a good idea?  Ah, whatever.  What's the worst that can happen?
     You had to ask, didn't you?  You just had to ask!  Because no matter how bad things are, they can always be made worse by adding a -
     But later for that.

We Finally Hit Half-Way!
Of that long, productive list of "Rolling Stone"'s Top 50 Sci Fi Shows Of All Time, some of which are apt and some of which Your Humble Scribe has never seen and ain't going to, and some of which are only in there because of bribery.
     So, here we are at #25: "Fringe".  Art?

No!  NO hairdressing puns, Conrad - be strong and resist!

     The description over on Wiki says that it started off as an unoriginal clone of "The X Files" and then changed quality gears by exploring alternate realities.  Your Humble Scribe only saw the pilot episode and cannot remember anything about it, other than an erstwhile hero dies of rainbow acne face.  Or something.  It was a long time ago.  Anyway, it scores pretty high on IMDB at 8.4, and it didn't outstay it's welcome, finishing after 5 seasons.  Conrad might pop on over to the episode guide and see if it's worth catching.
    On a side note, "Wynona Earp" is an enjoyable enough romp BUT once again it's not sci fi, nor is it a landmark.  Watching it is like wearing comfortable shoes.

Adapted from a comic book, lest ye be curious

Finally -
My copy of "The Star Fox" arrived yesteryon and I began reading it, having remembered nothing about it save that scene where an autonomous tank rolls over someone, it's underside having lots of sharp things built into it -
     Well, so far we have a Hungarian singing in French whilst a Norwegian listens, which is pretty cosmopolitan for 1964 yet fairly typical for Poul Anderson, who was definitely not Amero-centric in leaning.  
     Sadly it's an edition with the rubbish abstract cover.  Art?

Sic

     And with that not only are we done, we are going to get some lunch!