kiseca
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Posts posted by kiseca
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Experience is what you gain just after you needed it.
Experience is a terrible teacher. It gives you the test before it gives you the lesson.
I probably read both of those scribbled on a bathroom wall somewhere.
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23 hours ago, Graham T said:
Blimey. I always think of this as quite a modern jet but seems not!
Me too. Last I read about them was some concept drawings and a writeup of their anticipated potential in a 1980s Bill Gunston book about future warplanes. Now they've had a whole career, come and gone. I've been stuck in a timewarp because I stopped buying aircraft books in around 1990.
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I see a lot of people in karts try to steer with their upper bodies instead of with their arms. They lean right over with their head and upper body and end up hanging on to the wheel instead of turning it. Come to think of it, I see lots of people doing this in cars, too.
It restricts how much lock they can apply and makes them feel like they are running out of response from the front end when they actually have plenty left. It looks like this chap might be trying something like that. If he'd just turn the wheel a bit more the kart will go where he wants it to. The things is, I can't tell what he's looking at! It looks like he's staring at the apex even as he's passing it (some distance away)
P.S. I was hopeless my first time in a kart. I set the record for the slowest ever lap that didn't include a crash.
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Some cars full of character already mentioned, and I think that makes them memorable. The Capris, the original Ford Focus previously mentioned, I can see the attraction. The Mazda MX6 - I've never driven one but my dad had a Ford Telstar, which was basically a rebadged Mazda 626 (last gen before it became the Mazda 6) with the same 2.5 V6 that the MX6 had... and the engine was superb. So smooth!
My car I still wish I had is easy. A 1980 Alfetta GTV. It was red, one of the last of the chrome bumper ones before the facelifted GTV was released and the GTV6 added. Being a GTV, mine was a 2 litre engine, twin cams and two twin choke Weber 40DCOE carbs.
Mine was in South Africa and had the split dash, with the rev counter in front of the driver and the speedo in the middle of the car. UK cars had those two gauges swapped over. Mine also had the 1980s standard wooden wheel and gearlever knob that was equipped on pretty much all Alfas for the next 5 - 6 years.
Nothing I've had since drove like that car. The unassisted steering was direct for the time, particularly around the straight ahead at a time when most cars had a dead zone in the steering about 5 - 10 degrees either side of straight ahead. The brakes needed a push but were really powerful and resisted lock. The grip, particularly at the front, was strong for the era. The balance was really good, and adjustable. The gearchange quality was terrible. I drove quite a few Alfetta variations from that era and no two of them had a gearshift quality that felt the same, but they all had the common factor that the shift was terrible. It was just a case of what way made this particular car's shift terrible
It was 10 years old when I got it and is the most unreliable car I've ever run. It was in South Africa, up in the old Transvaal, so didn't rust, but electrics were awful, the 2nd gear synchro was weak, the rubber doughnuts holding the two piece propshaft (always turning at engine speed) together would wear out, and bits of trim would regularly fall off. One day I opened the driver's door. The door opened but I couldn't get in the car because the door card had stayed behind...
Despite all that, best car I've ever owned. Nothing ever felt so alive, so communicative, so enthusiastic, so different. Every time I drove it, no matter what speed I was going, it always reminded me it wasn't an ordinary car, whether it was the talkative, quick responding steering, the floppy gearchange, the heavy clutch and brakes, the windscreen that started above my knees and ended just in front of my forehead.... it defined how drivers cars should feel for me, and taught me so much about driving, too.
Honorable mention goes to a Jaguar XE I ran for two years. It was a 25T - 4 cylinder petrol with 240bhp. I think the XEs are hugely underrated. The infotainment system isn't particularly slick but the Meridian sound system sounded superb. It had the best ride of any car I've run. It felt like that's where most of the development budget had gone. It was comfortable on a trip to Paris, quick enough, and to me felt more special than the midrange BMW 3 series it competed with. It also rode and handled much better. As an all rounder family car, I think it's better than the current Giulia, if not quite as engaging to drive.
