…ded religious literature to benighted heathens around the world. Enough dilly-dallying, on to the castle! Now this is what a real gatehouse looks like (take note, Edinburgh Castle). It was built during the reign of James IV, early in the 16th century. Another view of the gatehouse, from the 17th century bowling green. Like Edinburgh Castle, this was a royal palace as well a military fortress. Still on the bowling green, but looking the other way,…
…of this one but as it’s airminded, I had to include it. It’s a toy Wright flyer, probably 1908 or so. It’s obviously not airworthy, so I suppose it was used just as seen here — suspend it from the ceiling, wind the key, and watch the propeller push it around in circles. A Meccano aeroplane from 1934. It looks a lot like the paper aeroplane published in the Daily Mail that same year. I had a look to see if it was based on a real aeroplane, but coul…
…electro-mechanical world of the 1930s? Such a device would have been prohibitively expensive and, if it could have been built at all, probably impossibly unreliable. When considering simulation, it’s easy to get carried away by flashy toys (or lack of them) without stopping to consider what the actual requirement is/was and the most effective way of meeting it. Sometimes the most cost-effective means is not the flashy toy. Brett Holman When consi…
…atistic suggests. Re Desert Storm, here’s one answer: in absolute terms, only a bit over 60,000 tons, hardly worth mentioning. But at a monthly rate, it’s roughly comparable to the United States’s WWII and Vietnam/South-East Asia rates. The WWII figures quoted there would appear to be for ALL US aerial forces, and the ratio has dropped to just under 3 to 1. Add in the RAF and everyone else … well, it won’t be too far short. And temporally more i…
…Evidently scenarios which begin with friction in Europe and Asia respectively (possibly Korea, otherwise oddly missing from the list). US USSR ESCALATION Well, that seems a bit generic … USSR CHINA ATTACK Plausible enough, the USSR and China having fallen out since the 1960s. China had a huge army, but was massively outgunned in nuclear weapons. INDIA PAKISTAN WAR Again, plausible enough. Rivals since 1947, fighting three wars in that time. Pakist…
…war with anybody in the Southern Hemisphere since the Boer War. I originally had a lovely photo of an ex-RAAF Dakota here. But then I realised that I had to put in this one of a Fokker Friendship instead, the aircraft of which it is truly said ‘Sorry ocker, the Fokker’s chocker’. Actually, I didn’t realise that it was actually possible to walk through the passenger cabin — I could have seen just how chocker the Fokker actually was. (Not very, I s…
…n is at war, or at first, with whom. (The enemy is never named, but is fairly obviously Germany.) Joan Corbett’s resolutely Little Englander horizons are shown by her thoughts as they leave for France in their tiny yacht: Now, that dim wedge-shaped bit of land was England, perhaps the last of England she would see for years. Gone was the pleasant, semi-detached house that she had married into, had her children in. Gone was their well-loved, batter…
…s to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn’t timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised. The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine — and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn’t kn…
…waffe you don’t usually specify whose air force, but German Luftwaffe is a bit silly like saying Italian Regia Aeronautica. Generally, Luftwaffe, is like Blitz, or Kamikaze – a word generally recognised in English use, but it differs in that there is an English (three word) equivalent. ‘Airplane’ is, of course, the American term then as now, as is the more informal ‘ship’ as in ‘four ship formation’. Aeroplane is the British and (generally) Common…
…all museum (which I have to say was a bit ordinary, but as it was practically the only place I thought that about, I can’t complain!) Though it varies a bit from place to place, most of the walls date to the 12th-14th centuries. The view from the top is great, but after all that’s part of the point: though they are mostly picturesque today (their other function being a fun way to walk into town), they once defended the city. The last time they did…
