That is a most impressive and highly detailed work. You must have oceans of patience for having done this. It is amazing.

And thank you for your contributions to the sanity of DU. Your posts are so well-thought out and clearly intelligent as to boggle any lesser mind, including mine!

I hope to read many, many more...

This one did indeed require more than the usual measure of patience and diligence.

It has been quite a while since I joined up here, about eleven and a half years. I still feel like something of a 'new boy' however, since there were so many here already when i signed up.

You know...

Ship in a bottle

Aeroplane in a bottle



In any case, nice job!

Wife did once photo-shop a bottle over one of my models, to make an honest man of me in my jest, but it has been a while since I could find the thing....

Your title gives the impression that it's in a bottle.

No big deal, I was just curious why.

Both the plane and the post count. I'm sure I have only read a fraction of your 80,000, but I've appreciated every one, dear Magistrate. You are the as vital to the core of DU as any Admin.

This is one of the few sites I frequent on the web; I like it a lot.

The 'New Yorker' recently published a lightly fictionalized story depicting it, which was very well written.

The Vimy was employed for a number of record-setting flights shortly after the war: it had an unusual ability to get weight aloft which commended it to the purpose.

The kit I used here was originally meant to replicate Alcock's and Brown's 'Trans-Atlantic Vimy', and a lot of the work I had to put in in correcting the kit owed to this. There were a lot of differences between their aeroplane and a standard service Vimy.

...you get the standard, but wrong, answer.."Lindbergh!"

Even though the first aviators to cross the Atlantic was the US Navy crew of the seaplane NC-4, they did it in stages (it took 19 days), and they had the added benefit of doing it in a seaplane. On the other hand, if A&B's Vimy gave out, they didn't have the luxury of merely setting it down in the North Atlantic and waiting for help. THAT makes their trip that much more impressive.

Died in an attempt to fly the Atlantic just a couple of weeks before Lindbergh's flight.

Congrats on 80,000, sir.

I appreciate your comment very much.

And thank you for contributing so much to this place.

I got the bug to do one of these a long time ago; just something about those naked engines....

DU is a nice place to loiter about, and I expect I have by now become part of the local color.

I really like that forward facing landing skid on the front. Those early aviators were nuts.

And congrats on your post count. You are a valued member of the community.

Those fellows do seem to have had more than a fair share of nerve....

excellent work...

Someday you've got to post the whole collection if you haven't already...

But here are a few others ( all in 1/72 scale )....





These are about as modern as I go: the first is an early B-17, stationed at Pearl Harbor in the summer of 1941; the second is a Seversky 'Convoy Fighter', one of twenty sold in 1938 to the Japanese Navy ( with some great scandal when the knowledge became public ), and operated in China during 1939.



This is a Dewoitine 510, a French fighter sold to the Chinese in 1938; the one depicted is the only example of the type to have shot down an enemy aircraft ( which had on board the chief of Japanese navy bombing aviation, as it happened ).





This is the Breguet AG-4 ( only two were ever made ), used in a flight from Paris on September 2, 1914, during which was detected the first signs of the German Gen. von Kluck's turning to pass east of Paris, which led to the Battle of Marne. The model is scratch-built.



This is perhaps the most colorful: a German Albatross DV, of Jasta 4.



This is the Morane-Saulnier Type N militaire, a prototype, flown by Sgt. Gilbert ( a former test pilot for the company ), in May and June of 1915. It is the first scratch-built model I ever made.

A lot of the old machines that interest me, no one is ever going to put out a kit of.

I do maintain, though, that scratch-building is more a question of nerve than skill; many more modelers are capable of it than can nerve themselves to try it.

Some sculpting with 2 part epoxy to modify some 28mm figures. Once you get familiar with the process its fun and easy. One never knows until one tries.

Flying this, "back in the day", must have been quite an experience.

According to a brief 'Pilot's Notes' printed at the time as advice for aircrew, this one was fairly sedate, which probably accounts for it's long use as a trainer. It was sort of a flying truck, in essence, made for getting a lot of weight into the air and carrying it a good distance at modest speed.

We look forward to another 80K posts from you.

Not sure I will ever manage to double it: about half, I should say, piled up in the Moderator forums....

all blessed to have you here.

That means a lot to me.

Hope to see more . . . perhaps a P-38, or a Corsair??

Glad you like it.

The items you mention are a bit out of my particular interest, which centers on older machines. I may, though, one day, do an F-82: those were just too weird....

Mostly I just dig planes, trains and automobiles!

So . . . which one was your favorite?

