Trending Touch-Me-Not

In my day Japanese Knotweed was the illegal migrant of all illegal migrants, but it has been overtaken apparently by Himalayan Balsam, a member of the touch-me-not family of plants with its own Facebook page and Instagram account. Here it is seen relaxing with friends over at a river in Keighley, North Yorkshire.

EMA-IL

Your cut-out-and-keep guide as to where to turn base in a Boeing 737. The other item circled is, within a kiss-Amazon's-ass logistics hub, a patch of woodland that is altogether inaccessible... see signage and fencing below.

I'd have preferred a sign that said "Enjoy Nature at Your Peril".

Trouble at Mill?

Could there be anything better to do on a Friday morning than drive along the Colne Valley that spans Lancashire and Yorkshire, and witness so many of the places that birthed the Industrial Revolution? *

The mills in Keighley hosted the production of streaming sensation 'Peaky Blinders' but like so many others has been burned down by crackheads, because that's where we're headed here. Note though the cast-iron column at right (What can you see in the right window, children? Yes, a bit of industrial architecture!) that would have held up a floor replete with looms driven if not by water-wheel, then steam-engine instead.

Look though at the Italianate tower in the background, a flourish repeated at every corner of a building that was built to last in perpetuity!

* Ed. How about one in a Bangkok brothel?

Alternate Lore

Driving down the A500 I cannot help but notice an airliner departing East Midlands in a climbing turn that looks more ballsy than average? For it's Ryanair practising circuits and go-arounds at the same place I did the same thing in the same aircraft back in the early 1990s... just remember to turn base over the power-station!

Ordinarily this would be done in a simulator nowadays, a much more eco-friendly solution altogether. Nonetheless crashing an airliner is not altogether eco-friendly and there is no surer guarantee against that contingency than practising in the real thing.

For it turns out that over at Heathrow, BA nearly succeeded in stalling an airliner over central London during an approach. Unlike the aircraft seen here, which was designed in the 1960s, the Airbus A320 was a product of the 1980s and introduced 'fly-by-wire' technology wherein effectively the airliner does the flying in response to pilot input.

The problem with that is you've an airliner that does everything for you except suck your dick whilst in Normal Law, but turns out to be your worst enemy in Alternate when frankly it's a bitch to fly. The principal problem is that during the 99.99% of the time it's doing the flying for you, you've largely forgotten how to do it yourself.

Stalls in airliners, which involve losses of altitude of hundreds of feet at a time you might be at just two or three thousand, are fortunately rare and you'd have to re-run the FlightRadar 24 to see if this event was actual or incipient... and I'm not going to pay for that.

Suffice it to recall that Air France 447 stalled all the way into the sea from around 35,000 feet because, essentially, none of its three pilots recognised a stall situation. But had you learned to fly circa WW1, the stall would have been the first thing you got to know about in an aeroplane (beside the spin, which killed people until a pilot happenstanced upon a recovery) and your constant companion thereafter.

The situation is reflected in largely-electrical cars, and moreso again in self-driving types. They are statistically altogether safer, like largely-electrical airliners, but at those times when they call upon motor skills: we've largely forgotten what they are.* It's not though a particular airline thing or a particular crew or pilot thing, but simply an evolving technology thing.

And as we segue between a human-managed world and an AI-, we may as well get used to it. Elon gives us ten years, but airliners are designed and manufactured to last many more tens of years than that, and they have seats up front. Will we get to see a robot sat on the flight-deck and leaning over to the captain to say, You can't do that, Dave?

I do hope so.

Unless you're playing Grand Theft Auto instead.

Big Day Out: Sammy Miller Museum

If you're anywhere near the New Forest in the south of England ~ 'new' because Henry VIII had chopped down all of the trees around London and needed some place else to hunt ~ then this museum's a must for petrolheads.

On the way in there's as good a selection of petrol-pumps, in fact, that you could hope for and ideal by way of mental stretching-exercises. This is the sort I most remember as a kid, and into the days I'd work as a teenager filling tanks:

Thereafter I'd recommend a visit to the caff, not only for a fine selection for brunch or lunch, but for its array of oil-cans. During the aforesaid work at a petrol-station, this is the one I recall that I sold most often ~ or used in my two-wheelers ~ beside Castrol's legendary GTX. A recent YouTube video explains how engines are failing sooner nowadays because oils are thinner, and as everything else is fairly shit I can imagine that's the case:

At the entrance to the museum ~ itself beyond a quadrangle that used once to form the outbuildings of a farm and which itself contains any number of curiosities ~ there is what I am sure is the only motorised mono-wheel that I have ever seen and which in some ways is not at all surprising:

Move on inside the main collection however and there is apparently no fewer than five hundred motorcycles to inspect. The only other sizeable collection exists in the Midlands, which is where bicycle and motorcycle manufacture is historically centred in the UK: they have double the number despite a serious fire some time ago. Bear in mind however the museum we are looking at here is essentially a private effort begun by a legend in the field of motor-sport, and run by volunteers.

