Ha! Do you see wh - O you do.
Well, first of all, we have to acknowledge a debt to sci-fi author Brian Herbert, whom is best known for creating "Dune" but who also had a fairly prestigious body of work behind him at the time. Art!
Conrad is prepared to believe you have never read this novel nor will ever be likely to do so, thus a little more background is surely in order. Okay - the year is <Cough cough> and Westopia had being fighting Eastovia for years and years, so yes this is a Future-war Sci-fi novel, except that this one is from a vanishingly small trope, that of Submarine Warfare. Our protagonists are on a mission to steal vast amounts of petroleum from their Eastovian opponents from beneath their very own oil-wells, which by implication means that Texas has been blasted into a thin vapour* obscuring the upper atmosphere.
Your Humble Scribe also recollects that Ol' Bri makes mention of 'vampire gauges', which, in best sci-fi author style he does not bother defining or purposing, bar that they have something to do with blood chemistry. Art!
Instrument panel from a Vampire
Of course - obviously! - none of this is to do with what I really wanted to lay out in this Intro, which is still to do with dragons in the sea. Art!
Okay, this is a NASA launch from the Eighties, in a timeline where the Sinisters got to land on The Grey Lady first, and South Canada had to play catch-up afterwards, which includes <gags> matters like first woman on the Moon. The NASA 'catch-up' takes the form of projected technologies that we here in This Reality never came close to. Art!
It's an impressive moment, all the more so as 99.9% of the viewers have no idea what a Sea Dragon is.
"What, Conrad, is a 'Sea Dragon'?" I hear you query. Well, go on, allow me to explicate. Art!
That's the Sea Dragon arraigned against the puny Apollo for your delectation. The principle underlying the Sea Dragon is that water density and bouyancy would help support it's massive bulk until launching, whereupon it could put a 500 ton payload into orbit.
Yeah yeah yeah, all fiction. Still a man can dream, can't he?
Deep Stuff
It is an established trait amongst humans that they love to get where it's as difficult as possible to be; the tops of mountains, the edge of space and the ocean's abyssal depths. If it's hard or horrid or both to get there, you'll find Hom. Sap. doing it's best to arrive.
And thus we arrive at the wreck of the USS Samuel Roberts - excuse me - the USS Samuel B Roberts (just to avoid confusing it with all the other Samuel Roberts out there). Art!
Intact and afloat
It's story is a bit of a corrective to those "Ice-cream South Canadian" stories one hears, because it took on a fleet of 23 Japanese ships, including cruisers and battleships, getting so close that the enemy couldn't depress their guns enough to engage. Inevitably, it was pounded to scrap, but not before crippling one cruiser and badly damaging another, having fired off all it's ammunition. The crew got that rarest of awards, a Presidential Unit Citation.
Well, what do you know, the wreck has been found. It is, to date, the deepest ever shipwreck discovered. Art!
You can't just pop over to the Pacific and don a snorkel to visit the wreck, as it's 4.25 miles down, and the pictures above were taken by a remote-control submersible.
Hmmm looking at the drab grey day outside, Your Humble Scribe is happy to be working from home this week.
Enough Of The Sea, Let's Have Some Sand
Or, back to the BBC's Nature photography exhibition. Art!
Courtesy Sandesh Kadur
Matey says this image is called "Ghost of the Mountains" since this is a snow leopard, a creature that lives in the mountains, which means it's hard to come across one. As you will also note, it blends in wonderfully with the background so if it's having a siesta you might never notice it. Just don't tread on it's tail.
Whilst On The Theme Of Sand -
I think it's time to whip out another instalment of "The Sea Of Sand", regardless of what you think. Once again, whose blog is it?
Sarah stood
up, removing the Doctor’s hat from her head, causing both men opposite to look
surprised.
‘Bloody
hell! Tam, that’s a woman!’ exclaimed
the rifleman. Tam, the driver, pushed
his goggles up to reveal incongruously clean eyes and looked Sarah up and down,
confirming that the slender “man” in spotless linen clothing was really a
woman.
‘Don’t be
rude, Sarah. Introduce yourself,’
prompted the Doctor.
‘Sarah Jane
Smith. Journalist,’ blurted Sarah.
‘Davey, Davey,
man, d’you think these two are all tickety-boo?’ asked the driver, in a broad
Newcastle accent. ‘All alone in the
middle of the desert, like.’
Davey
scratched his matted hair and looked backwards over his shoulder. The distant brown line on the horizon had
become a pronounced darkened smear.
‘We haven’t got
time to stand around and argue. Get in
the back, you two. We’re taking you to
Mersa Martuba.’
The rifle
didn’t exactly point at either Sarah or the Doctor, but it did emphasise his
speech. The Doctor climbed into the rear
of the truck, sitting on several dusty wooden crates that had been stacked
there. He helped Sarah in and even
offered a helping hand to Davey, who ignored it.
‘Step on it,
Tam. That storm’s not hanging about,’ he
called, sitting by the tailgate and indicating the Doctor with a nod of the
head.
‘How’d you get
out here, in the middle of nowhere, eh?’
The Doctor
gave a sad smile.
‘Our transport
was destroyed. Bombed.’
Technically true. Almost.
Only One From "The War Illustrated"
Because you can have too much internecine content and we've already had war at sea and on land (even if fictional). Art!
This series of photos shows a Mosquito night-fighter getting ready to depart, first with the crew getting a briefing about weather conditions from their squadron's Meteorological officer, then having a chinwag and finally the beast about to depart. Night-fighter Mozzies were the bete noir of the Luftwaffe, whose own night-fighter crews lived in dread of being picked up by one. Their own aircraft's performance had been considerable degraded by the addition of lots of external aerials and lots of electronic black boxes internally. This meant if they were to encounter the exceedingly fast and nimble Mosquito, it would turn them into flying confetti.
Finally -
Conrad is going to have to go through the Naval & Military Press' monthly catalogue to see what enticing bargains catch my eye. I mean, they take the trouble to send it out every month, it would be rude not to, wouldn't it? Art!
Part of the fun is noting which works I already have, because there's always a few, given how
* Certain South Canadians will regard this as a win from the get-go.
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