Christmas Card: I've been watching GI Joe

So sometime in May I discovered that Hasbro had posted the entirety of the original run of GI Joe. I've known for a very long time people need different sorts of TV for different moods, and when I need something that causes no stress and demands no effort: for some, that's some reality soap, and rock on if it is, but for me, one of those shows is the original GI Joe. Having watched the whole run, I think it's one of the funniest TV shows of the 1980s; but I also came away with a respect for it that I didn't have before.

You may ask what is going on here, and the answer to that is 'Tuesday'.

I think the show's makers did a good job; most episodes are completely insane. Given the source material and the constraints of children's TV programming, (not the least of which is 'making things intelligible to small children) I'm convinced "insane" was the correct approach - 'insane' is preferable to 'boring', every time. This helps that the show's antagonist organization, Cobra, is a completely wild: a cross of ruthless supervillian ambition and Amway. Cobra as an organization is so rich one wonders why it bothers creating weather dominators or mind control schemes, but one where the goons are unionized and furthermore have a comprehensive health care plan. Cobra Commander is a character that soon becomes hilarious. He's a man who seems to have been given a monkey's paw that he made three greedy yet unwise wishes with, and has the option to reverse those wishes, but refuses to because he's insulted by the implication he wished unwisely. His war against the world is a quest to get everything denied him by the monkey paw when it granted him infinite wealth, perfect anonymity, and his own private army. He addresses the United States by TV every month or two. He's sometimes so defeated he's reduced to tears. His mask means he must often communicate with gestures like Hitler giving a speech on amphetamines. He is, in other words, a joy. 

And like the rest of us, sometimes he sabotaged himself, sometimes he was just unlucky.

The show is I think remembered for its craziness. What I was surprised to notice this time was that the show had some surprisingly admirable messages. The writing staff has a surprising percentage of women writing episodes, and it manages to be stalwart in its message of the equity of men and women. In fact, the show manages to ju jitsu a trope into serving a wider goal. Man being men in the Eighties, the guys are restricted to the "permissible" band of emotions most of the time. Women get the full spectrum and are used as stand-ins for when the full spectrum is needed. This is the trope. But because of this, throughout the first season the female Joes appear in every episode, because guess what, having people who express the full spectrum of emotions is dramatically useful. 

Similarly, the show comes across as inclusive, with the Joes coming from every corner of the United States, across a broad spectrum of backgrounds and classes. While some of these efforts definitely wouldn't pass muster today, (looking at you, Spirit, and your bald eagle named 'Freedom' instead of 'Custerfucker') you gotta start somewhere, and 1980s American TV was definitely still in Honkyton county. One episode even showed the Joes coming from diverse families. The execution of these values you can critique, or point and laugh at, but there's no doubt the motive behind them was genuine. 

It's a lot like the original Star Trek. By modern standards it was all over the place with its progressive values, but again, you have to start somewhere. Nichelle Nichols may have been wearing a skirt so short a matching bikini bottom was necessary, but that didn't stop a young Whoopi Goldberg from saying "Momma! There's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!" when she first saw Lt. Uhura.

So, yeah. GI Joe is legit good, here's the Christmas Episode.

 ------------------------

I've no idea where the Joe base is; the show has it in a desert literally someplace in the continental US. (As a kid, I always wondered if this was the same desert the Autobots crashed in.) But wherever that is, it's snowing! Because it is Christmas!

The Joes (Shipwreck, Cover Girl, and Dusty) are in an Awestriker buggy, with a haul of presents for some toys for tots program. Polly (Shipwreck's parrot) is singing Jingle Bells, to the annoyance of Shipwreck. When suddenly, a Cobra Rattler starts strafing them! The Joes hide in some nearby rocks...and already I'm saying "wait, this was your plan?" The Rattler was to drive the Joes into this cover, where Cobra saboteur Firefly slips extra gifts onto the trailer - because God knows slipping gifts in a donation bin requires a ruse with aircraft and a hidden cave

With the deed done, the Rattler leaves. The Joes shrug and return to base. But we the viewer know the toys are sinister. 

 

 

The Joe HQ has minimal staff for Christmas, and is protected by a laser wall which physically blocks unauthorized visitors - a minor detail that will make sort-of sense for the plot in a minute. The Joes are sitting down to Christmas dinner, and thank god machine gunner Roadblock is a gourmet chef in addition to a large lad. He learned French so he could attend a French culinary school. He enlisted for the college money. Yes, he's still bitter about it. Here he is inventing Turduckin':

 

 The Joes minding the store this Christmas Eve in addition to Roadblock, (machine gunner, sometimes speaks in rhyming couplets) are Shipwreck (brawler, sailor, has intelligent parrot), Dusty (desert survival expert and tankist), Cover Girl (ex-model who joined because she's really into being a mechanic for tanks and heavy armor), Wild Bill (helicopter pilot and guy who is more Texas than Texas), Blowtorch (the Joe Firefighter slash flamethrower soldier who is coded gay at the start but, and this is true, becomes somewhat less coded as the series goes on, starting when he says the word 'antiques'), Mutt, (K-9 trooper with his dog, Junkyard, who's a good dog, yes he is), Tripwire (explosives expert), and Duke, GI Joe commander, or at least the highest ranking Joe in GI Joe's nebulous season 1 command structure.  