Let's get back to the show, though, by admiring a delightful 50cc unit from Honda. In view of the fact their 50cc Super Cub is the best-selling form of transport ever, technically this engine and its derivatives is the most-produced machine in history:

There are any number of custom motorcycles to look at beside production runs and here's one with a petrol-tank that has literally taken a beating to knock into shape:

Another aspect of the development of motorcycles is the range of different engine configurations that has been experimented with, before evolutionary forces weeded out the least likely, such as this square-four:

Inevitably in-line variants tended to win out over the course of that evolution (my own favourite Kawasaki's two-stroke 750cc triple), though like Gillette's razors they covered both ends of the spectrum as represented here by Honda's in-line six:

There has also been some debate as to whether the front or rear wheel ought to be driven, and whether the engine ought to be cradled in-between or else fitted on or above either of those wheels. My first moped ever was the Honda P50, which I have only ever seen in Glasgow's Transport Museum... where my offer to buy it would be rebuffed. Although it incorporated its 50cc motor within the rear wheel, however, it appears not to have been the first to do so:

Honda themselves though have proven to be among the most innovative and indeed experimental companies on Earth, not least due the imagination and perseverance of its founder. We as teenagers once found a 100cc two-stroke twin to restore and it may have been a Yamaha, but either way I figured that's about as far as dividing cylinder-capacity as things could get. But seems I wad wrong, and here is a Honda 50cc divided among no less than four (!) cylinders. Thought I was going to orgasm at this point!

I incorporate this next Yamaha FS1E because at school it was a choice between this or Honda's 50cc four-stroke SS instead. I could not afford either, and persisted with a moped with an engine for a rear hub. Conventionally 'mopeds' had been engine-assisted pedal-bikes, but the Japanese managed to include vestigial pedals into a pair of motorcycles that any 16-year old could ride. As a consequence the deaths of 16-year olds around the world became statistically significant, and you'd wonder if that kept them awake at night; although I doubt it.

I wondered looking back at these photos why I had included this particular one, and I wonder if you can guess? Yes, it's an example of the Brough Superior upon which Lawrence of Arabia died on those country lanes in Dorset! He lost his life swerving to avoid two boys on bicycles, effectively both living and dying the hero that he has commonly been viewed as ever since:

We've seen some interesting variations on the theme, though, haven't we although to my mind this takes the biscuit. The radial engine was a spectacular success in the aeroplanes that featured in WW1, and it is perhaps no surprise therefore to see that it was tried out in a motor-cycle. The layout of motorcycle engines is like all things a compromise, however, and one that includes lowering the centre of gravity as much as providing the maximum ground-clearance, and radial engines basically leave the exam-room quietly at this stage:

Turning to mopeds with a front-wheel drive, France's inestimable Solex survived in production between 1946 and 1988 and that first date is key. After WW2 the entire nation was skint, and barely able to afford a loaf of bread or half-dozen eggs, and thus no surprise there were few Honda CBRs to be seen at the time. Fledgling cars had been wiped out along with any number of civilian and military casualties, and so the next best thing was to fit a motor to your front-wheel.

It started out by bearing upon the front tyre, tho' this tended to drive previously-harmless punctures home, so that a chain would eventually be included along the way. You'd think that electrical motors would revive at least the former means if only for its simplicity, but then the motor-in-hub came along to prove even better.

Writing of means of transmission, however, we cannot depart the museum without a look at this constantly-variable means of gearing. It's like an LP record set vertical and with the outside running altogether faster, picking up power from thereabouts is going to be like seamlessly shifting into a higher gear. Only DAF would persist in the development with their 'Variomatic' cars that nobody wanted to be seen in, for at the end of the day a conventional toothed gear transmits power with fewer losses due to friction altogether.

Nonetheless we like a good foray into the mechanical unknowns, as we do our days out at the museum:

Maquette Man

We've seen the value of mock-ups in prototyping and product development, and a maquette is a scale model that provides for the look and feel of an element of the design, besides an insight in how it might best be constructed.

