Installment 4.5: Drive shafts and Universal joints

Chad Izzo and Kenny Lane sat in the early morning shade of the massive air conditioning unit on top of the industrial building.  They were using their binoculars to watch the I-5 north of their location.  They were the main command-and-control team and were hardwired to laser communicators on the far side of the AC unit.  The communicators were aimed at approximately twenty  teams scattered over 30 square miles of land immediately south of Sacramento, California.

Kenny was muttering into his hands-free, “Ya, Carlos, I know you want to put a hurting on them but this is a team sport.  If you drop the hammer early I’m gonna kick your ass so hard you’ll have to lift your pony tail to take a crap.”

Chad looked over.  “We all good?”

Kenny said, “They been hearing those choppers coming for the last twenty minutes.  Its gotta be like sitting in a bass drum, waiting in those warehouses.”

There were five mortar teams set up to hose the six miles of road from Sacramento city limits to Franklin.  But they could not get into action until the choppers had been neutralized.  That looked like it was going to be a problem because there were twenty choppers and Chad only had twelve MANPAD (Man Portable Anti Aircraft weapons, aka, Stingers) teams deployed.  Things were definitely going to get sporty before the mortars would be able to come into play.

Intelligence suggested that the California Guard’s order-of-battle was essentially a parade starting at University of California, Davis ten miles west of Sacramento.  The “parade” was to swing through Sacramento and additional troops would be packed on to the buses.  

White "stars" are choppers or "vampires" later in the battle.  Yellow dashed line are buses carrying soldiers.  All Izzo's teams to the east, right side as shown in image, of the chopper formation.  Orange dot is the position of Carmelo's team.

Intelligence claimed that a wedge of slow moving helicopters was to form a narrow V at the head of the column to “sanitize” the route and to impress the yokels.  Expected spacing of 700 meters between the birds and an elevation of about 200 meters.

So far the intelligence appeared to be spot on.  The only fly in the ointment was that Chad only had enough seasoned people to man 12 MANPAD  teams.

The plan was simple.  Knock the birds out of the sky and then mortar the heck out of the busses and support vehicles packed into the six miles of road leading south out of Sacramento.  If the assignment appeared to be less than fifty percent achievable, the secondary plan was to let the convoy roll past and redeploy to chop at the logistical tail.

All it required at this point was discipline and execution.

One week earlier…

“Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Frank shouted at the phone (after carefully breaking the connection). 

A large part of supervising is theatrics.

“What’s up, boss?” one of the mechanics at the SD-LA bus garage asked.

“Those DRMFs in Sacramento want to take all of the busses we got back on line.” Frank said.

“Say what?” another mechanic asked.  While he liked the overtime pay he had really invested a bunch of emotion in getting those old pigs back on the road.

“Sacramento says that we have excess number of running busses, at least compared to the rest of Cali.  They ordered me to send two hundred of our most newly serviced busses up north for some military exercise.  Don’t that suck?” Frank said.

The next morning a small convoy of 21 busses left the SD-LA bus garage.  Twenty of the busses were going to Sacramento and the twenty-first bus was to shuttle the drivers back home.  If anybody noticed the five pallets of “pipes” in the shuttle bus they did not bother to mention it.

The twenty busses showed up at the appointed staging area with the shuttle bus showing up an hour later, just enough time for the drivers to compete the paperwork.

The only excitement occurred when Kenny Lane was driving.  He was heading for the off-loading spot when a cop noticed an SD-LA bus driving down a street where it was not supposed to be.  He was suspicious, particularly when he saw that half the seats had been removed and there was a bunch of cargo.

“What’s that?” he asked Kenny, pointing at the pallets of mortar tubes.

“Those are drive shafts.” Kenny replied.

The cop looked at the manifest which was written in Korean.  “Why isn’t it in English?”

Kenny rolled his eyes.  “It ain’t like we can buy them from Cleveland or Detroit anymore.  ‘sides, plenty of people in the bus garage can read Korean or Farsi or whatever.

The cop considered himself a “gearhead” and something just did not seem right.

“They look way too short.”  He said as he visually assessed the length of the bus.

