More plumberiness

Wide ducts

I continued assembling the busier end of the cannon. Below the barrel itself a three-cylinder recoil handling system. Next to it, in the photo below, was one of the core pieces of the gun's cradle.

With one of the tubes this looked like a small-scale Karl-Gerät's gun. The cannon barrel itself was still waiting to be installed, for at this point it would have been on the way more than anything else.

I had to admit that I lost a shameful amount of time searching for the teethed piece that was responsible for the gun's elevation. The stepping plate seemed a bit flimsy at this point, but I thought I could strenghten it later, if needed.

These four rods I didn't clean up completely yet, as you could see in the photo. Fitting each four was a bit of a surprising struggle, but they got installed without much violence or threats of getting thrown into the trash.

Interrupted plumbing

Results of the previous round

To begin with I checked what I had accomplished the last time. The carriage rotated neatly on its turntable, which was pretty cool. From the rear end I saw that the ground plate had ended slightly tilted, which in this case meant that if I was ever going to make some display terrain for it, the butt of the cannon had to be on a slight slope.

A barrel in three stages

One of the key components of the atomic cannon, the barrel, consisted of a number of sections. I took this photo below when I had gotten the three first bits done and squeezed them tight with tape. Especially the middle tube wanted to split apart like an overripe banana.

I had glued the two narrower components together and was about to proceed to the next step in the instructions, when I tipped my glue over. The remaining session time I spent on cleaning up.

That was a shame, for I had gotten to a pretty good pace, quickly.

Carriage work 2/2

A massive box trail

First things first: I wasn't 100% sure if this counted as a box trail but that term made more sense than the others - but if this was false, my apologies!

After a good amount of dry-fitting I glued the left half-block of the trail into the bits I had built the last time. I also remembered to add the missing axle-gear combo for the gun's elevation. The ways all these parts were all to be attached to weren't too clear in most of the cases, so I was being pretty damn paranoid before going for the glue.

Onto the front and back ends of the bottom of the carriage a few pieces were added that, among other things, added structural integrity and helped keeping the thing in its proper shape. In the front of the next photo was the three-wheeled oddity that was used to rotate the cannon. And in the rear, guessing by the teethed bits, a part that was somehow tiltable and got installed to below the module that contained the hydraulic rammer.

Some visible progress

The front of the carriage got a large-diameter (~2,7m) ground plate and the wheels that we saw in the previous pic were running on a track on top of it. This reminded me of the artillery in Suomenlinna for some reason. That setup in the rear of the carriage didn't get much more attention, my guess was that its tiltability was to allow for a less-than-billiards-table flatness of the firing position, meaning that it could be set on natural terrain in addition to some proving grounds.

These long beams that ran along the length of the carriage didn't want to go in place decently, so I had to hack them a tiny bit. The one on the right side in the photo below needed much more tweaking than the other, first one. Still, nothing traumatic happened. Next I could start building the ordnance-delivery mechanism itself.

Carriage work 1/2

The first evening

Being a nice boy I followed the instructions and started with the carriage. Perhaps I should've painted these pieces first, but that train went already. The first photo showed an interesting detail: working gears. I assumed that this meant that the cannon's elevation controls were actually working.

Behind the gun's breech block, in the end of the massive carriage a hydraulic rammer was to be built, for no one was going to ram the 272kg shells nor 385kg nuclear shells by hand. Nineteen long years later, I could almost hear the rattle of Giatsint-B's dragon's tongue when looking at this thing. Clearly time hasn't healed all wounds.

This was the subassembly that occupied the rear deck of the carriage. I didn't have the time to glue it into the righthand frame yet, or more accurately: I didn't want to glue it accidentally at an awful angle and realize it the next time I got to build. So I left it to wait for the next session when I was going to complete the frame itself.

Project IV/20

M65 Atomic Annie

Again, after a good amount of pondering I chose the M-65 Atomic Cannon as my next project. According to the claims a weapon of this sort has been fired only one time, ever. Or at least its namesake special ordnance has been fired once, but one would assume that before that one shot at least one normal grenade has been propelled through the barrel.

The box

The Atomic Cannon's box was ridiculously large. Its cover art was somewhat different from what the typical ones have been during my years looking at them. This appeared to be Renwal's style before it got bought out by Revell, based on a quick image search.

