"Pipes, philosophy, and aircraft-carrier toilets." "I'll take 'What things don't hold water?' for $200, Alex."

In a disappointing development, the forward-thinking legislators of Wyoming have dropped their intention of acquiring their own aircraft carrier. This proposal had been part of their contingency planning -- hatched after a marathon back-to-back screening of all three Mad Max movies -- for an apocalyptic future of social and economic collapse where federal power has unravelled and individual states must see to their own defense. Evidently it came to their notice that Wyoming is a landlocked region, lacking ports such as might accommodate and provision such a ship and its crew of 5000.

This news dovetails with some intriguing documents recovering during a recent expedition in the Riddled time machine. The following photograph appears to show Wyoming -- now calling itself Intersol -- hovering above the Mediterranean Sea, en route for Russia.


Additional records (right) show how the state legislators, to console themselves for their nautical shortcomings, will use Blish Graviton Polarity Generators to tear the entire state from the underlying mantle, turning it in its entirety into an airborne aircraft carrier.


Confusingly, Intersol will also become a name for the square hole left in the ground by the state's levitation. Apparently it will become a focus of iron mining.

This all came as an surprising revelation to the Riddled Research Laboratory, where we have considerable experience in the well-established field of airborne-aircraft-carrier technology. We would never have expected them to opt for a heavier-than-air design. These are superficially appealing...


... but they are vulnerable to Dalek attacks and temporal rifts breaking through to the end of the universe.
The smart money has always been on solar-powered Zeppelins.

Colour version is smaller, due
to extra weight of the paint

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This change in plan will also come as a blow to the US Navy, which had hoped to sell the USS Bush to Wyoming and saddle someone else with its problematical plumbing:

The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier has a messy problem. Since deploying in May, the Norfolk, Va.-based carrier George H.W. Bush has grappled with widespread toilet outages, at times rendering the entire ship without a single working head.

Now they are stuck with it. Unless it is caught in a mysterious time-storm and carried back to the neighbourhood of Pearl Harbour in 1941.

If the crew of one newly-launched ship are forced into bladder retention by its state-of-the-art vacuum-plumbing system -- fitted by an outside company that moved from cruise-liner design to the more lucrative world of Pentagon contracts -- it's likely that other ships coming down the slipway will suffer from the same problem. So Plan C is to design a Toilet-Ship to meet the entire fleet's hygiene needs:

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes in the higher of the bulkheads (the Rücksichtslos here lists at a permanent angle of 23° 27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows. [...]

The Rücksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the German mania for subdividing. “If the house is organic,” argued the crafty early Toiletship advocates, […] “Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarine as the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we all know that, ha-hah!” [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] The Rücksichtslos was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navy over to the A4 rocket program.

Hey Wyoming, watch out for midair collisions with other square landlocked states that also have turned themselves into flying airfields! Especially Colorado!

UPDATE: Bonus phuture philately.
Further research reveals that the future independent Wyoming -- under its new name of Intersol -- will issue square stamps.



The idea that the shape of a nation's stamps should match the geographical outline of the nation itself was discussed at the Congress of Vaduz in 1892. The French and Spanish delegations were keen, but the proposal was vetoed by the Norwegians.