Weird combinations

I got a chance to buy some old books recently, including H. Beam Piper's Four-Day Planet, which I finished yesterday. I also looked at a lot of TF2 stuff. (Yeah, yeah, I know, hating my vagina, blah blah blah, erasure of the feminine, blah blah, doing feminism wrong. I bought Slow River by Nicola Griffith too, and I'm listening to Sarah McLachlan as I type this. Because it's possible to like more than one thing. By the way, I've noticed that several Sarah McLachlan songs fit some of the more disturbing TF2 fanfics PERFECTLY. It's eerie.) Anyway, I wasn't looking for any new AU concepts that would have an audience of maybe two, but I had to sit up and take notice when I read the following paragraph from Four-Day Planet:


The gun I was to handle was an old-model Terran Federation Army infantry-platoon accompanying gun. The mount, however, was power-driven, like the mount for a 90-mm contragravity tank gun. Reconciling the firing mechanism of the former with the elevating and traversing gear of the latter had produced one of the craziest pieces of machinery that ever gave an ordnance engineer nightmares. It was a local job, of course. An ordnance engineer in Port Sandor doesn't really have to be a raving maniac, but it's a help.


It reminded me of a certain hard-hatted engineer.