Papers, please

Decals were pretty simple, I thought I could even use the 'murican stars but the caution stripes would be so much better if just painted on the vehicles. Maybe this was partially my own disgust towards the decals as a medium, mixed in with my fear of those damn things going all spaghetti when applying them on anything. A huge effect has come from the fact that I have enjoyed painting and weathering a painted on detail has worked better than a brighter, higher-contrast decal.

The instructions themselves were pretty nicely sectioned so I didn't need to guess what I was working on at any given point. In the second pic you could see an interesting detail that I couldn't recall seeing anywhere before: it named each subcomponent. This was exactly what I had wished to see in the airplanes, for example, and some more random projects than plain old tanks.

Bits and pieces

There were, like the box said, a couple of hundred pieces to enjoy. To my great joy I found that a decent amount of said pieces were loose inside the box, torn out of their sprues over the years and kilometers. So an amount of the project time was going to be dedicated to finding out loose pieces. The numerous tire halves were at least pretty self-evident, but the rest...

The six-person crew consisted of single-piece humanoid males from the sixties. Maybe I'd paint them for a photo, but one couldn't do much dynamic things with these.

From this next set I had some difficulties in guessing which may have belonged to the carriage and which maybe to the vehicles, if the most obvious ones were ignored. These pieces were numbered, which was technically nice, but in practice reading the tiny numbers (where they hadn't fallen off) was a bit challenging sometimes - or my eyes were awful (also true).

The cannon's carriage was ridiculously large, but I guess it had to be, if the barrel's diameter was 280mm. At this point I was just guessing which set of sprues were prodiving which part of the build, more or less, so my comments may have also been totally off.

Rapture

Easily influenced

I observed earlier while the Project Assistants were watching cartoons. Between some episodes of Phineas and Ferb an episode of the new Duck Tales was scheduled and while half listening and seeing it I got a strong urge to play through the Bioshocks again. In this Season 2 episode 2 the ducklings found cousin Ferthy (whom I could not recall encountering anywhere outside the comics) in a lighthouse in the middle of the sea. The thing inside the lighthouse was a bathyshpere that took them to an undersea research facility, with the whole episode being a bit weird.

Man chooses, slave obeys

The episode drove such a strong urge into my head that I actually did install Bioshock. At some mystical point in history my Steam library had received some Remastered versions of both, so I'd just check those then.

Walls and floors updated with bloody messages were more numerous than on the Citadel itself.

Little sisters

I had completed both Bioshocks back in the day and of course I harvested each and every single Little Sister I encountered, because it just felt like the handiest approach. My then colleague had taken the opposite approach, as was his habit, and he tried to convince me that saving them was more beneficial in the long run and therefore the best choice. This being my second run I thought I'd give it a shot, so I'd see how the game went if you were "good".

Dunno. Every time you saved one of the girls you got some Adam, then a few times as the game progressed (I thought it happened after every n saved Little Sister) a gift teddy bear was put in front of a nearby Gatherer's Garden and it contained some Adam and ammo, typically. Upgrading the plasmids got much slower and tedious compared to straightforward harvesting.

Generic mumbling

It made no sense for me to specifically tell details of a game this old. Cohen's hub with the artists was pretty disturbing, more so than I somehow remembered, and the guy himself was... well, strange to say the least. In the end I just left him alone to admire his stupid masterpiece, which was pretty bad with the photos of the victims being so very unrecognizeable. He was happy so who was I to judge?

Details such as these local traffic map and schedules prints I stopped to admire a few times during my adventures. In a way they were pointless for the gameplay itself, but supervaluable for the world building. I enjoyed these.

A new victim in the corridors of Hephaestus

Would'ya kindly?

My absolute favourite plasmid was the swarm of angry bees, had been since I saw the teaser video a good while before the game was out. Who wouldn't want to launch a massive swarm of mad bees against their numerous adversaries? Truth be told, it didn't feel quite as handy as I had hoped for, but it was hysterically fun to use!

