Titans in the Desert

On the advice of a friend, I visited the Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, AZ, about a half hour south of Tucson, this weekend.  Rather than taking the basic tour, I did the extended 'Beyond the Blast Doors' tour for an extra few bucks.  It was well worth it!  This tour only runs on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month and is supposed to be an hour and a half long.  It turned out to last about two hours and fifteen minutes, and was followed up by a small "class" on the development of missiles from sometime in the past until the present.  This tour takes you through the command center, the crew quarters, down to the bottom of the silo and then up to the top.

Most of the tours have actual former Titan crew members giving them and the amount of information these guys possess - and pass on to you, the tourist - is incredible!  It was a lot of fun, the guides are - as noted - extremely knowledgeable, and extremely personable.  One of our guides was Bob, a former launch commander.  So let's begin out tour:

The outer blast door - 35 feet below ground level - weighs

in at three tons and hasn't sagged a millimeter in 50 years.

 Oops!  Just launched one in the general direction of Russia! 

They talked through the launch process and what it took to

send a missile on its way.

 

 

 The crew quarters and command suite are actually suspended inside a

concrete dome.  At the top is the 'hook' holding the complex to the

dome and at bottom is one of eight springs that supports it.  In an

earthquake in California, the launch facility at Vandenburgh AFB

didn't feel a thing!



While the springs support the weight and minimize vertical

movement, this doo-hickey minimizes horizontal movement.

 

The accommodations aren't much beyond four bunks

and a kitchen.  Very little cooking was done because

everything had to be cleaned to the satisfaction of the

relief crew.  They basically lived on Twinkies and Coke

when on duty.  When females were put on the launch crews

in the late 1970s, the Air Force - in its infinite consideration

for its personnel - provided a modesty screen for the bunk room!

The cableway connecting the command suite to the silo.

I think it was a hundred or so feet - could be more.

And there she is in all her glory!  From the bottom of the silo.

You can see the silo door is half open at the top of the picture.

 

The blast well, which channeled the exhaust, steam (thousands

of gallons of water were dumped on the missile during lift off

in order to dampen the sound and vibration and converted to steam

by the heat of the exhaust), and noxious gases to the surface.

And the business end, looking through the open silo

door - visible at the top right of the picture.  To give

you some sense of proportion the missile is 103 feet

from tip to tail and 10 feet in diameter, although the

engines were removed and on display elsewhere at the site.

Just a side note, although you can't get a sense of the size

of the silo door from these photos, it weighed 760 tons.  It

was claimed that a nuke could strike within a mile of these

complexes and they could still survive to do their duty.



Although these look like John Glenn spacesuits, they are

actually special suits used to handle the fuel, which was

extremely corrosive. 

Nothing like surviving another day without mutually assured

destruction, only to get bit by a rattlesnake in the access gangway!

 

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour of the facility.  If you're ever in southern Arizona, it's well worth the detour to see it.  For more information, please see the Titan Missile Museum's official website here.  Thank you for visiting!

A Small Air Combat Memorial Park

I found these pics in my files and thought I'd better put them up before I forget about them.  This is a small air park just outside Clay National Guard Center in Marietta, GA, which used to be a Naval Air Station.  I wasn't able to get a pic of the B-29 on the Air National Guard side of the base, but these make up for it somewhat.  What caught my eye driving by was the S-3 Viking, for a long time my son's favorite plane.  When I actually stopped to look, I realized they had aircraft representative of a carrier air wing.  So here we go:

Pretty neat stuff.  They had a small variety of other aircraft, Army and Air Force, but these were by far the more interesting.

A Few Ships on Commission

NOTE: This post is actually several months old.  Because of changes in my computer system and the geniuses at Microsoft, I haven't been able to post using my normal browser and have to use another one to access my blogs and post pics to them.

I've been really lazy about posting for the last several months.  The boy and I have been playing a lot more lately - his latest craze, actually, is chess.  He asked me to teach him about a few months ago and we've played several games since, not including several more games that he played against the computer. 

What I have to offer here, though, is a handful of 1/6000 ships that I painted on commission.  I wanted to try painting authentic camouflage on them and asked the owner if he minded if I played around with them.  Nope, play away, he said.  So I did. 

First up is the Arizona in pre-war camo and the Pennsylvania in the blue on blue camo she wore from '42 through '45.

Next there are two Japanese behemoths and some early carriers.  Not much camo on them, though.

Finally, we have the creme de la creme!  Here are the Chiyoda and the Chitose in their '44/'45 camo schemes as well as I could portray them in 1/6000!  They took a while, but I thought they turned out very nice!  

Hope you enjoy them!  I'm actually jealous - wish I had painted my own ships in this way.

New Year's Eve, 2013

We usually try to set New Year's Eve/Day aside to hang out and play games with the kids.  While they were watching a movie, I got one of my favorite games out and reread the rules, then cut up some cheese and sausage to have with crackers while playing.  I got a Dubliner, a mild Gruyere and a Gouda, along with some summer sausage and a mild salami (the girl doesn't like strong flavors - in the end, she didn't like the cheeses except for the Gouda).  I really liked the Dubliner and the Gruyere - can't remember having had them before, surprisingly.  The Gruyere, if I recall correctly, had a very milky flavor, while the Dubliner was more of a buttery flavor.  Both were hard cheeses, which was a nice contrast to what we usually have around the house. 

Anyway, enough of that.  I haven't played Formula De for at least thirteen years, but figured the boy was finally old enough to give it a shot and I've had a hankering to play it for a while now.  We used Zandvoort No. 1 from the Netherlands. 



In the picture above you can see me in the red car and mom in the white car with the red fin running neck and neck on the straightaway in the middle of the photo, with two turns to go before the long straightaway to the finish line.  Unfortunately, for the girlie, mom caught on pretty quickly and the boy got some expert advice from dad after struggling through most of the game, so she ended up in last place while dad won the first race.  The boy gets the concept of the gears, but not enough to plan what gear he should be in a turn or two in advance to safely corner so he tends to get some amusing results when moving. 

This morning, I was trying to get some job applications done so mom played a game on Zandvoort No. 1 again with the kids.  Julia showed what she was made of, beating mom and her brother.  The boy still wasn't done, though.  We played another game (minus J who was raced out by that point) on Monaco.  I won again, but mom stalled at the start and so was basically a turn behind the whole game anyway, while Adam had some trouble negotiating the curves. 

And speaking of New Year's Day, the traditional New Year's Day pizza turned out impeccably this afternoon.

I think this was the best one I've ever made.

Happy New Year, my friends!