“These buses have a two-piece drive shaft, an’ ‘sides, they telescope.” Kenny said in his most off-hand, bored manner.

“What are those?” the cop said, pointing at the pallets of 81mm mortar ammo.

“Those are universal joints.” Kenny said.

The only reason this explanation was even remotely plausible was because the mortar rounds did not look like shells.  They resembled precision machinery with their 12, precision ground facets running the length of the exposed metal and the mirror polished aluminum coating.  The aft portion of the projectiles were plastic sabots that trapped high pressure gasses when launched and forcibly detached themselves once clear of the barrel.  Unencumbered with surfaces that had been in contact with the propellant and with a radar defeating shape, mortar teams were fairly safe from smart-gun’s counter-battery fire.

“Sumbitch, you gotta lot of them!” the cop said.

Kenny leaned toward the cop in a conspiratorial manner, “It’s the damned grease.  Fucking biodegradable, soy-oil based grease doesn’t work for shit.  We go through them like a teenager goes through a bucket of popcorn at a movie.”

The cop nodded sagely.  It wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard a hundred times before.  Newer, better, environmentally friendly just didn’t work as well as the old stuff.

Fifty pallets of military goods is not trivial and the Cartel had a lot of experience in purchasing and moving contraband under far more difficult circumstances. 

It was Chad and Kenny’s job to get the most mileage out of those fifty pallets of material.

Next installment

Springtime at a break-neck pace

Apricots are blooming and the honey bees like that!

A plum rootstock "Krymsk"

Tashkent quince with zero winter dieback.  Skorospelka had an inch of dieback.  All other varieties died back to the snow line.

Seed potatoes.  They look pretty good for having been stored in a bucket in our basement all winter.

Seven rows of potatoes planted. Potatoes can be planted into really rough seedbeds.

Trees were fertilized.  The orchard was mowed.  Plums were grafted to some sweet P. americana I found growing along Irish Road in northwestern Eaton County.  I moved five grape vines, cv. Steuben.

My brother covered mom-and-dad detail today so I could catch up on my outside chores.

Dad is eating soup well.  I know what you are thinking....

We don't feed the Alpo to Dad.  We feed it to Dad's dog.  She is used to eating six meals a day.

Blogging will be light tomorrow.  I will be driving to Ashland, Ohio and watching Belladonna toss dwarfs.  Do they have Highland games (caber toss) for women?

Installment 4.4: An invasion is authorized

Bona-Brown’s cabinet convened shortly after midnight as the scope of the attacks became apparent.

Early on, word of the assassinations of Bona-Brown’s parents arrived.  Bona-Brown looked annoyed.  His parent’s attitude toward him had been as personal as the affection they might show a Rolex watch, something to display to impress friends, an accessory to be worn when it might get favorable attention.  Bona-Brown’s contempt for his parents was poorly concealed.

Spirochete was clearly shaken by the death of his father and siblings.  Whereas Bona-Brown had the subtlety and nuance of a hungry reptile pursuing its dinner, Spirochet more closely simulated a psychotically well-ordered human.  Bona-Brown and Spirochet had been unstoppable. Bona-Brown was the unswerving tool while Spirochet orchestrated the background to ensure that the point of the spear found appropriate targets.

With Spirochet mentally “checked out”, Bona-Brown raged.

“I want the fucking heads of the fucking Cartel people who are behind this fucking attack!” Bona-Brown screamed at the head of the Cali Bureau of Investigation.  Bona-Brown was jabbing her in her sternum as he screamed, driving her back eight inches with each jab.  “And I want them fucking YESTERDAY!” as flecks of spittle impacted her face.

Tess DeChaunac, the head of the CBI was shaken.  “I don’t mean to dispute you, sir, but penetrating SD-LA in force is now a military matter.  We don’t have the equipment, manning or training to do that.  By all rights that should be executed by the military with us assisting once SD-LA is subdued.”

Bona-Brown was shaking with anger.  “I am not done with you!” he said with one more stab of the finger and then he wheeled around and directed his wrath at DeTroy Williams, the head of Cali Military.

Tess breathed a sigh of relief.  Without Spirochet keeping Bona-Brown on track he had the attention span of a six week old puppy.  She was undoubtedly off the hook for tonight.

