Great news for aviation and specops aficionados to read in Time that bulk production of the H-60-based StealthHawk revealed in the OBL takedown has commenced…not so great news that production is in China…
Fortunately, production is also also only in 1/144 scale, so while small boys of all ages will be happy to find two in the box, the Specops balance of power remains stable…
I have got to get me one of these!
It is, though, a credible effort on the part of Dragon to design, tool, produce and distribute this model in only a few weeks since the May 1 raid where the new design was revealed…Dragon pulled off a similar coup in 1989 by releasing the first close-to-accurate models of the F-117 and B-2…
Edit: Some interesting analysis from over at Paper Modelers (the rest of the pictures referred to below are there):
I worked at Sikorsky for 9 years. That being said,that model is really “funny”. It is much like the old Aurora models of stealth aircraft that looked nothing like the real thing.
I think it is a variant of the S-92. The drive shaft for the tail rotor is far too long to be off of a Blackhawk, and they don’t even remotely look like that. Also, that picture of the tail rotor is not what it appears, as far as it is mounted to the helicopter.. In the attached picture, it looks like the tail rotor assembly flipped over from the torque of the drive shaft. On the helicopter facing from the rear, that tail rotor is probably on the left side. The black tiny parallelogram is the top and the flat spot is the back of the helicopter you are looking at. The 2 men of the picture hint at the scale. That is definitely not based on a Blackhawk, it’s huge.
The S-92 is all that’s left, it is also the most modern helicopter in the world. New standards had to be developed as it exceeds every standard for a helicopter of that class by that much.
The LHX75 is just for reference and rules any variation of that helicopter out because it is too small.
The S-92 SAR looks like the likely candidate. IMHO.
A new release by ‘Lily aged 4’. displaying exceptional use of colour with clear direct and subliminal imagery which gets her message across in manner which is crisp, concise and to the point…it’s a pity that we can not expect the same from the socalled professional media…
Michael yon yanks Time’s tail for if not directly telling porkies, then definitely playing fast and loose with reality…the Taliban have initiated a spring offensive!!! Wow!! What have they done every other spring since 2003…? If Time wanted any credibility at all in this article it might have found a source better than Hamid Karzai whose grip on reality is tenuous at best…
And still on the Yon trail – in a good way again(Wow!! twice in a row – is Mike reforming?) – while I accept Nancy Colasurdo’s point in Spotlighting Loyalty and Our ‘Confirmation Bias’, I don’t agree that Mike was wrong in calling for a boycott of Rolling Stone magazine for its Kill Team story. I do not believe that the positioning of the Kill Team story with the roadside checkpoint video was an accident or an error – the intent was for readers to join the dots and form a totally erroneous opinion – that is both dishonest and not in the best interest of those at the sharp end of this conflict – certainly not those in US uniform – and I assume that Rolling Stone still considers itself an American magazine? No matter what one might think of the conflict in Afghanistan, how we got there or where it’s going, these are issues to be raised with politicians not targeted against those who serve… (a fine distinction perhaps – is what politicians do regarded as ‘service’?)
Yon’s call for a boycott of Rolling Stone advertisers became even more timely when the results of the Pentagon’s investigation into the circumstances leading up to the dismissal of GEN McCrystal by President Obama following another skewed Rolling Stone article were released last month…
So..until such time as Rolling Stone tidies up its act, it should be hit where it hurts the most – while is not in the court of the media where the more controversy the better the ratings but in the bank account…as Michael Yon discusses in Rolling Stone: Boycotting Advertisers…
Getting back to the Spotlighting Loyalty story…I do like the point that she raises in regard to confirmation bias…a year ago, I had no idea that such things existed; well, certainly not that such a body of social science existed around them. I have been doing a lot of reading about this and other biases and am planning an article on some aspects of them and their employment…or the practical employment of that supporting science anyway…
In other news
FM 3-24 is being critiqued again…when will it register with some people that this was the right book at the right time – FOR IRAQ – and that it was never intended as the universal panacea for all thing not major combat operations…
Fighting Al Qaeda To Fight Liberalism, that I got from Dean at Travels with Shiloh…has given some food for thought but with all the big words, it’s become a bit of a mouthful…some more digestion required nefore I draw any conclusions from it…
So it wasn’t just me…I was looking at the Reuters images in the Wall Street Journal of the OBL compound this morning and being a bit of a train spotter wondered about the angle that this image of wreckage from what was allegedly an SO Blackhawk was taken from…had a lot on today and just figured that maybe it was some sort of noise or signature reduction shroud around the rotor and went back to work. But it’s been niggling away all day and I was glad to see this Wired article asking the same questions.
