How Much Dragon Do You Want With Your Sea?

We Touched Briefly On This Monster Marine-Mounted Missile

When going on about 'Dragons in the sea', although that quick gloss could do with a little more background information.  We have seen that the Sea Dragon, whilst being slightly taller (or longer when lying down) than the Apollo's Saturn 5, was a much beefier beast altogether.  Art!

?

     What on earth is this ghastly apparition?  Have you been at the lignite again?  You know it makes you see things.  What's that?  It's a species of fish called a 'Sea Dragon'.  I see.  CAN IT REACH ORBIT?  Of course not.  Then we don't want it here.  Try again.

"LEO" is "Low Earth Orbit"

     Thus the SD could lift almost 4 times the payload of an Apollo mission, and the size constraints of what you're sending into LEO are almost negligible.  That's not all, either.  The SD was designed to use the very cheapest of components, and to be partly recyclable, to further keep costs down.  A few commentators on another forum exclaimed in horror at this thing's sheer size, stating that it would destroy any launch pad it used thanks to that enormous engine.

     Ah, but -

     It was intended to be built ashore, then floated out to sea, where an aircraft carrier would generate the hydrogen and liquid oxygen to fuel it and pump said fuel aboard.  It would assume an upright position, without the need for all the support gantries of conventional rocketry designs, and be launched from this position.  Obviously there would need to be a minimum depth of water beneath the engine bell, as otherwise you'd risk potential damage from bits of the ocean floor being blasted away at high speed.  Art!

     It's a very cool idea and a real shame that NASA never took it up, because by now we'd have hundreds of people living on the Moon and a small Mars colony, too*.

     Now, where did I put that Tazer?  Art needs a lesson or two.

Lazy Conrad Is Lazy

As you pikers ought to know, it's a constant battle here in the blogosphere to create fresh and interesting content - or at least content that interests me, you people are quite incidental.  So, when I came across a BBC webpage that details significant authors from the Commonwealth, selected from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign STAND UP FOR THE QUEEN! it rather intrigued me.  Take the selection from 1952 - 1961, which I will append here.

1952-1961

 

The Palm-Wine Drinkard - Amos Tutuola (1952, Nigeria)

The Hills Were Joyful Together - Roger Mais (1953, Jamaica)

In the Castle of My Skin - George Lamming (1953, Barbados)

My Bones and My Flute - Edgar Mittelholzer (1955, Guyana)

The Lonely Londoners - Sam Selvon (1956, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

The Guide - R. K. Narayan (1958, India)

To Sir, With Love - E. R. Braithwaite (1959, Guyana)

One Moonlit Night - Caradog Prichard (1961, Wales)

A House for Mr Biswas - VS Naipaul (1961, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

Sunlight on a Broken Column - Attia Hosain (1961, India)

     I know, I know, a cheap way to up the word count.  Still, the only one I'd heard of was "To Sir, With Love", and the only author I'd heard of was VS Naipaul.  Fortunately the BBC has another page that gives a plot synopsis, and a couple of these seem interesting in that they tell a horror story.  HOWEVER I really can't justify buying another 10 books when I've just ordered 4 from Naval & Military Press.  Art!

     I have heard that there are these mysterious entities called 'Libraries' where one can borrow books ...

The Bronk's!

NO that is not a typo and it should NOT read 'The Bronx', thank you very much.  I refer, of course - obviously! - to Justin Bronk, senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute and a chap who really know his onions.  Thing is, he only looks about 17, which must cause friction with his alumni and fellow fellows.  Art!

Trying the old 'A suit will make me look older' trick

     He's been featured on Ward Carroll's vlog a couple of times, which are well worth watching.  I'm sure they do preparation about subject matter, but he doesn't hesitate or fluff lines or look blank, and his detailed response to a Patreon member asking if the South Canadian Air Force was going to stealth-enable it's flying tanker aircraft was very impressive.  Briefly put, a tanker has a low radar cross-section if it's not deploying the fuel drogue, and there are technical issues about putting a stealth-skin on them, which shoehorn's The Bronk's explanation a lot.  They also discussed this monster - Art!

     It can carry 4 Hellfire missiles and bombs as well, and it can stooge around the sky for 25 hours.  When they arrive in You Know Where there are going to be some very bad hair days in store ...

Let Us Now Travel To Libya

And the desert war of early 1941, before Rommel arrived, for Lo! yes, it's back to "The Sea Of Sand" where The Doctor and Sarah have been rescued from an imminent sand-storm, only to be scrutinised by a very suspicious British officer, who thinks they may be spies.

Not that he really believed that.  A spy would try to blend in with their background, not stand out like a circus act.

          ‘Our transport was destroyed, bombed.  Nothing left.  That’s why we were out in the middle of the desert,’ answered the rather attractive female detainee.  Her brunette curls bounced appealingly in front of the captain, who swallowed abruptly, remembered his wife and thought of England.

          The gangling male detainee, still wearing a long coat, gave the captain a broad smile.  Captain Dobie wasn’t fooled; the curly-haired chap had summoned Corporal Mickleborough from across the desert sands by using a vertical flag.  He didn’t seem dehydrated, or properly suffering from the symptoms of sunstroke.  Odd, perhaps, but not mad.

          ‘Quite why the War Office would give a pair of civilians permission to travel into a war zone escapes me.’

          He looked at them dispassionately before abruptly exclaiming.

          ‘Good Lord!  You’re not here for that blithering idiot Templeman, are you!’ he grated, his moustache twitching in righteous indignation.

          ‘Ah, Professor Templeman-Schwartz,’ said the Doctor in a cunningly-calculated ambiguous tone of voice that could have been either statement or question.

          Sarah watched the Captain’s face flush in anger.  He called Corporal Mickleborough into the sultry office and pointed to the two detainees.

          ‘Take these two and deliver them to Lieutenant Llewellyn.  And be quick about it, the storm is nearly here,’ he added, looking outside.  Once the distracting pair were out of his sight, he calmed down a little, picked up his fountain pen and began annotating his list of salvaged supplies.  Silently he cursed that buffoon Templeman, the War Office, Templeman’s political  connections that allowed him to return out here and little lost sheep in the middle of nowhere.

     It's a moot point as to whether the War Department would really allow archaeologists back into enemy territory, which is why we have a credible suspense of disbelief.

Finally -

Hmmmm, unusually for a relatively early evening shop at Morrison's, Your Humble Scribe picked up a fair bit of remaindered food.  Usually it doesn't start going into the chiller cabinet until 19:00 and there are human gannets hovering nearby, waiting to pounce, nor did they change their habits during the Covid crisis.  Obviously garlic bread going cheap is worth risking one's life for!

     On another consumption-related topic - Art!

     This was my Father's Day prezzie from Darling Daughter, which has now become Secondary Teapot of choice, since I can get about 3 pints of tea from it.  Just to keep you informed and up to date.

*  We'd have to be verrrrry careful not to spook either the Rock Snakes or the Mysterons.