Scolopax

More footage and perspectives
 

ZBD-05 amphibious IFV heard that there is a water in the mountains, discovers that it is all frozen.

Started my Dark Souls 2 level 1 run on Labor day. My goal is under 8 hours, but we'll see. 
 
In the meanwhile, here's a fantastic video about some really great changes and critiques for Dark Souls 3 (Aka, Moneysoulz)
 
Granted, I really enjoy DS3. And DS2. And DS1. But I'm not blind to their faults.
 
 

Roton was a fucking magical idea. Combining a helicopter and a rocket to make an SSTO was certainly a bold strategy.

I went to a place and took pictures
 

 

 

I went to a place and took pictures
 

 

 

I went to a place and took pictures
 

 

 

I went to a place and took pictures
 

 

 

The Curtis XP-55 Ascender was an ill-starred, and unconventional fighter design.


 
Ascender was designed by Don R. Berlin, who also designed the combat-proven Curtis Hawk series of fighters.  Given such an excellent mind, it should have been a good design.  But its pedigree was the end of the good luck for the design.

Don R. Berlin left Curtis immediately after he designed the Ascender to work for the Fisher division of General Motors.  This meant that his expertise was not available to de-bug the XP-55, which would hurt the design badly during the prototyping phase.

The next disaster to befall the XP-55 program is that the engine originally intended for it was cancelled.  The plane was originally designed around a Pratt and Whitney X-1800, a technologically advanced and ambitious liquid-cooled sleeve-valve engine similar in general concept to the Napier Sabre that powered the Hawker Typhoon.  All development work on this engine was cancelled just prior to the outbreak of World War Two when Pratt and Whitney consolidated all production and development work on to the Wasp family of air-cooled radial engines.  By 1940 all development effort was used exclusively on the R-1830, R-2000, R-2800 and R-3460.  Legacy engine designs were kept in production, but no further development energy was to be squandered upon them.

While this was a fine decision in terms of wartime production rationalization, and in particular allowed Pratt and Whitney to produce vast numbers of war-winning R-1830s for Wildcats and Fortresses, as well as large numbers of the godlike R-2800, it did leave the XP-55 short on power.  The Allison V-1710-95 was substituted, but this was a much smaller engine that produced almost 1000 less horsepower than was envisioned for the X-1800.

The final nail in the coffin was the plane's handling.  The wings were swept, not to reduce transonic wave drag (which was basically not understood at the time), but to place the wingtip rudders at a greater moment length and move the center of lift rearward in order to offset the destabilizing effect of the canards.  The stall characteristics of swept wings were similarly unknown at the time, and this led to some hair-raising surprises for test pilots.  Test pilot Brig. Gen. Benjamin S. Kelsey had this to say about the Ascender:

"The slow, steady stall was quite satisfactory, and the plane behaved normally in the usual intentional maneuvers.  Because some aircraft have different characteristics when a stall is initiated abruptly, I tried a sharp pullup.  The nose came up rapidly to a very high angle, and forward nose-down control was ineffective in checking the pitch-up.  What happened next was a series of of completely confusing out-of-control gyrations.  Essentially a wobbly sort of spin developed from which recover was possible.

After trying a few more violent stalls, all of which went through the same sort of out-of-control contortions, I thought I knew what happend[sic], but I am still not sure.  Initially the plane, without the damping of a conventional tail to slow the ray of pitch, came up to such a steep angle that the forward elevator could not be moved enough to get any down force on the nose.  What must have followed was a stall with the nose pointed nearly straight up.  This much and the beginning of a rolling motion was fairly clear.

Assuming that with the swept wing, one side or the other stalled first, the plane did a sort of twisting cartwheel, first rotating about the fuselage and then pivoting on one wingtip.  As it went over the top in something like a hammerhead stall, the top advancing wing seemed to roll the plane partially onto its back.  This rotation of the aircraft about its fuselage axis and in the plane of the wing was like an autorotation spin except that the axis of the spiral was falling through the horizontal so that it was probably more nearly a very wobbly snap roll.  With the rudder surfaces located on the wingtips and the fin surface close to the center of gravity over the engine, these surfaces weren't effective in slowing the spinning.

All of this occurred in very rapid sequence, and noting was effective until a recognizable spin had developed.  If one visualizes the movements of the outside references-- the horizon, sky, and earth-- it will be readily apparent that the pilot was in no position to provide a precise description of what went on."

M48 with LEO II turret

Big ol' post by Oryx on ISIS tank workshop
 

 

 

Big ol' post by Oryx on ISIS tank workshop
 

 

 

AAVs arriving for use in Houston following flooding from Harvey

AAVs arriving for use in Houston following flooding from Harvey

I think all superheroes have a never-mentioned power that makes anything they touch invulnerable.  Also, weird momentum-cancelling effects.  You see this all the time; large sums of delicious money are spent on special effects to have Lieutenant Imperialism toss a car at some baddy to show how strong they are.  
 
You can't pick cars up like that though, and it isn't an issue of how strong you are.  Unless Wonder Woman is heavier than the tank she can't just pick it up like that; she'd just do a handstand over it instead.  For another, cars, ships, even tanks aren't that strong.  If she really tried to lift it that way bits of it would wrench off in her hands, and it would very likely bend.  It's designed to support is weight on its tracks, not on a tiny area on its turret.

I feel that this is not nitpicking at all.  It should be obvious to anyone who's ever interacted with things.  Like, by picking them up and pushing them or trying to get the unstuck.  Is there some unspoken convention that all super-heroics on-screen have to look incredibly fake?

Fireants coming together. Just like Houstonians coming together for this disaster.
 

BMP-2 there in the back has got it too.

And speaking about Boomerang. A turret, that some people called Epokha here, when refering to turret on Boomer, is called Boomerang-BM. Epokha turret have 57 mm low velocity gun. Boomerang-BM turret and Berezhok have basically same weapons, difference is that Boomerang-BM is unmanned and have plenty of electronic gizzmos.

Caught about 15 hellbenders yesterday

Some more pics.


 

Will be at Army 2017

Long exposure of a Soyuz takeoff

FUCK YEAH POLAND