Face Off... and On Again

In a moment of epic import on a par with that of Odysseus, I too have returned after ten years sojourn: but to Facebook if not Ithaca. Needless to say the profile needed updating to reflect the advancing years ~ but not overly so ~ and I have settled for this delightful AI render.

I asked it to drop the 'northern trucker' vibe for a look that says 'Here I am in my vineyard in the Napa Valley on a summer's evening entertaining billionaire friends and enjoying the fruits of my labour designing and building not so much rockets for Mars as bits of polystyrene I can sit on out at sea.'

As a young man about London Town I'd be told I had the look of Rick Astley about me, although nowadays ~ as I just saw in his book ~ he still retains a quiff whereas I do not. Nonetheless you can be whomever you want to be on social media!

The alternative being that seen below, which frankly still has its hat in the ring.

Big Day Out: Portsmouth

It would be churlish to depart the South Coast on such glorious summer days with no excursion around the many museums that illustrate the history of our foremost naval port since the days Henry VIII lost his flagship thereabouts: it preserved here too, or what's left of it.

(A positively Proustian sentence that has left me exhausted.)

Sailing in you cannot miss one of the two carriers the UK possesses, looking with its marquees like it's being prepared for a tea-party, though it's attributable here to its ongoing maintenance. A problem with conventional navies is that at any one time a significant portion of its inventory is laid up in this way: a dilemma drones will go a long way to rectify.

The best overview of the harbour however comes from atop the Spinnaker Tower, the UK's tallest observation tower (although that at Brighton might elevate the eyes that bit higher).

At the various museums that comprise the historic naval dockyards (available on a single ticket that lasts a year, even though everyone knows you'll never be coming this way again), you can see HMS Victory along with the spot upon which he died in a kiss-me-quick-Hardy hat.

More impressive perhaps is HMS Warrior or the first iron-clad sailing-cum-steamship that was built in 1860 and could fire cannon-balls over the horizon at a range of five miles and as a consequence was untouchable. Most intriguing perhaps was the fact it appears to have within its bowels a spare propeller-blade, seen top row third left.

Alongside we've moved on to the Submarine Museum over on the other side of the harbour and without leaving the car-park there's an exhibit in the shape of one such propeller adapted for such vessels. These have to be as undetectable as possible, so they feature any number of bizarrely-shaped blades designed to reduce cavitation whilst they turn at a lethargic pace.

In the 1960s there were apparently sixty-two subs harboured here, and now there are none beside a fascinating post-war relic that you get to do a tour of, and which served in both the Far East and afterward the Arctic as the War got Colder. We've now a handful of nuclear submarines instead based in Scotland, and some of which will be undergoing maintenance (see earlier comments) at any one time. Worryingly when one of these test-fired one among its Trident missiles, it didn't work properly.

Check out however that first pic on the bottom row and tell me whether you've ever seen so magnificent a set of push-rods?

We've mover on however to the Munitions Museum at neighbouring Gosport, that is renamed 'Explosion!' in the hope of attracting the younger visitor. Worth a visit in order to get the set if nothing else, it includes fabulous exhibits like a wooden model of a design of naval gun that sadly would only feature on-screen nowadays, touched only by way of a mouse.

It's been a jolly day out as ever though, and topped off by encountering this 1930s steam-wagon on the high street beyond. Fully restored with local naval engineering expertise it ferries passengers around from pub to pub in the sunshine... something I imagine happens to us when we get to heaven.

And to cap it all off, a two-seat Spitfire is doing the rounds of HMS Daedalus if you are able to afford the £3,250 required for a quick-ish spin; although you can settle for a cup of tea and a Victoria sponge-cake as I did on the day. Daedalus is in fact an airfield and not a ship, naval personnel calling anything that moves or does not a 'ship' for reasons best known to themselves.

This constitutes the 1500th post appearing in the blog, which overall has attracted a third of a million views and as many as 3,000 in a single day. Recently I suggested its apparent success might be attributed to AI bots scraping it for material and this appears to be a clear and present danger. Accordingly the next 1,500 posts will be about how the moon is made of cheese, so Google offers it up to genuine enquiry.

DC Comic

Probably said so before but this is among the most popular of my uploads to Digital Commons, where it goes by the tag of Drone for Human Carriage. It's true that the tag alone might have acted as clickbait, but I think there's room to consider it might be the long-term feasibility of the arrangement that attracts 116 of this last month's 163 downloads for example.

The premise as ever was flat-packability but the main attraction was the fact PAVs or personal air vehicles of the kind simply grow in weight. HEXA for example over in the US was supposed to conform to a regulatory 250 pounds of (basic?) weight, though it would be relaxed by 200 pounds by the FAA at last count. For prototypes designed to fly all have a thing in common ~ they grow in weight.

