How to Spot a Psychopath

Stuck in a tropical paradise with nothing to do

3 October 2008 — dan

In a development so astonishing that this month's issue of Astonishing Developments Magazine has been held back for a complete rework to accommodate it, "Colourful Perth businessman Warren Anderson has fallen out with his friend Tim Johnston - the founder of failed fuel technology company Firepower - after chasing him to Bali."

Apparently Tim wouldn't meet with Warren. Poor Warren. Everybody, all together: "Awwwwww."

All Warren now has to comfort himself with is the millions of dollars he made by offloading his Firepower shares before they, inevitably, fell to zero. And, um, also all of his numerous other millions.

But he does get points for using the word "henchman" to describe another of Johnston's business associates.

Posted in Firepower. 2 Comments »

A rare recantation

2 October 2008 — dan

A reader brought New Zealand company "Octafuel" to my attention. As I write this, the Octafuel Web site contains nothing but a press release admitting that "on-demand hydrogen generator technology" - which is either injecting a little electrolytically-generated hydrogen into your fuel-air mixture to allegedly greatly increase engine efficiency or, according to countless dodgy Web sites, a full-blown "Run Your Car On Water!" system - is indeed worthless.

What a surprise.

Octafuel do, however, stick to their previous statement that "there are a number of international studies supporting" the idea that these generators work.

It is my considered opinion that if you set your plausibility-of-evidence bar low enough to believe that trickling a little electrolytically-generated hydrogen into the fuel/air stream will have any significant effect on anything - here's a decent starting point for exploring what evidence there is - then you must also believe that people bouncing around on their bottoms are flying, that people who allegedly have psychokinetic powers that never manifest when someone's looking at them aren't just cheating, that stickers can improve battery performance, and that magnets make wine taste better.

Apparently Octafuel issued this press release shortly before one Eric Otoka was going to have this piece published in the Waitako Times, detailing the results of his month-long test of the system. Otoka concluded that the Octafuel device achieved "a maximum of only 4.8 per cent fuel savings", which suggests to me that the error margin of his testing technique was 5% or more.

Octafuel was "'absolutely' confident the product would save between 25 and 40 per cent", though, so this is still a pretty solid piece of evidence to the contrary. And Octafuel are now arranging a product recall with refunds for purchasers. This makes them about a million times more honest than the average fuel-saver outfit.

Octafuel are behaving so unexpectedly honourably because they are not an outright scam organisation like Firepower. They actually offer some fuel-saving devices that do not blatantly defy any laws of physics. (Or, at least, they've talked in the past about offering such devices. There's nothing on their Web site but the press release at the moment.)

Octafuel apparently have a bolt-on regenerative braking system for normal cars, for instance. I've no idea how their one is supposed to work, but I've seen others. One type basically clamps an electric motor over each rear wheel - it's conceptually similar to smaller systems to add electric assist to bicycles. The motors work as generators when you brake, charging a relatively small battery or capacitor bank, which gives you extra drive when you accelerate again. This is pretty much useless for highway driving - the extra weight and drag are likely to eat up what small fuel savings there are - but it can give a not inconsiderable economy improvement for stop-start city driving. It also makes your car look a bit like a prototype Spinner.

Octafuel have also talked about Peltier-device heat-recovery units, which turn waste exhaust heat into electricity to take load off the car's alternator. Less alternator load means less fuel burned - though not much less, if you're not running an impressive wattage of electrical gear in your car.

Modern cars are adding more and more high-powered electrical hardware, though, and there's room for more. A good enough exhaust-heat scavenger could, for instance, deliver enough power to make an electrically-powered automotive air conditioner a more economical choice than the current type, which is belt-driven from the engine. And just harvesting heat from the exhaust - rather than, say, making exhaust gases directly turn a turbine - won't affect the power or economy of the engine itself at all.

Major car manufacturers have been researching this for some years. It's possible that the miserable efficiency and not-so-great durability of Peltier electrothermal devices may make "Automotive Thermoelectric Generators" uneconomical, though. I'm delighted to say that this means it may turn out to be better to run a closed-cycle steam engine from exhaust heat!

Posted in Cars, Science. 7 Comments »

My contribution to European sightseeing

1 October 2008 — dan

I just talked to a nice chap from my bank about my Visa card number being ripped off. Again. I'm getting a new card, they're sending me a form to fill out to get the fraudulently spent money back, blah blah blah. The usual drill, and not that much of a hassle for me, since I don't use the card very often.

