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Polyakov posted:I believe its a firefighting vehicle, or drag racing taken to extremes. Snow off runways, surely.
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Sep 27, 2016 22:07
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If I recall correctly it was used to help put out fires in Iraq during the first Gulf War. The idea being that it would literally blow out the flames, I think? I dunno, I'm not a fire-ologist.
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Sep 27, 2016 22:16
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I read about vehicles that blew radioactive dust off of things. Maybe it's one of those.
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Sep 27, 2016 22:37
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It was used to propel paratroopers to their target area.
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Sep 27, 2016 22:41
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Perfectly reasonable fire fighting vehicle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOlq6RRh3sg
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Sep 27, 2016 23:03
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Polyakov posted:I believe its a firefighting vehicle, or drag racing taken to extremes.  glynnenstein posted:Perfectly reasonable fire fighting vehicle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOlq6RRh3sg Holy poo poo, the sound as they throttle up the engines. Immediately followed by the driver slamming the hatch shut as fast as possible before he gets hosed up. MikeCrotch fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Sep 27, 2016 |
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Sep 27, 2016 23:05
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Ensign Expendable posted:I read about vehicles that blew radioactive dust off of things. Maybe it's one of those. Yeah that's what it was originally. Then they turned it into a fire truck.
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Sep 27, 2016 23:11
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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spectralent posted:I genuinely want this to be an actual weapon of war. Just drive it up to some poor rear end in a top hat and leafblower him across the continent. It's for extinguishing oil well fires iirc.
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Sep 27, 2016 23:55
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Another one of the main characters of this book pilots a seaplane on a cruiser. His copilot is American Indian, so of course their nicknames are Tonto and the Lone Ranger. I am 40 percent through and this book is wearing me out with its cliches and factual errors and horrible dialogue and descriptions.
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Sep 28, 2016 00:17
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SquadronROE posted:If I recall correctly it was used to help put out fires in Iraq during the first Gulf War. The idea being that it would literally blow out the flames, I think? I dunno, I'm not a fire-ologist. Pyrologist?
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Sep 28, 2016 01:04
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This is much delayed due to PC woes and I caution you all now that I'm in no way qualified to talk about this stuff, farming details from all kinds of questionable sources like Wikipedia and wargaming forums as well as various memoirs and unit histories that I've read over the years. If anything is obviously wrong let me know and I'll edit to correct the posts. This is very much "babby's first tank primer" level stuff. Unless noted pictures are yoinked from the internet. The logical place to start talking about WWII British tank design is obviously the end of WWI. So let's do that and follow on into the interbellum to Dunkirk in the next post, and then on into the war itself in successive posts. I may go on as far as the Challenger II but TBH once the Chieftain is up for discussion my knowledge drops off sharply so this might end at the Comet. Heavy Mk <whatever>  Mk IV Female, "Baby", Ashford, Kent. The primary British tanks of WWI were the Heavy Mks I to V, rhomboidal boxes based on the Holt Manufacturing Company's design for a caterpillar tracked tractor. These tractors were in use as prime movers for heavy artillery pieces and handled the terrain well enough to get gears spinning. The Mk I was designed by the team of industrialist William Tritton and Lieutenant Walter Gordon Wilson The differences between the various marks of Heavy are mostly internal shuffling of components or thickening of the armour, with "male" versions having two naval 6-pounder cannon to back up their Hotchkiss machine guns while the "female" versions were armed purely with machine guns. All but one of these guns were mounted in the sponsons, with the single exception being a machinegun mounted in the forward superstructure (irritatingly referred to as "the turret" at the time) on most marks.  Mk V Hermaphrodite, name unknown, Luhansk, Ukraine. The Mk V tank actually lengthened the body by six feet but this threw off the track width to length ratios and caused problems with turning, leading to an updated version with slightly different hull geometry to reduce ground contact and avoid throwing tracks. This change in shape is subtle, but you can see it by comparing the two pictured. The Mk V was also the version in which the "hermaphrodite" concept arose, whereby a single 6-pounder gun was included in one sponson to ensure that female tanks were not entirely outgunned either by the A7V or captured Mk I and IVs (the Mk II was intended only for training but some made it to combat and got shot to hell leading to rumours about unhardened steel construction, while the Mk III never left Britain). Ergonomics across the series were bad, and as you can see from this picture it wasn't exactly a big tank in any dimension