 

 

Things are going merrily until Mutt suddenly excuses himself from the party - Junkyard naturally follows. The snow is falling, the laser defense grid hums like a 1970s space ship engine, and Mutt has the blues. Wandering to the hanger where the presents are piled, Mutt confesses to Junkyard that he's always found Christmas a challenge - one that leaves him feeling down and sad rather than festive. Remember this point, because the show's about to forget it.

Mutt is interrupted by a Cobra attack!

 

 Cobra gets through the Joe defense grid by the ol' "Trojan horse" and "shrinking themselves down to the size of the toys the series is selling." The little grey robots are Cobra's Mark One robot trooper, which by most appearances seem to have the abilities of an actual 1980s robot, plus a laser cannon. Mutt and Junkyard and swarmed, then knocked out via gas. Cobra then lowers the laser barrier via smol airstrike:

The alarm triggers, and this gets the rest of the Joes outside where they can be momentarily mystified by the teeny tiny army attacking them.

Then Firefly uses a gun-device to enlarge the Cobra force. The war on Christmas has been declared. Firefly then drops the device and it breaks into pieces.

Cobra Commander says "seasonssss greetingsssss" in front of that sign, the message couldn't be clearer.

Despite being surrounded by guys with guns, tanks, robots, and some close air support aircraft,  Covergirl decides they can fight further without being gunned down for it.  A fight takes up a little time, even though the fight starts with the Joes vs. Cobra looking like this: 

Annoyed, Cobra knocks the Joes out with knockout gas, but not before Duke shouts the staggeringly useless advice "don't breathe!" 

We then get a rundown of Cobra's scheme:

1. Make a man-portable shrinking/enlarging device [x]

2. Shrink troops, infiltrate and capture GI Joe HQ during a period of minimal on-base staffing, then return troops to normal size [x]

3. Steal GI Joe aircraft/tanks [pending]

4. Attack nearby 'Keystone City', and ruin the Joes reputation/get the Joes convicted of treason [ ]

So the why is sensible, if we don't think about the how. We also see "Duke" make a brief, insane statement to Keystone City, saying "we're tired of serving the country! It's time the country served us!" This "Duke" is revealed to be Zartan in disguise.

 After Zartan does his reveal, Cobra inflicts wordplay on the Joes while locking them up (with Polly and Junkyard) in the walk-in freezer. Tripwire says "I think I hate puns." 

A few minutes later, after Cobra Commander checks to see how the flying the enemy aircraft thing is going, he returns to the freezer to gloat some more, even as the Baroness chides him for being childish. Shipwreck manages to unhook himself just as the door opens.

 CC comes in, and "gives" the Joes the key to the cuffs "just out of reach! Ah hahaha!" Cobra Commander even made a little red bow for it. 

  By the time the Joes break out and arm themselves, Cobra is already gone, closing on Keystone City. Only Destro is left behind, fixing his shrinker/enlarger. This leads to a fight and the creation of a bunch of kickass doll furniture:

Tripwire discovered that the shrinker/enlarger had a setting switch and enbiggens Polly back to normal size. "Polly feels dizzy" says Polly. Shipwreck places Polly on one of those tables shrunk in the above sequence who then departs with the rest of the Joes. The Joes use Cobra's abandoned equipment to attack Cobra.

The next scenes I'd summarize as civilians wondering why GI Joe is setting their shit on fire/blowing stuff up. Once the Joes - the Joebras, if you will - catch up with the false flag Cobras, the Joes unleash hell on them in a climactic battle full of "pew, pew pew pew" and whoosh KABOOM, etc. They are helped by Cobra being very slow to process the Joes are using Cobra equipment. 

The Cobra Rattler looks slick if you delete the upper turret.

Covergirl is pretty good at killing tanks, too.

Cobra Commander, in a Joe Skystriker, has Duke Handcuffed in the Weapon Officer seat. Cover Girl engages the Commander, but the Commander quickly turns the tables, even as Duke begins strangling him. CC blows off Covergirl's wing. For once GI Joe's terrible PPE game has consequences, and helmet-less Cover Girl is knocked out as her aircraft plummets to the earth. 

She is saved by Polly the Parrot, and let me explain. So, after the Joes left the Joe base, we see Polly grow to the size of a small airliner, presumably because of a malfunction in the shrinker/enlarger gun. In scene I'm pretty sure is referenced later in the manga Berserk (when Guts meets Nosferatu Zodd), Gigapolly takes flight. Oh! What rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born? 

 While singing Jingle bells

Meanwhile, Duke and CC's Skystriker has gone into a spin. Cobra Commander remains defiant in the face of death

But not Gigapolly

CC must be pretty strong to lift up Duke like that against the thrust of the ejection seat. Duke is of course caught by Polly. 

So for a Christmas episode that's been not so much outside the box as slashing its way out of the blister pack with its sword arm attachment and setting fire to the display, things return to form for the end of this Christmas episode.

A parrot with the mass of a 757 brings somebody back, safe and sound

 There's kisses

A member of the USN confronts a pet grown to intimidating size

Mutt says (to paraphrase, but only slightly) "Huh, I feel better now. Merry Christmas!" Which I found hilarious, and it's one of those sneaky jokes the GI Joe Staff managed to put in. Mutt's Christmas problem is introduced and then resolved like it was a contractual obligation, and the entire rest of the episode is a mad tale about false flags and mad science. So in conclusion, this is one of those episodes where the staff was allowed to run wild and is knowingly camp, good episode, nowhere near the top five weirdest.

