Higher, Faster, Farther

Los Santos, San Andreas - I can't remember where I first half-jokingly postulated the idea that the Strike Witches/OWaW universe, with its familiar places that have different places names, is the past of the same world as the Grand Theft Auto game setting, but I remember saying it somewhere, and for this one, I ran with it.

on the corner stood a car dealership - Those familiar with GTA Online may recognize these premises as the abandoned building just beyond the LSIA branch of Los Santos Customs (which will someday occupy what is, in this story, HY-Way Pontiac's detached service department).

her orange hair bobbed in a modish style - I've seen a couple of pieces of fanart with Shirley's hair done this way. It's cute!

still playing around with rockets - In the real world, General Samuel Phillips was the Air Force's man in NASA for a while, including the early stages of Project Apollo. Here he's been transposed to the Air Force's parallel, and competing, space-capable aircraft program (which in reality ended with the X-15, having lost out in the competition for funding to NASA's ballistic rocket approach).

don't meet the educational requirements - Chuck Yeager was excluded from NASA's astronaut recruitment efforts, despite being the most famous test pilot in the world, because he didn't have a college education. To hear him tell it, he wasn't interested anyway, but still.

a late-model Pontiac Bonneville with the Super Duty 421 engine - The Bonneville was Pontiac's largest and best-appointed model in 1963, positioned in GM's lineup as a sort of high-performance entry-level luxury car. The 421-cubic-inch "Super Duty" V8 engine was rated at 425 horsepower (it probably had more); it was available in a number of Pontiacs, but the Bonneville could only get it as an option in 1963. In that application, it cost $2,250 (at a time when the car itself, without options, started at $3,400 or thereabouts).

Here's what one looks like, if you're curious. (I should probably stash these photos against the time if and when this page goes away...)

Project Excelsior - This has been moved slightly in time (the real project took place from 1959 to 1960), but the purpose and basic outline of it are the same here as they were in real life. Col. Joe Kittinger, the man who made the real Excelsior jumps, held the world records for highest jump and longest freefall into this decade.

Joan Stapp - The OWaW universe's equivalent of Dr. John Stapp (1910-1999), an Air Force flight surgeon and pioneer in the medical investigation of the effects of acceleration and deceleration, hypoxia, wind blast, and other phenomena likely to be encountered by pilots. Had a habit of performing his tests on himself, and yet somehow still lived to be 89.

she can't open the door? - In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that the real Excelsior gondola didn't have a door, probably to avoid this very eventuality.

Lockheed NF-104A - Again, modulo being a Striker Unit in this scenario, this was pretty much what it says on the tin here—an experimental modified Starfighter with a rocket booster, used to try for altitude records. This part of the story is loosely modeled on the occasion when the real Chuck Yeager crashed one of them (and owes a stylistic debt to the way the incident is presented in The Right Stuff, both book and film).

Jack Ridley had been dead for six years now - One of several anachronisms about the last half-hour or so of The Right Stuff (the movie) is that Ridley is in this scene, despite having been killed in a transport crash in 1957.

just in time to take one of the Striker's heavy turbine units upside the head - What hit Yeager was his own ejection seat, which he had just released himself from after punching out of his hopelessly spinning NF-104A. The impact broke his visor, just as described here, and hot slag from the ejection rocket set his helmet on fire.

it's Shirley that I'm worried about - Ursula could see nothing identifiable about the witch who came to her rescue, of course, but who else could it possibly have been?

a person walking toward them - Despite a very hard day at the office, Yeager did in fact walk away from his NF-104A crash and his argument with the ejection seat. His face and hand were badly burned (the latter from trying to get the burning helmet off, or at least keep the fire away from his mouth) and he had a long and painful recovery ahead of him, but suffered no permanent harm.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

He's -short- (but then, so are most test pilots)

Every winter, someone puts a santa hat on the statue ;-)

Totally believe he was excluded from NASA efforts because of it, because... ]um... collage snobs; do not believe he CHOSE not to let it bug him. Then again, in spite of all the work I have done in this arena, I would find it very hard to not follow up by whacking peoples heads with extreme prejudice while shouting something along the lines of "WHAT WERE YOU Y CHROMOSOME IDIOTS *THINKING*?!?!?!?!?!"