Conrad Would Like To Proudly Announce "TOG"
Yes By Grud m'Lud. It's not as relevant now, in late February, as it would have been in November or January, when we all huddled beneath our electric blankets and layers of sheets and <drum roll> duvets. Duvets, you know, being made out of textiles. Art!
Conrad cannot imagine you getting a good night's sleep with that thing looming over you, but what do I know.
Well, about TOG ratings, actually. These are how duvets are categorised in terms of their ability to trap heat and keep your toes toasty warm, which is a bit of a problem if you're built along Conrad's lines, because if your head's warm, your feet are sticking out in the cold, whi
ANYWAY the lower the TOG rating, the less warm your duvet is. A TOG of 1 is basically a sheet of tissue paper, whilst a TOG of 50 is 3" lead-bismuth alloy plating.
Then we come to the real meat of the matter, the core of this Intro, the most gigantic-est TANK of the Second Unpleasantness you've never heard of. Art!
This is the TOG I, which peculiar name came from the people assembled to design it, they being the same folks who had designed the British tanks of the First Unpleasantness: The Old Gang. They included Sir William Tritton, the splendidly-named Sir Eustace Tennyson D'Eyncourt and Sir Albert Stern. We shall come back to this last.
As you can see, the TOG I bore a distinct resemblance to the 'landships' of the First Unpleasantness, complete with rhomboidal tracks, gun sponsons on each side, and a nice long profile for crossing trenches. It was sent for trials in 1940 and then cruelly scrapped.
The saga does not end there, or it would be but a short Intro. The designers, discouraged yet determined, cracked on with a new, BIGGER design, because nothing succeeds like gigantism, or so Cloverfield would have us believe. Art!
TOG-2
This 1941 beast is the 80 ton version referenced in our title. 32 feet long, ten feet wide and ten feet tall at the turret. This particular turret is one of four that were tried, and seems to be mounting a 3" howitzer. By 1944 they had settled on a turret that was going into service on the A30 Challenger tank, that 'stretched' version of the Cromwell mounting a 17 pounder gun. Art!
And to give you a sense of scale, let's have another picture featuring puny human David Fletcher of the Tank Museum. Art!
Yes, this thing is truly massive, Your Humble Scribe has seen it up close and personal at Bovvie and it makes him look small and delicate. The tracks were originally driven by two individual electric motors that, like all electric tank engines, proved to be enormously impractical and unreliable, getting replaced by sound conventional engines. Art!
These are Snips from a brief clip posted by the ever-reliable R G Poulussen on Twitter, who posts On This Day stuff from the Second Unpleasantness. What these clips can't accurately convey is that the TOG-2 was quite a nippy customer for a beast of it's size and mass.
HOWEVER here striketh serendipity, because Conrad has just this evening been annotating more of Professor John Buckley's "British Armour In The Normandy Campaign" and who features there? Why, none other than Sir Albert Stern, and JB is not kind about their TOG designs: " - enormous, unwieldy and surprisingly weak in armour protection" which were described thus by official War Office experts in May of 1943. Thus they were left very much on the back burner and formally knocked on the head the following year. Art!
The fact that only one was ever made is far too flimsy a reason for modellers and/or wargamers to NOT come up with a kit for these. That one above is a resin kit put together and painted, in 1/72 scale and will set you back £48. Art!
This one is 1/76 scale, which is just different enough from 1/72 that you can't mix them together. £23 and it's yours, or it would be if it was still in stock, which means some of you bought it.
No matter how small and delicate it makes Conrad look, he still has trouble keeping his toes under that duvet.
More Abandoned Islands
Let me enlighten you; the islands so-named here are ones that did have a human population, which has now declined to zero. Because they are islands, getting re-inhabited is not merely a case of strolling up and pitching a tent, especially not given the location in some cases. Art!