Finally Polly ducks down and acts as a Christmas card, screaming "MERRY CHRISTMAS! MERRY CHRISTMAS! AWWK!"

Shipwreck says "bah humbug" and slouches away. 

Downfall or Dodge in Hell from memory

 So there's this elderly silicon valley billionaire who got most of his money by making an MMORPG that is notWorld of Warcraft. He dies, and that's awkward, because he's the closest to a protagonist we're gonna get. 

His executors, who are west-coast silicon valley millionaires, we'll name Nissan and Toyota, discover that the dead billionaire (let's call him Chevy) did something unfortunate with his will, putting a bunch of language in it saying he's to have some cryofreeze process done to his remains in the hopes of immortality. At this point in the novel there is a lot of detail of the legal issues, but this is a mislead that is basically wasting the reader's time, as they are irreverent. What is relevant is that an another silicon valley billionaire, Elmo, has learned about this and via fuckery gets the brain of Chevy to digitize. Elmo is going to be this novel's antagonist, but he's going to be a dumb, shitty one. Elmo also wants to live forever and is obsessed with the singularity. 

So now with nothing better to do we get two short stories, first establishing the character of Nissan (aside from being into war reenacting he is definitely a Sentra, if you take my meaning) and the daughter of Toyota, Lexus. Nissan is the central figure in a mildly interesting story, where somebody invests a couple million dollars creating a social media fraud event, a nuclear explosion destroying a remote Utah town. This fraud, in addition to actors, fake video footage, and cutting off the telecommunications of this remote town, has a bunch of not-so-elaborately faked bombs in major urban centers, the point of which is the social media faking of a big event, then raking in the money via stock market fraud. This was done by Elmo. This really doesn't have any effect on the novel. The second short story is about the red/blue America in a "terminally facebooked world" where the red people basically become cavemen and have the most 'murica religion, where Jesus drops all that teaching stuff to become the American badass they all knew he was. Surprisingly for later plot events, this is the absolute last time religion is mentioned. This aside is also to establish the character of Lexus, daughter of Toyota, but Toyota is a completely anodyne rich person, and Lexus is the completely anodyne daughter of Toyota.

Then, a whole lotta nothing happens. Chevy's brain is digitized, axion by axion. This creates the really obvious problem, that of the transporter problem (which you can google) but TL;DR continuity of consciousness matters, so if Capt. Kirk was killing himself every time he stepped onto a transporter and a perfect copy was reassembled elsewhere, this would be bad. Despite Star Trek TNG, not exactly Proust in French, explicitly addressing this issue, this novel just asserts "continuity doesn't matter." So just forget that this brain digitizing service for the richest people on earth is creating software copies of these richers, and the people who paid for this are stone dead. It is at this juncture your humble narrator begins squinting at the text, wondering if this is going to turn into a hilarious satire of the singularity. Lexus, now part of this immortality project, solves "how to make this wad of shit you've digitized work as a human brain." We get zero detail about this.

So Chevysoftware does what comes natural and creates Heaven, the MMO. The amount of computational resources it takes to make a brain, let alone several, is vast, but there are hand-waved away via "cloud computing gets it done." Heaven the MMO rapidly IDs all the dead STEMlords, who thanks to their knowledge and ability to create, basically become gods in a new pantheon, with the mere enormously wealthy living as sorta-humans. Nobody at any point thinks this is kinda fucked. There is some mention as to how depression can cause you to self terminate when you are manifesting, so perhaps all those scruffy arts grads are just not getting into Heaven, the MMO. Fortunately your memories and your sense of self don't survive digitization, so the Heaven MMO is literally all you know. This is another part of the story that would break the whole thing if anybody thought about it for a second, since I'm sure the plutocrats of the earth didn't sign up to be reincarnated as a heavenly bootblacks. Further, despite soon having total mastery of how to express a sentient AI, nobody is like "hey what if we put these brains in the already-existing telepresence bots" Also nobody tries to communicate with the dead, that's "impossible", (another thing that would break the novel etc) but all of human civilization becomes obsessed with watching Heaven the MMO. At one point a STEMlord kills himself in a suicide machine he built himself so he can join the pantheon. The author nor does anybody in the book even blink an eye at how ghoulish and fucked this is, hand waving the excuse that "oh he had terminal cancer." 

Well, I lie, Elmo thinks it is fucked. Elmo (once again, is this satire?) is wont to say things like "the dead are doing it wrong" and think the Heaven MMO is moving in the wrong direction. He comes off as an idiot, since even this book can reference Kant once or twice to explain why humans in human form behave human-ish-ly. In a book that is eye-rollingly unimaginative as it is, he comes off as extra-stupid. This is even moreso when he insists AIs created from nothing are just as important as other AIs that were made by zapping brain tissue. Which is unfortunate, because Elmo casts himself as God in Heaven, the MMO. He uses legal fuckery to give himself superuser status. He then murders Lexus to send her brain to heaven the MMO in 'the right sort of way." He then dies, shows up in Heaven MMO, and expels Chevy and his pantheon, to a place that Chevy makes on the fly, IE "hell", but only in the sense that it is not Heaven, the MMO, where software constructs have begun fucking and eating and shitting. It's never made clear why exactly Elmo does this, (take over heaven, not shitting) if he has motives or is just the Zuckerfucker of Heaven, the MMO, but the [vague] impression we are given is that Elmo is shouting at the simulation trying to make it work like he thinks it should. Elmo manages to lock Chevy out of MMO heaven, but the rest of his followers can schlep back in. 

