Just Not How You Imagined One
No! We are not talking about the R.E.M. song either, mostly because REM (can't be bothered with the full stops) are a bunch of old fuddy-duddies now, though they were pretty hot stuff back in the day, and Your Humble Scribe still remembers being impressed with them on "The Tube" when they did "South Central Rain". And you'll see why the first three letters have a hyphen.
But I digress. An occupational hazard here on the blog, get used to it. Art!
That's Mars, as it used to be imagined back in the Fifties, to judge by the spaceship designs, at a time when the romantic Thirties nonsense about canals had been firmly quashed, yet detailed knowledge of the surface was lacking. You can contrast the gleaming gamboge (not a word you ever expected to see today, hmmm?) sands with the rusty reality, if Art has finished with his bowl of coal -
Mars in real life looks rather similar to Arizona, hmmm? Except if you took your helmet off you would die in hideous yet interesting ways.
"Why Mars?" you ask, "because I thought this was about catapults?"
Did you not read the warning above as regards digressions?
Okay. Catapults. You are no doubt thinking along the lines of siege artillery from classical warfare involving Greeks or Romans, which is a fair guess.
But WRONG!
For Lo! we are back on the subject of aircraft carriers again - don't wince, this is interesting stuff. Right, you have your aircraft carrier, and there are practical limitations to how big these things can be built, because - target. For one thing. By the Second Unpleasantness, the aircraft being launched were considerably more massive than their string-and-canvas biplane predecessors. Take the South Canadian's Dauntless SBD, a naval scout and dive bomber, which when loaded for combat weighed over 4 tons. Art!
You have a limited length of flight deck to accelerate your crate to take-off speed, and consequently very little time to ensure you fly instead of swimming. So, enter the hydropneumatic catapult. Art!
Delivering good news, or bad, depending on your viewpoint
The Type H, Mark 8 Catapult is a hydropneumatic, flush deck type catapult designed for launching an airplane from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
No scale, so just imagine it's about a hundred yards long. All you'd see on the deck would be the long slot and the catapult 'shuttle', just like a swan on the water. The aircraft being launched would attach to the catapult and be hurled forward at considerable speed, instantly, rather than having to accelerate itself.
The ol' hydropneumatic catapult was known to be very inefficient, so Her Brittanic Majesty's Royal Navy came up with the steam catapult in 1950, and this is the type of catapult most often used on aircraft carriers nowadays, which explains the plumes of what most people assume is smoke, issuing up through the flight deck. Art!
There is talk of replacing steam catapults with an electromagnetic system, which sounds very 22nd century, and we shall see if it comes in.
0 - 120 in 3 seconds
Oh, and remember that antediluvian clunker that the Ruffians have, the 'Admiral Kuznetsov'? Because it was built by the Sinisters, they built it cheap (and nasty!*) without a catapult. So the aircraft it launches cannot be either heavily-armed, nor heavily-fuelled, as otherwise their pilots would become submariners in short order. So they can either carry a lot of ordnance a very short distance, or travel a long way with with very few weapons.
So there you go. Catapults.
The AK on fire a year ago. This ship was surely launched on a Friday 13th.
Motley, I've got a bait catapult and a bag of steel ball-bearings. Shall we try a distance and impact test?
Dance, motley, dance!
Still On That Theme -
Conrad is re-watching "Battlestar Galactica"'s first season and just finished the second episode, "Water". Which is indeed about H2O, that stuff that you we all need to survive. Cylon sleeper-agent sabotage has caused the Galactica to vent 60% of all her potable water, creating an instant rationing schedule. Ironically, Helos and Boomer are back on Caprica, where they are drenched thanks to the non-stop rain.
I won't post any spoilers - this time. Be warned that the whole series is 15 years old and I anticipate throwing spoilers in from time to time, because you SHOULD have seen it by now, no excuses.
Boomer and Helos
Why did I bring up this particular television program? Because the central conceit, as explained by the show's creators, was to have the situation on Galactica mirror that of the South Canadian or British aircraft carriers of the Second Unpleasantness (and perhaps that business in the Falklands). That's the DNA for anything to do with the battlestars, which may give you a different perspective on things.
The battling beast herself.
More Of Cats
I thought a change of pace from either sharks or hyenas would be welcome, so here we are. Jenny had an early Christmas present in the shape of a new 'fur igloo' which replaces the unwieldy one that perched precariously atop the chest of drawers. Art!
She fits in very snugly, a quality cats are said to like about their lairs.
Now, you know those humourless Ruffians, the ones who maintain a stony glare at all times, and who dream of nothing more than overthrowing the West, and who are happy to send grandma to the gulags if she so much as twitches an eyebrow when Tsar Putin comes on television? Yeah, them. Art!
These humourless, stony-faced rascals saved a cat from going into the recycling machinery at a plant in Ulyanovsk, after the poor creature had been stuffed into a bag full of paper. Having been rescued, it is now officially a mascot for the provincial government and (allegedly) has been appointed an assistant director. Not what you'd expect from the Stony-Faced Gimboids, is it?
The Director is: IN
Finally -
I don't know how I missed this opportunity earlier, possibly Conrad was so ferociously focussed it escaped my attention, so let us repair that omission. Art!
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| How to scare cats the Brickmaster way! |
And with that we are done!
* There, there, Dimya, don't cry so
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