u/MrSubnuts

It's been almost 35 years since I begged my parents to buy me a copy of the original Incredible Cross-Sections, and yet I still find myself becoming hopelessly obsessed with this guy's work for a couple of weeks every 18 months or so. As an adult, I find myself cringing at some of the technical errors and simplifications, but then again, he was producing books for the 9-12 age group, so I can kinda forgive him. It probably says a lot about Biesty's skills as an artist, and his impact on me at a young age, that I'm still unhealthily obsessed with a lot of the subjects he illustrated.

Anybody else beg their parents to buy them a copy of this book in the early 90s, and became completely obsessed with maritime history shortly afterwards?

Saw these two little ones and their flustered mother running around under the power lines this morning and just had to film them.

I posted Biesty's Saturn V illustration on the Apollo reddit a couple of days ago, so I thought I would be interesting to share this earlier work of his. Considering that the book was published in 1992, it presents a very early/mid 80s version of the Shuttle - everyone's wearing blue coveralls, the Pilot still has his Launch Entry Helmet on, and the horizontal stabilizer and sides are liberally festooned in white tiles. The version in Incredible Cross-Sections even featured a detailed view of an MMU in the bottom right corner, and also showed a female astronaut sitting on the toilet with the urine hose obscuring the bits you couldn't show in a kid's book, which isn't in this version for some reason.

Still, I'm sure a lot of young space geeks (myself included) got this book as a present in the early 90s spent a lot of time staring at it in wide-eyed wonder.

Found this while browsing on Flickr earlier today. Wouldn't be surprised if it raised some eyebrows back in the day, even if a lot of the details are just a best guess or are completely fudged, including the tiny size of the air search radar, the lack of a conning tower or aft torpedo room, or that both engine rooms and the auxiliary machinery space are combined into one giant uncompartmentalized space.

If you're in Hartford county and have a couple hours to burn it's a lot of fun to just hang out at the gardens and ponds and watch the critters scurrying around. The frogs at the Lotus Garden will stay perfectly still when you're photographing them, and the Blue Jays at the Oriental Garden will land on the bench next to you, provided you have some peanuts, of course!