except length, making it very unpleasant for the eight man crews. On the plus side, it did start the tradition of  names for each vehicle. Mk V Male, "Devil", IWM London. Author's blurry collection. Humans for scale. Medium Mk A "Whippet"  Tank in Aberdeen Proving Grounds. In 1917 however the Medium Mk A "Whippet" tank came into service. The work of Tritton alone, the armour was thicker than that of the earlier Heavy marks, and while it only carried four Hotchkiss guns the speed was four times that of the Heavies allowing it to be used to actually exploit breakthroughs made by the infantry and tanks working together. Riding on the success of the Mk I, Tritton proposed a double-engined lighter model tank to fulfil the exploitation role and to do it less expensively than the Heavies. The Whippet was the result of that idea, using a single engine per track to allow for steering via throttle control. In practice it didn't work well and the tank was difficult to accurately steer but the idea was interesting and individual track control was a feature of later tanks. Interestingly, the prototype versions had a rotating turret based on the design used in the Austin Armoured Car, but this was dropped for the production model. Why "Medium Mk A" specifically? More on that later! Renault FT  Polish Army Museum, Warsaw Something truly revolutionary happened in France while all this was going on. Renault has been trucking away on a light tank design since mid-1916 and the result was the FT-17. This thing was totally world-beating in 1918 when it hit the battlefield. The most obvious feature was the rotating turret which could mount not only a Hotchkiss machine gun but could instead be configured to take a 37mm gun. While the SA 1918 had a short barrel the HE it could fire made it a valuable support weapon and the speed was almost twice that of the Heavies while having a two man crew that was almost as well protected. Once the dust of the war had settled this tank basically set the bar for performance and pretty much defined the concept of "tank" for the next century (thread favourite Stridsvagn 103 excepted, obviously) but for the purposes of the rest of this post at least it was largely ignored. It's a French tank, but it's relevant because of what comes after this period so I'm including it for completeness. Medium Tank Mk B  I dunno, some field? It's probably not still there... So that "Medium Mk A" thing eh? What was all that about? Well when Tritton went off to make the Whippet he left Wilson out of the whole project. Wilson, feeling a bit slighted by this and now a Major decided that he could fix the flaws of the Whippet all by himself and designed the Medium Tank Mk B. The design was visually similar to a small heavy with a larger superstructure, but actually included some revolutionary features such as "a separate engine compartment" and "an exhaust that didn't poison the crew" as well as some nifty but not quite as obviously useful details like sloped armour and a smoke-dispensing system to provide concealment for the vehicle. Apparently "a clever, non-confusing name" was not a design priority, as Wilson intended to name this tank the "Whippet" too. The armour was somewhat lighter than that of the Mk A in places, and armament was an average of four machine guns intended to move between seven ball mounts as needed. An order was put in for 450 units, but this was cancelled after a quarter were made due to objections raised about accessing the engine compartment for repair in-battle. It saw battle in Russia and Ireland. However, this was not the primary reason for the overlooking of the design. Medium Tank Mark C, Hornet  Some other field? In a masterstroke of "no, gently caress YOU", Tritton decided to develop his own successor to the Whippet, the "Medium Tank Mark C, Hornet" as soon as he got wind of Wilson's idea. Helped in part by the Mark B prototypes being built in one of the factories owned by Tritton the Mk C was not only better than the Mk B, but also finished before it. Longer for better trench clearance, better armoured, faster, and with five fixed machine guns the main advancements were in crew ergonomics. There were lots of vision slits to look out of and the commander had a special revolving turret on top of the superstructure which included a little map table to aid in navigation. Speaking tubes between crew positions helped communication and the driver even had a mileometer to tell him how far he had driven. A "male" version was planned with a single 6-pounder gun fixed in the forward superstructure, learning absolutely nothing from the French Saint-Chamond and Schneider tanks, but happily this never saw even prototype production. As it was the newest hottest poo poo the Mk C was carefully not sent to Russia or Ireland and thus never saw combat. Apparently nobody ever called it "Hornet" either which is a bit sad because it's a cool name. Medium Tank Mark D  This might even be a wooden model... There was also a Medium Mark D, but it seems to be noteworthy only because the name was re-used for a later Vickers designed medium tank and because it was an attempt at making an amphibious tank that failed amusingly, becoming known as "the tank that sank" after a British Pathe film of it being hauled out of the water after a failed test. Yes, you can watch that film. It seems literally nothing about the tank's design was fully nailed down, so it's hard to say much about it other than "it existed". At this point we can already see British thought splitting into the Infantry Tank and Cruiser Tank roles, with two roughly parallel design lines and some fun slapfighting and shenanigans. Next time we dip into the post-war
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Sep 28, 2016 01:41
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Sep 28, 2016 02:05
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The Renault FT actually owned so hard that Renault didn't want to make anything else for another 20 years.