A Few Thoughts On Socialism, Since The Matter Has Lately Come Up....


In society, no person has the right to injure others for their personal benefit. Everyone recognizes this in the case of a stick-up artist with a pistol in his hand and a snarl of 'Gimmie yer wallet!" on his lips. But a great many things flow from any serious attempt to apply this principle universally. For at the core of our present economic practices is the blunt statement that ownership conveys the right to do injury to others for one's own gain. Indeed, this is even raised to the status of an imperative, presented as something a person does not just have the right to do, but something a person is right to do, and ought to do, whatever the promptings of personal conscience, or protests by those it is done to, might otherwise dictate. An owner who pays cut-throat wages; an owner who lays off workers to increase a profit margin; an owner who looses poisons on the land; an owner who shirks taxation: all these do real injury to fellow citizens, and do it for their own gain. People who do these things constrict the lives of others, disrupt and unsettle the lives of others, inflict illness and its attendant costs on others, force others to open their pockets further to the tax collector, and they do them for no better or different motive than the stick-up artist: they want more money than they have at present, and no scruple whatever in effecting that desire, whatever the harm done to another in its fulfillment.

The chief difference between the case of the stick-up artist and the grasping owner is not the different style of their methods of aggrandizing themselves at the expense of their fellows. The chief difference in their situations is the attitude of the state in which they operate. The state takes an adversarial relation to the stick-up artist: police hunt them, courts jail them. The state does no such thing with the grasping owner: the state is the grasping owner's friend, it is in very fact the pistol in his hand. It is by means of the state that the owner can effect his injuries to others, and the owner depends on the state for his very existence. For the very fact of ownership, the secure possession of a great deal of valuable property in the face of those with less property, or none at all, requires the power of the state, and the exertion of state power on the owner's behalf. Nothing is more puerile and false than the claim of owners that they arise and exist independently of the state, that they owe it nothing, that the state is even their adversary. Without the armed power of the state, the habit of obedience to the state, and the civil order this maintains, it would not be possible for an owner to act in ways that injure many other citizens, indeed, it would be scarcely possible to main concentrations of ownership such that one individual owned a good deal more than others. Equilibrium would be restored, and maintained, by that simplest tool of mass numbers, the mob.

Capital is simply value in excess of immediate consumption, fixed for storage in some durable form for later use, whether that be something so basic as pile of food or so esoteric as a piece of paper people have agreed to regard as more valuable than some other piece of paper. Humankind has been accumulating surplus value ever since the species commenced its existence, and the piles have gotten rather large. They are essential to any complex society. A great deal of what people in society need done, and want done, does not have any immediate pay-off, whatever it may bring in time. While engaged in such doings, people must still eat, be clothed and sheltered, amuse themselves. That is done out of the accumulated surplus, which is replenished by the proceeds of the ventures they are engaged in when these come to fruition, and produce a value greater than what has been consumed in the course of its production. The accumulations of surplus value are the enablers of complex social orders, the engine which moves social activity, and the augmentation of surplus value is the nearest thing to a collective purpose for a complex social order.

That this surplus value should be regarded as a private possession, and the increase of it wrought by the labor of many go into the purses of those who claim it as a private possession, is hardly necessary to its function in society. Tended by stewards rather than held by owners it would perform exactly the same function, and produce exactly the same benefits, for the society around it. It is undoubtedly true that some people would be better at superintending the employment of a society's surplus value than others; there is no field of human endeavor in which differentials in aptitude and skill cannot be discerned. But a system of private ownership of the accumulations of surplus value no more guarantees it will be in hands best suited to manage it than a system of private 'ownership' of the state (in the forms of autocracy or hereditary monarchy) guarantees the state will be well governed. In any society, it swiftly becomes the case that most who enjoy private ownership of large portions of accumulated surplus do so through inheritance, through accident of birth into a privileged class of owners. "No damned nonsense about merit" attends their position as those who possess, direct, and personally profit from, the accumulated surplus that is the heart of the society they exist within, or their position at the apex of it.

A chief method by which the owners of the accumulated surplus value defend their private possession of it is by blurring the concepts of property in capital goods and property in personal effects. They pretend that to deprive them of ownership of banks and factories and fleets of transport and great tracts of land is to deprive people of their personal possessions, and since the same word, 'property', is employed for both things, it is a fairly simple trick to pull off. They have been helped at times by ill-judged social movements who have in fact engaged in the same blurring from the opposite direction, and regarded a carter possessing a truck or a neighborhood baker possessing an oven as objects for expropriation equally with the owners of a fleet of several thousand trucks, or of a dozen factory ovens turning out millions of loaves and cakes each year. But a moment's reflection will disclose that these things are no more identical than a mouse and an elephant, and that the difference is the degree in which they are able by their possessions to impact the lives of others for good or ill. The small proprietor can do little in either direction, and must look the people he or she directly affects in the face: the great owner can do great good or great harm to great numbers, and to people he or she will never see.