This seems to be true even as the underlying tech moves in the opposite direction, for electrical aircraft that hover like these all suffer from lack of range or endurance and whenever batteries and motors get lighter, more of them are simply added so as to redress the balance.

This here then was an attempt at a drone that could lift its weight into position and have a pilot step into the resulting space; the harness doubling as a platform able to mount flight controls. This would have been drawn up to waist-height like a pair of underpants (to use the technical term), or else would have been open at the rear in order that the pilot could step into place and strap in. It also serves to bolster the uprights in support of the weight overhead... and those are 10-kilo weights you see.

Hope it happens some day but I had to abandon the proj in favour of boats because they were simpler, safer and ~ critically ~ cheaper to prototype. You would have to add too that it would be altogether easier to pioneer in the US, China or even other parts of Europe than here, where so many of us are employed in regulation and are tasked daily with finding things to regulate.

Proud of the pic though, and as the pioneer of rocketry in New Zealand was to point out, it does not matter so much if something proves not to work in practise so long as it works as art...

...as it does here.

Strip Show #8

Here though is where we left off, and it seems like a lifetime ago but that trip across the sea has been an inspiration to us all. It was so calm enroute Cherbourg that the sails of yachts were reflected as if by a mirror. It was an all-female crew at the helm and as what I guessed was the Second Officer stepped from the bridge for a smoke and a check on her DMs, like Noel Coward I said "Tranquil pour La Manche, non?" in an O-level French accent before we both shared a few 'Ahaaars'.

But as those farmers banding together to create a ferry-line must have asked, what do we want from this? Well at my age that is something of a moving target and the benefit of stepping away from the vehicle as we have done is that it gives time for us ~ like a tiny ocean ~ to do a bit of reflecting at the same time.

And right now I think as much as pioneering new shapes for maritime dronery, it is about building something I'd like for myself and which I figure we can do better. By better I mean more bangs for your buck and I think for our sakes and the planet's we need stop looking at horsepower and thinking about a new formula for boats ~ and this is my invention and I patent it and no backsies ~ that relates to knots per kilowatt or kts/kW as I like that there's lots of 'k' in there as much as anything. 

Sadly ~ an excuse Airbus have been known to use at weekends ~ the timber yard is closed on Saturday afternoon and so what I tend to do is either walk round what we have or set up a chair and stare at it for long periods: the reason small children are advised to avoid my driveway.

But we wanted something very narrow and very planar, and then realised it would roll over the second we sat in it. This is something marine architects like to avoid at the get-go, and so we needed something to stabilise it without adding too much in the way of mass or frontal section... which is when we added wiiings. These lie here inverted on the garage floor, as they have the past two weeks awaiting the caresses of their creator. Mwah-ha, mwah-ha, mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Looking at them, you like I will be asking what shall we go for: levity, ease-of-build or modularity? A recent news report stated Russia produces fifteen million drones per annum, whilst the UK inventory stands at around 70,000; frankly am amazed at that latter figure and wonder whose garden's big enough? But wasn't it the lesson we took away from Kursk, how manifold T-34s were able to overrun mighty Tigers?

And looking at this through urine-coloured spectacles, I think we should go down a modularity route as it combines ease of production and I'm lazy (as I said it in the Powerpoint presentation to the board). What we'll do once the timber-yard opens therefore is to reproduce each of the side-decks that we see here, and attach them at ninety degrees so as to form pontoons.

If these were hinged or snap-on unitary parts then the frame could be flat-packed for storage, but at the prototyping stage you needn't be ashamed to be fixing things permanently. It makes for the strongest construct, the simplest manufacture and a lighter framework than otherwise when it's about iteration, failure... and reiteration.

Costa Coffin

The new Netflix doc on the Costa Concordia shipwreck is instructional, if alone from the light it sheds on hitherto details that ~ whilst easily overlooked ~ may well have proven to be decisive. The most telling of these is the fact that in the given situation the captain ordered a turn in one direction that the helmsman pursued in the wrong direction for over forty seconds.

Regular readers will recall how ~ and it wasn't me that discovered this ~ the brain is divided into two hemispheres connected by something surgeons tell each other not to cut through no matter how inviting it looks. This is thought to lead to the left-versus-right confusion that has plagued aircraft accidents from the get-go; although it is less commonly referred to in maritime accidents that tend not to have been analysed in the same sort of forensic detail.

One reason it may have been overlooked for centuries at sea is for being considered something that was simply not done or a failure of character. You may recall though how one among the founding fathers of what is called 'human factors' in aviation was inspired by flying bombers line astern down the Bay of Biscay to ferry them to North Africa: the one in front turning right and never being seen again.

Besides this, it is obvious that Costa were either active or passive witnesses to 'sail-bys' during which you waved to your mistress, and not least because they'd either have enjoyed such forms of showboating themselves or else considered it to be the 'right stuff'.

in common with the airline industry the captain, helmsman and four others aboard were charged while management would 'tut-tut' their way to daily lives. My guess is the helmsman would have been charged for turning the wheel the wrong way, the way we used to hit kids at school if they'd made a mistake.

