Bullethead

Just a head's up that I might be off the air for a week or 2 starting about Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. There's a chance what's now Tropical Storm Isaac will be Category 3 Hurricane Isaac by then and right on top of me. That's what Gustav did in '08 and I was without electricity for 2 weeks. But OTOH, Isaac could still miss or just sideswipe me, although the odds of a clean miss seem to have evaporated since yesterday. In any case, I figure I'll be quite busy this week with the fire department.

No, we've got River Bend here. While I was there, they told me that Waterford was already down at the time (don't know why) so losing the 2nd plant would have caused a major blackout. It must have worked because they haven't called us back and the lights are still on :). NOTE: River Bend has its own water tanker for this and other jobs but for some reason it wasn't available. That's why they called us. Glad some of the rain made it up to where it was really needed. We had a big drought last year but solved that this year so really didn't need any of it. It's interesting how things work. Last year, we had a record-setting drought here ourselves but running through the middle of this desert was a record flood of the Mississippi River. The River was so high because the winter of 2010/11 was so long and cold. This year, we got enough spring rain to break the drought but the winter didn't really happen. So right now, I'm living in a wet, muggy jungle but the River is so low you can almost wade across it. It's 1-way traffic for barges right now and even then, they have to break the big barge tows up into single columns to get them through the narrow, shallow channel. Maybe this low water had something to do with the nuclear plant's pump losing prime. Anyway, while we got off pretty light in my area, things elsewhere are far from good. Things are especially bad in the several parishes along the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. First they got the storm surge from the lake, then they got like 10-20" of rain, and now they're getting all the run-off from up in Mississippi where they also like 15-25" of rain. Rivers are overflowing, dams are breaking, and people are still being evacuated there as we speak. There's also extensive flooding in La Place (SW corner of Lake Pontchartrain) and in the whole SE quadrant of Lousy Anna, some of which is also still getting worse even though the storm's been gone for a couple days now. Same sort of story in those places, plus the unintended consequences of all the levee construction done since Katrina. The levees mostly held up but they funneled the water into places still without levees, so conditions there were even worse than before. Another thing is that the storm surge was way higher than expected from the strength of the storm alone. Isaac was friggin' huge, totally filling the Gulf of Mexico, and it was moving very slowly. So, while its winds weren't capable of raising water very high in any one place, they were able to move it over a vast area and it kept coming for several days. Thus, when the water reached land, it just piled up and got much higher than folks had based their pre-storm evacuation decisions on. By the time this was realized, it was often too late to leave. So as I understand things, they're going to change how they predict storm surge as a result of this storm.

Very pretty machine, Olham!

From reading the article, it seems the bottles were designed to sink after a while, so they probably couldn't have gone very far from their launch point.

Maybe my experience with seaplanes in Lousy Anna has biased my opinion, but the waters hereabouts are always full of floating driftwood, basking alligators, floats for trot lines and crayfish traps, Cajuns passed out drunk in pirogues, etc., plus there are always tree stumps just below the surface. These things are very hard on pontoons (to the point that seaplanes never stop on the water because they're leaking so badly), so I'd imagine they'd just tear hydrofoils right off. Plus, of course, once in the air, the hydrofoils add a lot of drag compared to a stepped pontoon. Of course it's fair. If there weren't engineering failures and disasters, we'd never learn what works and what doesn't :).

The minesweeping thing Olham mentioned is usually called (at least in English-language publications) a "paravane", not a "hydrovane". In fact, I've never heard them called "hydrovanes" until this thread. Paravanes were (and still are) widely used in all navies on many types of ships, not just dedicated minesweepers. But anyway, now that I've looked at more info on this plane, I have to agree with Lou that those things on the floats are hydrofoil surfaces. Given that the pontoons don't have steps on their bottoms to break the suction, they must have needed the hydrofoils just to get the thing off the water. But given the complexity and apparent fragility of these particular hyrdofoils, I'm thinking they'd have done better to use steps.

Sounds like a lot of fun. I hope you have a good and safe trip. Maybe you can meet up with some of our German members along the way?