Worst car wasn't one I owned, though I've owned a few stinkers. That GTV of mine, I said it wasn't the most reliable, in fact, and partly due to my own budget restraints, I estimate that for about 33% of the time I owned it, it wasn't running. In those periods I'd borrow one of my parents cars, and the worst by miles was my mum's 1980s Passat, um, GLX I think. It had a 2.3 litre Audi 5 cylinder with a carb on top. The engine was the only decent part of it. It floated, it understeered, it was reluctant to do anything with any enthusiasm. It had a lot of room, and it had a reasonable turn of pace. But I hated it. It had absolutely no cool factor, and no redeeming qualities from behind the wheel either. It was reliable, but I saw that more as a curse than a blessing.
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29 minutes ago, PLC1966 said:
Ooops, one I forgot about was I saw Tom Jones in Ballys in Vegas when on Red Flag back end Nov88. First half of the concert was with an orchestra, second half was with a Rock ensemble, and then the encore was with both lots of musicians. The audience were sat around tables ordering drinks and food. He introduced Fleetwood Mac to the audience, they were sat on a table two down three to the right of us. There were eight or ten of us Brits jamming down cocktails at a rate of knots. All very surreal, but to be fair to the fella he could sing, it was a great concert.
He has a hell of a voice. I heard his phone broke and it was 3 months before either he or anyone he called noticed.
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For biographies, Paul Brickhill's Reach For The Sky, about Douglas Bader, is a favourite of mine, even though I've heard some parts may be embellished or inaccurate. I still think it is a great read.
Not many others have stood out for me. Johnnie Johnson's Wing Leader was quite good, and I also quite enjoyed Mandy Hickson's An Officer, Not a Gentleman, about her experiences moving through pilot training and her career in a Tornado cockpit.
Stretching the theme of Aviation a little, Michael Collins (the third guy on Apollo 11) wrote an autobiography called Carrying The Fire. It is well written and he has a good sense of humour, and continuing on the space theme and stretching the definition of a biography somewhat, Stephen Walker's Beyond is a superbly written book about the early Soviet space program and Yuri Gagarin's first flight into space.
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The sign reads "Danger. Any aircraft left in this zone will be cancelled."
As for the health and safety, Darwinism in an environment like this doesn't remove stupid people, it removes ordinary people who make one stupid mistake. Or removes the ordinary person standing near the one who made the stupid mistake. Also, the longer you work in that environment, the more opportunities you give yourself to make that one, stupid mistake. And nobody's perfect.
The high viz and cones and crap are there because just saying to yourself "be more careful" doesn't actually change anything. You have to change how you're doing something in order for it to be more carefully done.
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Best:
1) Def Leppard's Hysteria concert at Wembley Arena, maybe 5 years ago? They didn't sound like a bunch of retirement age grandads at all. They were active, lively, and Elliot's voice was in top form. I can't imagine they'd have sounded any better back in the 1980s.
2) Bon Jovi put on a top, pro show at Ellis Park in the early 1990s too. I've never been a big fan of them but full credit to them, they made sure the audience got a top class performance for their money.
3) Within Temptation at Wembley Arena. Some time in the 2010s. Very moving live performance, the band were super tight and the vocals were soul stirring. I thought they really did translate well to a live performance.
Worst performances:
1) Whitesnake at Wembley Arena, maybe 2015. The sound was awful. David Coverdale's voice was shot. And the only reason I realised it was Tommy Aldridge on drums is because he played just about the exact same drum solo that he did in 1981/2 on Ozzy Osbourne's live album "Tribute", just after Ozzy says "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Tommy Aldridge on drums."
2) The Cranberries, north Johannesburg in the late 1990s. I think the venue was called the Mnet arena or something. The performance wasn't really bad, it was just... tepid. Dolores choked the notes on her guitar riff in Zombie, too. Impressive to see two Parker Flys on stage at the same time, though.
3) Lenny Kravitz, Ellis Park. Late 1990s. I walked out at what felt like 30 minutes into a saxophone solo. Earlier on, The Cult had rocked the place. So the concert on the whole wasn't bad, just Lenny.
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The photos are fantastic and thank you for sharing them. The topic's title had me seaching my brain for jokes about how much faster jets in grease would be.
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4 hours ago, Farmer matt said:
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Rattlesnakes.