But can you think of another accident that might have involved such an error? Yes, that of the Titanic! There's a suggestion the captain's order to turn to starboard may have been confused with a conventional 'tiller' order commanding a lever connecting the rudder conventionally to be driven to the right so as to steer the ship to the left.

We're here to think about design in general and boats in particular though aren't we and more taken by the fact that 'Full Reverse' reduced the effectiveness of a turn in either direction? For this I'll need to take you over to the kitchen worktop, for that's what it's for, to examine our scale model of the ship where you'll see that unusually it had three propellers, one of which dedicated to 'washing' the rudder to maximum effect.

'Full Ahead' might therefore have avoided the 'berg as experts suggest, though had the engines been able to be telegraphed separately then 'Full Astern' on the mains and 'Full Ahead' on the central would have had them doing doughnuts around it.

Most experts thus agree nowadays that had Colin designed the Titanic, we'd all be a lot happier.

Ed. The title of this post is the author's pathetic attempt at a riff on Costa Coffee, a brand begun by the Costa brothers in London and later sold to Whitbread breweries. For years he'd travel to Waterloo station on the train, where commuters knew they had arrived because of the smell of beans roasted beneath the arches by the bros.

Artichoke Points

Life however is a vale of tears and it is time for us to return to these beleaguered shores, doing so on a Brittany Ferry across the English Channel. Where exactly the Channel starts or ends is a moot point and the French dodge the issue by calling it the 'Sleeve'.

But the origin of their ferries between Britain and Brittany in France is instructive and shows what can be done when you try, especially by the French. It is French countries that are charged with building our nuclear power stations now we have neither the expertise nor the inclination; and as former chancellor Jeremy Hunt has pointed out, the same station costs twice as much to build here as it does there due the planning regulations we cherish (and versus South Korea it's a factor of ten).

But what neither you nor I were aware of was the 'artichoke crisis' of the 1950s when in brief, there turned out to be more than even they could eat. This led to a collapse in prices and the knock-on effects it had on farmers, who together founded a ferry firm to export excess artichokes and onions (you read it right) to the UK too.

And what you get is one of Europe's most successful ferry systems, which you and I used to ferry ourselves between Poole and Cherbourg, and afterward St Malo and Portsmouth, in order to attend the wedding of the year.

But we're back to life, back to reality as the song goes, although on the way there is as ever an incursion of drones for those who look carefully enough. As one such boat arrives in Portsmouth ~ our most historic port in view of its naval connections ~ what is that we see passing through her wake? Only a pair of the UK's unmanned drones, albeit followed by a crewed mother-ship to ensure they don't collide with a boat-load of wedding-guests and artichokes!

(The development of maritime drones is centered upon the naval dockyards of both Portsmouth and Plymouth, partly for historic reasons and partly because politicians haven't the imagination to look elsewhere. Nor do we have the imagination to base their development on anything other than the sort of inflatables and motors we'd use for picnics at the seaside.)

Imagination is not something the French have ever lacked, however, and among the cabins of the vessel transporting our precious selves back home, no less than a view of the future inspired by Regent's electrification of (flying) boats over on the far side of the Atlantic!

Wedding Post, Post Wedding.

I'm not going to say where, as I don't want it becoming a shrine to the amount that I drank on the occasion ~ though suffice it to say there are few settings so suited to pretending you're Hugh Grant just for one day, working the throng in a Panama hat.

Working ~ or gliding ~ left to right and top to bottom, staff prepare the courtyard for canapés, champagne and oysters in the aftermath, whilst over at the parterre celebrants gather whilst the Grande Dames retreat to the shade where they and I discuss how Paris was never the same after the death of Marcel Proust.

Meanwhile the MC hammering the decks has flown in from Ankara for the occasion, where not far hence he did the same for Aston Villa following victory in the Europa League... they drank, he adds, until eight next morning. I ferry him from the hotel to the venue, which was likely the low point of his day.

The bride had farther to process than you'd expect from the average aisle, where temperatures would equally be unlikely to hover at thirty-five degrees. But on to the ceremony, brief enough for the assembled not to wilt faster than a bouquet. During this the couple recited in English how they met, and what they meant to each other. Neither are native speakers, English though having displaced French as language of love... as I suggested prior to being removed.

Thereafter it was on to the relative cool of the chateau, where for the moment I was lost in the world of Brideshead Revisited and its bright young things: languishing in the quad prior a louche progress toward the hall, with bow-ties discarded during an equally leisurely culinary procession.

Ed. Google tried to re-spell it 'Birdseed Revisited'... an altogether better treatment so far as any budgerigar reading this will be concerned.