My second guess was that it might be one of the trial RAH-66 Comanches out into SO service but Comanche, from memory, has a fenestrom enclosed tail rotor like Gazelle and Blue Thunder…hmmm, this will be interesting to watch…and maybe it leads towards a better explanation of why the helicopter crashed in the first place (experimental and or prototype) and b. why it was blown during the raid and not simply left for recovery post-raid while Pakistan taps dances around the big question of who knew?
I guess the design engineers at Italeri and Testors will be gearing up to get an extrapolated full version into the market before Christmas, noting their previous experience reverse engineering stealth design…or maybe something in paper…
It would be so great to think that something cool, new and nice was part of this operation…it all just adds to the almost fairy tale feel of the whole story, regardless of how poorly it is being handled by the White House…to paraphrase Princess Leia “When you went in there, did you have a plan for getting the information out?” Some interesting speculation over at Secret Projects
One of my virtual stomping areas, the Unofficial Airfix Modellers Forum, UAMF for short, has just relocated and upgraded to a new site and a long history of issues with its host at forumer…with the 21st Century Airfix going from strength to strength and with its new Valiant due out any day, this site will also go from strength to strength…not only does it have an iconic focus but it is also mercifully free of the prima donna modellers that haunt some other sites…the old site will be locked off but remain as an archive…The transfer process has been about as painless as such things can be and a hearty well done to those who have been beavering away behind the scenes for the last few months getting it all set up and tested…
A slow day today, just taking advantage of it being the weekend to catch up on some work – I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this week so haven’t gone home for the weekend and have stayed on base to just have a quiet weekend without the 600+ km round trip home…I also don’t really want to drive the little red car too much until the ding I put in it during the snow storm on Wednesday morning is repaired – well, actually, I didn’t ding it…there was this old guy, see, who jammed on his brakes on the snow and slid across the centreline – all I did was broadside trying to get out of his way and he smacked, tapped actually into the rear panel between the passenger door and the rear wheel – fortunately only pushing the panel in and not inflicting any sort of mobility kill: an MX-5 is the last thing I’d be wanting to shelter in waiting for the snow to clear and the towie to arrive…I have pictures but they are stuck on the camera as I left the (cursed proprietary!!!) cable at home…
Leon Scott Kennedy from Resident Evil
Saw this picture on Paper Modelers this morning: a pretty good effort, I thought, considering that it is, of course, ‘only’ constructed from folded and curved paper.
Also, in ‘tidying’ the study on Tuesday, I found the manual for the big Dora which has been hiding for a couple of years…this means that this monster should rise somewhat on the production schedule over the next few months…
It’s a monster!
After a number of (dis)organisational issues i.e. I needed to get my act together and arrive on base with both model parts AND tools, I have made some progress on my upscaling of the Modelik Udarnyj…this is start #3 after the first two attempts aborted after I found that I had made some serious error s in the upscaling conversion process…anyway, now back on track and this is my on-base project when I am away from home…it’s working out to be a little bigger than expected as seen by the CD case for size comparison…the parts here are just sitting in place hence the slightly out-of-kilter appearance…
First hull formers
It was Carmen’s birthday the other weekend and one of the things that she got from the kids was the Ultimate (with the two pistols) version of House of the Dead for Wii – we both miss not be able to use the Xbox guns on the plasma TV so this brought this capability back – we both really like the Wii because a. you have to get up off your butt to play and b. you don’t have to be a competent thumb twiddler to play as you must with Xbox and Playstation…
A bit of a disappointment…
While blasting away at the screen is a ton of fun, the game itself is a bit of the disappointment…the video cutscenes that players are forced to endured are not only poorly rendered and constructed but the add nothing to game play and are riddled with bad language…so I’m now on the hunt for a better (which wouldn’t be hard) Wii shooter…I did see Marines Urban Combat on the shelf in JB Hifi the other day but we’ve got enough hand cannons now so just want the game on its own….