I was generally in to heavy rock as a teenager, but had a bit of an indie phase too. Saw them at Hammersmith Odeon, me and my mate had our denims with ACDC patches and studs, amongst all these arty student types.
Matt
I still really like My Bag, but had never heard anything else from Lloyd Cole apart from Perfect Skin. My Bag is on one of my playlists and after it popped up a few months back I searched on Youtube for Lloyd Cole and watched some of his live stuff. Very laid back delivery.
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Those smooth, asymmetrical Gallentian ships 😄.
You're a lot more experience than I am then! I started in late 2007, got involved with the two racing organisations that were operating around those years. One group did frigste racing across low sec systems - had to visit each system and retrieve a bookmark from a secure can. The bookmark gave the next waypoint. The other group anchored a bunch of secure cans in an arrangement that formed a circuit, all in a single system. We'd race around the cans in T1 ships.
Took a break around 2010 / 2011 and tried to get back in around 2020 but I didn't have a good enough computer. Then they started Eve Anywhere and I got back in with that, played for about 6 months, also joined the Excel beta testing but didn't finish it as they canned Anywhere and that was me screwed. I'd tried Geforce Now but I got too many issues on that too. So, now waiting for an Eve computer, which may take a while because Gran Turismo 7 with VR looks very good so my entertainment fund may well go to a Playstation and goggles instead 😆
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Yeah, sorry, I wrote and posted my reply, then re-read your post and only then saw that you had already addressed the quality of the transparent fuselage. I didn't do a great job of reading your post the first time around 😅
As for skillset, I look at nearly all the builds on here and think "I can't do that" but every time I try something different, it works out fine. Well, usually... if you want to do it with the open side, I'd say go ahead, go one step at a time and it will very likely turn out very nicely. If you don't think you're ready for it, no harm in leaving it in the stash until a few more kits get your confidence in. I got back into modelling to build just one kit. It's still in my stash, I don't have the confidence to take it on yet.
I think TV / film is a great area to specialise in though it is relatively limited in what is available for comventional kits. There is a huge 3D modelled and vacformed market though. I'd love to make a few models of game spaceships from Elite Dangerous or Eve Online. When my application to the SAAF failed, my flying passion went on to the microchip, basically.
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I considered using the transparent fuselage halves and leaving an unpainted "hole" to show Dom's station. I didn't do it but I think it's possible.
The reasons I didn't do it:
1) The structure of Dom's station has three interior walls and an interior roof. I'd have to leave one of the walls out, or chop most of it away, and that would leave the rest of the structure unstable so that would need to be braced somehow.
2) I was doing a lot of sanding work around the area just behind the door to alter the detail, and I felt it would be easy enough to make my work smooth enough to hide under paint, but any sanding marks I left on a section I wanted to keep clear would need a lot of careful polishing to make presentable and I thought it was an opportunity for me to screw it up.
3) the transparent parts themselves aren't that smooth, so it would either be like looking at Dom through a frosted bathroom window, or lots of careful polishing of the fuselage side (and not a flat section, either...) would be needed to give a view of Dom that is clear and reasonably undistorted. I don't think lighting the area would make him clearer, but it's easy to test.
For me, each or those points were potentially model breaking if I got them wrong. I could create an issue that I couldn't live with, and couldn't fix. At my skill level I chose not to take that risk. You might consider it worthwhile or lower risk.
The light I got from Small Scale Lights was perfect for me. Simple to install and it's still working fine now. One thing I'd say is I view Dom's station from the front - through the front windscreens and the door windows. There's an interior wall behind String that forms the partial front wall of Dom's room. It was easy to mount my light behind that wall so that Dom was illuminated and not in shadow from my frontal viewing angle, yet the bulb is completely hidden from view. The bulb is also inside Dom's room, which is completely enclosed in the fuselage, so for me it was easy to prevent light leakage.
It might be harder to hide the light itself if illuminating Dom for a side view through the fuselage side. I can't think of anything to put it behind unless you do something clever with the fuselage paintwork. Also light leakage might need more work to control.
It's a great kit, I hope I get to see your build on BM at some point!
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I am certainly biased to music from my generational youth. I think it can stretch a few years before that, depending on what your parents listened to.
