Yes, that’s my takeaway from all this. And it comes from a line in this widely-syndicated article about the rocket’s uncontrolled re-entry from Sky News: See that size – well, in this case, mass – reference to a Volkswagen Beetle? There’s a long, rich tradition of that, with the classic Volkswagen Beetle having become a nearly universal standard of size and weight and interior volume and so, so much more. So much so that years ago I encouraged a friend of mine to write an article about it, and I think he expressed the strange universality of the Beetle as a unit of measurement remarkably well: While Beetles have been used to illustrate the size of things as varied as “whale hearts to heavy artillery,” space hardware especially has long been compared to the Beetle: Here’s some of the referenced quotes in there that equate various space exploration hardware and objects to Beetles, primarily to get my editor David off my back: Soyuz capsules are the “Volkswagen Beetle of the space program” due to their size and workhorse longevity, Gemini capsules had the seating room of a Volkswagen, and Apollo capsules were “Beetles from the 1960s, cramped but useful.” For a time, you could experience the thrill of the VW-size International Space Station capsule as projected by the advanced VW-size IMAX projector. From The New Atlantis: and from Malin Space Science Systems: and from this guy Norbert’s blog, to show how pervasive it is and not just journalists, even if the context here is more conceptual and less scale-oriented: and from Discovery.com: and from SpaceRef: See, David? It’s everywhere. So, the comparison of the mass of the Long March 5B rocket’s core segment to 12 VW Beetles is a return to an established form for this sort of writing. What doesn’t really make sense is the inclusion of the year of the Beetles referenced, because a 1963 Beetle really isn’t that much heavier or lighter or bigger or smaller than a 1953 or 1973 Beetle at all. It’s about the same.
In fact, the inclusion of a specific year works against the use of the Beetle as a universal size standard, because one of the key reasons why the car works so well as an easy analogy for size/volume/weight is that it remained so consistent for such a long period of time, from 1938 to 2003. Almost no other car can make that same claim, which is why the Universal Automotive Size Analogy isn’t, say, a Toyota Corolla, because Corollas vary wildly in size and weight over their various generations.
Before I saw this, I was wondering if the era of the Beetle as universal metric may be passing, as vintage Beetles are no longer an ubiquitous sight on modern roads. But now I’m thinking that maybe they’ve managed to build up enough cultural capital and influence that their form and size is now a true part of the Collective Unconscious, and if we’re still comparing Chinese rockets in 2022 to old VW Beetles, then maybe, just maybe, that’s how it’ll always be.
I look forward to a time in the future when people selling you cargo teleporters help you decide what size you need by explaining that the Basic model can handle two VW Beetles at a time, but if you go up to a Beyoncé-class one, you can send out four to five VW Beetles, easy.
https://www.nps.gov/chis/learn/nature/images/960-diver-adjusted2_1.jpg
Allegedly, even Pythagoreus drew on a clay tablet the standard 3 lumps on 4 wheels as a 5 year old!!! Math never lies.
A VW Beetle is 85.2 cubic ft.
Therefore a Beetle can hold 294 breadboxes.
https://www.cookbookpeople.com/blog/breadbox-buying-guide/#:~:text=Loaves%20this%20will%20fit%3A%20A,are%20getting%20for%20your%20dollar.
https://www.google.com/search?q=volume+of+a+volkswagen+beetle&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS869US869&oq=volume+of+a+volkswagen+beetle&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160j33i22i29i30.12942j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
T Beam’s reference to battleships firing projectiles that had the weight of a Beetle may be a little modest. My recollection, having owned a 1960 Beetle and having been in the Navy when the New Jersey was brought back for Vietnam, is that the Beetles of that era weighted in the neighborhood of 1800 pounds and that 16-inch projectiles started at 2200 pounds and went up.
So…there was an estimated 1,200 Torchinskis falling from space and landed peacefully in ocean.
Thank God. It could’ve been “dinosaur-mageddon 2.0”
A picture of the 30 mm rotary cannon from an A-10 Warthog airplane shown next to a VW Beetle for size and weight comparison:
The gun is the size of Volkswagen
https://i.redd.it/onhvhn5ds7u51.jpg
http://hudsonhongo.com/danzig/
When trying to impress young women with my Corvair, I mention that it has a rear engine like the VW Beetle. That fascinating and historical nugget of information is often met with a blank stare, and even occasionally with a restraining order.
