The Eagle Has Branded

I Can Tell What You're Thinking

Not because I am telepathic, merely because Conrad is clever and you lot are predictable.  You are, first of all, INCORRECTLY ASSUMING THIS IS A TYPO.  It is not.  I mean exactly what I type and nothing less.  Moreover, you are assuming one of two options, neither of which is correct.  First of all, there is that classic line as spoken by Neil Armstrong "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed."  Art!

Looking more bleak than tranquil if you ask me

     Then there is that silly John Higginson novel of the same name, which is also WRONG IN SO MANY WAYS.

     No, what we're going to be discussing in this Intro is the 'Eagle' spaceship from "Space 1999", an absolutely iconic design for reasons of eye-appeal and functional utility.  This is a spaceship you can believe in because it looks real.

     Of course - obviously! - it wouldn't be a BOOJUM! Intro if we didn't diverge off on a tangent at the first opportunity.  Art!

    Yes, this is supposedly 1999 and here Doctor Russell is hammering away on a manual typewriter with a sheet of paper held firmly in it's grip.  Don't tell me, the backstory is that it's an heirloom antique.

     ANYWAY for the episode we're perusing here, "Dragon's Domain", the writer came up with an "Interplanetary Space Station", which see - Art!

     It's only in-shot for a few seconds here and in a couple of other scenes, but it looks realistic and plausible.  Not quite the ISS as it lacks solar sails - probably nuclear-powered - and we're talking about a design from 50 years ago.

    That large spaceship docked to the IpSS is the 'Ultra Probe', a vessel designed to make transit beyond the orbit of Pluto to investigate a recently-discovered planet named 'Ultra'.  Don't snigger, there are serious astronomers who have considered that there may be another large planet beyond visual detection in the outer reaches of the Solar System.  No satisfactory evidence exists.  Well, yet.  Art!

      Here I've juxtapositioned - not a word you expected to see today - three shots of the UP, from the bow and then two shots displaying the sternward layout.

     Once again, this is a credible design even today, 50 years later.  At bow you can see the crew's command capsule - Art!

The interior

     Behind that are the living quarters, protected from radiation and micro-meteorite impact by fuel and resource modules.  Towards the stern you see the communications dish, used for contact with and from Earth, and further behind that the actual engines, kept at a safe distance from the squishy human meat-bags aboard the forward compartments.  It's not stated whether they're chemical or nuclear engines but best practice is to keep them away.  As a further detail Doctor Russell narrates that the Ultra Probe will take nine months to reach it's destination, the longest crewed space journey to date, hence it's size.

     Note that the command capsule looks identical to that of an Eagle.  This plays a part later on.  When disaster strikes the UP, Cellini is forced to undock the command capsule in order to escape a <ahem> monster.  Art!

For veracity

     This shows the clamps being released and the airlocks closed as the Command Capsule - I think we'll capitalise now that it's a separate vehicle - moves away.  Art!

COMCAP

     Cellini proves what an ace astronaut he is by getting a slingshot assist to return back to the IpSS, barely alive after his epic solo journey.     

     Now, back to the Eagle, and it's modular design, which allows modules to be swapped out at short notice, because this again is part of the plot.  Desperate pilot Tony Cellini - an actual Italian actor playing an Italian character - is determined to get to what you might call an "Sargasso in space" alone, despite pretending to be all up for a crew coming with him.  So - Art!

     He takes off, leaving the crew module behind, to the unabated fury of John Koenig.  It's a temporary gambit, because Eagle 2 is ordered to leave it's crew module behind and come pick up Koenig et al.  Still, it gives Cellini a 6 minute lead.  When he arrives at the abandoned Ultra Probe he demonstrates more Eagle utility.  Art!

     He detaches the COMCAP from Eagle 1 and docks it with the UP.  Before you quibble, yes, these spacecraft would have been designed with common parts and interfaces to enable functions like this.

     THIS, I hope, has shown to you why the Eagle is such an awesome brand.  If it hasn't then THE EXIT DOOR IS THAT WAY.

More Of Spaceships

The terrestrial variety, that is.  As I mentioned previously, I have come across a Led Zeppelin fan webpage all about "The Starship" and I mean ALL.  They go into the registration of the Boeing 720 in 1960 and trace it's passage through commercial airline use, and then exhaustive details on it's life as a giant flying hotel for rock stars.  Art!

     The Civil Aviation Board placed strictures on the plane's use: it couldn't travel outside South Canada (although they relented later and allowed flights to British America), it was limited to 100 hours flying time per year, and they couldn't charge more than $2,000 per hour (about $50,000 per hour in today's dollars).  Art!

As above

     The swivel seats visible here were strictly off-limits when taking off or landing.  That seems to have been the only 'No' for anyone flying in the plane as passengers.

     One omission in this enormously long tract, which goes on to follow the 720 after it stopped being The Starship, is that we don't know what profits, if any, Contemporary Entertainment Services made out of the plane during it's 4 years as an hotel in the sky.

"The War Illustrated Edition 195 8th December 1944"

Let us return to the photographic coverage of the Second Unpleasantness, where Your Humble Scribe was covering the central montage of photographs.  Art!

     The caption to Picture #4 explains that these are Royal Marines "Manhandling their gun in a landing craft at Breskens, on the mainland south of the Scheldt, [they] prepared for the short crossing to the Flushing beach-head".  Art!

     They appear to be pushing a 75 m.m. Pack Howitzer, which you might call "The Little Gun That Could", being as it was compact, air-portable, able to be broken down into loads to be easily transported, and it rendered the enemy satisfactorily dead.  Art!

Bravely naked

     Let's have another picture, it's the weekend after all.  Art!

     In Picture #2 we see troops marching along wearing berets, whom appear to be infantry not tank crews.  They are actually Commandoes, except Dutch ones, complete with dog at the rear of the column, whom may be a pet, a mobile sniffing machine or a mascot.  This voluntary enlistment of freed peoples to combat the Teutons was a thing that Herr Schickelgruber worried about and with good cause, because such troops had an awful lot of hard lumps to dish back to the Teutons.

I See The Weather Is Being Fickle Again

It's been a kind of sandwich-layer of weather today.  When I rolled out of bed this morning it was raining, so I delayed the constitutional to Lesser Sodom in the hopes that it would stop.  Indeed it did.  It did to such an extent that Edna and I gambolled gaily in the sunshine around 14:00 - I mean that Edna gambolled, I am much to large and stolid to do any such thing - and an hour later it was chucking it down again.  Now the clouds are blowing away.  Art!

     This is what I went to the shops for: seven packets of more sugar-free sweets from "Sweet Deals", whom have been around for ages and must be raking it in from sugar fiends and diabetics alike.

Finally -

Old dog feels older.  I just came across this item on Twitter.  Art!

     The BBC used to broadcast this during the summer holidays when I was decades younger than I am now, BUT they split it up into short  segments of about 20 minutes, thus stretching the whole 13 x 85-minute series across six weeks of the summer.  The theme music is an evocative classic, go track it down on Youtube NOW!

     That is all.  Well, for the time being it is.  Tatty-bye!