So Chevy, protagonist of MMO Heaven, is dead again. Toyota is described as "being destroyed by grief" by the murder of her daughter but we don't get any experience of that because it might because we might ask why the fuck *anybody* is doing what Elmo wants. He's software at this point, but the entire world (who once again are in love with Heaven the MMO) have no issues with the God of the system being a crazy dickbag. Toyota does nothing, Nissan does nothing, and in the real world we only see corporate board meetings and intellectual symposium. So to summarize thus far, Heaven the MMO is a for-profit organization that digitizes the richest people in the world, and basically the rest of the world is totally passive and accepting of this, and are universally in love with the idea and have no objections of any sort. Much like the human race in Seveneves, they exist only to suck and die.

 So for the second time the protagonist is gone from the novel, and the author having committed to this bafflingly shitty structure, wastes our time again, this time with Digital Adam and Eve. Elmo made the first two digital people, and has been tearing them apart and rebooting them, over and over again to try to get them to act "less human". Frankly we don't know even that much; all we really know is Elmo is "displeased" that these human things with human drives and human appearances and human thoughts are acting human. Once again, is this satire? Anyway Adam and Eve get kicked out of the garden, and we get a ground level view of Heaven the MMO, and it has religion (worshiping elmo, obv) and people living at a medieval level, they've become NPCs in an MMO. This whole section is a small novel in itself and aside from establishing "this is a fantasy MMORPG setting, it's procedural generated yet completely generic!" it has zero importance in the novel. Things that definitely go into the satire basket, though: Elmo has American angels, essentially hot blonde people, as the ten foot tall enforcers with magic of his regime. Oh, another thing, we have AIs reproducing, so now "people" are forming with no real world ancestor, which should turbofuck things incredibly, since they take up the same resources and can multiply infinitely. We also learn that Elmo has retained his identity from the real world, and is clearly in constant contact with it. Furthermore, we establish that the software brains are now so well understood that Elmo can copy brains, and *modify them*, within limits. In software terms, this is circling the square of AI, with implications out the ass, but in the pattern of this goddamn novel, any, you know, thinking about any of this has to be locked down, because we're doing Heaven, the MMO, perfectly straight-faced. So none, zero of these are examined at all, In fact, this is why the character of Elmo exists only as "dumbass" and "asshole": if we were to examine his abilities in depth it would ask inconvenient questions. 

So having locked itself away from literally interesting thinking, it must waste the readers time with misleads. So to cut a long story short, the thing that the author wants is to bring back Lexus as a magic princess, (literally, she's a super user) and have her go on a magic adventure to destroy Elmo, and bring back Chevy, rightful ruler of Heaven, the MMO, and here is where we get the failure - hundreds of pages have have been wasted establishing all this, and it is to tell a completely dull, generic fantasy adventure that the crew of a DND novel would know not to do. So guess what, Elmo is defeated, literally cast down. Chevy comes back. In the real world, the global economy has basically been taken over by MMO Heaven. People don't have kids anymore, they are waiting around to die. Robots do most of the work. The human population vanishes into the MMO. At that point (once again, is this fucking satire) the software people are beginning to research THE REAL WORLD. I want to scream this is so dumb. I have no idea what tone the novel wants at this point, I guess hopeful and happy, but it's so fucking stupid I have no words. Humanity goes singularity, robots take care of the "real world", the end. Oh, Oh Nissan becomes a wizard in the generic fantasy Downfall by Neal Stephenson 

This novel is so dumb and low effort even in the title. "Downfall" is an almost impossibly shitty and generic name, which is why we get "Dodge in Hell" tacked on. They could have changed the title, like "Heaven as a MMORPG", but just slap that subtitle on. Also note that while a "Downfall" does happen, it doesn't describe the book at all, nor does 'Dodge in Hell.' Frankly if some evil Zuckerfucker took Dodge's brain, and then made him the admin in a MMO heaven filled with richers that would have been much more interesting than what actually happen

The Cold War: a Trip Report

[er, that is the late 1990s documentary series The Cold War]

Some kind soul a long time ago posted this: a documentary series, produced by CNN and made by the same production staff of ITV's landmark series The World At War. The last month or two I've finally got around to watching it, while working on a bitch bastard whore of a model. (It's that 1/350 Zeppelin Takom released last year. It's been death by photoetch.)

TL;DR: It's a great series and I learned a lot

Slightly longer: Can you believe that a series that is 26 episodes long and fifty something minutes long each, and it still feels like stuff is left out? That's more the material than any flaw in the series itself - telling the story of the Cold War is like telling the story of the Napoleonic era in history: shit's gonna get left out. That's pretty much the only substantive criticism I can make, though. The series was made in the late 1990s, and the biases it has are that of the bias of its time, rather than favoring one side or the other. Even that can be educational: one genuinely interesting thing I found about the series is that it portrays something I haven't thought much about: just in many ways how happily the Cold War ended. The Warsaw Pact and the USSR fell apart with (in context, anyway,) remarkably little violence for such a major geopolitical event.

