huh?

It's on the Baen site, in the free library, if it's not in "Retief!" , it's in one of the others.

Cheers, Gary B-)

yeah, I got inside a 111 at an air museum in Arizona. very strange bomb bay indeed, but it seemed practical...

Craig

i dunno, i've looked for it for many years and a lot of retoef "experts" tell me i'm lying and no such story. but i know what i read. the beginning starts a lot like the sweatie storie with him on a ship, except he's 30 years older. i really want to reread.

_eat_ shrubbery. Ni!

Pat

That would make it move slightly to one side, wouldn't it? Okay, we make a lightweight bomb, and seal it inside of a big Styrofoam sphere, like a giant Wham-O Tracball:

then mount these in C-130's and spin them up like Dambuster bombs before rolling them out the back. The Magnus effect makes them fall on other paths than merely ballistic as they hit the high speed airflow behind the plane. In short, you can fly to one side of the enemy and hurl bombs at him diagonally like explosive curveballs from hell. You can fly right over him, and after you pass and he thinks it's safe to look around, he will not have noticed that thing you released out of the back which climbed several hundred feet above the aircraft before starting its slow descent...as the nuclear weapon in it arms. :-)

Pat

It was an efficient way of carrying a lot of medium/small bombs in a fuselage of that shape. On the civilian version of that plane before its true purpose was revealed, the bomb bay was the the aircraft's "smoking compartment" A rather large area given the small passenger complement of the airliner (ten, with four in the "smoking compartment") Still it beat the six passengers on the Do-17 "airliner/mailplane" who had to be be gymnasts just to get aboard and take their seats.

Pat

neither onkle adolph nor his pilot, hans bauer liked the 111 as a airliner. apparently there was no way to seal it tight so it was drafty, cold, and noisy. like their counterparts, the b25 boys, almost all the 111 vets have hearing aids, usually two. i knew one when i was a kid in the vaterland and he was deef as a post. his faverite word was VASS?

Guess it depends on which way the wind is blowing, and which side of the aircraft it comes off of...and how heavy it is. But that's what the little wedgies are for:

...what, behind the rabbit?

Yes, that's the story I recall, and I *read* it in a Baen Free book, sometime in that last 6 to 12 months, probably "Retief" , but it may have been in one of the others.

No, it's in "Retief", it's called "DIPLOMAT-AT-ARMS" and it is Chapter

2, at , so stop whingeing and go and read it!

Cheers, Gary b-)

i've read diplomat many times. wer're talking two different stories. and i don't whine, so intercourse the penguin, ducky.

Cut and pasted from Chapter 2, "DIPLOMAT-AT-ARMS", of the book "Retief", on the Baen site:

that's diplomat? from the first book? i can't be remembering that poorly.

snipped-for-privacy@some.domain wrote: [SNIP]

Yes.

You do know that there was a novella/short-story called "Diplomat-At-Arms" (which is what this is) and a book called the same? Which, AFAIRC, is *not* an expansion of the short. (May also be the old "different titles for different markets" thing, too.)

Cheers, Gary B-)