#i just really like the aviators

[disneybrandautism]

so. uh. i haven’t talked about it much but. i’m actually crazy about the topgun movies. so. if i have any topgun moots in hiding let me know.

[chiropteracupola]

He’s red and he’s white and he’s green and he’s grey / My bonny young dragon, come hither away...

Keith Windham and Nuntius, out of Luzula's stunning Flight of the Heron/Temeraire crossover fic 'The Flight of Dragons.'

[deathianartworks]

'To the master of the eldritch, she's a growing bed of thorns'

[compacflt]

I know you said that you aren't the pinnacle of military knowledge that people think you are but know a damsite more than I do about the US military than I do, so I have a question. Do you have any idea how long the Darkstar project would've been going on for in canon? It can't have been a few months but I also don't know if it would be years and years? I know Mav has an award for being a test pilot that I think is dated 2007 (I may have imagined that) but that doesn't mean the Darkstar project was going on for over ten years? I think the F-18A took 8 years from testing to being approved, so it can't be far off. Just wanted your opinion. Thanks :-)

awright here’s my opinion (not an expert)

the darkstar is canonically a Lockheed Martin “skunk works” (super duper secret) surveillance and reconnaissance (SR) spyplane, as evidenced by the skunk works logo on the vertical stabilizer (left is darkstar, right is me with the SW logo on the SR-71 blackbird at the udvar-hazy museum this summer).

we can look to see how long other SW projects have taken to develop in the past. the SR-71, for instance, was first suggested as an “undetectable spyplane” idea in 1957. the lockheed A-12 oxcart, which would provide the framework for the SR-71, had its first flight in 1962, five years later. the finished SR-71 was introduced into USAF and CIA service in 1966. so a 9-year development for the fastest-ever air-breathing jet, with 4-ish of those years being flight testing (ish because the A-12 had to be heavily adapted into the SR-71 which had its first flight in 1964).

Lockheed’s been teasing its blackbird successor, the unmanned aerial vehicle the SR-72 “son of blackbird,” on its socials recently. i saw someone say: “soft-launching its new death machine like an instagram influencer with a new boyfriend”

leading many to believe this is what happened

note however that the SR-72 son of blackbird is an UNMANNED aerial vehicle (UAV) which is why in my fic I specifically said this

note also that most of aircraft development is just that—development. Flight testing (i.e. where mav would get hands-on involved) doesn’t come until very very late in the development process. For the plot of my fic’s sake I had mav go out to NAWS china lake in 2003, but in TGM during the Hard Deck scene Penny says something to the effect of “you got sent out to the desert three years ago for pissing off that other admiral” and mav goes “that was three years ago? 😀” (cute!) so that’s the longest mav could’ve canonically been involved with the darkstar project. (For my own purposes i made it like a year, for those two sections of the story to neatly flow into each other—from 2015ish to 2016. I know TGM takes place in 2020 [i know but idfc] Maybe LockMart has had this tech [probably not high hypersonic like in the movie] for that long anyway and it’s just been so heavily classified that we didn’t know about it till very recently. Definitely possible.)

[ceasarslegion]

Followers what do we think about the fact that i looked on my ticket and im flying on the same plane model that got boeing into their current mess in june twice

[greenorangevioletgrass]

GUYS GUYS GUYS HEAR ME OUT

this is giving me rooster going to the gym with houdini as she prepares for the big top gun beach scene 👀👀👀

like he’s half expecting to fuck around (but in terms of working out and well, fucking around), but turns out she’s hella tough and things got hella competitive???? and they’re like running on the treadmill, doing pushups and all that shit, and at the same time admiring how good each other looks all sweaty and pumped full of adrenaline and endorphins?? but at the same time houdini’s like “focus dammit montages last forever” and rooster’s like “you’re not gonna let a civvy outlast you in the gym goddammit!!!”

[0mka]

A little darthfett-ish prompt sketch dump

Piggyback ride // Holding hands // At a bar

[endlesslytired]

At chapter 29 now, I'm reaching closer but my fight to catch up to the new chapters is far from over (the Otto is simping so hard he breaks the universe arc is SO LONGGG) but I know I'm getting there

[boeing-787]

i also got my first "was this made with AI" comment today on my art and it wasn't even for the nice a220 i drew on Sunday it was for last night's piper cub

[trashyvanillabean]

Listen, I don't mind a few of the Xianzhou ladies having the same kind of outfit. It's probably super popular. Maybe we'll even see a fashion magazine about it.