This is an on-island shot of the thumbnail for the series, which Conrad successfully guessed was Hashima Island, better known as 'Battleship Island', off the coast of Japan. The island was the site for a submarine coal mine, with workers and families being accommodated there, up until the coal ran out. Art!
You can see why it got the name. It is currently a subject of controversy as the Nips refuse to either admit or publicise that it was run with slave labour from Korea, and the Sorks are predictably unamused. There is a limited tourist trade to and from the island, where over 90% is off-limits due to safety concerns. Can't have those nice tourists suffer injury or death like the old slave workers, can we!
Some People Have Entirely Too Much Time On Their Hands
Yes, that is howlingly ironic, in case you were wondering. Ladies, gentlemen and other parties, may I introduce Mokso, who posts videos on Youtube where he (I think it's a he) of his match sculptures, which are constructed with - you may be ahead of me here - matches, and a glue gun. Art!
There will eventually be thousands of matches being placed and glued into position, so Mosko does this in time-lapse, or we'd be here all week. Art!
You may be getting a hint of how this is going to progress. The vlog title has the word "Volcano" in it, which provides a further hint. Keep going, Mokso!
Yes, he's forming a cone of sorts, and into the cone go - more matches. One hope he gets a discount for bulk purchase. Or - perhaps he owns a match-making plant and this is all provided free? Art!
The final structure, completed. Now comes the bittersweet moment of ignition, where all that work goes up in flames, in the most literal sense of the word. Art!
 |
| Ignition! |
 |
| ERUPTION! |
Please note for safety reasons Ol' Mokky set his sculpture alight outside, safely away from anyone or anything flammable, and given the yard-high flames leaping madly from his match-volcano, he did the right thing. Art!
The sad aftermath
"City In The Sky"
The Lithoi's lethal armed drones (which term was not in use 10 years ago when this was written, the author informs us) are not being as terrifying or efficient as might be imagined.
‘What can we do?’ asked a terrified Billy Barakan. Dodging killer beams from alien spaceships
that remained almost invisible was new to him, and he felt the urge to ask Doctor
Smith what to do. “Urge” written in
letters fifty yards tall.
The pair were sheltering behind the framework of a house that had
suffered total failure of all it’s window frames, allowing gusts of sodden air
to smack them in the faces.
‘Improvise!’ grinned the Doctor, not feeling anywhere near as cheerful
as he sounded. More thunder rolled
around the township, rattling window panes (or those that remained seated) and
jarring the ground. Despite being early
afternoon, the light levels were those of early evening.
Billy looked south, to where sinister grey storm clouds were sweeping in
over a fractious and disturbed ocean, made vague by sheets of rain, sheets in the literal sense of the word, giant
laminates of precipitated water hanging from the sky.
He looked back at the strange doctor, who looked puzzled and who stuck
one forefinger into the ground and another into the air.
‘How do we improvise a gun or something that destroys hidden things in
the air?’ asked Billy. The light was
bad, yellowish and pale thanks to the amount of water in the atmosphere, but
Doctor Smith seemed worried in a way that he hadn’t been up till now. He leaned back against the lower brick wall
of the house and looked upwards, glancing over at Billy.
‘Thunder without lightning?’ he muttered.
Expect another party to arrive shortly.
A Little Get Together To Cock Snoots At Putinpot
Yesterday a great many people turned up at rallies in support of Ukraine, which must have rather ticked-off the Ruffian diplomatic staff inside the embassies these rallies were held outside. Peter The Average, seeing them, must be having a dilemma about whether to cover his eyes or his ears so he can pretend that it's all still going according to plan. Art!
This is a South Canadian rally in Washington and is a still from a video clip that shows even more people off to each side.
Evil should never prosper. Slava Ukraina!
Finally -
I may not need to take a constitutional into Lesser Sodom this afternoon as I've got the remaindered meat already, a pack of diced lamb from Wednesday that is quietly maturing, and half a dozen sausages on top of the Masurian Polish sausage, too. Plus a cauliflower.
Laterz!
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