Virginia Plane

I Admit I'm Reaching A Little Here

Also, NO! this is not a mis-spelling of the Roxy Music classic, for am I not Conrad, the human-spellchecker and UnterGrippenfurrer in the Grammar Nazi Brigade?  However, having invoked it, I now have to find a suitable image to plonk on the Intro's opening paragraph.  Art, you coal-chewing sloven, wake up and work!

     You see, Lockheed-Martin have a production plant in Virginia at Arlington, and you will have been hearing about one of LM's beautiful babies, the F-16, known as the 'Fighting Falcon' and yes it's a plane.

     My eyes were drawn to a picture on Twitter that I can't find the original of, which is a bit of a buzz-kill because the text is too small to read, and too blurred if enlarged.  Just looking at it must make Ruffian pilots have a sinking feeling in their collective stomach.  Art!

Courtesy of the terrific Tendar

     Yikes!  I counted about 40 different missiles here, some of which look rather peculiar, and of course I cannot go search for them on teh Interwebz as the text degrades when enlarged, as Art will surely prove.

     Conrad is guessing this is a cruise missile intended for Air-to-Surface usage, but that's still a guess.

     However - ah.  Nope.  I tried the Lockheed-Martin home page and it doesn't have any such image, though they do trot out the eye-watering statistic that the latest F-16 (called 'Block 70/72') can carry 180 different stores (Ruffian pilots now feeling positively ill).

     There is a listing on the Air Force Technology page that mentions some of the ordnance and electronics that the FF can carry.  I bet there are even images on teh Interwebz!  Art?

AIM-9 Sidewinder (Air-to-Air)

AMRAAM Advanced Medium Air-to Air Missile

AIM-7 Sparrow

Skyflash
(Not to be confused with the 'Fireflash')

Fireflash

Magic 2

     That's just the Air-to-Air stuff.  This is all NATO-compatible ordnance that the Ukrainians ageing Soviet-era fighter jets either simply cannot use, or can only use in constrained and limited fashion.  It's rather impressive that they've managed to fit Stormzies onto their jets and use them to considerable effect.
     Go on, let's see what some of the Air-to-Ground puppies are.  Art!

Maverick

"Say what?"

HARM

     This infernal engine is a Homing Anti-Radiation Missile, and it hunts down radars, which are a vital part of any air-defence network.  Using these in any number causes the enemy to turn what radars they have left, off, meaning their air-defence immediately becomes as effective as wet tissue paper.  Not only that, the newer HARM variants 'remember' where a target radar was, so turning it off won't work.
     Then there are anti-ship missiles.  This is a niche design, having to cruise above the waves and avoid hitting them, but not flying high enough to risk radar detection, without having any geographical waypoints to navigate by.  Art!

Harpoon

Penguin

Another killer penguin

     I think we'll wrap it up there, reality is starting to warp around the edges.


Ouch

As you should surely know by now, Conrad has mixed feelings about First Bus.  Yes, their services are utter rubbish, yet they provide a ceaseless source of blog content.

     Likewise with Citizen Trump.  His list of excuses for why he stole (and kept!) classified documents hasn't stopped changing: they were planted; they were his; Clinton and Obama did the same thing; they were his; he declassified them with his awesome mind powers; they had his golf clothes in them; they were his - etcetera.  Art!

Notable absence of clothes

     Well, his shiftiness and general shady character has had more consequences in the Jack Smith-helmed trial over said documents.  He is NOT allowed to have access to the documents in question, only in the presence of his legal team, if they are used as evidence.  Nor is he, or his legal team, allowed to make notes in any way.  It is wisely suspected that he would immediately make a list of names present in order to have his MAGA cult members harass them.  In terms of trust it's a bit of a slap in the chops for DJ Tango.

     He may be coming to realise, however dimly, that being charged under the Espionage Act is a very serious matter and all his money and privilege may not save his satsuma-coloured hide.  Art!

Conrad recommends you lay in supplies

You Couldn't Make It Up

And if you did, people would accuse you of romancing too much.  Your Humble Scribe is currently about 1/3 of the way through "The Man In The High Castle" and hit a point that I probably glossed-over when I first read it back in 1975 and subsequently the other two or three times I re-read it.  In my defence I can only say that there was no internet back then.  Art!

FDR

     Franklin D. Roosevelt had just won the 1933 election, and went to do a tour of Miami before his inauguration.  Whilst travelling in a motorcade, a bonkers Italian-American called Guiseppe Zangara took five potshots at him with a pistol, completely missing FDR but injuring five bystanders and fatally wounding the Mayor of Chicago, whom had been in the motorcade.  Zangara was put on trial and executed because the South Canadians didn't mess about in those days.

     PKD merely moves the fatal bullet by a few feet and has FDR die before ever becoming Prez.  This naturally has severe consequences further down the timeline.

     At the time I read it, I assumed PKD had made this up out of whole cloth.  Not true.  Art!

     No, they are not giants, he's just extremely weedy and small.  He had to stand on a chair to see the motorcade, and because it was a rickety chair, FDR may have been saved by bad workmanship.

"City In The Sky"

Davy has been giving us a perspective of someone long used to living in an orbital arcology, or 'space station' to you.

     Having been Upstairs for four years, his point of view had changed.  Not dramatically, just enough to regard the internecine bickering and worn hatreds of Planet Earth with something approaching middle-aged resignation, which his parents wondered about in a sixteen-year old. 

     ‘Maths genius,’ his father would proudly state.  ‘Above petty human squabbles.’  His father, the doctor.

     ‘Literally,’ his mother would add, a touch of asperity in her tone.  ‘I worry when the sulky teenager will emerge.  Probably when he begins to look at girls.’  His mother, the nurse.

     Now, looking down on Planet Earth from orbit, he found it as hard as ever to imagine why people down there would be doing their best to be as unpleasant to each other as possible, up to and including killing each other on an industrial scale.  Upstairs you had the Tab to detail other people’s perceived or actual failings; Downstairs they seemed to reach for guns the instant anything went wrong.

     The view in Communications Suite was actually a virtual one; a curved bank of digital screens, thirty-six of them in three stacked rows of twelve, that represented views from Arc One’s camera, telescope, radar, laser and thermal sensors.  For the real thing, you needed to go stand at one of the observation stations constructed against the sphere’s transparent panels, or petition the busy astronomers for time on their beloved optical telescopes.  

     Hmmmmm I get the feeling that the author is being a tad didactic here, the lecturing swine!

Mad For Madsen

You may not be aware, but the Madsen arms enterprise of Denmark came up with one of the most definitive light machine guns ever, and they came up with them in 1902.  They were never sold in large numbers, but they sold across the globe for many decades, because they were an excellent design that was expertly made.  Ian 'Gun Jesus' McCollum of "Forgotten Weapons" was lucky enough to fire one a few years ago as a variety of field-proof, as the gun was going to be sold at James D Julia auction house.  He only had a single loaded magazine, so he had to make it last.  Art!

     In passing he mentioned that it had been used in the Russo-Japanese war, by the Ruffians, a detail I was unaware of.  I did know that the Ruffians had them by the shedload in the First Unpleasantness, so much so that the Teutons were able to equip entire 'Musketen' battalions with captured versions.

     The Brazilian police used them up until the 1990's, for your information.

Finally -

Been a bit of a wet one this afternoon.  Conrad walked down into Royton whilst it was only spitting a little, and caught the bus back in a full-on downpour.  O well.  Good for the reservoirs.