ETA: Title should have been 'Those mofo’s be crazy). Doing this on my iPad and its weird on editing stuff sometimes
Anyone catch the premier of Rocketcity Rednecks on National Geographic tonight? I honestly don’t know what to think of this show. The potential for someone to be hurt or killed seems high, but it was entertaining in a terrifying sort of way. Spoiler alert…going to be tons of them so fair warning.
So, in the first episode I caught they were building an Ironman suit out of old car parts from a junkyard along with field tested composite armor. Yeah…for real. And there was none of this pansy testing stuff…they basically built it (along with shoulder mounted rocket launcher with real rockets) and put the host of the show in it to try it out. A few highlights: before they got it all hooked up (I.e. It was still unpowered) it nearly tore off the hosts arm AND almost fell over when everyone walked away from him (it had to weigh a lot and had it fallen backwards it would have hurt like he’ll, at a minimum). Next, the shoulder rocket launcher misfired and nearly hit one of the helpers…missed him by a few feet at least. :p. Finally when they put the helmut on, there was a short of some kind and a small electrical fire…
But, they actually managed to get the thing to work, though you wouldn’t have gotten me into it! Looked like a disaster waiting to happen, and they had zero safety in place if the host fell or caught on fire or…well, anything short of him needing a beer.
But the second episode was the real terrifying one, to me at least. They decided to build a submarine out of a fertilizer container, some old beer kegs (of course ;)), some trolling motors and a field expedient CO2 scrubber. And it worked, sort of…until first they didn’t equalize the pressure right and it started to implode, and then their CO2 scrubber bot wet and filled the cabin with toxic gas! Oh, they managed to get it to the surface (eventually), but then they couldn’t get the hatch open (in fairness, they had regulators and oxygen, plus safety divers). Then, when they did the sub was sitting to low in the water, so the cabin filled with water and sank like a stone, with the host and his nephew on board. After a few tense moments (no shit) they both managed to swim to the surface unscathed. But…there were so many things that could have gone wrong it was far from funny.
Anyway, like I said, I’m not sure what to think of this show. It was pretty interesting, and funny at times, but the potential for disaster seems fairly high here. Anyone else see the show?
-XT