The last time this happened - which was actually the first time it'd ever happened to me - was late last year. Someone bought himself a couple of lovely iPods and attempted, unsuccessfully, to purchase $US1500 worth of Ultrasone headphones.

So far, so normal.

This time's a bit different, though. There was just the one charge, working out at a hundred and forty-something Australian dollars, to a payee listed only as "TRENITA". The nice man from the bank told me this was "Trenitalia"; someone was trying to buy Italian train tickets with my credit card.

The charge was instantly noticed by Visa and/or the bank, who did that precautionary-card-lock thing that's usually what you want but which can be a big problem if you've actually gone overseas for a holiday and would now rather like to be able to buy things.

According to the bank bloke, there's been a sudden rash of these Trenitalia charges just over the last few days, indicating that some major company has, yet again, cheerfully handed zillions of card numbers over to what will inevitably be described as "hackers" when someone writes a news story about it.

Sometimes these mass card-number leaks actually do happen because an attacker managed to compromise the security of one or more companies' card databases, or just sniffs a network to harvest any numbers that pass by. But, more often, serious blue-chip businesses seem to just put a billion numbers in plaintext on a laptop and then leave it on a train, or burn a copy of their unencrypted database to a CD and mail it to the wrong person. Or they print the numbers out and send them to newsagents for professional distribution. Or they put them on an open Web server, and Google indexes them. (And there's no reason to suppose that financial institutions will be any smarter.)

I would, out of morbid curiosity, like to know who trod on their dick this time. It'll probably be one company - quite possibly a bank - with which all of the compromised accounts did business. It could also be a credit-card processing firm or "payment service provider", though, that provides card-handling services to many small businesses.

I've only had this card since December last year, but that doesn't narrow it down much. Tell me if you see any news stories about this.

Posted in Scams. 17 Comments »

K-9 will tell him if you say anything important

30 September 2008 — dan

Why did this not already exist?

(I'm not counting this, which is obviously inferior. This, however, is brilliant. I found the source image on the BBC's K-9 wallpaper gallery. Please leave a comment if you make a prettier version.)

I think the original Captain Kirk version - which can be motivational or demotivational depending on which way you look at it - is one of the finest ever made. But, c'mon, if it came to a fight Jim would find it pretty hard to captain that starship of his, what with his grandfather never having met his grandma.

(In case you don't spend a lot of time on teh internets, and this is all Greek to you: The Despair Incorporated Demotivators became a lolcats-like DIY phenomenon a while ago, and now there are about a billion of them, often riffing on previous efforts. See this one, for instance.)

I made the poster with the despair.com Motivator, which looks suspiciously similar to the Big Huge Labs Motivator. I presume one of them licensed, or ripped off, the other.

"Wow. Moth balls. So, what's for dinner?" "Plastique."

29 September 2008 — dan

This MetaFilter post reminded me that just owning a common Casio wrist watch is now being used as evidence of terroristic intent. The post links to this Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, in which a retired FBI agent points out that this "evidence" is every bit as preposterous as you'd think.

That model of watch may be popular for use as a bomb timer, but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other watches - and non-watch timer devices - that'd work just as well. The Casios show up so often merely because Casios are easy to find, and cheap.

Similarly, most terrorists have eaten bread on several occasions before committing their crimes. So if you find some bread in the kitchen of a guy called Achmed... do I have to draw you a picture, people?

At the end of the article, though, the ex-FBI guy goes on to say "You give me a half-hour in a supermarket and I can blow up your garage."

It's great to point out that bad people cannot be prevented from doing bad things by banning certain commonplace but allegedly magically dangerous items. But I think claims like this don't help. The idea that any kid can find a recipe for an honest-to-goodness building-smashing bomb on teh internets and be blowing up their school tomorrow is a common one, and it fans the fire of unreasoning fear that's screwing the Western world up so badly.

I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think it is, actually, possible to build a proper bomb out of stuff from the supermarket. No matter how easily Kyle Reese did it in The Terminator.

(Note that the above does not apply if your local "supermarket" is a Wal-Mart that sells guns and ammo.)

