Author: John

Maschinen Krieger

Maschinen Krieger - Gustav

Wow, I remember seeing these in hobby shops when I was growing up and wishing that my dad would buy one for me. I had a friend that owned a Neuspotter and that was just the coolest kit ever. I liked the fact that you could pick out the parts from other kits in it. The pod in the middle is part of an Empire Strikes Back AT-AT.

Welcome
This is an unofficial site dedicated to the S.F.3.D / Ma.K. ZbV3000 model kits, designs and other material related to the work of Japanese model maker / artist Kow Yokoyama. Kow’s SF3D Original designs, now renamed Ma.K. ZbV3000, became popular through a long-running photoseries in the magazine Hobby Japan. They were produced as plastic kits of unmatched quality by NITTO Japan and were the first major science fiction kits released that included etched metal parts, springs, pieces of wire and decent decals. The attention to detail and moulding quality was excellent, finally elevating the science fiction kit to the level of kits offered by Tamiya and Hasegawa.

Maschinen Krieger

plastic, kit, build, models

HOAP-3

HOAP-3

I’d like to have one of these, it would be programmed to follow me at a respectable distance and hand me my cell phone whenever it rings.

Honda’s ASIMO has a new friend on the block now – Fujitsu Automation’s HOAP-3 humanoid robot. Short in stature at 60cm and weighing in at 8.8kg, image recognition and various sensors have been added. With a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor that runs on RT-Linux inside, HOAP-3 would be a prime target for homebrew application developers. Fujitsu Automation has announced that the internal interface information of the hardware/software for the unit will be released. Simulation software for pre-confirmation of control programs is included for those who are into self-programming.

Fujitsu Automation unveils HOAP-3 robot

homebrew, Fujitsu, Honda, robot

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

Underground Atomic Explosion

A few weeks ago I was listening to the radio in my car, I forget what station it was but it might have been the local National Public Radio station, and I heard someone mention ‘REHP’ and that there was going to be funding for this new program. The announcer seemed kind of upset about this so I figured that I should look into it – anything that twists the shorts of the radio nuts should be worth reading about.
Turn out I was right, RNEP stands for ‘Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ ( I can see why they used ‘Earth’ and not ‘Ground’ – Who wants a bomb called a ‘RNGP’? The other nations would smirk and point their fingers at us while we were not looking.) If you ask me, ‘Nuclear Earth Penetrator’ sounds like a real good brand of gopher killer or a bad guy in a low budget Japanese horror porn movie. But I digress, the device is the latest in the anti terrorism bunker busting ordinance. The idea is that a thin very pointed bomb will be dropped from an aircraft and upon impacting the ground it is supposed to dig itself down like 30 feet and then detonate it’s atomic payload. Once that is done, the bunker (hidden 1000 feet below the surface) with the bad guys de jour will be destroyed and the flyboys can go back to the base and catch up on some missed beer time.
Well, that might be nice on paper but the million cubic feet of radioactive dirt that will be thrown up as a result of the nuclear explosion is going to cause some serious issues. You can’t just go around irradiating the country side like that and not expect to piss everyone off. Thankfully, it looks like congress is not going to be funding much research into this weapon. I guess even in this day of ‘there’s a terrorist under every rock’ cooler heads still prevail. Or not. The Air Force was just given $4 million (from the energy bill!) into non-nuclear bunker busting devices. Anyone want to bet that the warhead is the same size and mass as a nuclear one? Yeah, I’d say thats even money there. The future looks dark folks… Nuclear winter dark…

Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
What’s a “bunker buster” nuke?
Background: The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

RNEP, nuclear, weapon, war, busting

TV Stick

Tv Stick

The TV Stick could be just what you need when your sitting at a Starbucks and get tired of surfing the ‘Net (GASP! Yeah this CAN happen, even to me). If your laptop is faster than 800MHz (2.4 GHz for DVD quality), runs Windoze, and has a USB 2 port you can watch analog TV. No mention of what the working frequencys, but it does say that it will work with NTSC, PAL, and SECAM. That should just about cover it, at least for non HDTV transmissions. You can do all the things you can with a regular DVR, records in MPEG1/2 and 4, timeshift, captures single frames, all that good stuff. You can even adjust the sharpness, saturation, contrast and hue for each channel. The thing is tiny too, only 9.0 x 2.6 x 1.1 cm and best of all it is powered by the USB port. No messy cables or the dreaded second USB cable to act as a power supply (I so hate that).
The only input is for an antenna, so your not going to be capturing video from a camera or hooking this up to cable. Think of it as being able to turn your laptop into a TV. Neat, eh?

TV Stick

cool, timeshift, USB, NTSC, TV

The Geobat

Geobat

Looks like a workable design, there are R/C flying models of it and they act pretty stable. The 1/4 scale (5.5 feet) craft is downright impressive, I would very much like to see the full scale version come to market. At the very least as a kit that an experimenter could build on their own. General aviation has taken a big hit in the last few decades due to the rising cost of aircrafts, maintenance, and insurance. Plus I think that many people just don’t get exposure to aviation like they once did. In my fathers day, due to pilots being trained for World War II, the general aviation field entered it’s golden era. My dad dusted crops in North Dakota from his Piper Cub and people were talking about every family owning their own flying car. Now days that is still a dream. I hope the Geobat makes it.
I could even see in the future a group of Geobats preforming acrobatics at air shows. Talk about a show stopper!

Good overall performance envelope combining outstanding Short Take Off and Landing (STOL) performance, (expecting less than 500 ft. ground run) reasonably high cruise speeds (180 – 220 mph depending on power installed and cruise altitude), with eyewatering aerobatic performance. Expect power-off stall speed to be at or below 55 mph with flaps down at nominal gross weight. Excellent forward visibility combined with transparent floor panels creating a helicopter-like cockpit environment. Unique leading edge design feature, transparent leading edges about the forward and rear wings are illuminated with lights (pick your color).

BTW, they have a store if you want to build your own! (Sorry, radio control only)

Flying Saucers – The Geobat

future, cool, aircraft, experimental, aviation