Final fumbling

In the very end of the game you had to find the pieces of a Big Daddy setup (I spent a small eternity looking for the last part and was about to give up in frustration) and that's how the end went, stomping around in a diving suit, now accompanied by Little Sisters. Somehow I had this idea in my head that the helmet overlay disappeared quickly in the original version but here in the Remaster it stayed as long as it made sense.

A final boss moment

I really couldn't remember what was the thing with the end battle, so I was just as lost as 10+ years ago. Somehow my mixed memory was very confused, as I had an amount of details from the KOTOR final battle. And that was a bothersome fight.

All that this Silver Surfer -cosplayer needed was to be attacked and avoided until he got damaged enough and jumped into his recharger. While the chap was locked in you could punch him into the liver with the harvester. Repeat four times and he fell for good. In a way pretty damn straightforward, but in practice somewhat more bothersome with all the extra slicers swarming around.

Creepy beasts, those Little Sisters.

Of the sequel and ancestor

As my Steam library had a set of games from the series I thought I'd go through a few of them. Bioshock Infinite didn't interest me enough, as I gave up on it on an endless airship battle on a flying boat, most likely near the very end of the game. Playing up to that point again, just to get frustrated with the same damn multistage fight didn't sound like a good use of my time. Or nerves.

Bioshock 2

Straight after finishing Bioshock I jumped on to Bs2 Remaster, but that one died on its tracks pretty quickly after getting the fire plasmid, in the second Big Sister fight. After about n minutes of fighting her the game crashed seriously, no matter what I did or didn't do.

Though, every time I started the game it complained about my hw not being perfectly compatible with it, so maybe that's why it crashed so spectacularly. And here I was, so very happy about the remastered version doing away with the braindead GFWL garbage that took ages per session to go around, in the original game.

A funny detail: I uninstalled the Remastered version and installed the old Bioshock 2, but that said the same about my hardware, so I didn't bother using any more time on it anymore. Bleh.

System Shock (1994)

After the disappointment of the much more modern game I played through (with the walkthru and a pretty low difficulty setting combination, I admit) their predecessor, System Shock, as that one also had gotten a n Enhanced Edition before the Kickstarted remake was to be released. I'd taken a bunch of screenshots, but as the Steam overlay didn't work straight out of the box, I didn't bother. In fact, getting the thing to start in the first place required some DOS-era "install one of these, then a driver for that, and a patch for the other thing", but at least it didn't want me to dive back into the autoexec.bat and config.sys editing. That was something I didn't want to get back to anymore, not in 2020.

The UI was really strange compared to a comfy person like me who's way too used to these modern and simple ones, but it didn't take that long to get used to. Still, way too often I switched weapons (or threw them away) instead of doing what I intended to do. Also after the first couple of sessions my eyes felt like I had been doing something very unusual, but then that went away - or I got used to it.

The game itself with the story and Shodan was familiar to everyone, so I wasn't going to be able to bring any new viewpoints about it. The new version I was looking forward to, to get the same story but in a new packaging (truth be told, I'd keep the original musics). That's assuming that my a few years old compy was up to running it, that is...

(Before anyone asks, I had finished System Shock 2 a couple of silly years ago, about the same time I did my incomplete run of Bs:Infinite, so it wasn't on the list, either.)

Miniproject III/20

A bicycle

I'd been pondering over the Spring, if it made any sense to buy the season ticket to the HSL city bikes this summer, as the need and especially my ability to use them were going to be many months worth of partial work commuting fewer. As a quick recap, last April-October I drove the city bikes to the nearest metro station and back, whenever there were any bikes available. Hadn't the nearest bike station to my home been always completely empty between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, I could've used those for random shopping trips and whatnot. But there rarely were bikes in any of the nearest six stations.

As a total Sunday cyclist and as someone who jumped on a bike for the first time in about fifteen years last April I didn't really need any kind of a Sci-Fi thing or any other high-end junk. I ordered a normal bike, which were nowadays called city bikes.

This sizeable box got dropped behind the door on a Wednesday afternoon and stood waiting at the entrance until Sunday mid-morning, when I finally had time to even think about the damn thing. Luckily the weather had sucked and I was, as said before, very busy with everything else, so this didn't get to bug me.