It is perverse to the point of absurdity to attempt to seriously maintain decisions concerning how surplus value is to be deployed ought to be made without any concern for the general effects one use or another will have on the society in which it exists, and the people who comprise that society, and insist instead that the sole concern governing how surplus value is deployed ought to be getting more of it into one individual's pockets, whatever any other consequences might be. Actions which have great public effects are properly the concern of the public, and ought to be directed by the public, as the nearest thing possible to a positive assurance they will be made in the public interest. Once this is grasped, it is clear that the private owner of surplus value, and the aggrandizement of the private owner of surplus value, is an irrelevance, where it is not an active agent of harm. A public stewardship would have incentive to increase the accumulated surplus, for doing so is a public good, that enables a society to do more, and is essential to its growing larger and becoming more prosperous. A public stewardship would have no incentive to do this in a way that harmed large portions of the public, and indeed would be actively discouraged by the public from doing any such thing.

( Posted by The Magistrate in General Discussion Thu Oct 23rd 2008, 02:53 PM )

I originally meant my request as humor, thinking you could never choose a favorite out of 80,000, not without years of research. But that is a good post. I like it that you write in paragraphs, not just sound bites. It demonstrates a depth of thought often lacking in political discussions. Yet there are details in there that really grabbed me.

I only have time to mention one: "the great owner can do great good or great harm to great numbers, and to people he or she will never see." The "never see" part of that got me thinking. Experiments (Stanley Milgram's famous experiments, in particular) show that people find it easier to inflict harm on people at a distance--in another room or behind a barrier of some kind--unseen, remote, more of an abstraction than a real person. Some say it is easier to kill a thousand than to kill just one. If you push a button or issue an order and never personally see the victim, it reduces the feelings of sympathy one would feel if looking the victim in the eye.

And there's my time limit. I have to go make some surplus value for some owner I will never see.

I have squirreled some of my comments here away over the years in the journal function.

When I was a moderator, it was fun to occasionally look up my own file, which contained in the record of deleted posts several masterpieces of invective....

I do a wee bit of the modeling myself. N Scale Narrow Gauge Steam Trains. Wargaming Miniatures, tanks, planes.

This was a Star Wars Stap and Droid kit, some putty and sanding and I turned into a Pharon Battle Tank for a wargame, Vor.






A Trencher Unit for a wargame, Warzone.



A Hydra from the wargame Void.

The figures are 20mm size?

I saw your other pix, very nice work Sir. I stood on the wing of a PT-22 back about 13 years ago, sweet plane. I see you use ground foam on your bases. I've used matte medium to afix sifted sand and dirt and maybe a rock or 2 or even a tree stump, then apply the ground foam. A newer product is static grass, it is superb used with ground foam.

The amount of resin, photo etched etc. up grades for plastic models is stupendous.

I used to work a hobby shop, we did a lot of wargaming. Napoleonic, Am Rev, Am Civil, WW2, sci fi and fantasy wargames. I once made a 22 ft x 4 ft Normandy beach head from pink building insulation foam for a WW2 28mm event. Also Leningrad & Stalingrad.

I do not know much about table-top gaming. I have seen some excellent modeling associated with it, though. With aircraft, I expect there are types you could make completely from after-market parts, without a 'kit' at all. There is even some stuff for the kind of 'classic years' subjects and old kits I favor, nowadays.

The bases are actually plastic sheet, which is given a coating of epoxy to give it some depth. I then cover it with colored grout, sprinkled over dilute white glue. My local hobby shop is pretty general purpose, and has a large doll-house section, in which I found small packets of this stuff in various colors, including many greys and browns quite suitable for earth colors. The powder is very fine, practically aerosol in quality, so it gives a good texture for the small scale. No more than a about teaspoonful is required. I use Woodland Scenics static grass in various mixed tones over this. Sometimes I will toss in a bit of sand or earth or a few pebbles. For snow I use baking soda ( not powder ):



( a Polikarpov I-15bis on the Leningrad front, early in 1942 )

28mm is close to I/72nd. I made a shot up crash landed Stukka, based on plexi glass, with all those materials. For a Wargame scenario called "Saving Pilot Brian".

