After I posted that I looked at the picture again and realized that the rotors are definitely not turning. The blades are drooping which means that they're not moving.
Helicopter are at their most dangerous just after the power is cut. The blades still have momentum, but that is when they begin drooping while still rotating. With power and collective they curve slightly up.
I sort of like the "we don't need them but it's too much work to take them off" idea :)
Besides, the motors might still be there for a backup system or for when you want to impress someone witha lot of noise and a 'shithook' makes plenty of that.
Sorry Cent i didn't mean it as a criticism. I agree with OldArmourer the fact that the blades are not spinning is the reason they were able to stealth it. It would be really hard to stealth prop wash and the noise of the blades which is what you hear from a helicopter in the air.
I found this file that says that at 100' AGL the noise level is 82dBa off the back in a hover, and about 1.5 dBa lower when its in ground effect at about 10' AGL. they tested landing to be about 10dBa lower at all ranges.
https://chinook-helicopter.com/Technical_Reports/Operational_Noise_Data_for_UH-60A_and_CH-47C_Army_Helicopters.pdf
Chinooks don't really 'fly' they just make so much noise the ground pushes them away...
That said, there are some very quiet helicopters, very, very quiet ones, but it's hard to do and they're not exactly efficient, I seem to recall reading about a few modified ones being used in vietnam, and of course probably after, for clandestine activity and they worked quite well.
The hardest part is masking the 'crack' of the blade tips going supersonic...
ok,, in the artist defense: she is using stock art.. and never worked on heilos.!
.. i mean it still has the old style seats,, and cargo lights!? (i worked on shitters for 8 years and not one had cargo lights..)
never had the 'pleasure' of working on them, we had some when I enlisted in the 70's and I got to ride on one a few times but then we sold them off only to buy them back again 40 years later...typical
A few thousand years on, an 'A' model would be just as likely to have survived as an 'F' or later one, maybe these are 'W' models and they went back to the seats for function over form and found the lights useful ? or maybe not....when you're talking millenia, a few decades don't matter nearly as much and a flint axe will kill you just as dead as a railgun.
I may be losing the thread a little bit (though the art is very nice). In the previous page, panel #2, we see an incoming ship of futuristic design with pronounced twin guns projecting forward. It seems like this ship ought to be the stealthed ship the Ranger is detecting. However, on this page, the ship containing the mystery hostile appears to be of a completely different configuration. AND the raider is interacting with what appear to be ground-based friendlies whose arrival apparently went completely unheralded by the Ranger. I think I can fill in the blanks on what is supposed to be going on here, but I suspect that, in the interest of keeping things ‘moving along’, things got a little ‘jumpy’.
However, if I am missing something obvious, please clue me in.
No worries, @CentComm. I am sorry you are having a rough go of it at the moment and hope things improve. As always, thank you to you, @Tokyo Rose, and the rest of the creative team for a quality entertaining product -- even in spite of recent difficulties.
It made sense to me, we've seen gutters with armoured cars before, Dolly owns one that she's keeping at Breaker's ;)
The Chinook makes sense too, the Feeliewhackers seem to have been part of a military unit that has either been in cold storage or otherwise existed quietly for a millenia or more.
Their minds may well be past their 'best before date' after all these years but it stands to reason that they'd have the equipment that was stashed with them, which would be antiques at this time.
Their incessant search for 'tech' might be partially due to their needing to upgrade the things they have, such as spotwelding anti-grav units and stealth field generators onto a helo.
As a side note, assuming the transport pilot is also a victim of this attack, it appears LunaCom will now be offering a bounty on the mystery hostiles … doubled, if dead. So that should help. <grin>
Ah. The Golden Golems are back. And they seem to have some kind of troop transport. That's a worrying development, as last time we saw them we hadn't seen any evidence of a vehicle yet.
I will be interested to know if this vehicle corresponds to a recent theft/raid, or to one that happened very long ago, or whether it was last known being issued to some military organization a long time back and has never been reported stolen.
On the other hand this presumes it corresponds to any records at all, which is not a sure thing.
in this story the CH-47 (ch = cargo helicopter) would be over a thousand years old... and since it 'has' military trappings,, i will go with ,, an old! military base,. that no one has records of.. because.! WHO would know how to use it,, and why use it , when you have perfectly good equipment that every one knows how to use.??? (refueling, maintenance, operation.!! i mean wood they know what a ' 145D1300-9 ' is and where to use it.?)