I think the closest you could get to a genuine "supermarket bomb" would be fertiliser (if your supermarket actually has some fertiliser product that's reasonably pure ammonium nitrate) and motor oil. But then what're you going to use as an initiator? I don't remember seeing a "Blasting Caps" aisle the last time I was in the supermarket.

The most feasible initiator would probably be the dangerous but widely-used TATP, which you can almost make from supermarket supplies.

The problem with TATP - and HMTD too; HMTD is what the rather implausible "liquid bombers" apparently intended to use as their main explosive - is that you need concentrated hydrogen peroxide to make it. I don't think there's any way to concentrate "drugstore" peroxide - which tops out at about 6% concentration - that's easier than synthesising peroxide (which is hardly a complex molecule, after all) from scratch.

Apparently the unsuccessful London July 21st bombers thought they could concentrate peroxide by just boiling it down, but I think that's hopeless. Hydrogen peroxide will constantly decompose into water and oxygen even at room temperature, after all; the hotter you make it, the faster that happens, leaving you with nothing but water. Perhaps you could concentrate hair-bleaching 6% peroxide a bit by simmering it, but you need to get it up past 50% concentration to make it useful for whiz-bang sorts of applications. That's just not going to happen on the stove.

(The result of the July 21st bombers' incompetent work was, of course, that none of their bombs went off. So much for "supermarket terrorism".)

There are various other teenage-mayhem sorts of possibilities with supermarket ingredients. You could make rather nasty gas - though not any sort of explosion - with ammonia and bleach. Pool chlorine plus anything acidic will give you chlorine gas; that's poisonous too, and if you cork the mixture up tightly the bottle will explode, though not with enough force to damage anything bigger than a badly-built doghouse. And there are umpteen different supermarket flammables with which one could simply burn a garage down.

But I don't think that even if you visited the supermarket and then the hardware store, you'd be able to make anything more deadly than a pipe bomb full of match-heads. Which you wouldn't want to go off under your chair, or anything, but which isn't going to blow away a garage either.

If all you've got to work with is off-the-supermarket-shelf ingredients, I think the most impressive result you can hope for is that achieved by that schmuck who hoped to destroy Glasgow Airport by setting his Jeep on fire.

Some or all of the above has been independently discovered by every 14-year-old boy who's ever downloaded the notoriously incompetent "Jolly Roger's Cookbook". The take-home message for them, and for everybody else, is simple:

Yes, ordinary household products can be dangerous, as has been discovered by many people who mixed ammonia and bleach and then woke up in hospital. Or didn't wake up at all.

But there's no reason to wet yourself in terror if you come home early and find your kid mixing drugstore peroxide and nail-polish remover in the kitchen.

People who intend to commit crimes of violence via a method that can't possibly work - "I'm going to kill the Prime Minister using my powers of mental telepathy!" - should still be investigated, because it's possible that after trying the telepathy thing for a few weeks, they'll just go and buy a rifle.

But worrying about terrorists making bombs out of groceries is foolish.

Explosives are actually difficult to make, and domestic terrorists in the Western world are (a) clearly not very bright and (b) so rare that even if their idiotic schemes worked every time, you'd still be far more likely to die because you fell off something.

Relax.

Posted in Strange Tales. 22 Comments »

Not your everyday fuel-saving gadget

28 September 2008 — dan

"A Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent", says this report on PhysOrg.com.

A couple of readers pointed the report out to me, observing that at least this one doesn't claim to be using reverse-spin antiunicorn particles, magnetising the unmagnetisable, or cracking water into hydrogen and oxygen then reacting them to somehow give more power than went in.

Next, the report turned up on Slashdot, and some more readers pointed it out to me. These readers were less complimentary.

Once again, yet again, this gadget is supposed to give "more efficient and cleaner combustion". This is apparently because the fuel's viscosity is reduced by an electric field, but it doesn't matter how the heck the "more efficient combustion" happens, because there's almost no room for improvement there.

As regular readers who've been subjected to my snowstorms of links to Tony's Guide to Fuel Saving will already know, modern engines in anything vaguely resembling a decent state of tune only fail to burn a few per cent of their fuel, at the very most.

If you're only blowing 2% of the fuel out of the exhaust valve in the first place, improving combustion can only gain you a maximum economy and/or power increase of that same 2%.

If a fuel-saver inventor bothers to address this unfortunate fact, they usually start banging on about how functionally all of the fuel might be getting burned in the engine, but their invention makes it burn faster, or more evenly, or something.