Real life has really been impacting on my post-writing time in the last fortnight or so… definitely not part of the annual plan which is for 3-4 contemporary posts each week…such is life…so this post is really just to keep my profile above the radar horizon…
On the up side I have been accepted into the RNZAF and I have been very pleasantly surprised at how painless this process has been on the Air side…what has been tying up a large proportion of my time is getting out of the Army Reserves in order to join another service…which has not been anything like as simple as you might think…
31 March is also the end of the commercial financial year here and I have been doing the year end accounts for Carmen’s business – this is the first time I have done it all from scratch and getting all the bits and pieces organised into a coherent picture for the accountants has been ‘interesting’ – that’s interesting in the same sense as the Chinese curse…and, yes, I am getting soft: while renovating the study, I’ve had to shift the computer down to the dining table. An upside of this is that I can have TV or a movie on while I am working as I do seem to function better with some background activity; the downside is that the chairs around the dining table are hard wood and not that comfortable on butt or back…any extended periods of work tends to become feats of endurance…like I said, getting soft…
Winter’s first snow 9 June 2010
Winter is quite clearly here now so we’ll also gearing up to run the guest house over the ski season so we’re doing final tidy-up and touch-up projects around the property before the season opens…
I’m off to a workshop on aspects of hybrid war next week (touch wood and so long as the snow doesn’t close the road) and am thinking that the nights, rather than spend them in the bar, might be an opportunity to progress so paper projects like the Kitakami which is a rather unusual looking cruiser with four gun turret and ten quadruple torpedo turrets, designed against the requirements of naval battles like those around Guadalcanal in 1942 and 1943…this can be my night time away project…
…and the big 1/32 Heritage Aviation Vulcan will remain my at-home spare time project…this thing is a real pig…it was my gift to me after Carmen sold a property in 2008…at the time it seemed like a great project and an impressive attention-getter when completed and on display…as one of only 25 models built it cost an arm and a leg and it’s size meant that just getting it to New Zealand from the UK was a major pain..
…but that pain was nothing compared to finding that it only bears the flimsiest resemblance to any version of the actual aircraft and that by the time all the errors are fixed, I might as well build it from scratch…but…due to the cost involved and the lack of a local market to sell it on (especially since it’s reputation as model now precedes it), it has had to become a builder as the domestic issues arising from keeping this level of investment as a hangar queen in the garage are just too great. So, slowly, piece by piece, I’m building it as close as I can get it to an original straight wing Vulcan before they started to do all sorts of ugly things to the wings…with parallel build threads on Large Scale Planes and Paper Modeling – a completed build can be seen on Britmodeller…
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…it’s not snowing or raining at the moment so it’s off to (outside) work I go…
@ Small Wars there is a new article by Wilf Owen rather provocatively proposing that a ‘horde’ of 4WD armed with modern guided weapons could inflict significant damage to an Anglospheric brigade size force i.e. a Stryker Brigade or Armoured Cavalry Squadron. I’m not convinced – we have always been susceptible to myths of uber-weapons from the other side of the fence – remember the Hind super-helicopter killing machine that was going to sweep all before it in the 80s? – and think that we shouldn’t be selling ourselves short…
Wilf’s article is well-written and if the aim was to promote professional discussion, then it is probably successful and more power to anyone prepared to publicly put pen to paper rather than just lip off in the Mess/ O Club (if such things still exist).
If however, the aim was to actually promote a viable capability, then it has a long way to go. What really got my back up was the comment “…if any officer reading this cannot conceive of ways to inflict significant damage to a Stryker Brigade, or Armoured Cavalry Squadron; given 100 SUVs, 100 x ATGM + MANPADS and maybe 500 men; then they probably have no place in their chosen profession…” To me this is an unnecessary and somewhat arrogant (ignorant?) throwaway line that adds no value whatsoever. To turn it around, any officer that would allow such a force to do significant damage to a Anglospheric brigade probably needs to be relieved immediately, as does any unit commander in one of those formations that could wipe the floor with a Toyota horde.
The horde, if successful at all, would be a one hit wonder (anyone remember ‘Promises‘and Baby It’s You from the 70s – not just the lead singer’s ‘attributes’?) that would be easily countered. The terrain necessary for the horde to have any sort of practical mobility would also act against it and unless it could shelter behind the skirts of a large non-combatant population, it would be vulnerable to both ISR and engagement systems. Where the horde might be employable, would be a follow-on force to a more conventional ‘hammer’ to mop small outposts and stay-behind forces.