Rather than tell the story chronologically, the series organizes itself by topic. This can mean events are touched on multiple times, but are usually covered in depth someplace. And being made in the late 1990s, it has a frankly astonishing collection of people interviewed. I don't think it is a stretch to say they interview either the actual top decision makers, or their closest aids throughout the Cold War. For example, Fidel fucking Casto features predominantly in several episodes (at one point he gets the off-camera interviewer to laugh.) Gorbachev, naturally, every living US president at the time, save Reagan? A merely elderly Henry Kissinger, actual spies and assassins, CIA agents, the former head of the Stazi, even Boris Chertok, he who authored "Rockets and People." It is a truly astonishing collection.

Given "it's CNN" and every episode ends with "series idea Ted Turner" you can be forgiven for thinking that the series is going to pull its punches with US Cold War policy, and I can assure you they do not. In regards to the coup in Chile, for example, America comes across monstrous idiots - the CIA generally comes off very poorly. Both Vietnam and Afghanistan (1980s) are seen as bloody, pointless wars that cause immense human suffering to no real benefit. Similarly, when both sides begin to back sides in regional wars with material, the result is usually a never-ending conflict in a war that refuses to resolve. The most depressing episodes are the ones where forever wars start in Angola (much to the annoyance of the USSR, who thanks to a really generous economic aid package to Cuba basically empowered Cuba to mess in regional conflicts without consultation) or, interestingly, the spies episode. After establishing that intelligence work played a small but critical role in keeping the Cuban Missile Crisis from escalating, most intelligence work, especially the creation of secret agents, as somewhat pointless. The interviews, especially, with former Soviet spies are just damning; they come off as conventionally intelligent men with enormous functional blind spots, for whatever their motive come off as causing an inordinate amount of death which they seem oblivious to.

Speaking of emotions, all viewers should be aware that this series does not spare you from people being killed on camera, collections of freshly killed bodies, etc. They do this with little to no warning, too: the first time it happens to my recollection is when they show Cubans being executed by communist firing squads? Definitely a blanket trigger warning over this whole series if you are sensitive. Somebody watching this series, please make note specifically of what episodes have the triggering stuff, and ideally when in the episode it happens?

So if you only know yer Cold War history for hot takes on Twitter or somebody who knows a lot about this stuff and just wants a refresher, this series is a solid recommend. The entire thing can be watched for free here:  

https://archive.org/details/Cold_War_1998_CNN_Kenneth_Branagh/01+-+Cold+War+%5BCNN%5D+-+Comrades+%5B1917-1945%5D.mkv

Random thoughts:

• The second-weirdest moment in the Cold War is when global communism is saved partially by the intervention of Nixon and Kissinger, who threatened to back the defender with nuclear weapons in a war between the USSR and China.
  
• I've read that post war, the happiest time in the USSR was under Khrushchev, which I can believe. I also get why apparently the USSR was in the end glad to be rid of him. He attempts two agricultural reforms: one, trying to plant Soviet steppe lands, and one involving young Communists and claiming "we can grow Corn here now." The former fails with crops rotting in the fields because despite how much the Soviets invested doing this steppe farming thing, they forgot to build grain trucks and rail cars to go with it, and the second is one of the dumbest agricultural plans I've ever heard of, and it ended with corn dying in the cold and the shattered hopes and dreams of the young Communists.
  
• Gorbachev comes off as a fantastic leader in this documentary, despite being the Barrack Obama of Communism: a man who wanted reforms in order to save the existing system, unable to see the system itself was doomed. I'm not sure anyone could have saved the USSR at that point, but it was a bold attempt.
  
• The USSR and the Warsaw pact had the same problem: Marxism should have made the people there richer, but had not, and with its policy failures could only stay in power via one-party dictatorship. This set up Marxism to fail, because without the freedom to point out mistakes of the state, there was no mechanism to correct errors of the state. This fits in well with a broader criticism of Marxism, which in its literature, anyway, aspires to be scientific, but doesn't understand what that actually means. In science, any given statement is in theory can be revised or provable to be false, a type of freedom that the Warsaw pact was terrified of. Further, when spring finally came to these nations, the one thing everybody could agree on despite their differences was "communism sucks and needs to go."
  
• Gorbachev became increasingly unpopular at home, and did what national leaders do when this happens but are popular elsewhere: they go elsewhere.
  
• Speaking of, one thing I don't think I really understood until now was that Boris Yeltsin was moving ultimately to break off Russia from the USSR. That makes sense, of course; it's what all the other SSRs were doing, but Yeltsin being a rival of Gorbachev while backing him during the Coup now makes sense to me. From 2022 it is darkly hilarious to me that Russia wanted this move because it was by far the richest of the SSRs.
  
• The Sino-Soviet split appears to be about Mao seeing his opportunity to take over "world communism" by defending Stalin, a guy who did Mao few favors in his lifetime, but set the precedent of World Communism being overseen by a infallible cult of personality. Mao loved both those things when he was the possessor of them.
  