But if Glaciator Marum ever comes out and she's wearing the same kind of dress with windows on the chest, shoulders and back with only some variations to make it different, I will be so disappointed.

Yeah, we still don't know what she's like. She could be sweet. She could be an absolute bitch. She could be a hero. She could be a tyrant ruling over the Fanghu (Preceptors included) with an iron fist.

Whatever kind of character she is and what her portrayal is going to be—

Glaciator Marum is the Vidyadhara High Elder of the Fanghu.

She deserves better than a copy-and-paste cocktail dress.

[devilfish-landing]

Pittyober Prompt 8: Mask

we are just husks seeking

the world's false graces

~~~

goodness gracious i have had NO time for any actual pieces ever since the last one. maybe for the better i need to recover because there's some prompts coming up that i'm REAL excited for,,, but alas you just get scanned pen doodles for now

way before this month i actually had ideas for an armada OC (surprised i went this long without making one, tbh) that was, for whatever reason, not tied to the armada at all and was just off doing their own thing, either being unaware of their affiliation (which is what i ultimately went with for this fellow) or renouncing it entirely.

this guy just kinda wrote themself as i was concepting them because i tried to cover a mistake on the mask and was like "oh wait i could just put a really big hole there. hm" so what i've ended up with is a former marine (kind of, i based their first outfit on the in-game marines) that, somehow, got so busted up that they don't even realize they're a machine, and are now just trying to... live life, i guess. i dunno. i really like how they came out though. even if that first outfit was a nightmare to draw abhjgebjheg

[disneybrandautism]

consider croz. just. consider.

[azurine-cryptid]

i havent drawn my scp researcher oc in a long ass while so here she is, Researcher Mary Oswald

probably will refine this later

[compacflt]

I love your interpretation of Mav and Ice. I love how realistic they both feel because well, they're white men in the Navy starting in the 80s. What it does make me wonder about Carole? I know you don't write for her but your analysis of Top Gun itself just made me wonder about her. Like whether she was a traditional military wife or just kinda met Goose and fell into it. Did Goose's death and the period between his death and her's change anything? Did it make her more skeptical of the military because of the cause of Goose's death or was her asking Mav to not let Bradley fly purely out of her hurt for Goose's death and not a moral/political thing also. PS. I read your Slider fic and absolutely adored it

well… i think any attempt to flesh out Carole’s character is gonna be completely based on conjecture, because we’re not given more than “slightly naive Christian woman who doesn’t always say exactly the right thing.”

But I think it’s helpful to remember where she fits into the narrative at large, and why: Carole Bradshaw is the villain of the Top Gun franchise. Top Gun is her villain origin story.

The rhetorical purpose of the top gun franchise is: to make money, obv, AND to get people to join the navy. (to what extent it’s successful at achieving that latter goal is the topic of a different post… im certainly not the first to say it’s pretty easy to find an antimilitary reading of TG.) but if top gun is aiming to portray the navy as someplace you want to be, and someplace where you have to earn a spot to be (as I keep repeating over the last couple weeks, it’s all about honor), then Carole Bradshaw becomes the villain of the recruiting story of Top Gun: Maverick, because she (momentarily) prevented her son from joining the navy with the honor he thought he deserved, and she is to blame for the emotional through line of the entire movie. Thank God! we don’t have to blame maverick for fucking up and preventing Bradley from achieving his Dream Of Working As A US Military Contractor! we can blame his dead mom instead, so that maverick is still a good guy whom we, a moderately-conservative pro-navy target audience (🤑), can still root for & pay money to see.

so yeah narratively speaking she’s just a scapegoat. She has no agency in the story whatsoever, she’s only an object to receive blame. any backstory/reasoning/character we invent for her doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t really matter WHY she does it—whether she hates the military or not, narratively speaking we have to blame her just the same either way—it just matters that she does it. and then she has to immediately die so she can’t explain herself and maverick has to self-sacrificially take the blame. Because otherwise the plot of TGM wouldn’t happen, which would not achieve the rhetorical goals of making a bunch of money and getting kids to sign up for the navy.

[weewoobrainrot]

it's so embarrassing when i'm talking to my dad about top gun and i refer to characters as their first name

[aahsokaatano]

getting so fed up about the lack of trans voices in rhetoric on an academia level while trying to find sources for a class project that i am considering changing my career goals