That's interesting, actually. You can't just park something for a thousand years and have it work when you come back.
Some of the parts just won't last; like, anything made of rubber will weaken over several years and eventually just crumble, even if it doesn't contact air or anything, because the the sulfur bonds inside eventually acidify and break down the polymer chains. So if you park one of those for a century you're going to need, at least, all new tires, seals, hoses, etc. I think the seat cushions are going to go that way too.
Other parts have to be protected from rust, oxidation, etc... most of the exposed parts are protected by paint but paint won't last that long exposed to air that has oxygen in it. Inside the aircraft you have a thousand things, including the switches and buttons on the controls, that require springs to operate and those springs can't be protected by paint. Lots of them are stainless, but even stainless oxidizes eventually.
Speaking of oxidation, I'd expect most of the plastics to turn brittle, and then turn to powder, over that length of time - and that's assuming you manage to keep the rodents away from them.
Obviously you'd have to replace the fluids. The water-cooled engine would turn into a water-rusted engine by a thousand years later, antifreeze additives notwithstanding. Gasoline would evaporate leaving varnish, and diesel, or lubricating oil, would gel and then crust, at best turning into unusable toxic goo.
So if you really want to mothball that helo for a thousand years, and then reactivate it.... I think you're going to have to completely disassemble it down to the last nut and bolt, replace every rubber part with plastic, and pack every metal and plastic part, including all the circuit boards and the fiddly bits from inside the switches and buttons, in Cosmoline or equivalent. And reactivating it will take a few man-months of work.
Yeah, I think it was last reported a thousand years ago, and the paperwork has been held up since then. Considering the military it belonged go has long since disappeared...
The CH47 pilots used to tell me that if you're leaking hydraulic fluid, that was good news. No leaks meant you'd run dry. So I'm thinking 1000 years of storage would require quite a supply.
That was exactly what we were told on 101's...if the door bay didn't have pink hydraulic stains, the accumulators were dry ;)
Same for the Argus, no oil leaks from the engine cowlings meant it needed a fill...mind you we parked one as a display bird around 1980ish and it was still leaking years later, had to put concrete pads under the engines because it was killing the grass...for all I know, it's leaking today...62 Imp gal. of oil per engine, that's 77.5 US gallons ;) but there was at least that much floating around loose inside the nacelles.
More than anything in this strip, I'm curious about "feral roses". The rose bush, apparently, has mutated into a fast-growing, hostile bramble bush that actively seeks out sources of 'fertilizer' to plant its seeds in.
As for the Feral Roses, there was a comment chain back in the days, started by Catsservant, I think, and the rest of the commenteers just ran with it - I added the idea that Tokyo Rose had many android bodies, and that the rest of them went feral, and was roaming the Siberian steppes, and were the only thing that would frighten a Murder Turd. 🤣
And if memory serves me right, the dynamic duo went "That's a great idea, we're stealing it, it's canon now !", or something to that effect.
How did aching know help. Get past the security guard outside? Anyone can hear the blades whipping the air miles away, that including the engine noise too. Speaking of helicopter blades… they are in a drooping like they were not moving, but they have too keep the helicopter in the air. Don’t tell me they are special engines.
No need to blur anything, I like the idea of them being a backup system and it would look strange without the rotors anyway.
that, and our Ranger is using optical equipment of some type and if you happen to be looking at a rotary wing A/C at the right angle at the right time, or through a video or TV camera, the blades often appear 'frozen', it depends on the speed of the rotors and the speed of the shutter and if they happen to match on a harmonic, but the blades seem to stand completely still while the A/C moves.
Helicopter are at their most dangerous just after the power is cut. The blades still have momentum, but that is when they begin drooping while still rotating. With power and collective they curve slightly up.
Besides, the motors might still be there for a backup system or for when you want to impress someone witha lot of noise and a 'shithook' makes plenty of that.
I found this file that says that at 100' AGL the noise level is 82dBa off the back in a hover, and about 1.5 dBa lower when its in ground effect at about 10' AGL. they tested landing to be about 10dBa lower at all ranges.
https://chinook-helicopter.com/Technical_Reports/Operational_Noise_Data_for_UH-60A_and_CH-47C_Army_Helicopters.pdf
That said, there are some very quiet helicopters, very, very quiet ones, but it's hard to do and they're not exactly efficient, I seem to recall reading about a few modified ones being used in vietnam, and of course probably after, for clandestine activity and they worked quite well.
