The Texas Towers – off-shore radar stations

NPR’s news blog reported that President Obama gave official recognition to “the 28 men who died when a massive radar tower collapsed in the North Atlantic 50 years ago.”  The radar tower was one of five that sat out in the Atlantic ocean off the north-eastern coast of the USA.  They were a hybrid of a radar station and an offshore oil-rig, which gave them the nickname “Texas Towers”.

Texas Tower 4.  Photo from the office of Sen John Kerry.

The radar stations were needed to extend the warning time that the USA would have in the event that Soviet bombers flew across the Atlantic towards them.  These early-warning stations would give the mainland an extra 30 minutes to respond to an attack.  Improvements in radar technology and the change from bombers to (much faster) ICBMs made the stations obsolete.  Texas Tower 4, however, suffered a disaster prior to this.  In 1960 it was damaged by Hurricane Donna and it collapsed during a winter storm the following year.

This tower had already shown several problems: it was built in much deeper water than the others (180ft deep, where the others were 50-80ft) which meant it needed longer legs, and it’s foundations were in sand rather than rock.  Now it lies below the waves, acting as an artificial reef for scuba divers.

I love the pictures of the old radar tower, with the domes standing over the (rather tall) base.  It sounds like a good starting point for a game - a radar tower out in the ocean, largely cut-off from the rest of the nation, even though they may only be a hundred kilometres away.  Doesn’t this look like it should be visited by Avrocars?  Or that it should be en-route to Camp Century?  Or was there something important left behind on a now collapsed tower?  Could they have detected something out in the sky or sea?

Carnivorous furniture

Rather like the vermin accessories, here’s another strange meeting of design and dead animals.  This time it’s furniture – furniture that draws power out of dead insects or animals.  The devices capture insects or mice and deposit them in a fuel cell that uses bacteria and enzymes to generate electricity from their corpses.  All of these machines are very simple, but there is mention of a robot that can be powered by dead flies.

In a sci-fi setting this would add a macabre edge to things.  After all, by harvesting electricity out of human brains, the machines in The Matrix were essentially treating people as a fuel cell, why not just go the extra mile?

Alternatively, in a fantasy setting there may be machines that are artifacts of some ancient culture.  Devices that now require sacrifices to generate their power – something like Blackrazor only it devours flesh rather than souls.

Camp Century, a city in a glacier

In 1959, the US Army Corp of Engineers built Camp Century into glaciers in the far north of Greenland.  To do this, they dug broad trenches into the snow, put a corrugated iron roof over the top, and then covered that with snow for insulation.  Inside the trenches they could then build shelters or facilities for their work.

Camp Century during construction.  Both photos via Frank Leskovitch.

Map of the facility.  Again, via Frank Leskovitch.

It was a nuclear-powered research centre, with a particular focus on deep-core ice drilling.  They were the first to the bottom of the Greenland ice-sheet, reaching 4550 feet in 1961, and when you’re drilling so far below the ice, who’s to say what you will find?

Power came from a portable nuclear reactor (which sounds like something from Back To The Future), which was still part of an experiment.  Only eight were produced, and the Army’s nuclear power program was abandoned a few years later.

The portable reactor.

If a nuclear powered research centre in a glacier isn’t exciting enough, Camp Century was partly a proof-of-concept for Project Iceworm – a plan to develop a series of nuclear missile facilities under the arctic ice-sheet.  And then, to cap it off, in 1960 a pair of boy scouts were given the chance to be “Junior Scientific Aides” at the camp, spending five months living there (October – February, right through winter).

This would make an awesome setting for a golden era Doctor Who game (of course, transposing it be the British military) or an atomic era Cthulhu.  Combining the Greenland ice-sheet in winter with nuclear power and weapons does sound like a marriage of Pagan Publishing’s Walker in the Wastes with Pelgrane Press’s Castle Bravo.

Isolated in the arctic circle, have they accidentally disturbed something?  Or could it be that this is part of some plan to release something on the world?  Have a pair of boy-scouts been invited to this unlikely situation to provide sacrificial innocents (virgins being hard to find among the service men)?

E-prime

Much of the way that people write and speak in English makes heavy use of the various different forms of the verb ‘to be’ – for example, count how many sentences use the words ‘is’, ‘am’, ‘are’, ‘were’ (etc).  Some thinkers criticise this pattern, saying that it promotes a kind of mental laziness or imprecision: we say “the sky is blue”, but what can that ‘is’ mean there?  Better (more precise) to say “the sky appears blue”.

Around 1965, David Bourland proposed a new dialect of English – E-prime, or E’ in mathematical notation, short for English-Prime – based around the mental discipline of deliberately avoiding all of the forms of ‘to be’.  Instead of saying “I am a lawyer”, say “I answer legal questions, I write contracts, I represent people in court”; by saying precisely what you actually do you are obliged to examine exactly what “being a lawyer” means.  Or consider the old ditty:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

In E-prime, we might instead write:

Roses look red,
Violets look blue.
I like honey,
And I like you.

