Daydream Notes

The Me 264.  'Black Gay Hitler' is a term used on the somethingawful.com forums; it means any history counterfactual so far removed from the actual history as to cease to be a meaningful what-if. For instance, given how World War 2 went down, the Nazis winning the battle of the Atlantic (IE imposing an effective blockade against Britain) is something that could have happened, given not very many changes on the Allied and Axis sides. It is not Black Gay Hitler. The Germans never declaring war on the Soviet Union on the first place, and, say, using at least some of those resources to secure Mideast oil instead is very  black gay Hitler, since you are changing not only history, but in a large part the reasons and mentality of the Nazis in the first place The German transocean aircraft projects, collectively lumped under the label " Amerika bombers" is definitely Black Gay Hitler. While a few prototype Amerika bombers did actually exist, none of them cou...

A kind reader tipped me off that there was something screwed up with link navigation in the R100/R101 posts. I'm not sure what exactly the problem was (blogspot upgraded to https while I writing the series, and the resulting technical twitches might've borked the links) but something was up. One of the chapters vanished from the sidebar as well. Anyway, I've gone through and fixed the links at the bottom of the page, and you can now find everything on the sidebar again. The metatags work as well if you are looking for different chapters. If you spot anything else wrong, please don't hesitate to comment/drop me a note. Oh, and I'm nearly done not one, but two new aeronautical nerd-posts on two different subjects. If you read that and ask "why didn't you finish one so we could read that while you did another", well, see above.

Random kits I've noticed lately: Meng has started a kids line which includes this obscure aircraft in kids form. I get kids lines, though I'm interested to know why the He 177 was picked. A kit for your younger sibling when the older one is a flourishing wehraboo? I'm in the middle of two kits right now, otherwise I might pick up one of these new weird car kits. For a long time, the '50s and the '60s was the staple for north American makers. Now that Round2 has had success redoing kits from the 70s, it seems like everybody is being out these horrible tasteless (IE absolutely wonderful) kits from the 70s and 80s. Like this ugly son of a bitch. The Volare is forgotten by everyone but serious car nerds. For about 20 years, Dodge made a car called the Dart. It was that was robust, and popular, actually gaining in popularity as the years rolled on. In the late 70s, Dodge replaced it with the Aspen/Volare, who were so misbegotten and ter...

After a pause of many months, I finished a new tiny tank, a modern one this time: A Leopard 2 A5. This tank is the tank of choice for pretty much any modern nation that doesn't produce its own Main Battle Tank (MBT) nationally. The kit itself was frustrating in places. The frustration started with me looking at the tracks. The tracks came in four pieces, which you were supposed to bend via hot water into the proper shape. The instructions came with a helpful note: " Bend with the help of hot water, do not use boiling water in any case! " Long story short, the tracks were a nightmare jigsaw of superglue and tepid water when I followed the vague instructions and got nowhere. After the fact I did work out a procedure for making the tracks work. A proper assembly would read: 1. Assemble drive sprockets, return wheels, road wheels. 2. Boil a kettle's worth of hot water. 3. Just after boiling, pour 2 cups or so of hot water into a medium bowl, preferably...

and it shows. For those who can't be bothered to click, it's a story on Musk getting up in front of an audience some place and doing some philosophy, badly: that we're all living in a video game in the future. "If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let's imagine it's 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale. So given that we're clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions. Tell me what's wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?" Thanks, Elon, I'll t...

I assume that most people reading this blog are like me; history nerds and people who like scale model things.  I bring this up because I've always more or less assumed the broad historical context is understood, be it about Zeppelins or B-36s. This blog features a lot of stuff that assumes the background of strategic bombing is understood. Now, if you are someone who does not understand strategic bombing, the Second World War must be filled with inexplicable, horrific events. Not that World War 2 in particular isn't chock full of those anyway, but Nazis murdering people is at least understandable because the Nazis are understood to be nasty, nasty people. Strategic bombing by the Allies, in contrast, must seem just as horrific but without any rhyme or reason behind it. Take the atomic attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example. They're the topic of many a university undergrad discussion/shouting match, where they are often treated as unique events. Truth be tol...