• Speaking of Mao, after causing massive famine by having literally all of China pointlessly making metal, and then getting tens of millions more killed in what was Mao basically asserting his authoratah over the Chinese Communist party after being kicked upstairs to chairman of the board, a Chinese reporter describes Mao's efforts to open up to the west as "Finally, Mao doing something good!"
  
• It is something of an irony that the two most avowed anticommunist US Presidents during the Cold War were the ones who did the most to end the Cold War. Only Nixon could go to China (as then old Vulcan saying goes), but at the same time, it took two to tango. Both Nixon and Reagan (eventually) had Soviet leaders open to such things.
  
• Speaking of China and America, there's a really funny line about how America was "heartbroken" when China went communist, like all of America was deeply hurt by the turn of events. I'm not saying that's not true; I'm just saying that's funny.
  
• Speaking of funny, apparently when Carter and Breshnev signed their arms control agreement, all the Soviet big-wigs in the background were speculating on if Carter and Brezhnev were going to kiss.
  
• Carter, oddly, despite wanting to further arms control reductions, comes off as kinda hapless, first wanting this thing without being able to articulate the details, and then signing a not very good agreement just to say it had been done.
  
• The fact that Reagan went from basically not understanding nuclear war to wanting complete disarmament, at least privately, is a positive attribute of Ronald Reagan.
  
• Reagan was described at Gorbachev's first meeting with him as a "caveman."
  
• The single weirdest moment of the Cold War was when in arms control negotiation with Reagan, Gorbachev proposed complete nuclear disarmament, which Reagan was all for, but refused, because Gorbachev wanted Reagan to give up his essentially imaginary SDI program.

Amerika Bombers Appendix 1: A4 Guidance

When writing the post on the V-2/A4, I fell down the rabbit hole learning how the A4's guidance system worked. I couldn't really work it into that post, as it was already way too long, so I present those details here, both because the details I learned are pretty cool,  and also to back up a claim I made: that the guidance system was a hard limit on the Third Reich's missile ambitions. While in theory later missiles could have been developed with the A4's motor, the guidance system would have to be completely redone, an development project that it's difficult to imagine the historical Third Reich ever finishing.

 The Obvious, Stated

I know quoting the dictionary is a hoary old cliche, so let me just say my research made me reflect on the phrase "guidance system". Before I started, I assumed a kind of black box that did the guidance thing. But once I got into it, I realized that "system" implies a bunch of mechanisms doing guidance: working, but not necessarily unified. This is the first thing about the A4 guidance: it was a whole series of disparate systems working to bring the A4 to a meaningful definition of guided.

The next word I ended up contemplating was "analog." The A4 development saw one of the early digital computers created, which Peenemunde engineers used to confirm trajectory calculations, but all systems on the A4 would be run by analog electronics. Digital electronics do everything with binary signals, the on/off function acting as a zero and one. Analog control systems are an entirely different kingdom, the Fungus to more familiar plants, and like fungi, analog covers an array of stuff that can get astonishingly weird.

After that, I found myself going to a high school physics textbook to learn about inertia. Inertia is an object's resistance to changes in velocity, and is a supremely useful force in the analog era, as it can be measured quite precisely - usually with a machine called a gyroscope which we will get to.

Still, it takes a slightly different mindset to get into analog, as something trivially simple in digital (like the holding of information) becomes its own custom problem in analog. Because of the bespoke nature of problems in analog, systems become very specific to application. There's one more pre I'd like to amble out: in the last post, I mentioned it took 100 men and about thirty vehicles to set up an A4 for launch. Despite this, engineers prelaunch only had to give two variables to the missile: an azimuth bearing, and a precalculated precise time for engine shutoff.

Back to the dictionary and the physics textbook one more time: 'ballistic missile' as it turns out tells you very well how the missile flies, and the cornerstone of its guidance. In fact, 'ballistics' (the study of projectiles) would be perfectly familiar to artillerymen of Napoleon's time.

 Inertia D

Issac Newton discovered that anywhere there was gravity, projectiles would fly in a parabolic curve. A bullet shot from a gun completely level would fly as if it had been shot from its highest point in a parabola. [You can see this demonstrated in a Mythbusters episode, where they demonstrate that a bullet shot from a gun and a bullet dropped from the same height of the gun barrel hit the ground at the same time.]

As Newton was pretty good with math, he soon worked out some simple equations for figuring out the parabola of a given projectile. These were seized upon by gunners and artillerymen the world over, who soon had collected a lot of empirical data on explody projectile flights. So the math about projectile weight, the energy applied to it, and its resulting curve, mathematical or real, was settled into the science of ballistics. 

The A4's engineers were going to use ballistics as their guidance system. Instead of a single shove via explosive, the motive energy was being released over time, but the basics and the results were identical: a weight, a quantity of energy, and the resulting parabola. By timing the engine cutoff, the distance traveled could be modified, creating a longer or shorter trajectory as was needed.

Working out HOW to get that timing right was more involved. Initially in flight testing, the shutoff signal was broadcast by a device that used the Doppler shift of the rocket on radar to time the broadcast signal. This first timing system would be used in tests and quite a few operational launches, but when the A4 was being developed, it was always assumed to be at best a stop-gap system, as it would be vulnerable to enemy interference. The permanent solution was the creation of a sensor known as a PIGA [Pendulous Integrating Gyroscope Accelerometer.] This sensor measured the inertia of the A4's acceleration and would be set to engage the engine shutoff once a preset point was reached. 

