Mr. Ranillon Goes to Washington

Posted by Ranillon on 8. September 2009 22:01

I am back from Washington D.C. and finished with all that real life work, so it's back to the fun stuff -- posting here.

My plan was to find material that was directly applicable to GW games, but fate got in the way of me getting the best stuff.  For instance, there was an Smithsonian exhibit on 15th/16th century armors, a perfect tie-in to Bretonnian and Empire styled armor.  Only one problem -- it was (as far as I can tell) the only exhibit in the whole Smithsonian system where photography wasn't allowed!  Arrrrgghhh!

So, I had to settle for cool, but not quite as relevant material.  Still, I think it can be inspirational.  The first two pairings of photos are from the Natural History museum.

Picture One is of a Dimetrodon, a mammal-like reptile that lived around 280 million years ago in the Permian era. To explain why it was "mammal-like" I need to geek out a bit.

Around 320 million years ago during the Carboniferous the primitive reptiles of the time split off into two basic groups – the saurapsids and the synapsids.  The first group led to everything we commonly think as being “reptiles” including beasts like turtles and alligators, but more famously into dinosaurs and their descendants, the birds.  The second group led to the “mammal-like” reptiles which are so named as they eventually produced all mammals, including you and me. 

So, the Dimetrodon is a distant cousin of ours that is more closely related to us than to lizards or Theropods like T-Rex.  What I find interesting is that for the first 70 or so million years it was our primitive ancestors who were the dominant branch while the saurapsids remained more in the shadows.  Then the “Great Dying” at the end of the Permian (which killed off as much as 95% of all species) all but wiped out the synapsids, thus allowing the subsequent domination of the dinosaurs and related animals for the following 185 million years.  One example of a dominant saurapsid is Picture Two which is of an aquatic dolphin-like reptile called an Ichthyosaur.

Of course, 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous a big rock walloped the Earth and suddenly most of the saurapsids bit the dust, thereby allowing our ancestors to once more become the dominant animals on the planet (Yippee!).  What goes around comes around, I guess.

 

These next two animals are from eras even older than the first two.  Picture Three is of a Placoderm from the Devonian, approximately 430-360 million years ago.  It was a member of a family of large predatory fish with huge armored heads.  I don't know about you, but it looks fairly Tyranid-like to me. 

Pciture Four is of an Eurypterid (say that ten times fast), a family of so-called "sea scorpians" that lasted 210 million years starting way back in the Ordovician era about 460 Million B.C.  This particular example was the size of a bear, but there were even larger ones than this.  If you ask me these are so alien they look weird even compared to the 'Nids!

I also took pictures at the Air and Space Museum (which was literally one block away from my hotel).  I got these mostly because they are super nifty.

Picture Five is of a modern unmanned drone -- there has got to be some Imperial flyer potential here.  

Picture Six is of an experimental aircraft NASA used to test various technologies.  It's just simply cool.

Picture Seven is a model of the "original" (not really, but it's the first example to become famous) YB-49 flying wing from the late 1940s.  Unfortunately for its developer -- Northrop -- the technology to make a flying wing work safely did not really mature until the 1980s.

Picture Eight is of a collection of various rockets.  Nothing says "boom" like a missile.

These last two pics have nothing much to do with GW games, but I wanted to include them anyway.

I stopped by all the new monuments (at least since I lived nearby in the 80s), but none of them compare both visually and emotionally to the Vietnam War Memorial.  The second picture lists the name of a soldier who died in May of 1969 -- Larry D. Hoch.  I never met the guy (I was only 2 when he was killed), but he had the same last name as mine and given that he was from Pennsylvania -- the U.S. origin of the Hoch clan -- it is a good bet we are distantly related. 

For me this name brings home the true cost of war.  It's easy to forget that battles kill real people, not just little toy soldiers that we can later bring out again for another game as if nothing happened.  Hopefully, someday all "wars" will only be make-believe.