I've an aspect of all this that I'd like to include in a patent specification, however, for which I prefer a half-decent render to the sort of hand-drawn sketches that I have disgraced these pages with in the past.

The way I do that is to put a maquette of this kind together upon which to base the drawings, and in fact for this I have re-used parts from the crewed cat mock-up we so enjoyed earlier today.

Then I put these photographs either to my cousin to reproduce in SketchUp (once having been an architect as against the EasyJet captain he is now); for a lager and a curry.

Alternatively I pop them over to Richard Bache in Estonia where now he lives with a wife from thereabouts, and he converts them into drawings suitable for patent docs.

He has worked on any number of my specs in the past, the only fly in his ointment being the fact that Estonia requires all businesses to invoice using VAT registration viz. UK and European sales tax. This has to be done by a friend of mine, whom after has to be reimbursed by self.

It's probably one reason why the sane don't develop anything if they can help it.

Strip Show #10

Without wanting to drag things out, this completes the feasibility study into whether flat-cats might be built for crewed operations: broadly speaking, seems they might. 

The half-decks are of identical build to the pontoons and largely serve to protect the propellers, which are overlapped (to reduce width by some 25%) by off-setting the motors longitudinally.

It is around 8' in length, and so a half-scale build. Asking whether it could be got to work in any shape or form, as a guide we've the fact that people on planks seem to plane happily on water when moved at speed. Whether anyone would want to buy a boat like the one here is debatable, and dependent on expensive prototyping prior.

What I might do then is to build something larger for the sheer entertainment value, and get it towed behind a regular motor-cruiser belonging to someone richer than I. 

But if you wanted swarms of drones stored or built as flat-packs at reasonable cost, then the outline would probably be worth considering?

The props should run in this event in the same direction in order that overlapping portions of disk run in opposition.

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Mark died on his 51st birthday. Recently he had run with us on a Thursday evening and over a pint ~ to restore his weight as much as his spirits ~ divulged the fact it had only been possible in view of the morphine prescribed for back pain that turned out to be more than practically anything you'd prefer instead.

People dying on a birthday turns out to be statistically significant, but attributable to excesses on the day of one sort or another. But there is a suggestion that there is a form of 'holding out' to, well, mark a day of greater significance.

Either way, people furnish our lives and it's like walking in one day to find the couch is no longer there. John Lennon was quoted as saying that life was what happened when you were planning other things; although a more meaningful quote would be to say that death is what happens whilst you're planning other things.

It does though leave one wondering why we bother getting up each day at all, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. But I guess in continuing to run ~ or walk ~ until he'd no longer the strength to do so, was an object lesson in that regard?

Seen here as part of a group of runners plying their passion across the South West Lancashire plain on a summer's evening not long since.

Heavy Metal

Spotted this on the outbound and parked the rig on the return ~ an object lesson on why not to loiter down the nearside of a truck, though surprising how many drivers are content to do so for miles at a time.

Crash investigation is big on TV currently, and here it would seem the car has been braking, with the doors being opened like a can of sardines.

And with all done, a pic of a container that's not going any place anytime soon, with a loose load making light of two-millimetre corrugated steel with brakes hit hard.

As a teen I collected an engine for a pick up and strapped it to the tail-gate, only for it to break loose in the same circs... albeit without conspicuous damage like this.

Containers are the 'black box' of haulage. Often sealed, there's no knowing what's inside or how it's been restrained, if at all. Their weight is known, for shipping lines need it. No-one was harmed, incidentally, in the making of this blog-post.

Dickensian Britain

A fellow in my running group divulges the fact we've re-introduced telegraph poles with which to furnish the communications network, presumably because it proves to be cheaper, easier and in many ways more long-lasting than burying cables under the ground where they've to compete with every other utility.

I'm all for it, being altogether the more eco-friendly solution on the one hand beside restoring a nostalgic feel to town and country. The lowest portion of pole features a coat of bitumen to guard against the deleterious effects of canine urine, and there's a label too and a set of steps within the reach of a ladder.

My childhood was peopled with telegraph poles, and on one occasion walking home from primary school and desperate as a canine to relieve myself, I was letting rip on the pole at the same moment one among my teachers drove past and clocked me. I think it merited a mention next day, but in truth it is something I'd largely forgotten until such time decades later that BT restored their fortunes.