There is/will most likely be a place for swarming in near/far future conflicts but, at the moment, the concept still awaits some conceptual and technical developments. Ultimately, it could take us a number of steps closer to Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry concept that we aspired to in the mid-90s with the Empty Battlefield et al…
I had a long discussion with a compadre last night and one of the topics we touched on was the paucity of professional papers, other than those extracted by force as part of staff college compliance rituals, on topics of contemporary relevance, from authors down under – certainly there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of serving and former officers prepared to launch themselves into the arena in the Northern Hemisphere and the US Army probably leads in the development and publication of professional discussion, regardless of whether the concepts espoused follow political or doctrinal party lines. Having been privileged enough to have been invited to attend the Chief of Army’s Seminar at Massey University last year and corresponding with some of the speakers and attendees, I wonder, of the 200 or so uniformed attendees, how many have progressed any of the subjects discussed at the Seminar? It probably doesn’t help that the Massey web page for the Seminar exhibits a rather minimalist design philosophy and only links to recordings of the presentations with no transcripts or even speaker bios, let alone forums for further discussion – come on, guys, I think you need to up your game for the contemporary environment and the information age…!!!! It might be an interesting experiment, as I assume planning for the 2010 Seminar looms, to ask all the attendees for their two most enduring memories of the 2009 Seminar…
Oh, what to do…?
It’s all so confusing…I’m looking around for a portable computing device that lets me make notes and sketches away from the desktop PC in the study e.g. when I am away from home, even just popping down to the shop, or watching TV in the lounge so that the notes and sketches can be ported/synced directly back into the main PC. At the moment, I make a lot of my review notes on the good old legal pad and then manually transcribe them which takes more time that I have and eats significantly into productivity. I often forget to take a notebook with me when I leave the house as it always ends up back by the PC for transcription and stays there for my next foray out into the world…
I had thought that perhaps the iPad might be the answer but following up a link from Paper Modelers I’ve found that there are a range of new and impending technologies that might meet my needs…my gut feeling is that I’d be better off with something closer to a tablet than an iPhone so that I can read papers in closer to a traditional page format (am I turning into a fuddy-duddy?) and also so that I can also have a decent-sized work area for graphics…
Mmmmm….
Those from the Wellington IPMS community especially will know that I am a bit of an attention-seeker in my modelling procurements…in 2007, I was allowed to buy the Soar Art 80cm Railway Gun in 1/35 scale. It is very big and impressive – I can only just manhandle the box on my own – and I have been slowly assembling it. Like most people, I built the barrel first…
Yes, folks, the breech block is really the same size as a contemporary tank!! The barrel assembly is now painted and as complete as it needs to be for now and I have psyched myself up to start on the railway trucks that bear this monster but…somewhere in the course of domestic re-orgs that comprehensive instruction manual has gone west – no doubt it has been placed somewhere ‘safe’ – and I went to the Soar Art site to ask for a new manual. While there, I surfed through some of their partnered companies and stumbled into the world of Dust, a “…what-if world, a fictionary world based on our true history and mixed-up with science fiction…” and found this…
Got today’s title from the twins….amazing how two words can convey so much from ‘I just filled my nappy‘ through ‘you know Nana’s fav wooden salad fork that she said don’t bang on the table in case you break the teeth off it?‘ to ‘I really would rather not go to bed at the moment‘…
But, oh no, the CAC COIN blog is down…I need my fix….
A beautiful sunny day in the Central Plateau (of course) and a great lead -in to the weekend…a quiet Saturday I think followed by the commencement of Phase One renovation at home – pulling out the front stairs to replace them with a rimu spiral we scored off Trademe for 500 bucks – I haven’t seen it since it have been refurbed but Carm says it is now well on its way to becoming a tourist attraction in the joiners in Turangi…my one aim tomorrow is to get a coat of German Grey on Dora who has been languishing in the garage for too long…
(The Dora link is to someone else’s one and that’s not me in the pic…)
Heigh-ho, heigh-ho…it’s not snowing or raining at the moment so it’s off to (outside) work I go…
Yes, folks, the breech block is really the same size as a contemporary tank!! The barrel assembly is now painted and as complete as it needs to be for now and I have psyched myself up to start on the railway trucks that bear this monster but…somewhere in the course of domestic re-orgs that comprehensive instruction manual has gone west – no doubt it has been placed somewhere ‘safe’ – and I went to the Soar Art site to ask for a new manual. While there, I surfed through some of their partnered companies and stumbled into the world of
The World According to Me... 