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Sep 28, 2016 02:24
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When do the Russians start taking notice of this stuff?
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Sep 28, 2016 02:32
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Fangz posted:When do the Russians start taking notice of this stuff? They've got to deal with this little civil war thing first. But before poo poo got real, I got two words. Tsar Tank.
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Sep 28, 2016 02:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Renault FT actually owned so hard that Renault didn't want to make anything else for another 20 years. Fangz posted:When do the Russians start taking notice of this stuff?
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Sep 28, 2016 02:37
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On the subject of British tank design, why the heck did infantry tanks of world war 2 mount a light cannon that only shot AP. They were supposed to advance with infantry and shoot up fortifications, which screams "big rear end HE gun" to me.
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Sep 28, 2016 02:55
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Monocled Falcon posted:On the subject of British tank design, why the heck did infantry tanks of world war 2 mount a light cannon that only shot AP. They were supposed to advance with infantry and shoot up fortifications, which screams "big rear end HE gun" to me. Which thanks are you thinking of?
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Sep 28, 2016 02:56
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British infantry tanks like the Churchill.
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Sep 28, 2016 03:37
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But Churchill was decently armed (varying by model). The early war tanks like Matilda II otoh had puny 2pdr guns with no HE when the French, Germans and Soviets had 75mm HE lobbers for the task.
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Sep 28, 2016 03:45
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This will be covered in the next post. Gimme 24 hours and I'll hopefully get up to 1940 in one giant mess.
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Sep 28, 2016 03:59
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Random Number posted:It's for extinguishing oil well fires iirc. Yep, the footage was from a kick rear end Omnimax museum movie back when that was a thing. The sound of that thing starting up through all the speakers was awesome. That was probably 20 years ago but I still remembered that scene the instant it was posted.
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Sep 28, 2016 04:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:Which thanks are you thinking of? The most famous two were the Valentine and Matilda II, which were "infantry" tanks that didn't get issued high explosive rounds. I can only assume the logic was that the machine gun would take care of any non-armored targets. Hell, mobilized howitzers for a time were issued a majority or entirety of smoke rounds rather than HE.
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Sep 28, 2016 04:06
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Pyrologist? I believe the German term of art is Brandmeister  "Anyone need some fire?"
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Sep 28, 2016 04:11
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Polikarpov posted:I believe the German term of art is Brandmeister That guy must be the busiest man in the company, bless him.