I am pleased to say that no such nonsense is being put forward by the inventors of this latest gizmo. They're streets ahead of most of the other purveyors of magnets and crystals and stickers and mothball pills, for one reason: These people are actually doing proper science. They have written up and published their research. And they're not selling anything.

You just don't see this sort of... honesty... from most mileage-gadget inventors. These guys are telling the world exactly what they did, and inviting replication of their results. This is what proper scientists always do, but it's almost unknown in the mileage-gadget world. The closest mileage-gadget people usually get is encouraging hundreds of dudes in garages to all try to finally make the first Joe Cell that actually works.

The Temple University paper is titled "Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion"; it was published in Energy & Fuels, a journal of the American Chemical Society. The whole paper is available online. It's only four pages, so I read it.

I don't know whether their basic idea - that applying an electrical field to fuel actually does reduce its viscosity - is correct. They say that this definitely does work on liquids which contain suspended particles, and that the larger molecules in gasoline or diesel fuel can be regarded as (very small) suspended particles. That sounds fishy to me - molecules do not, of course, behave at all like normal visible-under-a-microscope "particles" - but the paper contains a neat graph in which a sample of diesel apparently did decrease in viscosity, from 4.6 centipoise to as little as 4.2, after electrical treatment.

(I'm assuming that they kept the fuel's temperature steady. All sorts of petroleum products become less viscous when you warm them up, and their electrical gizmo will slightly warm the fuel. But only an idiot, or scammer, would fail to control for temperature in this situation.)

If their gizmo really does reduce fuel viscosity, then it's uncontroversial that it'll also improve atomisation when the fuel's squirted out of an injector in a diesel or fuel-injected petrol engine. They tested for this anyway, and got positive results.

But now we strike a problem. Devices to improve fuel atomisation are not new. They've been around for ages. And, as Tony points out on the above-linked page, even if the fuel is a vapour when it's introduced into the combustion chamber - if it's petrol that's been pre-heated by a fuel-saving gizmo, or if the engine's running on LPG or CNG - there's only a very small efficiency gain, if any at all.

According to the paper, the inventors of the electrorheology viscosity doodad tested it on a diesel engine in a lab for a whole week, and got readily measurable economy and power gains. Then they tested a Mercedes 300D on a dynamometer, and again got a clear improvement - though they say the power output improved from an average of "0.3677 hp" to "0.4428 hp", which suggests they've either slipped a decimal point or there's some large divisor here that I'm missing. The engine would be producing substantially more power than that even if it was only idling.

(They say, by the way, that their device ought to work just as well on petrol engines as on diesel. They've only tested it on diesel so far, though. The worthless atomisation-improvers on the market today are almost always for petrol engines.)

After that, the paper says they did "continuous road tests" on the same Mercedes and found even better improvements - 12 to almost 20% better mileage. But just driving a car around is, of course, not a proper test. There's just no way for a person driving a car to drive it exactly the same way every day, and people can very easily unconsciously drive more gently when they're all excited about the new fuel-saving thingummy they just installed.

You could maybe get some better-than-nothing data if you blinded a driving-around test - nobody driving the car knowing whether your doodad was operating or not - but the paper doesn't say they did that.

The paper as a whole, though, looks almost entirely kosher to me. It seems that these people really did this stuff, and really got these results. The very low 300D dyno power figures concern me - they don't seem to make any sense at all - but that's the only part of the paper that looks really dodgy.

Research like this is all about replication - other people reading the paper and then performing the same experiment. This irons out the effect of errors and dishonesty, and over time leaves us with the truth, or as close to it as we can get. Anybody who wants to can duplicate the Temple University experiment; the electrifier device should be very easy to build, and it contains no exotic materials or physics-defying woo-woo components.

But it seems to me that the electrifier's claimed means of operation, at the very least, can't be right. Improving fuel atomisation just doesn't improve combustion, or anything else. Modern petrol and diesel engines already atomise fuel as well as is necessary, and burn very nearly all of it at the right time, in the right place, and at the right speed.

If this device actually does work - and it'd be fantastic if it did - it seems to me that it must be for some other reason.

UPDATE: When I first wrote this piece, I missed the end of this press release, which mentions that the new electronic viscosity device has already been "licensed" to an outfit called "Save The World Air".

