Fighting is heavy in Fresno area.

Mariposa Artillery lit up the Fresno airfield last night. I guess it was decided it would be easier to repair after removing the Chinese forces there rather than dealing with reinforcements coming in, and a long ground campaign.

Either way the artillery was amazingly loud and echoed off the mountains for a half hour after the bombardment was done.

Reports coming in Chinese have overrun lines in San Francisco and Seattle.

AV-10 has 16 armor kills confirmed. Been writing down what we did to it so we can get production on them going.

Leemoore has been supplemented by two battalions of marines that had been in the LA area out of contact with anyone till they got a working radio and found out there's a war on. The rest of their regiment was on base when it got hit last year.

Assault on Chinese forces has started cannot talk about it.

AV-10 is currently undergoing trials in and around Leemoore. According to the pilots who were testing it yesterday it's pretty forgiving when it comes to maneuvering and movement., and pretty stable. Because of the way the engines are rigged up it doesn't need to be drawing a ton of fuel to stay aloft. It hasn't seen combat yet. Right now it's a staring match between the Chinese forces and us right now.

While I was away the Russians apparently destroyed all of the artillery the Chinese had brought in, reports are coming in from the north that it's pretty similar along the rest of the west coast that after the first major engagement it settled into a game of wait and see. Heard nothing from Alaska beyond that the bulk of the Chinese forces landed there and that most of the Russian army is helping out there.

The base commander blew a gasket at us.

Myself and the four others who had built the AV-10, thankfully the captain who'd accompanied us calmed him down and talked him into letting us demonstrate it.

....He wants nine more, depending on how well it does in actual combat.

On route back to Leemoore.

The A-10 monstrosity we've built is still slightly unstable, but it works. The captain was satisfied with the demonstration where our pilot/test guinea pig/volunteer popped up over a ridge strafed a practice target we'd put together out of spare parts, flew in and landed on the trailer. (we spent four hours practicing the landing.)

We've dubbing it the AV-10 Cazador. An apt name for a Vtol tank hunter.

The next one we build might even have engine pods that swivel on two planes of movement rather than just one. we hope the base commander will be pleased as well.

The captain came back earlier than we expected. Nearly thought he was going to blow a gasket when he saw what we were doing.

After chewing us out for a solid ten minutes he ended with how we'd put one of the tiltrotor assemblies on upside down, We pulled the engine and housing off and just had the raw assembly on the side of the craft, and we'd have to reverse the linkage.

Things we have done since monday:

• Welded in more aluminum struts at 45* angles for structural integrity on the wings and  tail
• Smoothed off some of the sharper points.
• Mounted three of the A-10 engines onto the tilt assemblies working on re-doing the upside down assembly.
• Created a control scheme for the tilt assemblies with parts taken from a Sikorsky helicopter.
• Powered up the systems and actually checked to make sure the flight computer worked. Thankfully it did, You'd think we'd have done this first.
• Did a hydraulics test, flaps and everything work within specs (found a manual in another A-10) and the tilt systems work.

The captain suggested we get something to act as a counterweight and weld it to the bottom of the fuselage to keep from having stability issues. Probably is a good idea. 

We also have two more days to get this prototype working otherwise we're going back to Leemoore empty handed. 

And that has been this week.