The Gasbag Strikes By Night!

I Know What You're Thinking

But no, this Intro is not about Donold Judas Trump blathering away on Truth Social in the small hours, for five hours past midnight, meaning he needs a restful nap during his subsequent meetings in the Oval Office.  For we are, instead, focussing on the zeppelin as a weapon of war during the First Unpleasantness.  Art!

     This is the Wright brothers flying their 'Flyer' - nil points for creativity, chaps - at Kitty Hawk in 1903.  However - cropping up early today - this was a heavier than air vehicle and we make the distinction because lighter than air craft had been flying for several years already.  Art!

Luft-Zeppelin 1 with puny humans for scale

     These rigid airships were made bouyant by hydrogen cells in their hull, meaning they needed an awful lot of hydrogen, meaning zeppelins were great big things.  The 'M' class, with with the Teutons entered the war, was 852 PROUD IMPERIAL FEET long, could carry 9 tons of payload and manage 50 miles per hour, being driven by three engines.  Art!

 
     Using zeppelins as a military resource was a novel experience, and the Teuton Army found out the hard way that operating at low altitude, which was the only way to bomb accurately, meant being very vulnerable to ground fire.  The Navy, operating it's own fleet of zeps, tended to use them for reconnaissance over the North Sea and Baltic, rather than delivering ordnance.  They kept a sharp eye out for the Royal Navy, seeing what they were up to and where, as well as tracking any British mine-laying activities.  Art!

     These ships came into service in 1915 and were a lot more capable than the pre-war 'M' class, being sent on various bombing missions over This Sceptred Isle.  As with their descendants of 1940, their accuracy was abysmal, thanks to the height they had to operate at, and 'Bombing only military targets' as ordered by the Kaiser turned into apparently indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the south-east and London.  Art!

     One of the more effective raids took place in October 1915, killing 71 people and injuring 128, before zep operations stopped for the arrival of winter's bad weather and full moons.  Zeppelins, you see, were so large they suffered from the effects of high winds, and were plainly visible in moonlight on cloudless nights.  In military or strategic terms the raids inflicted minimal damage; what they did inflict was a sense of horrified outrage amongst the British population, who were even less enchanted with Teuton 'Kultur' than they were already, and they had been pretty thoroughly disenchanted in the first place.  The Teuton populace lapped it up - this seems to resonate in a strangely familiar fashion today, if only I could put my finger on it - and felt it only fair that 'Gott strafe England'.  Art!

     

     The Teutons made a very determined effort through 1916 to hit British morale, dropping 125 tons of bombs, killing 293 people, injuring 691 and causing £2.5 million in damage.

     However - twice in one Intro! - the sheer scale of the Teuton aerial assault forced the Army, the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service to create proper defences, with dedicated anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and night-fighter scout planes.  By October 1916 the flyboys were acquiring the new incendiary and explosive ammunition from Brock, Pomeroy and Buckingham.  Unlike the normal solid rounds fired by machine guns mounted on aircraft, these ones didn't merely make small holes and release limited quantities of gas.  No, they worked on the zeppelin's greatest weakness: their use of verrrry explosive hydrogen gas.  Art!

     We have here a Camel outfitted for night flying and hunting zeppelins.  Normally it mounted two Vickers guns firing, synchronised, through the propeller blades, but in this instance it was firing Pomeroy explosive ammunition and the risk of blowing a propellor blade to itty-bitty pieces was not negligible.  So it is using twin Lewis guns fitted to the top wing.

      There wasn't a whole lot the zeppelins could do about this; they couldn't armour their hide or they'd never get off the ground*, and non-flammable helium was regarded as a passing rare laboratory element with no industrial production of same.  Unlike today.  Plus, a zeppelin was a massive target it was difficult to miss, and night fighters armed with machine guns were a whole lot more effective than ones trying to drop bombs or a 'Ranken explosive dart' upon it.  Art!

     Well, I could go on a lot more about the zeppelin, and doubtless will do, just not today.  I bet you can hardly wait.

A Further Famine Folly

Although 'Tales From The Bottle' rather cheekily included this one in his vlog about famine follies in Ireland, it's not in Ireland.  Rather, it's on the island of Uist in the Hebrides, constructed in 1830 under the auspices of Dr. Alex Mcleod, who paid for it's construction in order to give the poor and indigent something to do and get paid for.  Art!

     It's a two-storey tower, long derelict, situated on a small eyot and Conrad wonders how they got quarried stone there; is it passable by foot at low tide?  It looks as remote and lonely a structure as it's possible to get.  Art!

If I Were To Say 'Gyros'

You might well think that Conrad was thinking with his stomach again, yarking on about Greek food -

     Sadly no.  Art!

Gyros

     What we're really talking about it one of the critical core components of the orc's Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, 'Oreshnik'.  Putinpot likes to talk up this chimera as if it was the last word in technical proficiency, when in fact it's targeting system is based around a gyroscope design 50 years old.  Art!

     We've covered this before, when the Ukrainians got their hands on the wreckage of an Oreshnik, and lo! they found components from the Sixties being used.  The Gu-503 went out of production last year, alongside with the calibration equipment that ought to be testing it, but which doesn't exist any more.  So, the orcs can instal a Gu-503 into an Oreshnik, BUT CANNOT TEST IT.  Art!

     

AI but it seemed fitting

     This explains why the most recent use of 'Hazel Tree' blew $30 million to destroy three garages outside Kyiv, and why another fell in orc-occupied Donetsk; their gyros are failing to direct them with any accuracy and they're missing by tens of kilometres.  Remember that when Charlie Chipmunk Cheeks blathers on about how they deliberately hit Donetsk to see what would happen, because it was 'easier to observe there'.  Putinnochio.

Not Sure If Anyone Will Get This One

Art!

"The Trump-001 cannot fathom complex machines.  Guns and umbrellas have chemicals in them.  Moving parts.  It doesn't understand that way, but it can form stolid sentences.'

     There's other evidence of Rupar's assertion being correct, when Mopey Dick the Orange Land Whale abandons an umbrella as he gets in the door to Air Force One (the one that's not a bribe).  Art!

     Either he's genuinely too stupid, clumsy or unfit to close the umbrella and just leaves it for a minion to recover.  O his poor bruised hands!

Oooh!  Oooh!  They Made This Item JUST For Me!

There I was, checking the news feed to see if there was anything whimsical or odd I could exploit, and Your Humble Scribe came across this.  Art!

36 minutes long!

     I don't have time to go through and do a critical analysis tonight as I've still not had my tea - this tropical heat rather quashes one's appetite - but rest assured I'm going to Bookmark it and peruse closely, then get back to you.  I bet you can hardly wait.

Finally -

Going out with a Biercism.

"Dice,n: small polka-dotted cubes of ivory, constructed like a lawyer to lie on any side, but commonly on the wrong one."

* Lead zeppelin, anyone?