Wife still regards me as a refugee from the Bronze Age....

Fixed it for you.

That is museum/gallery-quality work. I only can wish that I could see it in person, close-up.

If I may ask, how many hours do you think went into this masterpiece?

Sometimes, Sir, a mere "WOW!" can suffice.
DBH

The camera is kind, I find. I assure you I can find all sorts of flaws in these, and am firmly of the 'my best is my next' school.

I do not keep time sheets, of course, but I would guess there are about a hundred hours, over about three months, put into the Vimy. Twenty to twenty-five would be, I suspect, about normal for a single-engined machine

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Due to financial issues, I haven't been around much

That changed for the better a week ago

I'll be around more often now

heck - I checked my own profile

I've been with DU for ten years

still like y'all

nice plane - I used to do model cars in my youth

- when I get settled, I might rekindle that hobby

Good to see you back.

I did this as a kid myself, and took it up again after getting some adverse health news. I find it relaxing, at least usually....

I do not believe for one moment that you have assembled this 'scale model' with such fanatical attention paid to both historical accuracy and detail!





I do believe, however, that you have either designed and built or acquired through nefarious means both a time-travel device and miniaturization ray, and have produced as your own work an actual aeroplane stolen from the RAF.














I half expect that you have in your posession both a miniature flight and ground crew, cruelly imprisoned.

Think of the effects on the stock markets....

But it is common knowledge on the better modeling forums that people construct pencils the size of telephone poles, dimes the size of coffee tables, and similar contrivances, to conceal the true nature of the things they photograph and post up for perusal.

Great looking plane!

This gives me scant opportunity to indulge. These are static display models. Those who do flying models seldom talk about the joys of surface preparation, though we all know what they are. I have often wondered if the stuff got its name from the effect of the fumes on people who had been brushing it on a couple dozen square yards of linen in a shed for several hours....

Just don't use it near a pilot light...

The English routine for the 'silver wings' finish was several coats of a dope pigmented mostly with iron oxide powder, followed by several coats of a dope pigmented with aluminum powder, so the machines were essentially coated with thermite....

Sunlight rots fabric, and heat ages and warps wooden structures. Fire in any degree meant a write-off, so if it went up like firework when it did go, it made little difference.

Fires were mostly tripped off in flight by the gasoline supply, and in most designs still, the pilot sat on, or leaned against, or stared straight ahead at, a fuel tank. In the Vimy, he leaned back against a very large container of gasoline.

Safety concerns, at least as they are understood nowadays, hardly existed back then as factors in design. It was expected to be a damned dangerous thing to do.

Your posts always are interesting, entertaining, challenging and often charming.

DU is richer for your presence and your comments.

Thank you for being there.

Oh, and the model is fascinating. Any chances it can traverse some feet in an open space?

I expect it could, but not laterally, shall we say. These are static pieces; they can be dropped ( and one or two have been ), but not flown. The worst 'wrecks' I have had were things placed or dropped on top of models: in one instance, a bag of lollipops placed atop one by a child who shall remain nameless, in another, I tipped a large bottle of school glue over onto a scratch-built model when it was literally a few moments from completion ( I still look wistfully at the pieces of that one on occasion, and think of putting it back together again... ).

I've always been fascinated by those old biplane bombers (and early airliners)! There's a sort of Jules Verne ambience to them.

I do want to express my appreciation for all of your posts that I've read. You've always been a voice of reason and civility. That's especially appreciated in these recent years when Democratic Underground threads seem more like a barroom brawl than a civilized discussion.

There is something about those types in that period, I agree.

The Vimy was the basis for one of the early airlines, known as the Vimy Commercial. The largest contract was from the Republic of China, for some four dozen. Here are a couple of photographs of the Chinese lot:

I saw your planes and it made me think of this

I came accross this in the St Paul paper this week. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did

The flight of Old 666
http://voxvocispublicus.homestead.com/morrow.html

I will look at that when I get the opportunity; at present I am on an old machine and the browser cannot handle that.

Thank you.

I don't think I shall ever be able to celebrate my 80,000th post, as my comments are fairly few and far between. I do, however, enjoy listening and learning from the many people I have had the honor of knowing here on Democratic Underground. I do esteem you Sir, and thank you for sharing your love of model making and history with us.

I appreciate your kind words.

Common sense is in such short supply.

Carry on, Sir, to your 100,000th post!

One hundred thousand is a nice round number....

Here is the first one I completed this year:





A Curtiss F11-2 of VF-1B, assigned to the U.S.S. Saratoga in July, 1933.