“Drawing Upon Considerable Technical Skills…
…[aeronautical engineers] decided to combine these features into one death-filled, high-flying hayride called the V-22 Osprey. (The proposed name, the V-22 OhJesusIdon’twanttodietellmywifeIloveher! didn’t panel well.)”
– A V-22 Osprey completes a fully-automated landing via its advanced autopilot system.
…Numerous technical advances were made during the Osprey project. The Marine Corps decided to adopt the Navy tradition of going down with a stricken ship and fitted the Osprey with fly-by-wire systems. This guaranteed that, should the electronics or even the vanity mirror light fail during flight, everybody dies with the plane. The Osprey was originally planned to be a “glass cockpit” aircraft, where all the reliable gauges and indicator lights are removed in favor of scads of LCD monitors capable of simultaneously displaying the Blue Screen of Death. A V-22 variant, the MV-22B, built in partnership with Nintendo, retains the glass cockpit layout and adds three milnet-linked Nintendo Wii gaming consoles.
Military Thingies | tree hugging sister | 
April 8, 2008 2:01 pm
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I love the “original configuration” pic.
Wait until they install those chemical lasers in the V-22 for strafing ground troops.
I still like it and can’t wait to ride in one!
The Giant Rototiller line is cracking me up.
My god, that’s genius.
And scarily accurate.
Strangely – I saw something on the Military Channel just last night/early this morning, showing the Marine Corps doing troop drops on insurgent positions with the Osprey. Some of the Iraqi National Forces were with them on one drop.
The narrator says something to the effect that the Iraqis must be experiencing future shock, they’ve never seen anything like this; in the background you hear a translator talking with them. I would have given the world to know what he was telling his guys…
“Holy crap, guys, the Marines are going to use these things all the time! They’re hardcore. We must never annoy America ever again.”
OR
“One more ‘Virgin Delivery Service’ joke, Achmed, and I’ll shoot you myself.”
The Wiki entry to which you linked is hilarious! It had me laughing all the way through. Sadly, some of it was damn accurate!