STWA's current mainstay product appears to be the "MagChargR", which looks to me like an entirely straightforward magnetic "fuel saver". The Temple University researcher who's come up with the new electronic viscosity doodad appears to be involved up to his hips in STWA. This immensely reduces my opinion of him and of the value of his research. It seems clear to me now that he is actually in this for the money, even if he has published his method and results.

(The STWA test-results page, tellingly called "testimonials.htm" gives you the usual collection of hard-to-trace allegedly-independent tests to support the claims made by the company. As usual, in order to see if the tests are actually kosher you'd need, at the very least, to check with testing outfits identified only by a cryptic name {"CP Engineering", no Web site, address or phone number given}, or located in non-English-speaking countries - in this case Thailand and China. Or just believe the pretty graphs, which contain no information about their provenance at all.

I've taken plenty of time to look into this sort of stuff before, and I'm sick of it. Screw every single God-damned one of these people with their devices that'd be worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year if they actually bloody worked but which, strangely, they've never taken the time to have properly tested by contactable organisations in the countries where they do business.)

Unlike most magnetic fuel gadgets, the MagChargR goes around the carburetor or fuel-injection equivalent rather than being clamped to the fuel line. But, as has been demonstrated from the level of quantum physics up over decades, if not centuries, hydrocarbons are just as immune to magnetism no matter where you throw it at them. I'm pretty sure that magnets for every part of every engine have been marketed at one time or another. We'd probably know if they did anything (besides collect shavings in the bottom of the sump...) by now.

If the STWA device works as well as every other magnetic fuel saver anyone has ever tested, it does not work at all. This could explain why STWA was in 2002 enjoined by the Securities and Exchange Commission against making further fraudulent representations about their products and commercial prospects.

This action was resolved in the usual way: STWA settled out of court and didn't admit anything. It would appear that this event did not put a big dent in their business.

If I were selling a legitimate fuel-saving device, I would not choose to go into partnership with a company which, currently, proudly offers what looks to me exactly like an illegitimate fuel saving device.

Posted in Electricity, Science. 15 Comments »

The Gakken Cross Copter: Two rotors for twenty-seven dollars

28 September 2008 — dan

This is a Gakken Cross Copter, which can be yours, as it was mine, for 1886 yen plus delivery from HobbyLink Japan. (It's something like $US27 including the cheaper Surface Air Lift shipping, as I write this.)

The helicopter itself has two contra-rotating rotors, which are driven by one minuscule electric motor. The motor is tethered to a hand-powered generator, which you must crank with considerable enthusiasm to get the Copter airborne.

I was glumly contemplating a 600-take video session (with the cats, who find the Copter utterly fascinating, banished from the room...) to try to get some decent footage of the Copter in action. But fortunately, some people from Make Magazine got the chance to play with a prototype:

The prototype seems bulkier than the production Copter, and has a longer cable. But the principle's the same.

Because the power wire tugs on the bottom of the Copter, it tends to pull the bottom of the aircraft toward you, which causes it to fly away from you. This can rapidly get out of hand. Fortunately, you can just stop turning the handle and let the copter fall and dangle from the wires without damage. It seems to be pretty tough, too, considering its gossamer construction; the two interleaved rotors often end up mis-meshed after a crash, but if they haven't managed to get completely jammed, just twitching the generator handle back and forth a little will usually sort them out.

The generator's quite beautifully coupled to the tiny motor in the Copter. You only need a slight turn of the crank handle either way to get the rotors turning. It acts more like a drive shaft than an electrical linkage.

As with the immortal Vertibird (which actually did have a drive shaft from the power unit to the tethered helicopter), the Cross Copter's remote power source makes it lighter. The Copter by itself, not counting the tether wire, weighs only about 8.5 grams (that's 0.3 ounces). The whole 110cm (3.6 foot) length of the power wire adds only about one more gram.

The Copter's smaller than I expected, though. The diameter of each four-bladed rotor is a bit less than 12 centimetres (4.7 inches).

You also have to assemble the Cross Copter yourself, but this will only take a few minutes. As with so many Japanese hobby products, the packaging is beautiful - in this case a box with a short instructional magazine for a front panel. The instructions are all in Japanese, but the pictures are more than adequate to figure out how to click the few parts together. You need to squeeze rather hard to get the landing skids to click onto the bottom of the Copter frame, which could be beyond the hand strength of a small child, but the rest of the assembly should be no problem for any intelligent kid.

