You Know How It Is
At first you're looking for sausage casserole recipes, and forty minutes later you are reading about deep-sea ore-nodule mining operations. Thus it was that Your Humble Scribe felt obliged to do a bit of background digging into spaceships, after raising the issue thanks to those bampot conspiracy theorists who believe the Vatican is in league with the Daleks.
Thus, via footling about on teh Interwebz, we come to Project Icarus, which is an update of the earlier Project Daedalus. I think we may have covered the latter briefly, a long time ago, so a recap won't hurt. Art!
Icarus with puny Apollo for scale
The whole thing was a rigourous theoretical plan to design an interplanetary spaceship, using current or very near-future technology, with strict criteria to keep it plausible. Visible above, Icarus was a beast of a ship, expected to tip the scales at 50,000 tons and which would need to be assembled in orbit. It came in two parts - Art!
The main stage would provide initial acceleration for two years before it was discarded and the second stage took over, accelerating again. By the time it reached it's destination it would be travelling at 12% of the speed of light, far too fast to decelerate, so it would launch scads of secondary probes to scan the target system and send data back to Stage 2, which would in turn relay the information back to Earth.
Then we have Project Icarus, a new initiative 30 years after the original. Art!
They never came to a concrete conclusion, and seem to have gone through several different design variants before settling back on the original. For example - Art!
One thing they did change was the original destination, Barnard's Star, which is now known to be planetless. Proxima Centauri here we come instead!
Okay, we may not have the motivation or money to whip up a quick fusion-powered spaceship just yet; the design is sound and plausible, mind you, and inherently credible. Giant space-going hammers is what these vessels are (hence today's title). Probably not what you were thinking when Conrad mentioned spaceships, as you have long been raised on a diet of "Starry Trek" and "Space Wars".
Which brings us to the other 'Icarus', a spacecraft Your Humble Scribe was quite unfamiliar with, at least in name. Art!
A rare full-body shot
Given this particular spaceship's sleek, aerodynamic lines, it must have been launched from the ground, and can manoeuvre back to land that way, too, since streamlining in space is utterly pointless if you're not going to make planetfall. The ship does have a distinctly daggerlike quality, you have to admit. It was only ever conceived, however, as a Macguffin to get the astronauts from A to B, so nobody on the design team was thinking "Would the British Interplanetary Society approve?"
O, I nearly forgot to add - it's from the original (and much better) "Planet Of The Apes".
No, motley, you cannot watch the film. Don't want you getting dangerous ideas.
How to train your motley
The Hard Selle
For Lo! we are back to one of the last major battles that the armies of Perfidious Albion fought, as they beat the Teutons back from their defence line of the River Selle. Art!
In any river crossing bridges are important, all the more so if the enemy have blown them all up, for you then have to put up new bridges, which is supposed to slow down your advance. Not really the case in the Second Unpleasantness, when the Royal Engineers could throw up bridges almost faster than they could be destroyed. Back in the First, Ol' Pete above mentioned a mysterious "RSJ bridge" which baffled me for a short while. I then realised that 'RSJ' meant "Rolled Steel Joist", a species of girder. Art!
Thus he means a metal bridge. Well now, Conrad has heard of the 'Inglis Bridge', which was invented by one Mister Inglis in the First Unpleasantness, the better to bridge gaps quickly. Art!
This is one of the later versions, built especially to accomodate 30 ton tanks. The earlier models could bridge large spans of water in minutes, although they were usable only by infantry. When the utility of these structures was realised, the British Army immediately asked Inglis to design more, larger structures (not quite as stupid as painted, hmmm?). Art!
Ol' Pete makes no mention of these RSJ bridge's design name, and there isn't an entry in the index for the Inglis, but I remain confident that's what they were. We need not dwell on the matter any longer, for I have spoken.
More Of Water Features
As mentioned previously, Conrad has come across a Mancunian whose principal passion is industrial archaeology in the Greater Manchester area: Martin Zero.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3fqrmSkFjmkGGBPkoBO1GQ
That's a link to his channel. We've already covered the Chew Reservoir's history and construction, and today we're going to look at how it looks today, thanks to snaps I got of his long, long trek up there. Art!
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| Spillway |
This is the spillway from the reservoir, where water drains off if there's too much accumulating. Notice that masonry - nothing broken, nothing missing.
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| Spillway close-up |
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| NOPE! |
This is the 'siphon tunnel' where a giant pipe runs overground. It is cramped, low, dark, awkward thanks to the pipe, and full of spiders. That tiny dot of light at the end is the exit. Which they hoped was not gated shut.
And it wasn't. Fortunately, or they'd have had to turn around and go back the way they came.
Finally -
Just to let you know that I am working today <grinds teeth in silent rage> so this is the ONLY post you get to see, you pikers. Also, to those of you who wondered if I was seething with apocalyptic rage about Codewords, you betcha! I don't want to go too far over the Compositional Ton, so have a photograph in preparation for a long, ill-tempered screed tomorrow. Art!
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| The horror highlighted |
And I think with that we are jolly well done! Vulnavia, bring me a bucket and release the gin tank's outflow valve.
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