Ed. Miserable bastards will be suggesting that the pole did not stretch to Dickens' period, though in fact the telegraph was invented in 1855 and was rapidly slung along railway lines (internet 2.1, internet 2.0 having been canals) on such poles as these. The author's last work appeared fifteen years subsequent, and this author nearly visited his childhood home in Portsmouth recently, except that it was closed. 

HM Costguard

We can't leave the south coast (although in reality we have) without reflecting upon the SAR or Search and Rescue aspect of the UK, can we? (Ed. actually we could).

I learned to fly at RAF Finningley, which had been a nuclear V-bomber base but by then hosted navigation training in the form of the HS125 or Dominie; along with an SAR service comprising Sea Kings beside Westland Whirlwinds and Wessexes. I was offered a ride in the middle one, held out for a flying lesson cancelled due weather and thus missed out on both... the story of my life, if not those of One Direction.

Since then SAR in the UK has effectively been privatised and offered to Bristow, whose founder appeared at a mess dinner at the same airbase; speaking afterward about the ongoing wave of labour disputes back then in ways that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush. Bristow was though a UK success story and like all of the others, was sold to the US. So as with all else, we are paying foreign shareholders for what we used to do ourselves.

What caught my ear recently was news that the people running the service have asked crews ~ the dangling ones and not the pilots ~ to provide services for free, presumably inspired by the RNLI or lifeboat service. Difference being though that the elderly want to leave their savings to the latter, but few would consider doing so for the former.

The way forward would appear to be more extensive use of aerial drones like the 'cam-copter' from Austria seen above. They've four of them now, and prices aren't quoted as ever with taxpayer-funded enterprises, but suffice to say the Thai Navy spent over $18 million investing in a couple (tho' they come with a broader package of add-ons).

The argument for maritime drones meanwhile, without wanting to appear the sort of single-issue nut-job that people's cyberspace, is that extended range aerial drones are likely to remain prohibitively expensive in future ~ albeit a fraction of the cost of using the sort of helicopter seen alongside ~ whereas a network of drones loitering at sea provides broader coverage at a fraction of the cost.

And they could, anticipating the counter-argument that they don't provide a birds-eye view, deploy an aerial drone of their own... self-deploying types already already on the rise.

Figuratively and literally.

Strip Show #9

Am tee-ing up the first keel here, although prior to doing so I've had to shave some 20mm off the forward end of each deck to suit. In the US when you're buying 4' by 8' sheets of anything they are likely to be the stock measure. The use of metric tho' in different parts of the world means that there are endless variations on the perfect match of 1220 x 2440mm.

I've used the backer-board (aptly) to back the keels, whereas the decks are topped with ply. The latter conforms to that conversion metric, the former does not. In fact it measured 600 x 1200mm at the get-go, hence the required adjustments this morning. Elsewhere I have seen sheets 2500mm long by 1250mm wide, so what I do is to treat it like a box of chocolates, as Forrest Gump would.

Go With the Flowcopter

This thing is gaining traction and rightly so, although off the bat it looks unwieldy for a drone with distributed electrical propulsion (DEP)... and that's because it isn't.

The motor looks to be from Hirth, a venerable German company that dates back I think to circa WW1 but more recently turned to powering ultralight aircraft with 2-stroke motors.

Details are sketchy, but so far as I can see it drives a hydraulic pump that in turn is distributing pressure to each of the motors; except that those motors are not your regular pressure-driven actuators but digitally-controlled pumps themselves derived from the aerospace industry.

I can tell you that whichever airliner you fly, 'hydraulics' is a sizeable chapter in the manuals as it conventionally provides for practically anything that moves around its outline: landing gear, flight control surfaces, every other surface, generators etc.

These actuators are relatively cheap, decidedly light and super-responsive as you'd expect from a century or more of development. Turning back to drones, which to be able to fly require rapid adjustments to the RPMs of the propellers in each corner, it would appear that this is what they do viz. adjust the underlying hydraulic pressure supplied at source.

It's not the most efficient and pales when compared to a simple drive-shaft; but it is actually an arrangement that is everywhere in the modern world. Look at the fields, and those tractors with skinny legs and wheels to negotiate the crops use systems like this, as do any number of cranes manoeuvring containers around the docks.

What it does here is to provide a reliable means that far exceeds the state of the art when it comes to battery-come-motor solutions. Effectively the only way DEP allows for the range and endurance as such a vehicle as this is to turn it from a helicopter into an aeroplane for the cruise and back again for the landing.

Which is altogether more complicated to do than what you see here.

So well done. I'd offer to do their PR but am too busy doing nothing.

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.