The average looking ones, however, were allowed to keep their jobs.

In the 1990s I made some serious bank while in college doing some freelance CAD work for our local Toyota dealership. I laid it all out so that national could use it to do concept drawings and 3D models. This was when Toyota pushed all the dealerships into the current silver and red motif.

Being a German car of that era, I’d go (3) “Wires melted together at fusebox”

This is why populations decline. We reach a level of prosperity where all the handbrakes disappear, girls stop being impressed with sweet handbrake turns, and pretty soon we go extinct as a species.

“Yo dawg, we heard you like hood scoops, so we scooped your scoop.”

The Ebook of Sled Driver is out there. It was limited print and very expensive to begin with and now that it is out of print even more so.

The Blackbird is the fastest aircraft that will ever be built bc aerospace tech hit its absolute pinnacle in the 1960s.

Yes indeed -- it was a big coordinated effort. Even the Navy would be involved, getting as many sensors as possible to see what the Blackbird managed to light up.

One of the things they’d do on their missions was deliberately get detected by as many Soviet air defense systems as possible, so they could record how they were being detected and from where, thereby mapping out the locations and tracking capabilities of the Soviet air defense systems.

Indeed, it was as overt as hell. :-D One of the things they’d do on their missions was deliberately get detected by as many Soviet air defense systems as possible, so they could record how they were being detected and from where, thereby mapping out the locations and tracking capabilities of the Soviet air defense syst…

Actual operational costs would have been right up there near $300m/year. Remember that operational costs include the plane, pilots, dedicated airbase facilities, personnel and tankers. In the SR71's case, you need a whole lot of tankers, IIRC it held something like 11 or 12 thousand gallons of fuel and that was only…

No, we’re pretty sure it was pretty close to Mn 3.2. If you take the intake cone in its forward most position, the shock cone it creates at Mn 3.2 lands right on the outer lip of the inlet. Any faster and you’d get a shock coming off the outer lip into the intake air, which would then interact with the shock from the…

I just clicked on it about 10 times. Just helping out!

My favorite SR-71 story is the one where they had to firewall the throttles to outrun some SAMs and, when they finally throttled back, they realized they had overshot their tanker rendezvous by several countries.

Skunk Works should be required reading in the US public school system.

Andrew, your efforts to draw more page views to the Ultimate Ground Speed Check have been noted.

Ausfahrt is actually a Germanic abbreviated concatenation of alteraustralischerfahrt from the words Alter (Old) Australischer (Australian) Fahrt (Fart) but can be most directly translated to mean “Rupert Murdoch”

Same reason there’s no indicator to tell you when G-Vectoring is working. It’s seamless; you would otherwise convince yourself there’s something you’re feeling rather than just enjoy the drive.

http://www.autonews.com/article/20171030/RETAIL01/171039981/mazda-amati-employee-reunion

We’re not begging. This was just something that came up in a fun conversation last week at our SKYACTIV-X program. -your friendly Mazda PR guy