Stray Hawkeye

Kind of cool old-school snowmobile / tractor thingy:

Via Make

If you get bored, since it is a little slow paced, at least skip ahead to abut 7:25 to see the corkscrew things mounted under a car.  Somehow I imagine modern cars are a little less hacker friendly.  Also, at 9:20 or so, it shows it can run on dirt as well.

After watching that, I started to wonder why I’ve never seen anything like before.  It seems like it would be perfect for military use.  So, I looked around a bit and, low and behold, the Russians tried it out:

And, at least one modern company, Tyco, has picked up the technology (their version also goes on water):

Three pretty distinct takes on the same technology.

I eventually found a wikipedia article on the concept, and it sounds like the concept has been toyed with for a long time, but it’s not very good/fast on plain old dry land, so it doesn’t get used a lot.

So, maybe everyone else in the world already knows about this, and I’m just uninformed because I wasn’t around for the space race, but I thought this was fascinating.  Apparently, before announcing successful missions into space, the Soviet Union made several secret, failed attempts.  Even better, some amateur radio operators tracked some of these missions.  There’s a great article about it here.  It’s really, really worth the read.  (Fair warning, I have no idea why, but you can only look at the article once per day.  If you close the window and go to it again the same day, it asks you to register, if you come back the next day, it’s fine again.  Weird.)

There’s also an article about the brothers from an April 1965 Reader’s Digest here.  It’s a little dry, and covers a lot of the same things, but sort of interesting to see a piece from when it was happening.

Interesting article on how Russia’s changing economy has affected the behavior of the stray dog population there:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121123197068805001.html

Bonus points for identifying the obscure cultural reference in the title of this post (aside from the parallel of stray dogs and stray hawkeyes of course :) )