If you have no idea who Political Sculptor is or why he designed a 3D printable blimp, then allow me to fill in the blanks. Political Sculptor is Fernando Sosa, a 3D digital artist most notable for his line of 3D printed butt plugs made to look like political figures who exhibit very butt plug-like behavior. Ever since his Vladimir Putin butt plug went viral he has, as he laments, become known as the “butt plug man.” At this point Sosa has simply embraced his internet legacy by continuing to butt-plug-a-tize the deserving, including GW Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and, of course, the biggest butt plug of them all Mr. Donald Trump.
The blimp is one of two airships developed as part of the JLENS program, which stands for Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor Systems and is possibly the worst acronym ever. (Come on guys, there are entire letters missing from it! That isn’t how acronyms work!) JLENS was being developed to help defend Washington DC, and several other East Coast cities, against possible cruise-missile attacks. The two JLENS blimps work as a pair, one providing constant 360-degree scanning and the other focusing on any specific targets the first blimp spots.
As far as why there is a 3D printable version of the blimp, the story is, if you can believe it, far more ridiculous than a Donald Trump-shaped butt plug. On Wednesday one of the two blimps designed by aerospace company Raytheon for the US military was tethered just outside of Washington DC when it unexpectedly broke loose and ended up taking a multi hour-long trip. Amazingly, the very technology that enables the blimp to work undisturbed and unnoticed was also making it tremendously difficult to track, although it did have a pair of F-16s on its tail for a while before they lost track of it.
So this military blimp, costing the US taxpayers almost three billion dollars by the way, was simply missing. Which is hilarious until you imagine the damage that a huge runaway blimp straying into unsuspecting air traffic could do, or when you find out that the blimp happened to be dragging 6,700 feet of loose cable behind it. Cable that was dragging along the ground at one point, tearing up lawns and pulling down power lines that left more than 20,000 people without power for a few hours. The blimp was supposed to have remote controlled deflation technology that would bring it down in just this kind of runaway blimp scenario, so of course it didn’t work. I mean, why would you expect a blimp that we paid several billion dollars for to function properly?
If you clicked on the link to Sosa’s previous 3D designs, it is probably pretty easy to spot the fact that he’s a bit political. And he also isn’t a fan of wasteful military spending, and honestly regardless of your political leanings it’s pretty hard to disagree with him. If you ask me, blimps probably shouldn’t cost billions of dollars, and if they do then it should be a little easy to find them when they run away from us. I dunno, maybe use two cables just in case, or check and make sure that the remote control works before you launch a multi-billion dollar blimp into the air. Since the blimp is an expensive and useless hunk of junk, and looks a little bit like one of Sosa’s trademark butt plugs, it was an obvious choice as his next 3D model project.
“So whenever you are working your ass off at your office and wonder where in the f–k your tax dollars are going.. Now you can stare at this butt plug looking thing and be assured that your money is making someone at some government contractor like Raytheon or Lockheed Martin very very rich and we are getting some non working piece of military technology that took out the power of about 30,000 people because we didn’t buy the wireless model,” explained Sosa.
By the way, NORAD confirmed that the JLENS blimp eventually came down on its own in a rural area of Pennsylvania, thankfully without hurting anyone. And it is worth noting that our high-tech, multi-billion dollar super blimp fell out of the sky on its own, because not only did Raytheon not test the remote deflation system, but apparently they didn’t verify that it could stay in the air for more than a few hours either. Oh, and Congress just approved another $43.3 million more for further JLENS operational testing, because of course they did.
You can download the 3D printable JLENS file directly from Thingiverse here, and if you don’t have a 3D printer, or absolutely need a sandstone, butt plug-shaped blimp you can buy one from Shapeways for $25.99 and have it shipped directly to you. And please, feel check out Sosa’s collection of 3D printed butt plugs… and that’s another sentence that I never thought I’d be able to use in an article crossed off the list.
What are your thoughts on Sosa’s latest design? Let us know in the 3D Printed Blimp Butt Plug forum thread on 3DPB.com.
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