There's one more thing you need to make this system conceptually work. You need to know the precise distance between the launch point and the target, so you know how big a parabola to make. Fortunately, this was once again very simple. The A4 was road-mobile, and used concrete pads for launch. These pads were surveyed when constructed, which made it simple to calculate the distance between the launchpad and the target. 

So, you have one-half of an aiming method for your 1940s ballistic missile. Now, you need the other half: the rocket needs to be able to hold an azimuth bearing, IE a direction on the compass. You also need (small note here) to make the rocket able to fly autonomously through its flight. To do these things in the 1930s and '40s, you need a gyroscope.

Gyroscopes are frequently used in Second World War era electro-mechanical magic: they are simple machines that measure angular momentum. What's more, because they spin round and round, gyroscopes can also be used to generate analog control signals. 

That's a mouthful, so let me explain. The heart of a gyroscope is a rotor that spins at a set speed; like a top, it resists movement at a 90 degree axis to its spin as it possesses angular momentum. This resistance which means in a gyroscope precise measurement of that resistance is measured, as force in the measured axis either speeds up the revolution of the rotor, or slows it down; usually measured by the rotor making an A/C electrical wave as it spins. The A4 used two or three gyros to measure acceleration in the three axis of movement, and thus could correct itself in flight. The control gyroscopes of the A4 spun at 20,000 RPM, generating a control frequency of 333 Hz. Shifts in flight in the direction of spin would speed up the revolutions of the gyro, and thus boost the control frequency to for example 336 Hz; while against spin would slow down the control frequency, say 330 Hz. These analog signals are then used by the control surfaces to correct against the detected movement, which exerts the opposite force, thus bringing the signal back to 333 Hz. 

Just to make things a little less clear for later researchers, the A4 had two different gyroscope control sets. One used two gyroscopes, with one measuring yawl and roll, and the other measuring pitch and tilt. The other used three gyroscopes; a gyro for each axis of movement. (In aviation these are pitch, roll, and yawl, but you could think of the axis as X, Y, and Z if that works better for you.)

To get back to where we started, an additional gyroscope was used to set the azimuth bearing. This used polar coordinates, which you may know as degrees of a compass, with North as zero or three hundred and sixty degrees, East as ninety degrees, etc. Once set, like the control gyros, the navigation gyro would keep the rocket on a given bearing, correcting via inertial shifts.

And we're still not done! All the control inputs passed through a device which the German called a mischgerät, a mixer. The mixer took signal inputs and if necessary modified them for additional variables.These variables included the shift in the rocket's center of gravity as it consumed fuel, shifts in air density, and the rotation of the rocket as it flew: the rocket for stability spun six degrees per second, for much the same reason a bullet, shell, or arrow is set to spinning. The mixer also presumably handled the shift between the two different sets of control surfaces, initially graphite vanes, then the control fins. Then the corrected control signals we sent along to the actual control mechanisms, which took these signals and translated them into actual motion. 

So, what can we learn from all this?

First, understanding this stuff does a lot to explaining why A4 improvement was not really in the cards in the Third Reich Planning horizon, and why all Aggregat models post A4 were half-baked at best. The most difficult job of the A4 program was arguably the creation of this analog control system and then testing it till it worked. Essentially a clockwork computer, it was not built with easy modification in mind. 

Still, the Germans did try. Since internal mods to the A4 were out, they attempted to use external systems to improve guidance, and settled on creating radio guidance beams for the rocket's ascent phase so the speed and engine cutoff variables could be refined.

The Third Reich contracted electronics giant Lorentz to work on this, a move that made sense. In the early 1930s, Lorentz did something fairly amazing: it developed a blind landing system. Since radar was not a thing, how it worked was two guidance beams would be broadcast on either side of the runway. The landing aircraft has a radio set receiving both signals. When out of alignment it'd produce noise, but when in the approach path, the two signals would create a continuous tone.

So a system very similar to this was built to improve V-2 guidance. Two signals broadcast into the sky from trucks 15 or so kilometers behind the launch site. A radio receiver on the V-2 to steer the missile into the continuous signal. This Doppler radar control signal from tests also seems to have adapted for this new method. The Germans calculated that in order to achieve an accuracy of 250m circular error probable at a distance of 250 km, "the speed at burn stop had to be 0.5% exact." One thing I couldn't find: if this system managed to achieve this metric.

So this accuracy assist system appears to be completely done, ready for production in the end of 1943. But fortunately, it took an entire year for the equipment to be manufactured and issued to missile units. As it happens, it was only the SS's missile unit, SS Abteilung 500 who was issued the equipment. This unit would attempt the most credible tactical attack with A4s during the war, when in early March 1945 it was ordered to destroy Ludendorff Bridge, a bridge across the Rhine accidentally left intact that advancing Allied Forces seized upon. The resulting bombardment only saw one missile land within a mile of the bridge, but the US Army post-war reckoned it was an impressive performance in what was after all a contrabassoon solo.   

