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Centripetal Horse posted:
I've read this guy's autobiography. He was pretty cool. He shot down 12 german aircraft in WWII, "missed out" on Korea (and was pissed about it) and then went to Vietnam where he flew 152 missions and shot down 4 Vietnamese jets and masterminded a strategy to lure Vietnamese fighters out from hiding and shoot them down prior to and during Wild Weasel missions to protect said Wild Weasels. Per his autobiography, he intentionally avoided shooting down more than 4 total aircraft during the campaign because one of his superiors had remarked a few times that if he made Ace in Vietnam he would be recalled home as a "national treasure" or some such bullshit. Also, how could you post about him and not include this picture:  If you look at his right hip you'll see that he carried a loving revolver in the cockpit. I can't remember if it was a .38 or a .44 but it is briefly touched on in his book.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:01
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All military pilots carry a pistol.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:31
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Elwood P. Dowd posted:Per his autobiography, he intentionally avoided shooting down more than 4 total aircraft during the campaign because one of his superiors had remarked a few times that if he made Ace in Vietnam he would be recalled home as a "national treasure" or some such bullshit. A perfect summation of the Vietnam War
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Apr 29, 2015 22:34
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Bombadilillo posted:All military pilots carry a pistol. But not usually a revolver.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:36
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Blue Footed Booby posted:But not usually a revolver. Air Force pilots in Viet Nam did, usually a Smith and Wesson Model 15.
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Apr 29, 2015 22:42
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I just had to look up aces after the Robin Olds-chat and stumbled upon this fella: Erich Hartmann, the ace of aces, with a confirmed 352 kills. Three hundred and fifty two. Remember, you're an ace after 'only' 5. wiki posted:During the course of his career, Hartmann was forced to crash-land his damaged fighter 14 times due to damage received from parts of enemy aircraft he had just shot down or mechanical failure. Hartmann was never shot down or forced to land due to enemy fire.  I think this dude was some literal fighter pilot god or something.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:14
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cgfreak posted:I just had to look up aces after the Robin Olds-chat and stumbled upon this fella: Much like in Battlefield, a really really good pilot didn't do much to affect the course of the war.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:21
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cgfreak posted:I just had to look up aces after the Robin Olds-chat and stumbled upon this fella: Jesus, this is like the main character from some kind of fighter pilot videogame. 
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Apr 30, 2015 00:23
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quote:wiki posted: I'm picturing this guy blowing up so many enemy planes that dodging all the shrapnel created by it becomes like a bullet hell game.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:31
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Most Luftwaffe aces got the majority of their kills against extremely poorly trained Russian pilots-- not that shooting down 352 (or whatever the proportion of Russian/Western pilots was) is unimpressive, and there were certainly some well-trained pilots in there. Hans-Joachim Marseille on the other hand shot down all but 7 of his 158 kills against the Commonwealth forces in Africa, most of whom received a fair bit more training than their Russian comrades. FInally, Germany was known to have fairly lax standards for confirming kills compared to their contemporaries in WWII. Again, these guys shot down a shitload of fighters in very dangerous combat and were undoubtedly the most skilled fighter pilots in the war by a wide margin, but the numbers do need some context.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:50
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New thread title is pretty great
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Apr 30, 2015 02:15
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Elwood P. Dowd posted:Most Luftwaffe aces got the majority of their kills against extremely poorly trained Russian pilots-- not that shooting down 352 (or whatever the proportion of Russian/Western pilots was) is unimpressive, and there were certainly some well-trained pilots in there. This is a very important point to consider. A list of the top all-time flying aces consists almost entirely of pilots who faced soviet planes, largely because the soviets had some exceptionally lovely airframes early in the war. Case in point, one of the few non-germans to top that list is a Finn, Ilmari Juutilainen pictured below, who also faced soviet aircraft but was never once hit by enemy fire, never lost a wingmate despite sometimes using an almost-as-lovely plane, the Buffalo Brewster, and used basic tactics to score 94 confirmed kills (126 alledged) despite being regularly outnumbered during his sorties.  Click for wiki Another Finnish ace, Jorma Karhunen, was quoted as saying this re: russian planes: "The Brewster model 239 was good against the older Russian fighters, Polikarpov I-153 Chaika (Gull) and I-16. Hence the period 1941–42 was the best time for us. In 1943 it was already significantly more difficult when the Russians began to use their newer fighters against us... Later, with the Yaks, Hurricanes, Tomahawks, LaGG-3 and MiGs, it became a fight to the death." Elwood P. Dowd is definitely right about needing some context here.
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Apr 30, 2015 03:24
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How about some badass engineering: the highest bridge in the world.  Like other suspension bridges, a pilot cable must cross the span first to act as a guide before the main cables can be installed. Because they could not use helicopters or boats like other bridges, rockets were used instead. mrkillboy has a new favorite as of 06:52 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 06:49
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WHAT A GOOD DOG posted:Much like in Battlefield, a really really good pilot didn't do much to affect the course of the war.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:19
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mrkillboy posted:How about some badass engineering: the highest bridge in the world. Because of the perspective in the first photo the right-hand side of the bridge looks like it's just floating in mid-air.
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Apr 30, 2015 09:23
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mrkillboy posted:Like other suspension bridges, a pilot cable must cross the span first to act as a guide before the main cables can be installed. Because they could not use helicopters or boats like other bridges, rockets were used instead. Please tell me there's a video of this.
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Apr 30, 2015 10:57
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Radio Help posted:Please tell me there's a video of this. This is the best that could find.   
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Apr 30, 2015 11:44
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I'd like to believe this was an intentional shot.
