Excuse My Nickname For The Lancaster Bomber
We have been here before, because Your Humble Scribe is nothing if not an aficionado of things that go BANG, and one of the largest non-nuclear BANGS of the entire Second Unpleasantness came about because inventor Barnes Wallis was also into sudden loud noises. Art!
No, they are not very very small people. It's a very very big bomb.
Grand Slam was the operational name for a monstrous ten-ton bomb that BW had designed, a bomb so big that it didn't need to hit anywhere near the target. The design meant that it burrowed into the very earth, fifty or sixty feet deep, before the fuses worked and it detonated. This created a huge underground cavern which is called a 'camouflet', although Conrad and his audience are doubtless thinking of 'quaquaveral' as an alternative. Everything above ground promptly collapsed into the camouflet. Art!
As popularised by futurologist Gerry Anderson in "Pit Of Peril"*
Now let us introduce the Target For Today, the Bielefeld railway viaduct. This particular structure had been bombed relentlessly for years, to absolutely no effect, because if you're bombing from 30,000 feet up a railway viaduct looks like a length of thread laid atop a length of twine. Art!
Flaunting it's undamaged status.
According to "The Northern Historian", whose Youtube channel I am reciting this from, three and a half thousand TONS of bombs had been dropped in the vicinity without a single direct hit.
Enter 617 Squadron and Grand Slam.
617 had won immortality as "The Dambusters" with their ghoulish motto "Apres moi la deluge", and you could count on them to drop a bomb down a chimney from 40,000 feet up. In March of 1945 they turned up over Bielefeld en masse, fourteen of them dropping the 'mere' five-ton Tallboys alongside a single Grand Slam. The whole thing was filmed by a specially-equipped Mosquito. Art!
That above is taken from about two miles up and shows Tallboys detonating near the wretched viaduct in what you might call 'close but no cigar'. Don't forget these are five-ton bombs going off. Art!
This is a tricky one to illustrate. The Grand Slam has been dropped, and the carrier Lancaster promptly rockets upwards now that it's gotten rid of a ten-ton payload. The GS heads south, spinning thanks to it's specially-designed fins, and it reaches near-supersonic speeds of 750 m.p.h. before impact. It has an eleven-second fuse. Art!
Compare with the image above. And, don't forget, this is from two miles up. End result: Bielefeld Viaduct 0 Grand Slam 1. Art!
Oooopsie!
I would recommend "The Northern Historian" and his Youtube channel, with the proviso that people not hailing from This Sceptred Isle may find his accent a tad difficult to follow. He's a Geordie, you see, and their dialect can be a little - ah - obscure.
O the viaduct? The Teutons gave up on it, thus severing a crucial rail network link. In fact engineers went for a completely different post-war design, probably because it was quicker and cheaper than filling in giant subterranean caverns. Art!
As Conrad has posited before, it is wise to let sleeping bears and dogs alone, and also Perfidious Albion, lest you get prodded back a whole lot harder than you prodded in the first place.
Motley! Let us go and attempt to harvest the Devil's Spitting Cabbage from The Zone! Hazmat suits are de rigeur, weapons are optional.
Conrad Is ANGRY! O SO ANGRY! O SO VERY ANGRY!
For one thing, the off-season of the ballfoot game seems to be shrinking with every year. If it carries on like this it will re-start before it finishes and we'll have to call in that chap with a big blue police box to sort things out.
Secondly, modern bank notes are extremely hard to unravel when they've been rolled up in a bundle for five years. Did nobody think of this when they were introduced?
Thirdly, yes, the Codeword compilers are pushing the boundaries of acceptable use, to the extent that a criminal complaint to the ICC in the Hague would be quite plausible. What's that? You want examples? O just wait!
"DIAZEPAM": ARE YOU DOG BUNS KIDDING ME!? What, are we expected to be drug addicts familiar with the abuse of modern pharmaceuticals? Although, you know, that "-Az-" portion bespeaks of nitrogen molecules - NO! You're not going to get away with that. Conrad is ANGRY! at this obscure resolution.
This many is probably a bad thing
"GARBLING": This reminds me of Garbochock, a Swedish new wave group from the early Eighties, whom I don't think I've recalled since then. "Can Can Flikor" was one of their catchy little tunes if I remember correctly. And if you can't make any sense of that, consider yourself to have been garbled.
"POXY": NOT PRESENT IN MY COLLINS CONCISE! Supposedly derived from "Pox", which refers to the disfiguration of a surface (usually skin) by pits after a healing process. AND FAR TOO MUCH A VULGARISM TO BE IN A CODEWORD!
See - proof I am not raving. Not yet.
<takes five minutes to calm the raging torrents of vim>
"Redemption Ark" By Alastair Reynolds
You can't accuse Ol' Al of thinking small. There's a lot of Space Opera about this novel, with spaceships four kilometres long, and evil enemies who devour planets for breakfast, and what Conrad like was mention of rail guns. We have prototypes of this weapon today. Art!
This behemoth accelerates steel slugs thanks to electro-magnetic rails, whizzing them off into the wild blue yonder, where they impact the bad guys and cause severe headaches and a bad hair day.
Ol' Al's SO version are a thousand kilometres long (!) rather than a thousand centimetres, and bring their truck-sized warhead up to 70% of light-speed. They do have to manage this via the propulsive effort of thermonuclear warhead detonation, mind, so - a bit radioactive and messy. Art!
A baby version
Finally -
We have actually hit the Compositional Ton so Your Modest Artisan needs to get cracking on reducing the Codeword/Cryptic backlog, and in reading some more of his Book Mountain. The thing is, it's payday tomorrow, so one is tempted - O is one ever so tempted! - to get online at Turner Donovan and order £500-worth of books <wallet squeaks in anguish>. I think we shall see.
Don't forget, President Bierce needs your vote!
* I think. My meds might be wearing off, though.
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