I'm an '80s teenager so most of my favourite and classic albums come from then. I was very into synth bands but from my older brother I picked up a lot of slightly earlier rock and hard rock, and from my dad I got the Moody Blues and The Byrds. At some point I discovered The Doors (People are Strange got played on the radio one night and I was hooked). By the time I was 20 rap and hip hop were getting popular and it already felt next generation to me. I never got into it. Anything I enjoy from the '90s on to today was old fashioned even when it was new.
It is becoming rarer and rarer that I discover good, modern, rock albums now. I come across the occasional artist or band that I pick up on but that becomes increasingly rare too.
There's nothing wrong with modern music. It just doesn't sound like the stuff that I grew up and formed bonds with. I'm sure my parents felt the same about my music.
My daughter though listens to a lot of '80s stuff as well as modern stuff, which surprises me a bit.
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I'd also add Radiohead's OK Computer, which they say is not a concept album, but maybe has the cheat that it sounds, or flows, very much like a concept album and so it's hard to describe any individual track on it as filler.
Or perhaps the counterpoint is that the whole concept album could be described as filler
EDIT: Oh, oh, and as compilations are on the board, I'd add This Is The Moody Blues!
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Oh yeah, Automatic for the People is a good shout!
I remember my brother one day, having discovered a liking for REM quite late in the day (well after Monster) asked me which album he should buy. This was still back in the day when if you wanted music you had to go and buy it, you didn't have the band's whole catalogue sitting waiting on Spotify.
Automatic for the People wasn't my favourite REM album, or at least it didn't have my favourite REM songs, but that's the one I recommended as the album he had the most chance of enjoying because every track is good, and accessible.
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Def Leppard's Hysteria was designed to be all killer no filler. The question which kicked off the album's concept was "What if instead of writing a hit song for an album, we write every song as a hit song?" Personally I think they did very well.
Others I'd add from same era and similar genres are
Guns n Roses - Appetite for Destruction
Metallica - Master of Puppets.
I'd add Depeche Mode too, with Some Great Reward as a personal favourite and Violator as a more generally accepted option.
Simple Minds - Once Upon a Time: To me every track is a stadium anthem.
And Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
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It wasn't great. Jeremy Clarkson's piece on that same year was more accurate and more entertaining.
Can't say I thought much of the recent movies about Ferruccio Lamborghini and Enzo Ferrari either. I hope they keep making these but I also hope the quality of the writing improves. A lot. They are getting decent actors.
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Huh, it's blue! I always thought it was black
Every day's a school day.
Very nice build, one of Formula 1's better looking colour schemes in my opinion. Jodi Sheckter was recently interviewed by Ben Collins (The Second Stig) when he put all his racing cars up for auction. I don't know why he's selling them. This Wolf was featured (and I still didn't realise it was dark blue 😂)
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Pioneers indeed! I do wonder how many of them were disappointed in their later years to see how little progress had been made in human space exploration after all they had risked and sacrificed to open the space age.
Back in the 1970s they must have been thinking we'd have an occupied moon base and that humans would have visited Mars by now.
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That looks superb! I particularly like the first shots where it's flaring and about to touch down. Beautiful build and a great idea! I don't think I've seen an in-flight presentation of that moment before.
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13 minutes ago, alt-92 said:
The suggestion seems to be that .303s can't possibly down a He.111....
Nobody has said that nor suggested that.
The question that was posed when the "riddled with holes and returned" survivors was brought out is whether that aircraft would still have made it back if its attacker was armed with cannons instead of machine guns.
Of course it would be equally reasonable to ask if any of those that were shot down would have actually made it home had their attackers been armed with cannons instead of machine guns.
Anyway, apologies, I don't want to engage in a prolonged internet discussion on this, I just feel that survivor bias is not at play in this instance. If you disagree still, fair play to you and please have a virtual beer on me. It's not important either way.
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Just now, alt-92 said:
The point being nobody asks those questions about a bomber that was equally riddled with holes but did not make it back.
No, the point is whether an aircraft could survive being hit by a full compliment of .303 bullets (evidenced by those that did return), but could not survive being hit by a full compliment of cannon shells.
