Operation Sandy was the codename for the post-World War II launch of a captured V-2 rocket from the deck of the United States Navy aircraft carrier USS Midway on September 6, 1947. It marked the first launch of a large rocket, and the only time for a V-2, from a ship at sea.Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, Assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations, was an early advocate of the concept. It was he who initiated Operation Sandy.Preliminary testing was done at the White Sands Missile Range, using a simulated aircraft carrier deck. The V-2 to be used was assembled at White Sands. It was shipped across the country to the east coast and loaded aboard the Midway, then the largest carrier in the Navy and equipped with an armored flight deck. The aircraft carrier sailed to a point several hundred miles south of Bermuda for the launch.After liftoff, the V-2 tilted at an angle and subsequently broke up at an altitude of 15,000 feet (4,600 m), disappointing the distinguished witnesses.
This guy continues to surprise me with his inventiveness. And his productivity.
The Garage Kubrick (he never quite managed to be assigned a name) is a character who somehow escaped the focus of my latest novel. He was there in the notes, but he didn't make it to the literary equivalent of the screen. He had already demonstrated his unwillingness to take his place in my book when I learned of Stanley Kubrick's death. The character was based not on Kubrick himself but on certain theories about Kubrick's methods and intentions that were put forward by a friend of mine, a young British director who once worked for him. Kubrick, my friend opined, didn't care how long anything took, and would have been happiest if he'd been able to construct virtual sets and virtual actors from the wireframe up. The idea took root in my college-film-history recollections of auteur theory - which has it that the director is, absolutely, the "author" of a given film, just as the writer is the author of a book.Whether this is literally true is arguable, but the world, in my experience, is filled with wannabe auteurs, and my imagination conjured one particularly focused and obsessive example.[...] The Garage Kubrick is a stone auteur, an adolescent near-future Orson Welles, plugged into some unthinkable (but affordable) node of consumer tech in his parents' garage. The Garage Kubrick is single-handedly making a feature in there, some sort of apparently live-action epic that may or may not involve motion capture. That may or may not involve human actors, but which will seem to.The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline. He is making, literally, a one-man movie; he is his film's author to the degree that I had always assumed any auteur would want to be.And he will not, consequently, come out of the garage. His parents, worried at first, have gone into denial. He is simply in there, making his film. Doing it the way my friend assumed Stanley Kubrick would have done it if he'd had the tech wherewithal.
One big advantage of CGI is that even the unworkable projects work magnificently.