HD is quite correct. One of my major interests is American prehistory; I learn all I can about how the Indians lived (which changed a lot over time) and I practice a lot of their technologies myself. From what I've learned so far, it appears that my bailiwick has almost always been a poverty-stricken, lightly populated backwater between more prosperous areas, even in Indian times. But that's another story. To return to Isaac, I spent most of yesterday driving all over the parish. I visited all our fire stations to assess their damage, inventory their remaining supplies, and collect the accumulated garbage. In the process, I also assessed damage to houses, businesses, and infrastructure. The general impression gained was the same as previously reported: everybody inconvenienced and a very few folks screwed over. The main problem here now is that the whole supply chain feeding this area got disrupted so there are some temporary shortages of things like milk, bread, and gasoline, but those aren't expected to last very long. Later in the day, however, I performed what I consider my most useful service ever as a fireman. We have a nuclear power plant here. It survived the storm perfectly intact and there are absolutely no fears for it or of any radiological issue. However, it somehow lost prime to its big pumps that suck cooling water out of the Mississippi River. I don't know if this was due to the storm or just bad luck, but without those pumps running they'd have had to shut the plant down for a while. The plant would have been OK but thousands of homes and businesses would have lost electricity, which is the last thing we need around here with so many power lines already down from the storm. So I took a firetruck down there and primed the pumps with the water it carried. It was a simple job easily accomplished at no risk to myself (the hardest part was washing the truck after the 6-mile round trip on a very muddy road) but it did a lot of good. And that made me feel a lot better about doing little more than lie in a hammock for most of the storm :). I suppose this was kharma. Earlier in the day, I'd gone to one of our stations that still didn't have shore power but its generator wasn't running. Nobody was still living at the station but the station always needs power to keep various batteries charged and the air brakes of the trucks topped up. So I called the guy in charge of the generators and learned that he'd shut it down because it was low on fuel. When I told him it had been refueled, he told me to start it up. And the generator ran for a couple of minutes and blew its engine....

Where I live, the following pieces of gear are required for daily survival: a minimum of an 18" chainsaw, a generator, a 4WD pickup with a winch, a tractor (with a minimum of bush hog and box scraper attachments), a 16' flatbed trailer, 20' of log chain with a come-along, several tow straps, and a shotgun. It's nice to have a blue wrench, a welding machine, a chain fall or overhead crane, a backhoe/frontend loader tractor, a bulldozer, and a side-by-side ATV (with a winch), although you can get by with renting these things from your friends and neighbors for a few beers.

Definitely another candidate for the Museum of Diseased Imaginings.........

File Name: BH_DFW_CV_KuK_Random_Hex.zip File Submitter: Bullethead File Submitted: 25 August 2012 File Category: Aircraft Skins Yet another skin for the DFW C.V in OFF. This one is done in Austro-Hungarian hex camo. The fuselage is 7 colors, totally random. The upper surfaces are 6 colors arranged semi-randomly in stripes and squiggles. I got this paintjob from (many) photos of Knoller C.II(Lo) number 119.15 in a museum in the Czech Republic. The paintjob is copied hex-for-hex from that plane, but because the DFW is somewhat larger and has different proportions, the pattern doesn't quite fit and I had to ad lib all the wingtips. NOTES: The hex pattern is NOT supposed to like up between the top and the sides of the fuselage--they don't on the real plane. Also, there are some texture mapping issues, most noticeably on the upper wing just left of center at the trailing edge. Pretend those are repair patches--nothing I can do about them. Click here to download this file

The cat is a he, named Hurricane Gustav or "Gus" for short, because he was blown into my yard as a starving little kitten by that storm 4 years ago this coming Saturday. He has his own door so can go in and out at will and often brings his prey inside. But he's very considerate and conscientious about it. If he's hungry, naturally he wants to eat inside where it's cool, especially because he's gotten all hot and sweaty catching the thing. He brings his meals in dead and eats them in my shower so I can just hose the blood down the drain. But he also sometimes feels sorry for the dog. The dog is a poor but enthusiastic hunter, knowing nothing of stealth but always charging in full speed. Very occasinally she catches something but usually ends up barking up a tree while the squirrel laughs at her from above and showers her with bark chips and excrement. So the cat will bring in live squirrels and drop them inside for the dog to chase around. With no trees to climb, the dog usually succeeds in catching the squirrel eventually, although often my house gets trashed in the process

Damn, that bottle was launched just before the WW1 dominos started falling. Reminds of somewhat of Shackleton, who was shocked to learn that WW1 was still going on when he finally got back to civilization. And there's still about 1400 of them out there, so there's a good chance of breaking this record again :). I wonder how much 6d from 1914 is worth today?

