19 Comments

...r aeroplane manufacture. If in doubt, put more weight on the nose. Eventually it'll fly, or rather 'fly', perhaps only ballistically. I've printed mine out and will make it on Sunday, aided by a handy 5-year-old. I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. Quite some time ago now, me and my mates arranged a virtual lobby of a G8 summit, whereby we got passers-by to write messages to world leaders on printed-up paper darts. One of us then travelled to the...

16 Comments

...and used transparent parachutes that allowed them to drift to earth invisibly.5 Unfortunately, Gillies doesn't give any references for this, and the extent of the sightings is unclear.6 But such a panic fits perfectly into the precedent set by the phantom airships three decades earlier: people are told that strange new enemies are coming by air; they scan the sky anxiously, paying closer attention to it than they normally would; they then see some...

30 Comments

...iroshima where fire burned down wooden buildings, and those effects vary only very slowly with yield. The basis of mass destruction collapses when energy is conserved, which it isn't in the popular source books on predicting the effects of nuclear weapons. Even the apparently solid crater predictions in Glasstone and Dolan are completely false for large weapons because they neglect the energy used to dump material out of large craters against grav...

22 Comments

...re, mostly for the same men as it happens, and the same explanations probably apply: they actively sought out opportunity and adventure (Groves and Charlton, at least, were both volunteers), which is the sort of person most likely to try their hand at a new (and dangerous, possibly career-ending) service. Also, flying was a young man's game, but the decade's span between the end of the Boer War and the formation of the RFC meant that men who had v...

18 Comments

...February 1942. Its authenticity has never been questioned, but it was clearly heavily retouched. Recently, an earlier copy of the photo turned up in the archives of the LA Times. It's definitely been retouched less, if at all. I'm not even going to reproduce the better-known-but-retouched version (which can be seen elsewhere); instead, here's the newly-found-and-less-retouched version: This photo (or rather its retouched version) has been used to...

6 Comments

...selected as targets; civilian morale is obviously more abstract, but equally obviously attacking population centres would be the best way to attack morale. (Hello, London.) Alternatively, all these targets could be taken off the map and damage to each type tracked by moving a counter along a track. Much easier, though perhaps less fun. Again, it would probably depend on the scale of the game itself, and whether there is a map at all. Either way,...

30 Comments

...was taught by the late (and lamented!) Geoff Opat. Which was a joy, actually, certainly compared to the two QMs ... I think MARC is a good choice (aside from the specifics of project and supervisor, of course); they always seemed to have a strong group identity and supported their students well. Much like Astro actually. Anyway, good luck! cerebralmum Brett, if you are still looking into breaking the 1902 barrier, there is a pretty detailed hack...

12 Comments

...(!) Biggles books, along with plot summaries if you can't be bothered reading them all. (The covers are on the main page.) The main site, www.wejohns.com, gives the same treatment to all the other creations of Captain W.E. Johns,It turns out he wasn't a captain after all, but only a lowly flying officer. Must all one's childhood illusions be shattered? not excluding Biggles' feminine counterpart Worrals of the WAAF. I had no idea he wrote so many...