Getting the Copter to take off from a surface is dodgy at best, because of the wire-making-it-fly-away-from-you problem. If you've got someone to hold the chopper for you while you get it up to speed, though, you'll be fine.

(If you go for hand launching, you could also delete the two skids on the bottom, dropping a little more precious weight. It's not as if you're ever likely to use the skids for landing, after all. It's probably not completely physically impossible to get the Cross Copter to land, but I'm buggered if I know how you'd go about it.)

You can, these days, get a proper self-contained remote-controlled tiny helicopter for not much more than the price of the Cross Copter. The Interactive Toy Concepts Micro Mosquito, for instance, is a highly insectile (it has eyes!) twin-coaxial-rotor beastie that weighs only about fifteen grams and seems to cost only around fifty bucks. And it seems to be quite controllable...

...which is more than can be said for its predecessors, the foam-bodied Picoo Z and its endless clones - some decent, some awful, all very cheap.

For proper airlift-a-sugar-lump-to-your-tea control, you need something like the incredible Pixelitos or the Proxflyer prototypes that led to the mass-market Micro Mosquito, but you can at least try to control even the worst Picoo clones. The Cross Copter pretty much just goes where it feels like going.

(The Cross Copter actually has a similar stability system to the Prox/Picoflyer; its rotors are rigid, but loosely connected to the drive shafts, so they can flop around to counter movement of the Copter's body.)

If you want a helicopter, you don't want a Cross Copter. But if you want a neat little not-too-expensive toy that's half science project, half party novelty, the Cross Copter's the only game in town.

Not a lot of people seem to be buying the Cross Copter from HobbyLink Japan, because as I write this the "People who bought this item also like" section on HLJ's Cross Copter page contains nothing but items from my own last HLJ order!

I hope, faithful readers, that you'll at least manage to add that little Sherman to the end of the page.

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. 2 Comments »

Mini-tank du jour

27 September 2008 — dan

Tamiya make excellent radio-controlled tank kits; I have two. Their 16th-scale kits all cost several hundred dollars, though.

Here, in contrast...

...is one that should be well under $200, delivered.

It's the upcoming #48207 Sherman, a reduced-size version of the 16th-scale Sherman that Tamiya have been selling in different versions, on and off, for decades now.

This Sherman is 1:35th scale, an immensely popular scale for military models, so it ought to be about 16.7 centimetres (6.6 inches) long. And, like the 1/16th Kubelwagen Tamiya sold a few years ago, the 35th-scale Sherman comes with radio gear.

It's still a proper R/C kit that needs to be assembled and painted, so yes, there's more to buy. But you have to buy at least a radio set for a normal R/C kit; the 35th-scale Sherman has one in the box. And its major electronic and mechanical components seem to come pre-assembled. You shouldn't need anything but basic hand tools and glue to build it, actually, if you're happy with whatever colour the parts are when you snip them off the sprue.

The list price for the new Sherman is $US213 or something, but list prices for R/C kits are always ridiculous; you shouldn't find it actually costs more than about $US150 from a hobby shop. As I write this, HobbyLink Japan (with whom I do not, in case you were wondering, have an affiliate deal) have the new Sherman available for pre-order for only 13,110 yen (that's about $US124, $AU150 or 85 Euros, as I write this). That doesn't include delivery, but this isn't a big kit; it shouldn't cost more than another 5000 yen to ship anywhere in the world. So the total should come in well under $US200.

The pre-order price is a 5% discount on the 13,800-yen normal price. The kit's slated to be in stock in mid-October.

Tamiya have made several other 35th-scale R/C tanks, but in their typical treat-customers-mean-keep-'em-keen fashion, you're not going to find most of those kits in the shops any more. They released two other 35th-scale R/C tanks this year - a Panzer IV and a Panther G - and you may just still be able to find those for a reasonable price.

These current 35th-scale tanks are more expensive than the ones that were on sale a few years ago, but that's because they've got turret traverse and gun elevation. I think they have proper articulated tracks, too, not unrealistic and power-sapping rubber belts. If the above-pictured Sherman has rubber tracks, they're incredibly detailed, with proper sprocket drive.

You don't get sound effects or flashing "firable" guns, but you do get a lovely scale model with full Dalek motion control. What's not to like?

Posted in Nerdery, Toys. Leave a Comment »

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