We already know that plenty of aircraft were shot down by .303 bullets.
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20 hours ago, alt-92 said:
Again.
The ones that do not make it 'home' you will not read or hear about.
Survivorship bias.I wouldn't dismiss that as survivor bias unless we were also talking about all those aircraft that came home riddled with .50 and cannon shell holes.
If you can empty all eight guns into a bomber and it still flies home and fights again another day, then your guns have been ineffective on that occasion. If such occasions are common, you probably need a harder hitting weapon. That's the point being made.
Sure, aircraft survived cannon and 50 cal hits too, but riddled with them? Not so much.
Ultimately it boils down to how effective your weapon is at 1) knocking down the opposing aircraft when you get hits, 2) getting enough hits on target, 3) carrying enough ammo to, on average, knock down the largest percentage of aircraft.
You might need half your .303 ammo to shoot one bomber down, but that gives you enough to shoot down two. You might hit with 50% of your .303 rounds but only 30% of your cannon rounds. You might only need two or three cannon round hits (in biographies it often seems one was often enough) to disable your opponent, but that, combined with the lower hit rate and reduced number of rounds you can carry because they are larger and heavier, might mean you can only carry enough ammo for 1.5 kills on average.
In that hypothetical case, your airforce would get more kills with machine guns than cannon. I believe the reality was the other way around though. Overall, cannons (and 50 cal) were more effective despite their disadvantages, because the harder punch more than compensated.
Nothing to do with survivor bias, which is when you say something like, as a kid I rode in the load bed of a pickup truck and didn't die, therefore it wasn't dangerous. None of the kids who did die while riding in the load beds of pickups are in any condition to rebuke that statement.
On the other hand, if you notice that your aircraft often return riddled with .303 sized holes, but rarely return riddled with cannon holes, it is reasonable to entertain and research the idea that the ones that meet cannon fire are less likely to survive the encounter.
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Questions about Rammstein the Band ?
in Chat
Posted · Edited by kiseca
I think the original topic has been well answered by others more knowledgeable than me, but getting back to these points, yes, Ozzy did bite the head off a bat
I can't remember why exactly, but the audience got into the habit of throwing toys on stage. Someone threw a real, dead bat on stage, Ozzy thought it was a rubber toy until he bit it, and had to suffer rabies injections thereafter.
I can't remember if this was before or after the bat incident, but at one point he was with Sharon, pitching to CBS executives I think, in one of their meeting rooms. He was very drunk. He had some doves hidden under his top. Sharon had the idea that he'd release them into the room at some point, like a magician, I suppose. Sounds like a terrible idea, but then instead of releasing them, Ozzy took one out and bit its head off.
I've ignored all your other examples because I agree with the point you were making. So much of the rumours going around about these bands, especially in the 1980s, were utter rubbish. AC/DC stands for anti-christ / devil's child (not), play records backwards to get hidden satanic messages (rubbish, half of them were so out to lunch they struggled to successfully make sense played forwards, and if they could figure out how to add subliminal messages backwards, they'd have been saying "buy more of our records"). Ozzy was at one point accused of singing "I tell you to end your life" on Paranoid when he was in court being sued for encouraging a teenager's suicide (the focus being around his song "Suicide Solution"). The actual lyric in Paranoid is "I tell you to enjoy life", which fits with the follow up lyric ("I wish I could but it's too late"). Heck, in the 1980s I even heard some anti-rock music minister arguing that Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" was satanic.
So, just sharing Ozzy's stories as anecdotal because even in the bizarre world of 1980s rock stars, alcohol and drugs, Ozzy was a uniquely crazy person when he was drunk. He lost all of his limits.
And yeah, every time I hear "Born in the USA" (chorus only) being played as a kind of Proud to be American anthem, I do have a quiet laugh. "Fortunate Son" I think was sometimes similarly misunderstood, though I think more people clicked in to what it was about. Often when played in a Vietnam movie, it's supporting exactly the people that the song was written about. Those stuck in the war with no idea why they're there. Maybe sometimes it's me misunderstanding what Proud to be American is, warts and all. Embracing the imperfections because nobody's perfect. I dunno.