You Ought To Understand That To Mean -
'Armoured Fighting Vehicle' and not 'Another Fervid Victorian', which you might accuse Carroll of being. We here at BOOJUM! do owe him a vote of thanks for the name itself, so perhaps a little modest promoting the scribe wouldn't go amiss. Art!
This, gentle reader, is the Mock Turtle, a lachrymatory creature Carroll invented as a pun on the popular Victorian dish 'Mock Turtle Soup'. From "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland". It cries a lot thanks to it's tuturial condition, no longer being a proper turtle.
"But what about the AFVs?" I hear you question.
PATIENCE!
Then you have the Mock Turtles, plural, whom were a band that made it in a medium way in the Nineties. Art!
Only with a spade, mate.
Conrad, thanks to his skip-like mind, appears to have confused them with South Canadian rockers Vanilla Fudge, for no very good reason apart from my brain not having a proper filing system.
"But what about the AFVs?" I hear you quibble.
WE'RE GETTING THERE!
Of late, the Ruffians in Ukraine have been improvising desperate defences for their tanks et al, which has led to cruel comments from the rest of the world about their 'Turtle Tanks', most of which describe them as 'Garden sheds on tracks' and other citric aphorisms. The Ukrainians recently captured one of these 'Turtles' and today we're going to be mocking it. Art!
The chap there is Serhiy, our guide and cynic. He explains that the metal 'shed' here is merely sheet metal welded together, not to be mistaken for proper armour. Art!
Taken from an electrical junction box
The idea is to protect the tank underneath from drones, so the Ukrainians hit it's tracks instead. Oooops. The tank's principal means of defence was an Electronic Counter Measures suite atop the shed, which the Ukrainians removed and are now poring over. Art!
The main gun is fixed in place and cannot traverse from side to side, and even if it could there's only about 45⁰ freedom. Because it's fixed in place there's no shells for it. Why not remove it? Because it makes the Shed look dangerous.
Those metal boxes fixed to the hull are 'Explosive Reactive Armour', which is supposed to detonate on impact and thus break up any - excuse the jargon - 'Explosively Formed Penetrator', or jet of molten metal from a warhead. Except, and Serhiy knocked on a few to demonstrate, they're empty. Art!
A naked Shed. It's a T-62 tank that's over 50 years old, so the Ruffians seem to have run short of T-90s, T-80s, T-72s and T-64s. It could be worse, it could be a T-55. Art!
Serhiy confidently asserts that this vehicle is only good as a taxi, carrying personnel, and here we see what he calls the 'Livestock holding pen'. He's not wrong, Ruffian soldiers typically live like pigs except messier. Art!
Can you say 'Dysentry'? Hoarding dirty food cans is going to attract flies. That's the orcs for you, no proper corps of NCOs, who in Western armies would pitch a fit if they saw a disgusting mess like this on their watch.
Then there is the matter of visibility. There were only two crew, a driver and commander, and the commander was completely blind when in the turret as there were no vision devices on the Shed's exterior shell. Art!
Said interior: Art!
This is state-of-the-art stuff. For 64 years ago. Art!
That's the driver's position. The driver is a critical crew member, because he's the one selecting which terrain to drive on and how, and where to avoid. He gets the tank into a firing position or reverses out of danger, avoiding stalls or otherwise abusing the engine.
Serhiy then had a chat with 'Wedge', a tank driver who'd driven the Shed from capture to filming location. He was not complimentary. The driver can see very little bar a small cone forward, and needs to stick his head above the hull to get any proper vision, which is asking to be killed quick smart. Shed is also very noisy, both intrinsically and because of the giant metal sounding box sitting on it. It's also very smoky, because the engine is knackered - stop me if I get too technical. Art!
You tell 'em, Wedge!
Serhiy summed it up as 'Blind, loud and stupid.' The truth can hurt, hmmmm?
Okay, I think that's enough turtle mocking!
From The Real Thing To The Paper Version
Your Humble Scribe is still learning the ins and outs of the rules for "The Great War In Europe", because things are not always adequately explained or laid out in logical order in the Rule Book. In my defence there are 40 pages to work through, with frequent back-and-forward checking to ensure things are being done correctly. Art!
This is the very southern end of the French line, where it butts up to the Swiss border, and that terrain indicates Mountains. These are difficult hexes to attack, unless you have specialist mountain divisions, and neither side has them here. Note that the Teuton units are low-quality with poor attack and defence values. This reflects reality as there was very little active campaigning in the mountains, since it would be far too hard to sustain an advance across their trackless wastes.
Colour Conrad Confused
As you ought to know by now, Conrad shamelessly exploits the advertised tat on the webpages of "The Daily Beast", because I can. Normally we comment mockingly on items such as Scunge Bobblers or plugs that look like Fifties flying saucers. Not today. Art!
That spaceship seems to be a Lego Technic build, being sold by a Chinese company, who are very probably not conducting a counterfeit operation as it's much too public, and you get 923 pieces for your £108.18.
You could get three of those women for that price. Not sure if they come in different colour schemes or not.
"City In The Sky"
Ace and the locals are going to liaise off the coastal highway, prefatory to the descent of Arc One.
‘Guess who I discovered!’ grinned Terry
when he cantered back alongside Alex’s huge mobile home.
‘A person with low standards,’ muttered
Alex.
‘What?
No, I found Ace! She’s up there
with that American soldier the Doctor mentioned to us, the woman. Corwen – no, Kirwin. It was her binoculars we spotted catching the
sun.’
‘What are they doing, hanging about in the
middle of nowhere off the highway?’
‘Spying on the Lithoi. Look, we need to meet them properly. You come down here and I’ll take us both up
there. Charlie, can you get up to the
lead wagon and tell them to halt for the time being?’
One of the trio of riders pushed his
battered sunhat back, nodded silently and trotted off to the slow vanguard half
a mile ahead. Reluctantly, Alex took the
rear ladder to ground level, dropped off the vehicle and got a boost up over
the saddle from Terry.
Off they thudded, hooves thrumming over
the ground like a drumskin, then up the incline and to a meeting with Ace and
an unfamiliar woman wearing combat fatigues.
‘Hello astronaut!’ greeted Ace with
mocking good humour. ‘Wow, who’s picked
up a tan!’
‘Captain Kirwin,’ snapped the American, throwing a smart salute as Alex slithered awkwardly off the horse.
Yes, infra-red and ultra-violet will do that to you.
We are nearing the end of this novel, I promise.
 |
| The Eyre Highway |
From Ship To Shot
Another from the "Interstellar Research Centre" and only a single image, with, once again, no expository blurb about it. Art!
Starship 'Longshot'
From the looks of it, this might be a development of the Project 'Orion' pusher-plate technology, this time with a great big shield mounted at the prow. Allow me to dig a little.
Aha! I was correct. Nuclear pulse propulsion, with lasers being used to create fusion in deuterium, which would be stored in those black tanks you see above. The whole probe is quite compact, being 400 tons total, with the science payload totalling 30 tons. I even found a diagram showing how the probe alters over time. Art!
1 = Mission outset
2 = After 33 years
3 = After 67 years
4 = 100 years later on arrival in the Alpha Centauri system. The probe, powered by an internal fission reactor, detaches from the drive structure and goes into orbit.
So, another My Grandchildren Will Witness It design. Try harder, chaps!
Finally -
This is Monday's blog being done on Sunday afternoon, so I am getting ahead of myself, which is a better place to be than behind. Have fun.
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