No, this has nothing to do with masturbation. Well, at least, I think it has nothing to do with masturbation.

This device was created long before imageboards were even a funny feeling in someone’s balls, and was called the “fapper” before a gaggle of horny 14-year-olds decided that “fap” would be a great word for “masturbate”. Anyway, watch the video before I give too much away… It’s delightfully hilarious.

So, now that you’re done wiping away the tears of laughter, you’re wondering about the story of the Fapper. Well, y’see, one day in the very far past, Yakolev (who, despite being a writer for Clunkline, I haven’t spoken to in probably over 6 years) gave me a Dilbert doll as a gift for a birthday or something. The Dilbert doll’s legs had been torn apart, because originally they had been fused, and in Yakolev’s logic it made no sense to leave them that way. Totally independent of this incident, Yakolev, myself, and another person who I haven’t talked to in about as long, all had Lego Mindstorms and made little battlebots out of them. Time passed, friend groups shifted, and both Dilbert and my battlebot sat in my room with little attention paid to them, until one day a friend of mine saw the glorious potential to unite Dilbert with his pleasure machine. Since then they’ve been inseparable. And hilarious.

As you’ll notice, whenever I write about the aesthetics of machines that strikingly contradict my commie-pinko notions on warfare (Namely that it’s stupid and doesn’t solve anything), I very rarely mention vehicles made by the United States in a positive light.

This is no accident. They’re boring as all hell. Barring a few examples I’ll mention in the followup to this article, there is an utter failure of the imagination about them that can never be rectified in my mind’s eye.

Rather like a student who consistently receives the highest marks in class yet still has no working understanding of the material, American fighters have this flaccid aesthetic that performs what its intended to but is utterly and completely without soul. In short, in one of the few places where it is sexy for form to follow function, American warplanes follow function with abstinence-only sex education.

A shining example of the fruits of this trend is the F-35 Lightning II, an American Fighter that has blighted the world (quite literally with numerous export contracts) with its stealthy, curvy impotence. This F-35, of the Royal Australian Air Force, earns a mere D- rather than an F for not being This One.

This would fine if it had stayed safely in the dying republic’s walls but starting twenty years ago, the disease of sexlessness yearned for more souls and has slain some of Europe’s more interesting aesthetics.

Our first stop takes us to Sweden for a terrible pun.

Viggen to Gripen: A Saab Story.

Sweden has always used interesting designs. Our story begins with the Saab 37 Viggen, one of my favorite airplanes. This craft’s indulgence in right-angles, bluntness and boxiness was a different note when it was first developed in the 1960s, an era when right angles were dying and planes that for years had been shifting into manned missiles were getting tailplanes again.

This would not have been enough to set it apart however in that decade’s lineup. What did that was the that on top of all of it there were a pair of disproportionate canards and a towering vertical stabilizer, so massive and cozy and cementing this vehicle’s original morphology.

But then it got old, engines became smaller and more efficient, computers became more interesting and so the Swedish Air Force asked for a new airplane in the 1980s. So now, and outside of its spiritual successors (space-fighters in speculative fiction) the Saab 37 flies now only in our hearts.

The stoic unified tailpipe that just ends was gone! The sleek and curvy and… boringness of a “more efficient” usage of space in wing placement and engine arrangement means the air won’t touch a compressor till the plane’s half over with and the beautiful canards were reduced to two-dimensional shadows of their former selves. The world had felt itself too old for airplanes you could hug.

Instead they wanted an American fighter with a big delta wing and tamed canards. And it made the rest of Europe follow it.

Tornado to Typhoon: More Awful Aviation Alliteration

Britain and Germany and Italy had all gotten together in the 1960s and 1970s as well and put together the quirky Panavia Tornado, which never ceases to delight me with its tangram swing-wings and tailplane bolted on to the most Euclidean curvature I can envision. To sink it forever into my heart, they put a two person cockpit where there really should only have been a one person cockpit but didn’t make the plane longer.

Again though, they needed a new one. So they took the planform of the Saab 39 but made it lamer. This was the Eurofighter. And that wasn’t enough for the forces of flacidness. You see they’d also gotten France on board, who’d always made delta-winged fighters with their Mirage series but after a few years of development they struck off and just made their own Eurofighter clone.

I’ll go over both the completed Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale here. First the Eurofigther.

The Typhoon has all the makings of a sexy aircraft but is a worse offender than the Saab design because it fails more abjectly. The plane rides its box-inlets which should give it this delightful problem where it looks like the engine inlets are the front but the front is also the front but it’s not. Except it doesn’t work, there is the over-riding lankiness to the whole thing, like a rotten banana with batwings.

And the Dassault Rafale? The French design that came out of it? So very near to sex, the best of the vehicles I’m castigating to being too Americanized. It has everything. The best shade of composite grey, The least offensive curves, the best proportion of thickness to size in its canards. What’s wrong with it?

It looks too much like an F-16. A subject of my unrelenting hatred So it fails on principle.

In the very least, none of them are the egregious fuckup that is the F-22 raptor, a full-blown American plane that fails at everything somehow because it’s too short and too wide has that obnoxious stealth-plane dorkiness about it.

And that’s it for now! Stay tuned for American planes that don’t suck and how Sukhoi could be trying to join the club.

This entire thing took me 15 minutes. I’m not sure what it is either.