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Real Life "Kerbalisms"


Lisias

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Using kitchen salt and candies as rocket fuel!

_ "Dr Khermann, we run out of LFO!!!"

_ "Keine Probleme bekannt, call the Chief in the kitchen..."

In  the background, Jeb yells "Get your greasy hands out of my snacks!!!!"

:D

Edited by Lisias
I forgot the "bekannt"
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On 8/21/2022 at 5:25 PM, DDE said:

"You thought it was someone else, but it was me, Firefly!"

3371626_original.png

Wasn't really used, according to Shushpanzer.

So this was to add an fake barrel assembly on the rear of an turret to  confuse the enemy or at least give people something to laugh at. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

The SeaLand SL-7 is the world’s fastest cargo ship. They were high maintenance though, and thus unprofitable, so the US Navy bought them and they became the Algol class vehicle cargo ships. They’re still in a 96 hour notice reserve status today.

But long before that in the early days of the SL-7’s development, a problem emerged. The cavitation was so bad it would create massive holes near the propeller blades. Land engineers were unable to solve the problem.

The SeaLand naval architecture team was then approached by a group claiming to be commercial divers, who offered to free dive to the side and underneath an SL-7 as it went by at full speed and film the cavitation. They showed off a film of another ship taken underwater as evidence they could do it, so the SeaLand team accepted.

They went out into a part of the Caribbean and well… I think my retelling would not do it justice. Here is the blurb from the description of the video-

“S/L TRADE was routed to an area called ‘Brown’s Deep' in the Caribbean where they could get decent underwater visibility. Three divers went in the water with hand-held 16 mm cameras. The idea was to get one camera on each propeller from the side and one camera looking up at both propellers from underneath. S/L TRADE came roaring over the horizon at 33 knots and the divers submerged, taking up their positions and waiting until it was close enough to fire up the cameras.

After the ship went roaring past the two ‘side’ divers surfaced but the ‘centerline’ diver was nowhere to be seen. After a couple panicked minutes they saw him surface waaaaay astern still being churned about in the wake. His dive mask was gone and the only thing left of his camera were the two handles from the waterproof housing. The guy, after submerging, had misjudged how much time he had to prepare and had narrowly missed being struck by the bulbous bow. He got rolled end over end grazing the keel for the entire ship length, narrowly missed being sucked into the two condenser sea scoops, and somehow managed to escape the propellers. [Emphasis added]

After letting this poor guy catch his breath and take stock of what happened John starting asking him some very pointed questions about the wisdom of this procedure. It was at this point he gave up the fact that they were all amateur divers. None of them had ever done this sort of thing before. [Emphasis added] The test footage they had showed them was ‘borrowed’ from who knows where and they had basically conned SeaLand into giving them their first paying gig.“

@JoeSchmuckatelli @Gargamel Any divers care to comment? :D

Here is the full description from the video, it’s a nice read.

Spoiler

This story comes courtesy of John Boyleston (KP ’61), the only deckie-turned-naval architect I’ve ever met. At age 26 he became the chief naval architect with SeaLand. His two supervisors, in the midst of a heated argument, up and quit, leaving him as the only engineer on staff. Within a year he was managing the SL-7 project.

When the SL-7s entered service they suffered from severe cavitation. In a single round trip the cavitation would eat away at the propeller blade roots, gouging out enough metal for a diver to fit his arm in the crater. The temporary fix was to have the divers fill the craters with a two-part epoxy that could cure underwater, giving the cavitation some sacrificial material to eat away at. This went on for some time while the engineers on land tried to diagnose the problem. The model basin tried but failed to recreate the cavitation in their vacuum cavitation chamber. No one really knew what to do.

It was about then that John and his boss, the late Warren Leback (’44), were approached by a team of commercial divers who said they could film full-scale propeller cavitation with high speed underwater cameras. “Full-scale’ as in… drive the ship at speed over the team as they free-dove underneath. Apparently, they had done this before because they gave John and Warren a reel of test footage demonstrating their capabilities. With no other alternatives John and Warren figured they had nothing to lose.

S/L TRADE was routed to an area called ‘Brown’s Deep' in the Caribbean where they could get decent underwater visibility. Three divers went in the water with hand-held 16 mm cameras. The idea was to get one camera on each propeller from the side and one camera looking up at both propellers from underneath. S/L TRADE came roaring over the horizon at 33 knots and the divers submerged, taking up their positions and waiting until it was close enough to fire up the cameras.

After the ship went roaring past the two ‘side’ divers surfaced but the ‘centerline’ diver was nowhere to be seen. After a couple panicked minutes they saw him surface waaaaay astern still being churned about in the wake. His dive mask was gone and the only thing left of his camera were the two handles from the waterproof housing. The guy, after submerging, had misjudged how much time he had to prepare and had narrowly missed being struck by the bulbous bow. He got rolled end over end grazing the keel for the entire ship length, narrowly missed being sucked into the two condenser sea scoops, and somehow managed to escape the propellers.

After letting this poor guy catch his breath and take stock of what happened John starting asking him some very pointed questions about the wisdom of this procedure. It was at this point he gave up the fact that they were all amateur divers. None of them had ever done this sort of thing before. The test footage they had showed them was ‘borrowed’ from who knows where and they had basically conned SeaLand into giving them their first paying gig.

This video was unearthed from John’s attic in 2010. We had it converted from 16 mm to digital format. It’s the only surviving relic of this saga.

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Flying tankette / attacker LT aka SAM-23 (the first of its name).

Designed by the constructor of landing gliders A.S. Moskalyov in 1942.

Spoiler

 

 

The pilot is protected by 3 mm thick armor (4..5 mm at front).

2 x 20 mm (200..500 rounds each) + 2 x 7.62 (1 500 rnd each) + 4..6 RS-82 rocket (82 mm) or 400 kg of bombs.

Main combat mode: run-flight at 4..5 m attitude at 150..180 km/h.

The special foldable truss follows the ground landscape allowing the pilot to precisely keep the altitude.
In same manner can covertly follow the roadways for sudden strikes.

The truss can also destroy lightweight fortifications and wire fences.

Mass empty/full = 534/1128 kg
Span/length/height = 5.57 / 7.20 / 2.0 m
Wing area = 7.75 m2.
Engine = 1 x 100 hp (73.6 kW)

Max speed 188 km/h
Ceiling 1 200 m.

Real flights are unknown, but was tested on ground.

P.S.
UC now, where did the Star Wars get those ground fliers from.

Spoiler

Star-Wars-8-TIE-fighters-churn-up-red-du

 

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The Zeppelin could be boarded by passengers by the Mooring Mast.

boarding.jpg

I was not commonly used, tough. Can't imagine why! :P

r1011.jpg

Of course, this didn't prevented Americans to try it that way! :)

0zi85eau7o161.jpg

(in the end, the high winds prevented boarding the vessel on the Empire States)

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