Despite the fact I'm kicking dirt on the notion the Nazis could have improved guidance, don't mistake that as a problem of analog systems generally. Inertial guidance systems would see extensive research and development post Second World War.  This interview with a former Indian MiG-25 pilot has the interesting detail that the MiG-25 Foxbat had an inertial autopilot that could be programmed to fly an entire reconnaissance mission, minus takeoff and landing. Another fun example is Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere. The last purely inertial ICBM guidance system built in America, it gave an accuracy of tens of meters over thousands of kilometers, and looks like a scifi prop to boot.

There are now also solid-state electronic inertial tools like this ring laser gyroscope. Instead of a rotor, it uses light to measure the shifts of momentum along a given axis. I'd tell you more, but the last time I read it my brain exploded and I'm still finding little bits of it in odd corners when I sweep up.

On a Clear Day You Can See Peenemünde

There's one more thing I'd like to add. In the process of researching this stuff, I started reading Rockets and People, a four volume series of memoirs by Soviet rocket engineer Boris Chertok. Available for free via NASA, the books tell the story of the Soviet Rocket program. There are so many good stories in it that more stuff related to it will likely show up on this blog, but the story from the Soviets raiding the defeated Germany for rocket technology to the launching of Sputnik via the R-7 should be read by anyone who wants to know how much work is needed to build a functional space rocket/ICBM. The Soviet experience is especially relevant, as their missile program stuck with the Nazi propellants of ethanol/water and LOX through to their first ICBM, which didn't last long as an ICBM, but would go on to be the most successful space launch rocket in history.

That said, postwar Soviet research revealed some interesting things about the A4; namely how hard the design had been locked down. The A4 was from the middle of 1943 one of the Third Reich's top projects, along with jet turbines. The A4 was deployed in the fall of 1944, far too late to have a serious effect. And the A4 only made it to deployment that quickly with some serious flaws unaddressed. 

The first of these the Soviet rocketeers discovered for themselves while still in Germany. Like the Allies, the Soviets had a program for collecting Nazi war technology, especially anything (or anyone) to do with the A4. Messing about with A4 engines on captured test stands, they discovered that the A4 design had considerable thrust reserves untapped. Once optimized, the A4's engine could make an extra 10 tons of thrust, an increase of 40%! This is especially notable as it would have doubled the A4's maximum range to 600 km. Actually making a missile that could use this extra potential was more complected, and would have meant extensive redesign of the A4, so much so that a new design would have been more practical.

There testing moved in 1947 to the Soviet's first test range at Kapustin Yar, about 800 km east of Moscow on the Russian Steppe. The Soviets had laid down a methodical testing program, both to test that they actually understood the technology and to test the first products of their infant rocket industry. The program started with firing actual A4s, captured and reassembled in the east, then moving on to Soviet copies of A4s - the R-1 - as a test of the Soviet design and building capacities, before moving on to the first indigenous design, the R-2, as a test of fixing issues identified in A4 and R-1 testing.

Two further flaws in the A4 were identified. The first was its longstanding 'random explosion' problem; the second was that the guidance system sometimes failed badly. The random explosion problem was that approximately 10% of A4s launched would explode prematurely on their downward trajectory. Soviet and German scientists soon identified the cause: Peenemunde engineers had underestimated the heat buildup on the front of the rocket. These 'exploding in a bad way' A4s were exposed to enough heat that their warheads were evaporating into gas, would quickly make a rupture somewhere, which would cause catastrophic failure. Adding more thermal isolation solved the problem. 

The other problem was guidance-based. Test A4s would sometimes hit their X coordinate fine, but miss their Y coordinate to an almost ludicrous degree: sometimes 100 km off in a 300 km flight. This problem was handed to the German engineers on site. (The Soviets in their race for captured Third Reich technology had captured an almost complete missile train, that is, a rail mobile A4 launcher. In an extremely canny move, they completed the train and then ordered a second copy constructed. These two trains would be the field offices of the missile researchers in the 1940s.) The scientists, Dr. Kurt Magnus and Dr. Hans Hoch quickly found that on a test rig they could create noise on the control signal line with certain frequencies of vibration. Magnus and Hoch then whipped up a line filter between the gyro and the mixer from spare parts on hand which completely solved the problem. This greatly impressed the Soviets, who gave the two engineers a cash bonus and an entire jerry can of A4 rocket fuel, IE 75% ethanol. That's a lot even for all the Germans at the site, so it was shared with the Soviets that night in a particularly memorable party.

I bring all this up to underline how much had been ignored to bring the A4 to production, and even as it was it was a sort of freestanding miracle that it was deployed at all. If you follow the A4's development, even in its conception the A4 avoided ideas that Herman Oberath's book predicted, such as the rocket engine being mounted so it could vector its thrust, eliminating the need for early flight control vanes, detachable warheads for greater accuracy, or the use of the pressurized tanks of propellant as a structural component. All these ideas were put aside, rather reasonably, as technology that could be developed later.

The Soviet copy of the A4 would be called the R-1, and would enter Red Army service - entirely as an exercise in training Red Army units and as a manufacturing trial. The Soviets considered the R-1  useless as a weapon. 

 Part of the America Bombers Series

Part 1: Black Gay Hitler

Part 2: Vague Plans and Flying Boats

Part 3: Walking on Sunshine

Part 4: Stuffing arrogant mouths

Part 5: Eris is Goddess

Part 6: Ragnarocky Road

Part 7: Look Busy and Hope Americans Capture You 

 Part 8: Rocket Powered Daydream Death Notes