Well, my guess is that those things are a VERY BAD IDEA. They look like they're attached on top of the floats and free to swing along their sides, so I'd expect them to bash into the floats and poke holes in them. I note that such attachments did not become standard on other, later seaplanes so I figure Darwinism did for them ;). As to what their purpose is, I suspect they're bumpers or fenders, intended to hang down between the floats and the dock or a boat tied along side, to keep the floats from scraping on these objects. You know, the same job that tugboats often use old tires for today. And it could be that they were supposed to have been removed before flight, but that this picture is so old that preflight checks and red streamers saying "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT" hadn't been invented yet. Perhaps this picture shows one of the reasons such things were invented later :). What I'm curious about, however, is what is powering this plane. It appears to be a pusher but the tail booms seem too close together for a prop to be between them, and I don't see any engines out on the wings, nor under or above the fuselage. So what's moving the plane? Could it be that this is a faked photo? I mean, "photoshopping" was invented in the 1800s, only slightly after photography itself.

That collie's a she, same dog I've posted pics of before. She was looking at the fallen limbs to see if any were suitable for building sheep pens ;). But you didn't notice my cat. Look about 1 dog's length behind the dog and up to the brick walkway. Now you see why so many cats are black with white feet. The line between black and white on his legs lines up well with the irregular line between dark bushes and lighter grass. That way he can ambush critters even out in the middle of the yard, as long as he has a bush behind him.

Yes, the Gypsey Moth's version was a simplified version of the Austrian Teddybär type ;)

Welcome back! Drinks all around! :cheers:

Well, by working on this skin all day until now, I managed to get it finished today, and uploaded to the database here. And there was great rejoicing Here's the link: http://combatace.com/files/file/13265-bh-dfw-cv-kuk-random-hexzip/ This is BY FAR the most tediously difficult skin I've ever made and it'll be a cold day in Hell before I do another plane with this type of paintjob . To make matters worse, this was my 1st project to use PSP X4 on, and there are a LOT of changes to get used to from my old PSP 7.... But I think I got the hang of it. 7 colors on the fuselage sides, 6 on the upper surfaces. A couple of notes: 1. I modeled the paintjob off photos of the real plane, 2 of which I've attached below. As you can see, the hexes on the real plane don't like up between the fuselage sides and top, so I felt no obligation at all to struggle with that issue :). 2. There are OFF mapping problem near the center of the top wing's trailing edge. Nothing I can do about them, so pretend those are repair patches. 3. Try not to scratch the paint

The appearance of the camo colors varies with in-game lighting. In the top view pic, I maneuvered the plane so that when banked, the upper surfaces were perpendicular to the sunlight angle so the colors look brighter than they do most times. Compare to the fuselage colors in the bottom view where the bottom of the wings are facing the sun and the fuselage sizes are nearly edge-on to it. There's also plenty of dirt on the plane. You can see the mud splashed on the lower sides of the wings, plus some grime on the lower wing surfaces. The top surfaces have the same grime but you can't see it so much when the light is hitting it squarely. The museum with the real Knoller is somewhere in the Czech Republic. Just Google up "Knoller C.II 119.15" and you'll find it.

The speakers of the 1MC (ship's PA system) crackle to life. Then a bosun's pipe tweets a a voice says "Now hear this, now hear this! Secure from general quarters, resume normal underway watches. And sweepers, time to man your brooms." Well, it's now 1530 my time on Thursday. I've been back home since 1200, I've been drinking since 1300, my lights here have been back on since 1400, and I've now done everything around the house that can't wait a few days. So I'm fresh out of the shower and have just now sat down for the 1st all day, in front of my desktop with a bottle of bourbon and in the sweet embrace of central air conditioning, for the express purpose of bringing you all up to date. NOTE: as part of resuming normal operations, I have to go back to work tomorrow :). Anyway, my last post was yesterday about 1230. The storm kept slowing down so the time for the bad stuff to hit my area got moved back to about midnight last night. But we scared it off. Just an RCH before it reached us from the SE, the storm took a very slight jog north before resuming its NW path. I guess Isaac realized how preparted we were here and didn't want to mess with us :). By that time, the storm had piddled around over land so long that its circle had been divided diagonally from NW to SE. The NE half was still all nasty but the SW half had disappeared from radar, so was only wind, and that rather slower than in the other half. If the storm had kept on its path, we'd have been just barely on the bad side of the divide and would have eaten the whole diameter of the storm and the worst it had to offer. But that last-second jog to the north put us on the clear side of the divide by about 5 miles, so all we got was sustained 20-30 knot winds with gusts of about 50 and hardly any rain. As a result, I wasn't called out all night and slept right through it. By the time I woke up at 0600 this morning, the wind had backed around from NE to SW and died way down and it was only drizzling. At dawn, we sent out recon groups along all the roads, noted the problems, divided up the work up amongst all the teams we had ready (all our fire stations, sheriff deputies and jail inmates, and the parish and state road crews), and off we went. Lots of chainsaw and bulldozer work. We got done with that by about 1030 (which shows how little there really was here), declared the war over, and then back to the fire station to sweep and mop out all the muddy boot prints. And so on home. All in all, we got off VERY much lighter than expected. 5" of rain at my house so far but it's still drizzling now and again and probably will for a few days. Looks like the lower half of Mississippi got the worst of it, and in fact is STILL getting it right now. Plus of course all the folks along the coast who got flooded out. The whole area is still at risk of tornados for the next few days so we're not quite out of the woods yet, but we're much better off than we had any right to be and my power is back on, so I'm counting my blessings and hoping the Dark Gods haven't noticed. I've attached a pic of what my yard looks like right now. Lots of rake work but that can wait until the weekend. AFAIK, we only had 2 trees fall on houses, all roads are open and most folks hereabouts now have electricity again.

