Vertical Development

I had to write this idea down somewhere. I was thinking about airspace, and about how in reality it is unusually flat. For example, Class B (cool people pronounce it "class bravo") airspace typically extends from the surface (cool people write "SFC") up to 10 thousand feet MSL. In diagrams, this is usually pictured as this enormous shape extending far into the air. Its actually not that high though. The big runway at Boeing field is ten thousand feet long. Thats fairly long, but really not that big when you look at it (thats what she said). Stand that runway up vertically, and thats how high class B airspace really gooes.

I have enourmous nagivation maps taped to my wall. They cover about 1/5 to 1/4 of the United States, because I was planning to put enough maps up to depict the entire upper half of the United States, but before I could complete the maps I realized that A) a Cessna won't make it to Philly and B) having giant maps like that on the wall is a little weird. I've been too lazy to take what I have down though.

ANYWAY, so I was looking at this map one day, and then I measured how long The Big Runway is at Boeing Field, and then I tried to hold the point of a pencil about that far away from the surface of the map. It was ridiculously close. Kind of boggled my mind. Going thirty, even sixty thousand feet up (roughly the max operating altitude of many airplanes) was still ridiculously low compared to how big the map was--and this map was just the top left part of the United States. You know, Washington...Montana, Idaho...Michigan...some other states in their I don't think about. Maybe some Dakotas, idk.

You can try this at home, by the way. Buy a VFR World map, or WAC, and spread it out on the table, look at the legend to get a sense of scale, and then place something on the map that scales to 10 thousand feet high. I think you'll be surprised how low that is. Then, since 10 thousand feet probably doesn't mean much to you, put something on the map that is about 3 or 4 times as high--thats how high you are when you fly commercially.

Anyway, this post is actually about Legos. I wrote all of that so I could explain that I was thinking about my maps like ten minutes ago (when I started writing this post) and jumped to the sudden realization that I could build legos up my wall. Vertically. Like terraces and stuff. And mountain people. That could be pretty cool. It would still break from physical impacts if I had a bunch of drunk people in my apartment and they fell into it, but it wouldn't take up much space. I would need a ton of those specialized mountain bricks though. Or at least a lot of gray bricks. Oh man, I could have like a castle entrance...and a steep path winding down to...something else. And those glow-in-the-dark ghosts. And like horses and crap. And dragons. And barrels. I love those tiny little Lego barrels. You can stack them up. Or put them side by side, perhaps next to a little Lego wall. You can put little Lego barral covers (brown 2x2 rounded plate) on them. You can put little Lego swords, pistols and rifles in them. You can even put little Lego gold pieces of eight in them. In fact, now that I'm older and wiser, I just realized that you can store tiny little Lego hats in them as well. I wonder why I never thought of that. Maybe because my Lego men were always wearing their hats. Cause they had style.