DeTroy Williams looked exactly like what he was, a former defensive tight-end for Southern Cal who kept in shape.  DeTroy never got very many minutes of play time because he was two inches too short at 6’-4” and a half step too slow.  The coach kept him on the team because he was smart, witty and good at taking tests for other members of the football team.  The coach was smart enough to funnel his best players into classes where the instructors were not sticklers for which player took the test as long as it was a football player who took the test.

DeTroy took full advantage of the social benefits of being on the football team.  He never slept alone.  After graduating he took a job in law enforcement where his Hollywood good looks and the name recognition took him a long way.  He spent a year on-the-street and then was bumped up to Public Relations.

Bona-Brown and Spirochet knew DeTroy from their college days.  They had partied together.  The fact that DeTroy knew nothing about the military did not discourage them from appointing him as the head of defense.

That did not help DeTroy Williams today.  Bona-Brown screamed at Williams, although he restrained himself from thumping him in the chest, “I want their fucking heads YESTERDAY!”

Williams had learned much during his time in Public Relations.  The first play in the playbook is to stall and to buy as much time as possible.

“I am on it boss.  But you gotta realize that it is going to take me a couple of weeks to pull together the resources and make a plan and then another week to lock the towns down.”  Williams had no military experience and assumed the task would be little more complicated than packing his bags for a weekend vacation.

Had he been asked he would have speculated that the Cali military could subdue the nation of Thailand with two weeks of prep and a week of “boots on the ground.”  After all, the people in Cali were the smartest people in the world and everybody had a computer.

“You’ve got two fucking weeks to bring me their heads. Or I will have your ass.  Now what are you waiting for.  Get the fuck out of here.” Bona-Brown spewed at Williams.

The interest rate for the benchmark ten year Cali bonds jumped from 4% to 6%.

Next installment

Multi Point Initiation

Multi Point Initiation or MPI was in the news recently.

First a few basics on building an atomic bomb.

It is inadvisable to store your lump of fissionable material in a solid sphere.  It tends to make noise when you do so. More typically, the super-critical mass is stored as two hemispheric shells somewhat like grapefruit rinds.  The two, hollow hemispheres are then assembled to create a hollow sphere.

The fissionable material (U235 or Plutonium) will not go into a run-away chain reaction until a high enough a percentage of the released neutrons are capture by neighboring atoms, thereby going unstable and releasing even more neutrons.  Early US efforts shot a slug of fissionable material through the hole of a donut.  These bombs did not have a very high yield considering the amount of material used.

The technical challenge of building a fission bomb is to get the lump to go super-critical as quickly as possible and to keep it super-critical as long as possible.  In a way, fission bombs are self limiting.  The U235 or Plutonium turns to plasma and expands, thereby turning the reaction off.  The slug-and-donut design approached super-critical mass too slowly and turned itself off too quickly.

We don't normally think of solid metal as being compressible but it is.  By surrounding the grapefruit rind with a shell of very uniform, military grade explosive and detonating it at multiple points...like the intersection of seams on a soccer ball, the frugal weapons engineer can make a lump of U235 or Plutonium that is sub-critical under normal conditions to undergo the run-away chain reaction.  The metal is compressed when the rapidly collapsing hemispheres collide with the material collapsing from the other side of the ball.  Compression increases its mass density.  The nuclei are closer together than normal and that makes them more likely to "catch" a stray neutron.

If you know a smidgen about nuclear weapons design (hold my slide-rule, it is only math) then you realize some of the implications.

The first implication is that the weapons engineers are trying to milk as many weapons as possible out of a finite supply of fissionable material.  The sophisticated electronics and testing is simply not worth the effort for just one or two war-heads.

Pulling a number out of my nethermost regions, Iran is probably planning to make 25 or more warheads.  That should make western Europe and the Eastern US very nervous.  The first five would be enough to obliterate Israel.  The remaining 20-to-100 nuclear bombs could be transported in standard cargo containers and detonated anywhere in the world.

The second implication is that the weapon designers are shooting for high yield.  The hydrodynamic, explosive forging of the grapefruit rinds is one way to keep the fissionable mass super-critical for a longer period of time and to get higher megaton yields.

