Today, You Will Have To Indulge Me

Firstly, Because I Have The Launch Codes

I shan't say whose launch codes as MI5 and GCHQ might start to worry, and it's expensive to replace all your windows and doors when a Pagoda C.R.E.W. team from Sausage And Stew come a-calling.

They leave footprints in the flowerbeds

     Secondly, whose blog is it?  Thank you.

     Thirdly, it's not as if any of you out there pay for this, or even bother to drop a comment in, which would take mere seconds of your time yet I'm not bitter or resentful*.

     Okay, so today we're going to talk "Star Wars" back when it wasn't being milked like a dairy creamer by the House of Mouse, all the way back in 1977; prehistory to the millennials who cannot conceive of a life without the internet, mobile phones or quinoa.

What we ate instead

     There is a whole school of philosophy that surrounds one of the earliest scenes of the film, where C3PO and R2D2 escape from their hijacked ship, and are -

     - NOT blown out of the sky by a gunner aboard the Imperial Star Tickler** that hijacked their ship  Art?.

The crucial moment

"Should we shoot it?"
"Nah, it'll be fine."

     Consider, as Conrad did earlier today in between phone calls O LORD ALOFT THE ENDLESS PHONE CALLS "What if they did fire on the escape pod?  Because they're Imperial and evil and all."  

     It's not as cut-and-dried as you might think.  The gunner would have to acquire the target himself, and being a lowly Assistant Sub-Artificer Weapons Technician Class 2a (Probationer***), he lacks the authority to have the Star Tickler change orientation and certainly cannot request it pursue.  So he effectively gets only a single shot.  This is likely to shatter the escape-pod apart BUT also unlikely to destroy both of the two robots aboard it; with a debris field now camouflaging the heroes, ASAWTC2a(P) Ploot cannot pick them out nor shoot them again.  Gravity then takes over, and our two metallic comrades then plunge into the atmosphere of Tattooine.  Ooops.

     This is Game Over for C3PO, I'm afraid, as effete robo-butlers are quite flimsy and burn up in atmospheres pretty quickly.  Still, all that gold-effect metal will make a really nice firework!

     R2D2 is another story.  Firstly, his - it is a "he", isn't it^? - his design is a lot more robust than his compatriot, compensating for not being able to speak the Queen's english.  Don't forget that R2D2 units are used as plug-in aids on X-Wing fighters.  Art?

Thus

     Therefore, an R2D2 unit has to be able to survive transit through atmosphere as the X-Wing flies off to combat and then returns home; it has to be strong enough to sustain high-G manoeuvring in space dogfights and possible damage from hostile fire.  They are designed to be tough. Art?

    Once in the lower reaches of Tattoine's atmosphere, R2D2 would adopt a head-down attitude, with his aerodynamic 'head' acting as a heat-shield, and his legs as crude aerofoils, thus allowing him to reduce his terminal velocity to a survivable one, and even coming in at a relatively shallow near-horizontal angle, meaning he'd skip or skim over the desert dunes instead of hitting them vertically, losing speed gradually and thus surviving.  A little scorched, dented and alone, yet still hale and hearty.  Art?

     Of course, I might be overthinking this a little ...

Pole Position

There we go, the British spreading light and goodness everywhere we travel, which as of April 1945 was a place called "Swinemunde" on the shores of the Baltic.  There lived an ogre called the "Lutzow", and the Brylcreem Boys taught that ogre a very severe lesson, being as how they had the advantage of height - what you might call the tall ground.

"Ouch"

     Cometh the day, and the Poles acquired Swinemunde, Slavifiying the name to "Swinoujscie".  This meant they also inherited some of the duds that didn't go pop in 1945, and they recently discovered a Tallboy lying at the bottom of the Piast Canal.  

     This is a serious matter.  The Tallboy was exactly that, coming in at five tons apiece.  Art?

     The Tallboy is the one with an Assistant Sub-Artificer Weapons Technician Class 2a (Probationer) standing with his back to the camera.

     The Polish Navy decided to remotely deal with this recalcitrant rogue, which is fortunate for the divers involved.  Art?

     Before.  You can get a sense of scale by looking at that customs tower, and there is a barely visible car at lower starboard, just before the corner of that grassy verge.

Mister Boy objects to being woken up

     Again, you get some sense of how big that explosion is thanks to the customs tower.

     The Poles might well heave a sigh of relief, because they got off lightly.

    "What!" I hear you expostulate.  "Lightly!"

     Yes, because Perfidious Albion used the terrifying "Grand Slam" bomb to sink ships as well.  Art?

"How to make a Tallboy feel inferior"

    These monsters came in at ten tons each.  So yes, "lightly".

We've Not Had A Lego Feature For A While

Conrad made a hasty scrawl in his notebook "Lego dinosaurs" in between the endless phone calls today GADZOOKS THE ENDLESS PHONE CALLS and this is the end result.  A year ago, so sadly not present in Gomorrah-on-the-Irwell any longer.  Art?

     This 80,000 piece sculpture is by Lego savant Nathan Sawaya and models a T-Rex fossil skeleton.

     No information about this one, sorry.  Possibly a raptor of some variety, and I'd estimate 5,000 bricks or so, a bit of a stab in the dark given that I've got nothing to scale it with.

     Shall we try for one more?  Go on then!

     A flaming T-Rex again, this time fully-clothed.  Not sure what the grey goo is supposed to be.  There were other big critters here but Marwell Zoo didn't break down the bricks-per-sculpture, only that there were 2,000,000 overall (!).

Finally - 

Ah, this one is still running.  Remember how, earlier this week, Your Humble Scribe posted about a proposition to reduce the number of teams in the Premium Lager from 2,184 to 3?

     Of course I exaggerate for comic effect, it was down to 18 from 20, and the howls of anger and dismay from ballfoot game fans were heard by an alien probe in orbit around Tau Ceti.

     So, today - Art!

     In case you can't make it out, that's 555 comments in 48 minutes, or about one every five seconds. Conrad, delighting in the misery of others, had a good trawl through the comments and, do you know what - there wasn't a single one in support of the idea.  Not one!  There were a lot of very, very angry fans, in fact so angry if you could tap it you could run a major city's power requirements for a week.

    We may come back to this one, it's deliciously entertaining!

*  Much.

**  I can't remember the official title so this will have to do.

***  Base rate of pay C20 per hour for first 6 months or death, whichever comes soonest

^  Yes, this is a wildly contradictory question