We've featured a couple of inventions from the First Unpleasantness on the blog of late, one being the entirely fictional 'land-torpedo' form of protection, and the other being the entirely factual, and entirely rubbish, 'Hughes Shovel'. Art!
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| I dare not even ask |
I should also have pointed out that these big, bright, shiny objects could only be more obvious on the battlefield if they came flying a flag emblazoned with "HERE I AM" on them. No camouflage at all, hmmmm? I am going to poach a little text from the PM website, because I can and it ups the word count.
To make the trench less secure for the enemy is an object which each of the belligerents is striving to accomplish. A step in this direction is found in the work of a British inventor who has developed a wheeled body shield that affords immunity from rifle bullets and shrapnel when advancing upon fortified positions.
Notice that they don't name this mysterious "British inventor". Paddy Griffiths, in "Battle Tactics Of The Western Front", details how the War Ministry had to sift through oodles of suggested inventions, many of which were complete garbage, submitted by any loon with an axe to grind and a conviction that they were their country's saviour. Art!
No, this is not Ned Kelly. Here you see a South Canadian wearing the Brewster Body Shield, sans wheels. It was touted as being bulletproof, which was by virtue of it being made of thick metal, and it tickled the scales at 40 pounds. Art!
It only protected the front of the body, because a fully enclosed version would doubtless have weighed 80 pounds. Good luck negotiating No Man's Land carrying the equivalent of 16 bags of potatoes. Art!
This one never bothered the War Ministry as it's French. Note that the canny M8s have painted this one in olive and mustard, the better to blend in. We can even see the interior. Art!
In real life they were practically ineffective, as they were extremely heavy, which they had to be in order to be bulletproof, and moving over muddy crater-fields was beyond any bar the most Herculean physique. First Unpleasantness battlefields bore scant resemblance to a bowling green. Art!
I've not seen this picture before. It is said to be a Ruffian mobile shield, captured by the Teutons on the Eastern Front. For one thing, it looks extremely hefty, lots of steel plates, and it would need a gang of hefty Ruffian infantry to merely move it about. Again, protection from the front only, no side armour unless you count the larger wheels.
"Where are you going with this?" I hear you quibble. Well, all the designs above are about protecting the user/wearer/sweating minion from threats directly to their front, which you, as amateurs, are nodding your head sagely to.
HOWEVER! and we all knew that word was going to crop up, didn't we, pilgrims? there is the concept and practice of 'Enfilade'. Art!
The chaps in green can 'walk' their rounds up and down the length of the unfortunate red guy's formation, only needing to adjust elevation a bit. The blue blokes would need to swing their weapons about madly to try and hit the oncoming red tide, which in reality would have spread out an awful lot more. Napoleonic tactics don't work on the modern battlefield.
So, all the impressive armoured designs that address the problem of defilade-only fire were instantly cast adrift. The Teutons were especially fond of hiding their machine guns in enfilade positions on the Western Front.
This completely overlooks artillery fire, either high explosive bursting at ground level, or shrapnel going off at height -
Which is another topic for a different kitchen.
Speaking of which, I feel the need to brew a pot of tea. Be back shortly!
Just to keep you up to speed, I ought to explain that I got another five packets of loose-leaf Darjeeling from Sainsbo's on Saturday.
More Of Mike's Picks
That list of his top 10 dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels, as evinced on his Youtube channel "Mike's Book Reviews". This one was "The Giver" by Lois Lowry, a title and name unfamiliar to me. Art!
Hmmmm okay, it's about a society that has eliminated crime and sadness, by making everything focussed around order and 'Sameness'.
Nope, not selling it well. It sounds like a dull and plodding text version of that film "Equilibrium" where they use omnipresent drugs to dull people's emotions. Pass!
The Three-Headed Elephant In The Room
That's me making a point.
Okay, cast your minds back to the early Eighties, when New Wave was still new and nobody had ever heard of DJ Tango. Back then, "2000AD" published a strip called "Skizz", which was a kind of dour British look at ET, if ET had accidentally landed in Birmingham not California. Art!
Birmingham, to be clear, is a big industrial wart in the Midlands, where they speak with a funny accent and pretend to be England's Second City. That's Skizz above, being all purple. His spaceship crashed on the outskirts of Birmingham, and promptly blew itself up to prevent it falling into the hands of Hom. Sap. Not before our plucky young alien had absented himself, or the story would only have lasted a single page. Art!
Of course, Skizz ends up in the hands of The Authorities, who are keen to learn all his saucy little secrets.
The biggest take-away from this, even if nothing of Skizz's ship is recovered bigger than a pinhead, is that INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE!
That's all Hom. Sap. needs to get on the research train and find out how to do it, because now they know it's possible. Yes, it would be costly and complex and take decades; at the end of it you can bet your boots Hom. Sap. would come a-swarming out of the Solar System like a plague of cyborg locusts.
"City In The Sky"
Timelord-dingo comms have been established successfully, and the Doctor is now having a nosy at the Lithoi's base.
He carefully parted the sedge stems hiding him
and his canine accomplice, covering to the horizon
and back, twice. Puzzled, he frowned and thought.
No sign of an interstellar spacecraft,
disguised or otherwise: no landing site, no hardstand, no launch gantry.
The Lithoi couldn’t have left their ship in orbit because then they’d have been
easily able to destroy the arcologies, decades ago. There weren’t any visible blast marks where a
vessel might have landed or taken off, no stand-alone terminii to guide a
starship to a landing or ascent. No
aerials or antennae –
The phrase “hide in plain
sight” suddenly stung him.
Of course the Lithoi ship
didn’t appear to be lurking around anywhere, because he could see it right in
front of him. The ship was the base, and
the base was the ship. The aliens had
driven it into the surface of mother Earth like a screw into a block of wood,
concealing most of the vehicle beneath the surface where it would be out of
sight, protected from attack and free from airborne precipitation.
As his subconscious was wont
to do, the Doctor felt surprised when a sneaky paradigm closely associated with
the aliens use of their vessel ebbed into the forefront of his mind
Record-Breaking And Not In A Good Way
The Flabby Fraudster has been sitting in a New York court, trying to delay his hush-money trial into 2027 if possible, only to be told that it's going ahead as of April 15th. Art!
Donald Trump will face the first ever criminal trial of a former US president on 15 April, a judge has ruled, over hush money payments he made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Well well what's that smell?
He also got the Appellate Court to reduce his payment to New York to (!) only $175 million within the next 10 days. I wonder if the Attorney General will appeal this appeal? Watch this space and bring your own popcorn!
Finally -
I shouldn't bruit this about, but folks on our Team Chat have taken to calling Conrad 'Colonel', after Colonel Sanders, the Kentucky Fried king.
Speaking of which, I have a set of chicken drumsticks a-roasting that need taking out of the oven.
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