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Sep 28, 2016 05:07
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Fangz posted:When do the Russians start taking notice of this stuff? Immediately. All the surplus WWI goodies were given to whoever promised to fight communists and, naturally, found their way into the Red Army as well. By the end of the Civil War, the Red Army had a number of Mark V (referred to as "Ricardo" after the engine) and Renault FT tanks in service. Captured Whippets were also used, but didn't last after the war, IIRC. The first mass produced domestic tank in the Soviet Union was the Russian Renault, which is exactly what it sounds like, and the next tank, the MS-1, drew very generously from the Renault FT design. However, unlike the French, the Soviets figured out that this type of tank is obsolete and just scaling it up (T-12, T-24) won't work, so they went shopping for foreign assistance. The results are widely known: the TG-1 tank failed, but designs based on the Vickers and Christie designs formed the backbone of the Soviet armoured force (T-26, T-27, BT) for the next decade. The Soviets also bought heavier Vickers medium tanks, but didn't like them. Puzzlingly, they did like the A1E1 Independent and the Medium Tank Mk.III, which gave birth to the T-35 and T-28 respectively. Unlike the T-26 and BT tanks, these tanks were inspirations rather than direct ancestors. Arquinsiel posted:The R-35 and H-35 had the same gun initially, which is kind of insane when you realise how tiny it actually is. Please post about French tanks like this if you can, because I know far less than I'd like to. I was planning on it, will post tomorrow probably.
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Sep 28, 2016 05:34
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SeanBeansShako posted:They've got to deal with this little civil war thing first. But before poo poo got real, I got two words. Oh. My. God. How had I never heard of this? 
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Sep 28, 2016 08:53
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FT-17 was notably absent from the museum when I visited it  Great tank post, I loved it.
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Sep 28, 2016 11:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:Meanwhile, the Emperor has been trying to don't gloss over this like it's loving nothing! What was this about?
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Sep 28, 2016 11:41
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Tias posted:don't gloss over this like it's loving nothing! What was this about? Me making Baldur's Gate 2 references.
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Sep 28, 2016 12:58
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So I have a question about US helmet covers in WWII. Specifically if anyone has sources on GIs making their own in Europe. I know that the army experimented with camo uniforms in Europe but they dropped them pretty quickly. I've read stuff about making cloth covers of their own, does anyone have ideas what sort of fabric they would use? Just OD?
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Sep 28, 2016 13:23
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Yvonmukluk posted:So I have a question about US helmet covers in WWII. Specifically if anyone has sources on GIs making their own in Europe. I know that the army experimented with camo uniforms in Europe but they dropped them pretty quickly. I've read stuff about making cloth covers of their own, does anyone have ideas what sort of fabric they would use? Just OD? In the 1st World War British and Commonwealth used sandbags as covers until they started manfacturing helmets with a camo friendly surface. Maybe it was the same? some sackcloth and some glue?
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Sep 28, 2016 13:47
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Nebakenezzer posted:Me making Baldur's Gate 2 references. Oh okay. I wouldn't actually hold this kind of horseplay above a 30 yrs war monarch 
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Sep 28, 2016 14:15
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 quote:US-American soldier wearing the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, 1945,
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Sep 28, 2016 14:31
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Living the Landsknecht dream.
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Sep 28, 2016 14:34
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Tias posted:Oh okay. I wouldn't actually hold this kind of horseplay above a 30 yrs war monarch Oh poo poo, you're right. I've drifted into an area where DnD references cannot be recognized as silly out of hand 30 years war question: OK so Rudolf II was under house arrest much of the time? How in the hell did that work? Who decided this? Another observation: while talking about Spanish empire, they mention that the overseas empire started off with a native population of about 30 million, which had been reduced to 1.5 million thanks to "overwork and disease."  What's the 30 years war equivalent of the record scratch? Also, I'm endlessly amused by the Hapsburgs controlling like half of Europe and having an empire that literally hauls money out of the ground in the new world, but is still constantly bankrupt. I mean, what were the Hapsburgs doing? Playing cards with those Genoian brothers? Addicted to art collecting? Having to constantly shell out the florins for massive armies to garrison against the Ottomans?
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Sep 28, 2016 14:54
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Nebakenezzer posted:What's the 30 years war equivalent of the record scratch? A window smashing as someone is violently ejected from it.
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Sep 28, 2016 14:59
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Arquinsiel posted:
Thank you for this good post.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:07
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Nebakenezzer posted:Oh poo poo, you're right. I've drifted into an area where DnD references cannot be recognized as silly out of hand Fighting an 80 years war against the trade center of Europe, for starters.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:07
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Nebakenezzer posted:What's the 30 years war equivalent of the record scratch? e:f,b
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Sep 28, 2016 15:07
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