Posts Tagged ‘military’

Halloween Horrors: Mysterious Dark Atlantic Mass Eats a Torpedo

Wednesday, October 30th, 2019

Have you ever heard of the cryptid known as the Lusca?

The Lusca has been described in varying ways. Some cryptozoologists have suggested it is merely a giant octopus that has been misidentified. Many others have described the Lusca as a half-shark, half-octopus hybrid monster.

It has razor-sharp teeth and multi-suckered tentacles. It sometimes has many of the same characteristics as a colossal octopus, but has also been described at different times as having multiple heads, dragon-like features, or even appearing as a vaguely described evil spirit.

Some eyewitnesses have described the Lusca as appearing like a squid-eel hybrid, rather than the shark-octopus combination.

The Lusca is said to be over 75 feet long, possibly growing as large as 200 feet in some cases. It can change colors, much like some smaller species of octopus. Its habitat is rugged underwater terrain, large underwater caves, the edge of the continental, or other areas where large crustaceans are found, as this is assumed to be its food source.

It’s said to inhabit “blue holes,” deep blue pits in the ocean floor, especially in the Caribbean.

Which brings us to this story, relayed second-hand by a guest of Joe Rogan’s:

Back in the ‘90s, this pilot’s job was to fetch BQM aerial target drones and submarine telemetry torpedoes from the ocean. At the time, the pilot was flying a CH-53—“a big, heavy-lifter the Marine Corps uses for certain things,” Fravor told Rogan. “Off the East Coast they do a lot of shooting, at the time it was off Puerto Rico.”

“The helo drops a swimmer in the water, he hooks the whole thing up and they fly back,” Fravor said. “The first time they were out and they were going to pick up a BQM, he’s sitting in the front—in the CH-53 you can see down by your feet—and as he’s looking down, they’re 50 feet (15 metres) above the water, he sees this kind of dark mass coming up from the depths.”

As the pilot picked up the BQM, he was apparently at a loss for words. “He’s looking at this thing going, ‘What the hell is that?’ And then it just goes back down underwater. Once they pull the kid and the BQM out of the water, this object descends back into the depths.”

One dark mass coming up from the depths is weird enough. Two is officially cause for concern. A few months later, the helicopter pilot saw the exact same thing.

“He’s out picking up a torpedo, they hook the diver up on the winch, and as they’re lowering him down, he sees this big mass. He goes, ‘It’s not a submarine’. He’s seen submarines before. Once you’ve seen a submarine you can’t confuse it with something else. This big object, kind of circular, is coming up from the depths and he starts screaming through the intercom system to tell them to pull the diver up, and the diver’s only a few feet from the water.

“They reverse the winch and the diver’s thinking, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all of a sudden he said the torpedo just got sucked down underwater, and the object just descended back down into the depths. They never recovered it.”

Some people are obviously going to think of UFOs, but I thought of the Lusca…

Pictures from the Bovington Tank Museum: German Tanks

Tuesday, August 12th, 2014

(Cross-posted from BattleSwarm to here for non-political tank buffs.)

I hope you like tanks.

Here’s the first batch of pictures taken at the Bovington Tank Museum in Dorset, which I visited on Saturday as a gift to my inner 12-year old. (There are few prospects more pleasing to the preadolescent male mind than being encased in a 30 ton metal killing machine.) The first batch is all German tanks and tank destroyers from World War II. Let’s face it, the Germans had far and away the best tanks, and shortly after the allies managed to catch up, Germany would be about ready to introduce something better. Germany’s problem (as compared to America or the Soviet Union) was an inability to manufacture enough of them. (Good thing for us.) They had an enormous array of German tanks, and probably the best collection outside Germany’s own tank museum in Munster.

The first picture of the first of two King Tigers (AKA Tiger II, AKA Königstiger, Panzerkampfwagen Tiger Ausf. B) they had on display. The most powerful tank Germany produced during the war, its 88mm main gun could destroy any tank on the battlefield. It didn’t get on the battlefield until 1944, and Germany produced less than 500 of them.

The other Tiger II they had there.

Here you can see the Zimmerite anti-magnetic mine coating the Germans used.

Selfie, with tank.

The first of several tank destroyers.

This is a German tank destroyer that ended up in Finland. Stalin thought he could walk all over Finand, but the Finns tore the Soviets nine different new assholes in the Winter War, though this tank destroyer obviously post-dates 1940.

Alternate barrel used for the Sturmtiger close assault variant.

Here’s an early Panzer Mark I command tank. It’s amazing to realize that the initial German blitzkrieg was carried out with relatively slow, under-armed, and underpowered Mark I and Mark IIs, that, with Heinz Guderian’s new tactics of mechanized warfare, were simply Good Enough.

A Mark II.

I think this is the Mark III, would would be the mainstay of the Wehrmacht armored divisions through the end of the war.

A muzzle-eye view.

Armoured car.

An 88mm field canon.

How To Kill Godzilla

Friday, May 16th, 2014

Via Ace of Spades, comes War is Boring’s primer on how to kill Godzilla.

The basic plan is:

  • Blind it with multiple gunships unloading white phosphorous into its eyes.
  • Hit it with a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a “30,000-pound, precision-guided bunker-buster…filled with a deadly RDX explosive mix and designed to slice through solid rock.”
  • That would probably work in real life (where the square/cube law pretty much precludes 10-story monsters, much less ones breathing atomic fire). But in the world of the just released Godzilla movie (which, alas, I have not seen yet), given that our fire-breathing friend is reported to have survived Castle Bravo, America’s first dry-fuel thermonuclear bomb test on Bikini Atoll, well, color me skeptical that 30,000 pound JDAMs would do the trick…