The third implication is that the nuclear devices that use MPI are petite.  It is not hard to explosively forge a metal grapefruit rind.  Bury it in 1000 pounds of TNT and contour the thickness of the rind so it is thicker where the detonation front first encounters the shell.  But burying the grapefruit rind in a 1000 pound canister of TNT makes it harder to transport and limits the range if used as a warhead on a missile.

To repeat myself:

• Iran intends to mass produce nuclear bombs.
• Iran intends to make enough nuclear bombs to threaten the US, Europe and parts of Asia in addition to vaporizing Israel.
• Iran intends to make nuclear devices that are suitable for missile delivery.

MPI is a very big deal.

GIS maps

This is the elevation change over one of Mrs ERJ's and my favorite walks.  As always, you can click to embiggen.

I have been enjoying Eaton County's GIS maps.  I found the elevation maps to be most useful.

The lowest point on my property is 10 feet above the water table (right side of chart).  I think I could drill 10 feet with a post hold digger.  This merits some thinking on.

Shallow well pumps can only "pull" 20' of head. The lowest elevation on my property is only 10' above the water table.  The problem is that it is about 1200 feet from my orchard and garden.

Installment 4.3: Seven hundred feet per second

Seven hundred feet per second is not very fast.

It is precisely twice as fast as a BB from a Red Ryder BB gun. 

Back in more innocent times young boys played Cowboys-and-Indians with these guns.  They would chase each other around the block and shoot each other in the ass-cheeks from ambush.  It was all jolly good fun.

A wadcutter from a snubby revolver exits the muzzle at seven hundred feet per second.  The difference is that the wadcutter weighs thirty times as much as a BB.

The wadcutter bullet is named for its shape. It is basically a soup can that flies through the air, end-first.  Upon hitting the paper target, it punches a clean, circular hole that is easy to score.

If the target is backed up by something incompressible, something like water or tissue, the wadcutter transfers its kinetic energy to the target with the enthusiasm of a fat redneck performing a belly flop from a 40' bridge.

The lump on your skull immediately behind your ear lobe is called the Mastoid process.  The bone aft of the Mastoid process is paper thin.  Projecting a straight line from that paper-thin region to the opposite temple intersects the top of the Medulla oblongata, the portion of the brain that controls involuntary functions like heart rate and respiration.  Severing the top of the Medulla oblongata with a wadcutter traveling at seven hundred feet per second results in instant death 99.999% of the time.

The rest of the time death occurs fifteen milliseconds later.

The compressive wave traveling ahead of the wadcutter does little secondary damage.  Secondary damage occurs after the brain tissue to the rear and above the bullet's path rebounds from the inside of the skull and it goes into tension.  The tension tears apart millions of tiny blood vessels and rips billions of neural ganglia asunder.   

Forensic scientists sometimes liken the tension wave to air crashing back into the vacuum created by the passage of lightening.  Like thunder, the majority of the secondary trauma occurs when the tissue crashes back into the channel created by the passage of the bullet and the brain tissue in front of, and beneath, the bullet's path extrudes into the oral and sinus cavities and blows out the sphenoid bones behind the eyeball.

The wadcutter exited Michael Chelly’s right temple and pulled his eyebrow up into an expression of astonishment and wonder.  His eyes bugged out in cartoonish surprise.  It was an expression his face had never carried in life.

Ralph had already turned and pocketed his pistol, even as Chelly’s corpse slid down the side of the car.

Many species of scavengers lived around the quarry, attracted by the water and bonus food sources.  Cali IT experts were busy finding and corrupting all on-line examples of Chelly’s voice from the internet. There would be no evidence that Chelly had ever lived by tomorrow morning.  

In one respect, erasing Chelly's life was an exercise in futility.  The corporate and international community had already authenticated the Delarosa .WAV files.  Like most young people, Chelly had littered the internet with thousands of selfies and hundreds of minutes of audio.  There was no doubt that an agent who claimed to be sent by Bona-Brown and Spirochete had murdered Delarosa.

The only question was:  How close were the rogue elements to the throne?

Next installment