Before starting anything I leafed through the pdf manual so I'd have a clue what tools I should prepare to assemble my newest acquisition. Obviously this was no Ikea shelf, so there was no handy list of tools, but I boldly assumed that I'd need allen keys, wrenches and an assortment of screwdriver bits.

Working

Judging by the look of it and using some (hopefully) common sense it seemed that tools were not going to become an issue, which had been maybe my most noticeable worry. Assembling this was very straightforward and I could not really stretch that out to cover even a paragraph: attach the front wheel; attach the steering bar; attach the pedals and then drop in the seat; tighten up and call it a day.

A completed vehicle

This took about an hour of time. The only headscratcher was the filling of the tires, as I now learned that there were at least different valve types and this, obviously, wasn't the thing I considered normal. Luckily I had bought a multifunctional pump a few years ago that had outputs for at least two of these valve types, including this one they also used in car wheels (Schrader). Thanks to this I avoided walking my bike to the nearest fuel station to get started.

My brand new bicycle (or myself) wasn't up to the latest legistlation, as either of us needed front and rear lights if driving in anything but the bright daylight. While waiting for the Autumn I would have to invest to some sort of lights.

Finished: Project II/20

1:110 Moon rocket

Well, this was a proper building project. We decided that we'd only use our little free time in the evenings, because if the project assistants 1 and 2 were awake, the result would be pure circus. Any assembling would take place only after the girls had fallen asleep, not a moment earlier.

Boeing S-IC

The first stage ate roughly two evenings at a very calm pace of building and chatting. Actual time used was about three hours, roughly guessing. Essentially this massive construct was built in two more or less equally huge lower and upper parts that were then joined together in the end.

When the stage's core was built we got to build and attach the outer shell's panels. The incomplete build was very patchworky, thanks to especially those vertically running tubes were installed in the very end.

5x Rocketdyne F-1

The quintet of F-1 engines were massive. These too could be turned and adjusted a bit, as if you were expected to simulate the wobbling of the engine nozzles you have all seen in the Saturn V launch videos. Or maybe I was just more prone to silliness than most others. *cough*

North American Aviation S-II

Assembling the second stage started pretty much the same way as the first one. No wonder, the diameter was the same as the big sibling's. The top end was a bit more compact and quite a fun thing to build.

Lighter both in weight and greeblies the S-II was a quicker subassembly to build, because the outer shell's components were pretty much built out of four identical pieces and those were then laid in place. Plus the whole damn thing was somewhat shorter in general. This bugger got built from start to finish in one very tired evening.

In the photos above the red hook pairs were there for the attachment of the next stage. Coupling and decoupling the stages was surprisingly fun.

5x Rocketdyne J-2

At the base of the engine array, edge-wise, were the dark grey counterparts for the hooks on the top of the first stage. These were pretty handily hidden and as I said, they worked very nicely. As one would expect.

Obviously the assembled stages were to be attached together for storaging purposes. The size of this complex was getting more and more baffling, even if we already knew that the final construct was going to be 100cm tall, but still...

Douglas Aircraft Company S-IVB

This third stage of the rocket we built super quickly and while we were at it, we continued to the emergency tower and the remaining things. After the previous monstrosities these bit was like a soda can, but thanks to a rocket engine, it was automatically much cooler.

1x Rocketdyne J-2

This final stage only got one engine installed into its bottom, the same model and series as the five engines that propelled the second stage.

Lining up the chunks

Combined together all the three stages looked pretty impressive. All that was left now was the lightest subassembly, the cargo that was to be delivered into orbit.

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age

North American Aviation C/SM

After all we'd seen the Command and Service Module was amusingly easy to build. But so it was in the real life as well, much less imposing than the whole rocket. There were enough details to recognize the piece and one couldn't expect much more greebling in this scale.

A diorama version of the command module was built where it had landed on water. The attention-grabbing orange floating ring was a fun detail.

Grumman LM

The relatively few-piece landing/ascending module pair was immediately recognizeable. Got to tip the hat to the designer(s). The Lunar Module could be packed up and hidden inside the cone of the rocket, between the payload fairings.

At this point I had not thought of connecting these two key components of a Moon landing together. Pah!

The Lunar Module was also a part of a minidiorama on a tiny piece of Moon. A reality-bending set of four astronauts was sent along, with a flag for the country of origin.