You can find further examples of E-prime in the books of the psychologist Albert Ellis or science-fiction author David Gerrold, each of whom wrote several books in an E-prime style.

This seems to me to be a viable explanation of “alignment languages” in D&D, not that they are actually separate languages, but that they are “mental disciplines” of talking or writing using certain forms and avoiding others.  The idea of a dialect built upon such precision sounds like something that could mark out Lawful-Neutral types.

It also reminds me of the pop-psychology therapy idea of using an “active voice” and avoiding nominative forms.  So instead of saying “you are an idiot”, saying “I feel frustrated when you do that”.  They share a feeling of saying “me me me” all the time; I feel frustrated, the sky looks blue to me.  All this self-centric talk would suit chaotic alignments too.  Imagine Chaotic-Good as a kind of touchy-feely, new-age types instead of the rugged individualists for a change.

The Avrocar: attack vehicle of the retro-future

The Avrocar prototype on a test flight; photo via Wikipedia.

The Avrocar, the USAF’s experimental “flying pancake” aircraft, is a pretty familiar image these days.  Shaped like an upturned saucer wrapped around an enormous fan, this was only intended to be a proof-of-concept design built in readiness for a full scale attack aircraft capable of an estimated Mach 3.5 at an altitude of 30,000m – “Project 1794”, or “Weapon System 606a”.  Sadly the Avrocar never even reached its own targets of 300mph and a service ceiling of 3000m; the best it managed was 35mph at a height of only 1m.

But more than what it was, I love this image from the company’s promotional literature of what it could be: flying jeeps armed with rocket launchers that look suspiciously like cigarette holders.

Just the thing for golden-age Doctor Who or James Bond games: squadrons of Avrocars backed up by mighty supersonic disks capable of outflying conventional aircraft.

The Vdara Hotel death ray

Diagram of the Vdara Hotel’s concave surface concentrating the sun’s light, from the Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Vdara Hotel on the Las Vegas strip has a simple, sleek, concave design.  It’s curve gently cradles the hotel’s swimming pool, which was placed on the south side of the building to capture sunlight for as much of the day as possible.  It turns out that it captures rather more sun than they really want, as the building can act as a massive solar concentrator, reflecting and concentrating light that shines down onto the pool.

And it’s not even as powerful as it could have been: the designers had included a film on the south-facing windows to scatter rather than concentrate most of the reflection.  But the sun in Nevada is strong and it is such a large building that it still produces this spot that the staff have dubbed “the death ray” (management, who are less interested in stimulating the imagination, prefer to call it a “solar convergence”)

The article linked above gives the story of one customer who was sunning himself by the pool when he started to feel uncomfortably hot:

He tried to put on his flip-flop sandals but, inexplicably, they were too hot to touch. So he ran barefoot to the shade.

"I was effectively being cooked," Pintas said. "I started running as fast as I could without looking like a lunatic."

Then he smelled an odor, and realized it was coming from his head, where a bit of hair had been scorched. It was about 12:20 p.m., as best Pintas can recall.

Taking brief refuge at the pool's bar area, Pintas chatted with employees. He said they chuckled when he described what had happened. "Yes, we call it the death ray," he says they told him. Sometimes it causes disposable drink glasses to melt, a cocktail waitress added

When he gets back to his deck chair, he notices that the plastic bag he had left there has partially melted, especially around the black lettering (which presumably absorbs more of the heat).

The plastic bag after its tussle with the death ray; via Las Vegas Review-Journal

Now this is all accidental, but what if it could be used deliberately, could a sun-belt building be weaponized?  What if the hotel’s exterior windows were all motorized and could be angled to direct the sun at various targets around the city.  Built by a megalomaniac developer, the plan begins with just making the other buildings uncomfortably hot, driving up their operating costs and pushing competitors out of business (there were some complaints like that levelled against Frank Gehry’s titanium clad Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles).  Our enemy then purchases these defunct buildings and “retro-fits” them to add to his arsenal.

As people start to become suspicious, the attacks escalate to some murders, with charred bodies left and forensics can find no evidence of a fuel.  Ultimately, as the net starts to close in on him, he unleashes the full force of his magnifying buildings, sending a fiery ray of energy to destroy important buildings around the city.

Mobile re-education facility?

Mobile Cinema, newly reconditioned and fresh off the lot in 1967, via BLDGBLOG

This mobile cinema – essentially a big home theatre setup in a bus – just shouts “Doctor Who” to me.  Especially that second, older image with the extra signage “Ministry of Technology” and “Operated by PERA”, and the black-suited men being lead into the van by the white-lab-coated operator (and notice the second operator in the glass dome at the front).

Alternatively, there’s something about it that also resonates with Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep, the image of Nyarlathotep as a kind of travelling showman whose shows are more than they might appear.