1200 Wednesday my time. @ my station in hammock waiting for calls. Using smart phone. Storm hardly moving so time of bad stuff arriving keeps getting later and duratiolightn longer. Righandt now 25-30 knots gusts 45. Medium rain. Hell supposed to start1900 Not much business so far so catnapping. Thanks for good wishes

While trying to learn more about Austrian camo, I came across a photo of a real Austrian plane in a museum in the Czech Republic. So, I decided to try to find out more about it, in the process finding a bunch of other photos from differen angles, allowing me to see what the camo looked like on just about every surface. And I discovered something very interesting. While the fuselage has a totally random arrangement, the wings have more of a pattern than not, which I call "semi-random". These hexes make lines and loops alternating dark and light. Thus, I became curious as to how this camo scheme would have looked in the air and started skinning it. I also looked up the plane. Apparently it was restored about the time more info about Austrian colors was coming along, and they seem to have had the remains of the original paintjob to go from. The colors were, in fact, pretty close to the ones I'd been using, so I was happy there. So I tweaked my colors to match this plane's, which involved making the darks darker and the lights lighter, which created more contrast to make the semi-patterns show up better. The plane in question is a Knoller C.II(Lo), number 119.15. Thankfully (because these planes were total crap), we don't have one in OFF, so I applied the scheme to our beloved DFW, for which I already have a template. The DFW is a bigger plane with different proportions and shapes here and there, but the scheme fit on it fairly well. I copied it from the real plane hex-to-hex, except for a few areas where the DFW's bigger structure stuck out beyond the pattern, or where I lacked a photo. Then I looked at it in the game. Because I spent almost all day and now about 1/2 the night laboriously copying and pasting individual hexes together, I wanted to show it off. As you can see, this is still very much a work in progress. For instance, I still have to hex the lower wing. I'm sure that once I'm done, I will never want to play another board wargame again :). Anyway, it's quite interesting. Up close, it just looks weird. At medium distances, you can really see the stripes and squiggly lines on the upper surfaces. And at long distances, the plane's outline is pretty well broken up. The camo thus seems strangely effective. Oh well, I suppose I'll finish this in a few days and post some better pics.

I'm now at the fire station doing my HQ job. I'm the Logistics Chief, which means I'm the head gofer. I get stuff we need and get it to where it's needed. As to the storm, they say it finally made it to hurricane force. The track is still right over my head or a few miles to either side, but really that won't matter enough to worry about. We're getting the center slice either way. However, the fun hasn't yet started here. The outer edges of the cloud bands went over about an hour ago so now we're overcast and we've got a nice, cool breeze that's a bit gusty at times, but not yet a drop of rain. It's great kite-flying weather right now. The storm's forward progress is slowing down so we don't expect things to get rough here until about supper time. Updates to follow as time permits ;)

The important question is, were the 2 fingers your dad used on 1 or 2 hands? :). I'm glad nobody got hurt. With 1 week to go, the issue wasn't in doubt so there was nothing worth dying for on either side.

Thanks for the concern, everybody. And I'm willing to give away all but 1-2" of the 12-18" of rain we expect in my gridsquare. Tonight is my last that might be uninterrupted until the weekend. Isaac is predicted right now to go either directly overhead (bad), slightly to the west (worse), or slightly to the east (a bit better). And because the storm is so wide and so slow, we're expecting the main event to last about 36-48 hours in my gridsquare, where most storms blow over in 6-8. Thus, while the sustained winds will probably be "only" 40-60 knots with gust of about 80 knots, that will be happening all that time, along with all the rain, so trees will be falling by the hundred and quite a few will land on power lines. So all in all, I expect the bottom line to approach that of Hurricane Gustav, a much stronger storm but with much less duration. Anyway, I'll use my fire department internet when I have the chance but I don't expect to have any at home (or electricity) for a couple weeks. Here's to being proved wrong