Daydream Notes

 In Edwardian Britain at the turn of the last century, everybody was, like, super into balloon flying. The upper class, typically, did the flying, but everybody else was welcome to attend the balloon race, meet, fairground attraction, fete, [that one time a riot] , and observe the men ascending into the heavens. Despite it being the pursuit of the rich, the lower classes (if you pardon the pun) loved the sight of a man actually flying. The men flying could soak in the most gentle and settled land through the supernaturally weird perspective afforded by a balloon at 1000 ft. And since the balloon flight was well and truly random, nobody could say where the trip would end. It was an attraction where everybody got a picnic, and a first rate adventure could be had without leaving Buckinghamshire on a summer's day. It even received the ultimate mark of popularity in Victorian/Edwardian Britain: women were forbidden from some aspect of it. Women could go up chaperoned in a ballo...

Vice-Admiral Mark Norman has been somewhat vindicated, the fed dropped the lawsuit against him, with the prosecuting attorney saying publicly "we've got nothing". It could be that the Fed thought it'd just be a drag next election, but it's satisfying to see their horseshit fail so abjectly defense watch has a good summary Norman of course is now demanding his old job bad just to twist the knife in his former comrades in arms at the DND Also, Canada and the F-35 have taken a new turn. OK, so remember when the fed took de-facto policy and made it official, that any fighter design had to officially promise that industrial baksheeh ? Well it turns out that's not allowed in the framework in which the F-35 was developed, which actually wants F-35 sub-components to be sourced competitively (IE by LockMart, the primary contractor), and explicitly forbids nations from trying to get more baksheeh done in their own nation. While Canada now is BFFs with LockMart, this d...

Being ahead of your time is a paradox. The further you strive ahead technologically, the bigger your theoretical advantage over your rivals. But as you get further ahead, you run into problems nobody has encountered before. With the flying wings from the last post, these problems revolved around stability.  This youtube of a pilot from the YB-49 program gives you some idea of what is covered by "problems", but in short a flying wing without a conventional tail had a Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde personality. Flying Wings are sedate and agreeable to fly -- until you blunder into the Hyde part of the flight envelope. Then, if you get out alive you would count yourself lucky. In the hypothetical world of operational Nazi flying wings, a lot of German pilots would have accidentally bumped into Mr. Hyde. This was really not a problem the Nazis could have solved, if the Horton Brothers had their way and kept tails entirely out of it. Pure flying wings only returned to serious c...