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May 1, 2015 02:39
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Say Nothing posted:I'd like to believe this was an intentional shot. With the amounts of bullets fired by people at other people, it was bound to happen eventually. Much like the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters, except far more violent.
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May 1, 2015 03:18
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I like to believe that the one bullet dove in front of the other to save a friend. Friend is possibly a cop bullet, retiring soon.
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May 1, 2015 03:25
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Say Nothing posted:I'd like to believe this was an intentional shot.
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May 1, 2015 04:32
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mrkillboy posted:This is the best that could find. awesome, thanks. whoever fired that had the coolest job in the world for a second, there
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May 1, 2015 09:19
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GWBBQ posted:Years ago, my godfather gave me a pair of US civil war bullets that had collided, apparently they're fairly common. -ly made as souvenirs for people back home.
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May 1, 2015 14:18
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ok it's not strictly a picture, but on the topic of war badasses I thought you might like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart here's his opening paragraph on wikipedia 
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May 1, 2015 15:33
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Fair Hallion posted:ok it's not strictly a picture, but on the topic of war badasses I thought you might like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Carton_de_Wiart I imagine this man was almost entirely moustache.
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May 1, 2015 17:48
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mrkillboy posted:How about some badass engineering: the highest bridge in the world. This is far from the first time rockets were at least considered for the pilot cable. In 1847, when Charles Ellett, Jr., won the bid to start construction on the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, his initial idea was to use rockets. Other ideas that were thrown out included tying a wire to a bombshell to be fired from a cannon or using a steamship to navigate the rapids, either of which would have been bad rear end. Instead, they went with a kite-flying contest. In the middle of winter. The Canadian side had the right wind for it, so 15-year-old American boy Homan Walsh crossed via ferry two miles upstream of the area before walking atop the cliff face back to the site. He had to wait a day for the winds to be right, then flew his kite until midnight, when the wind died. The kite started to fall to the American side of the river, but the line broke. The ferries had stopped running, Walsh couldn't go back for eight days. When he finally did, he grabbed his kite, went back to the Canadian side, and successfully landed the kite. His reward?  (equivalent to about $300 today) and a wonderful memory.A bit bad rear end and a bit cute.
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May 1, 2015 18:51
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Vindolanda posted:-ly made as souvenirs for people back home. So this isn't even real? I mean drat the probability has to be so low for that to even happen.
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May 1, 2015 20:29
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There were some instances on the Eastern Front of WW2 of artillery shells from opposing sides colliding in mid-air, indiscriminately showering both the German and Russian troops with hot shrapnel. If that can happen, bullets colliding with each other is not out of the question either.
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May 1, 2015 22:50
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Shells are an awful lot bigger and (IIRC) slower.
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May 1, 2015 22:58
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HonorableTB posted:There were some instances on the Eastern Front of WW2 of artillery shells from opposing sides colliding in mid-air, indiscriminately showering both the German and Russian troops with hot shrapnel. If that can happen, bullets colliding with each other is not out of the question either. I mean, it's not "out of the question" for it to happen, but you've got a whole string of coincidences that have to come together. Napoleonic era mashed together musket or cannon balls are a lot more likely that smokeless era bullets, which would have to hit each other hard enough to stick but not to fragment, would have to be found, kept and got home. Each of those, quite apart from the ridiculous odds of two bullets hitting, makes it much more likely that an enterprising chap in a foxhole knocked it together with a drill.
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May 1, 2015 23:11
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May 2, 2015 04:16
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Mr. Gibbycrumbles posted:I imagine this man was almost entirely moustache. It doesn't sound like there was a lot else left.
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May 2, 2015 12:37
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thespaceinvader posted:Shells are an awful lot bigger and (IIRC) slower. Being slower doesn't change the odds of their paths intersecting.
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May 2, 2015 13:38
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Also I would think bullets would be more likely than shells just based on pure volume fired.
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May 2, 2015 15:17
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Slime posted:Being slower doesn't change the odds of their paths intersecting. Being slower should linearly increase the odds of path intersections as the object spends more time occupying the battlefield.
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May 2, 2015 15:48
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GWBBQ posted:Years ago, my godfather gave me a pair of US civil war bullets that had collided, apparently they're fairly common. Depends on how you define "common" exactly but yeah if you put enough poo poo in the air and have it fly around pieces of it are guaranteed to smack into each other at some point. That's especially true of Civil War-era tactics when you had bunches of dudes standing in lines firing at each other.
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May 2, 2015 16:04
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 Swimming in the ocean edit: the ship spit out a bunch of seamen canyoneer has a new favorite as of 18:52 on May 2, 2015 |
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May 2, 2015 18:44
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canyoneer posted:
Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, chief. It was comin' back, from the island of Tinian to Laytee, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Huh huh. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, chief. The sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. You know it's... kinda like ol' squares in battle like a, you see on a calendar, like the battle of Waterloo. And the idea was, the shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin' and sometimes the shark would go away. Sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he's got...lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those black eyes roll over white. And then, ah then you hear that terrible high pitch screamin' and the ocean turns red and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin' they all come in and rip you to pieces. Y'know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men! I don't know how many sharks, maybe a thousand! I don't know how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin' chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player, boson's mate. I thought he was asleep, reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water, just like a kinda top. Up ended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. He's a young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper, anyway he saw us and come in low. And three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened? Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. \  So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.
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May 2, 2015 18:56
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_op16ZWh3sE
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May 2, 2015 19:19
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canyoneer posted:
This is the dirtiest loving thing in the world. The water around the opening is all that gross rainbow water you get from oil, it's disgusting. I did this off the coast of Australia and we had a bunch of Marines get really sick for a few weeks. Why anyone thinks it's enjoyable is beyond me.
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May 2, 2015 20:39
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