Yeah, I bet you think I'm totally making this up, right? Hah, well, I have the pictures to prove it to you. This little
exercise happened in Winchester, where, if you were cruising around the lakes in the mid-afternoon, you might have happened
upon this little number.
Now you know that I can't possibly be making up that this is Winchester's own
HoverGuard 700® rescue hovercraft on a trial run over at the Upper Mystic Lake. And me being me, I just happened to be driving by and
had to stop by and take a few photos. Now the hovercraft is a hovercraft, so it can go over anything it can blow air against.
As you can see, when they are done they just drive it up out of the lake...
Now, a few comments. First about the photo. I was panning during this shot, i.e., following the action through the lens
of the camera while I took the picture. Thus the hovercraft is relatively sharp but everything else is out of focus. That's
because the hovercraft was the only thing moving, but I was moving the lens in time with it.
But more to the point, the hovercraft didn't actually make it up this hill. It would seem from my observations that the
ability of the hovercraft to convert air into forward movement falls off dramatically as the incline picks up even slighly.
Thus a hovercraft would be inoperable in mountain terrain, for example. Even this situation here is a bit ridiculous. If they
did actually have to evacuate someone from the lake, they couldn't drive the hovercraft over this small hill to the parking
lot (and waiting ambulance). They'd have to stop and transfer the person to a gurney.
I have all the photos, you know. Of it sliding backwards and so forth. The guy ran it out onto the pond, built up a good
head of steam, and popped it over the top without too much trouble. Although he did drop off his passenger before doing it.
They did seem to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to deal with inclines. Here you can see them all watching
as the driver tries again and again to crest the same hill from the other side.
After this escapade, the driver literally took a last spin around the lake. It was a nice slow tour to end the afternoon.
The really cool thing about all this turned out to be something totally different, though. You see, mostly when you look
at an ice covered lake there's not much to look at. You have to find windblown patterns or cracks or other features to make
it interesting and they are not always easy to find.
In this case, I had a hovercraft with a 14 foot (5ish metres) hull making patterns in the snow. Since I was standing
on the shore where he was driving onto the ice, I had an on-ice feature that spanned from foreground to background. That's
a rare situation, and one you play around with when it comes about.
Nykon: Umm hellllo. How do you expect the scientists to check their myspace??
Mood: pissed
i know that like no one reads this, but i just have to write. my bosses are total fucking newbs! Its like i'm in Office Space or something. so, yeah, today i totally busted some chinamen for stealing classified secrets and my bosses are all like "wuteva, we don't care" and i'm like "well u should" and they like "but we dont" so i took it to the FBI and their like "holy shitballs!!!!!1" and now i don't have a job.
fukerz
p.s. i just got 4.3 million dollars!!!! w00t!~!!!!!