The hardest part is masking the 'crack' of the blade tips going supersonic...
.. i mean it still has the old style seats,, and cargo lights!? (i worked on shitters for 8 years and not one had cargo lights..)
However, if I am missing something obvious, please clue me in.
the first craft belonged to the Bandits.. the helo belongs to the Gold guys..
The Chinook makes sense too, the Feeliewhackers seem to have been part of a military unit that has either been in cold storage or otherwise existed quietly for a millenia or more.
Their minds may well be past their 'best before date' after all these years but it stands to reason that they'd have the equipment that was stashed with them, which would be antiques at this time.
Their incessant search for 'tech' might be partially due to their needing to upgrade the things they have, such as spotwelding anti-grav units and stealth field generators onto a helo.
Wonder if it's one of these ones...
https://www.chinook-helicopter.com/chinook/gunsagogo.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNNs8rPmPO8
That would be dangerous indeed, and CERTAINLY not to be fucked with...
I wonder what Luna will do now? since it was (or will be) the goldies that kill her...
Of course, it being a bad policy is no guarantee that someone won't do it.
Much better to offer the bounty on anyone who attacks your craft and double the reward for anyone whose actions result in the pilot's survival.
I will be interested to know if this vehicle corresponds to a recent theft/raid, or to one that happened very long ago, or whether it was last known being issued to some military organization a long time back and has never been reported stolen.
On the other hand this presumes it corresponds to any records at all, which is not a sure thing.
Some of the parts just won't last; like, anything made of rubber will weaken over several years and eventually just crumble, even if it doesn't contact air or anything, because the the sulfur bonds inside eventually acidify and break down the polymer chains. So if you park one of those for a century you're going to need, at least, all new tires, seals, hoses, etc. I think the seat cushions are going to go that way too.
Other parts have to be protected from rust, oxidation, etc... most of the exposed parts are protected by paint but paint won't last that long exposed to air that has oxygen in it. Inside the aircraft you have a thousand things, including the switches and buttons on the controls, that require springs to operate and those springs can't be protected by paint. Lots of them are stainless, but even stainless oxidizes eventually.
Speaking of oxidation, I'd expect most of the plastics to turn brittle, and then turn to powder, over that length of time - and that's assuming you manage to keep the rodents away from them.
Obviously you'd have to replace the fluids. The water-cooled engine would turn into a water-rusted engine by a thousand years later, antifreeze additives notwithstanding. Gasoline would evaporate leaving varnish, and diesel, or lubricating oil, would gel and then crust, at best turning into unusable toxic goo.
So if you really want to mothball that helo for a thousand years, and then reactivate it.... I think you're going to have to completely disassemble it down to the last nut and bolt, replace every rubber part with plastic, and pack every metal and plastic part, including all the circuit boards and the fiddly bits from inside the switches and buttons, in Cosmoline or equivalent. And reactivating it will take a few man-months of work.
... well .. the Goldies seem somewhat damaged themselves
Same for the Argus, no oil leaks from the engine cowlings meant it needed a fill...mind you we parked one as a display bird around 1980ish and it was still leaking years later, had to put concrete pads under the engines because it was killing the grass...for all I know, it's leaking today...62 Imp gal. of oil per engine, that's 77.5 US gallons ;) but there was at least that much floating around loose inside the nacelles.
... but it's pretty cool, I approve. 😀
As for the Feral Roses, there was a comment chain back in the days, started by Catsservant, I think, and the rest of the commenteers just ran with it - I added the idea that Tokyo Rose had many android bodies, and that the rest of them went feral, and was roaming the Siberian steppes, and were the only thing that would frighten a Murder Turd. 🤣
And if memory serves me right, the dynamic duo went "That's a great idea, we're stealing it, it's canon now !", or something to that effect.
... they have done that a couple of times. 😄
that, and our Ranger is using optical equipment of some type and if you happen to be looking at a rotary wing A/C at the right angle at the right time, or through a video or TV camera, the blades often appear 'frozen', it depends on the speed of the rotors and the speed of the shutter and if they happen to match on a harmonic, but the blades seem to stand completely still while the A/C moves.