This is cool

This is awesome.  Watch the whole thing, including the pitch at the end to attend bomber school.

Sword missiles

It appears that the US has adapted the Hellfire missile to carry sword blades that deploy instead of explosives.  Guided weapons have gotten so accurate that explosives aren’t always needed.  This reminds me of my favorite weapon concept, the “Rods from God”  Frankly the US should deploy this if they can figure how to get a lot of weight into orbit cheaply enough.  It could solve the Iran/North Korea bunker problems (h/t to Jeff “Inch High” Groves for a reminder about the article above)

72nd scale Aircraft forum

I don’t pimp it enough.  The only forum I go to regularly.  Great group of modelers and some amazing models.  Go there.

New aggressor scheme

An all black scheme like some recent Chinese prototypes.

JAXA doesn’t get enough credit

JAXA (The Japanese Space Agency) doesn’t get enough credit.  They have been doing some great space exploration.  See the latest here.

Speaking of asteroids, NASA has been doing some fine work as well.  (Post in memory of Mike Nofsinger)

First US licensed female pilot

Harriet Quimby, 1911.  Also the first female pilot to fly across the English Channel.

77th Hiko Sentai

It is amazing what you can stumble on when wandering the internet.  The early days of WWII in South East Asia is an area of particular interest.  As such the activities of the 77th Hiko Sentai and their Ki-27 Nates are right in my wheelhouse.  Thus, I was pretty happy when I stumbled on this.

Its not just NASA

The Russians also have problems with waste and deadlines with their space program.  This confirms that while governments still have a significant role to play in space exploration, the development of commercial space programs is a good development. (post in memory of Mike Nofsinger)

Colourcoats paints

I am a huge fan of Colourcoats paints.  They remind me of the old Humbrol paints which I liked a lot, and its not just the packaging.  Here is a web page with PDFs of all the colors in all their different ranges.

Blog thoughts

I’ve been emailing with Jeff “Inch High” Groves on the one year anniversary of the start of his blog.  If you don’t go there every day you are missing a lot.  We’ve been discussing what works and doesn’t work, what gets views and reactions and what doesn’t, etc.  That caused me to do a little looking at the numbers, etc for this blog to see if I can discern any pattern regarding engagement.  Sadly, I can report that I’ve gained little insight from looking at the statistics.  This blog has been going for over 11 years.  The stats don’t really reveal any pattern.  It does look like book and movie reviews are fairly popular posts.  Surprisingly, for a blog on modeling, modeling posts, with actual modeling and photos and such,, don’t seem to draw any more engagement than your average post.

I do note that more posts in a day does seem to draw more traffic, which is natural.  Also, if I go a day or two with out a post traffic falls off quickly and seems to take time to recover.  I’ve started to go back through all the old posts, starting at the beginning to see if there is anything I was doing that maybe I should bring back.  THe one positive thing I’ e noted is that very few of the links in old posts are broken.  (As I am reading the old posts, when I find a broken link I am trying to note it and update the post.)

So, let me know what you like and don’t like.  Let me know what you want to see more of and what you want to see less of.