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Jobbo_Fett posted:Jets were never available in large enough numbers to seriously affect anything. The only major part they played would be in the Defense of the Reich vs Allied Strategic Bombing, but even that's a stretch. The other aspect of the piston-->jet transition was that the early jets, as temperamental as they could be (the axial-flow Jumo engines in the Me262 was especially prone to flame-out and stall if subjected to rapid throttle changes and in the best case had an operating life of about 50 hours between overhauls - and the less efficient centrifugal-flow Rolls-Royces in the Meteor also required careful handling and only managed 150-180 hours between rebuilds.) were in many ways easier to operate than the 2000+ horsepower piston engines they were replacing. The handling characteristics, especially the strong swing generated by the torque reaction when the throttle was opened on take-off, were reaching the limits of what could be tolerated in widespread service with 'average' pilots undergoing 'average' training. The air-cooled radial engines such as the P&W R2800 and the Bristol Centaurus had increasing cooling problems with pilots (or flight engineers) having to work hard to keep the engines within their limits by managing oil cooler shutters, cowl shutters, oil dilution system etc. and when a moment's inattention (such as during a dogfight or a bombing run!) could crack a cylinder head or fowl the spark plugs. Squeezing ever more power was also pushing the limits of fuel technology, putting even more strain on the piston engines and their operators. Aside from its huge performance advantage the jet engine's 'one lever' control and relatively simple operating limits (start-up and shut-down was the really tricky parts of the early jet operations - once it was running the only real limit was to be gentle with the throttle) was very attractive to the end-users...with the possible exception of the maintenance crews, I guess!
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Nov 27, 2016 21:57
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:For gently caress's sakes, was there some recent breitbart "expose" on the internment camps or something? Now I'm hearing people try to spin the internment as a well-intentioned attempt to protect Japanese-Americans from mob violence. Last November, after the Paris attacks, a Democratic Virginia mayor cited them as a good idea. This November, Trump surrogate Carl Higbie cited them as precedent for extreme action against American Muslims. The difference, of course, is that one team's leaders immediately condemned and disavowed. P-Mack posted:Wow. I was thinking internment apologia meant "well, you have to understand the standards and American psyche of the time before passing judgement," not "actually, they were a good thing!" 
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Nov 27, 2016 22:14
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Devlan Mud posted:I think both of 'em gotta be pretty bad for that sorta streak. Or fairly good, especially if using swords.
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Nov 27, 2016 22:49
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darthbob88 posted:HEY GAL, would your guys do anything like this? Two French officers drew up a contract saying that every time one of them was within 100 miles of the other, they would fight a duel, unless military obligations prevented them from meeting. It lasted for 19 years and 30 duels, until one of the officers said that he was going to be married soon and wanted to end the matter. As the post notes, this is one of those stories too dashing to be true, but it seems fairly plausible with the stories you've told. and the duellists owned as a movie
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Nov 27, 2016 23:13
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US Navy Submarines: sometimes their torpedoes were p badquote:Although it is not absolutely certain, the evidence strongly suggests that the Grunion was lost as a result of horrific torpedo performance during her encounter with the Kano Maru. Her first torpedo ran low, but despite its magnetic pistol failed to detonate. Two more bounced harmlessly off the Kano Maru without exploding. However, the remaining torpedo missed its target and circled back, striking the periscope supports on the submerged submarine without exploding.[9]
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Nov 27, 2016 23:54
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"Lost surprise attack against unarmed merchant ship by shooting self in own periscope with torpedo" has to be the most embarrassing way to die to be honest.
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Nov 28, 2016 00:25
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darthbob88 posted:HEY GAL, would your guys do anything like this? Two French officers drew up a contract saying that every time one of them was within 100 miles of the other, they would fight a duel, unless military obligations prevented them from meeting. It lasted for 19 years and 30 duels, until one of the officers said that he was going to be married soon and wanted to end the matter. As the post notes, this is one of those stories too dashing to be true, but it seems fairly plausible with the stories you've told. Oh come on, this is way obvious. Two guys who belong to a hypermasculine class and also dress prettily are compelled to immediately ride to meet each other whenever they are around the same corner of the empire, supposedly duelling but failing to decide the deal in 30 battles, only stopping 19 years later when one of the guys is getting married? I believe that they were swinging at each other, but with meat swords. QED.
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Nov 28, 2016 00:40
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OwlFancier posted:"Lost surprise attack against unarmed merchant ship by shooting self in own periscope with torpedo" has to be the most embarrassing way to die to be honest. With a defective torpedo.
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Nov 28, 2016 01:03
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OwlFancier posted:"Lost surprise attack against unarmed merchant ship by shooting self in own periscope with torpedo" has to be the most embarrassing way to die to be honest. Not only that, but literally none of the torpedoes exploded: they got killed by their own dud! Efb
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Nov 28, 2016 01:06
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Nebakenezzer posted:US Navy Submarines: sometimes their torpedoes were p bad A part of this story that is just as amazing is how this was discovered: quote:In 1998 Lieut. Col. Richard Lane purchased for $1 a wiring diagram from a Japanese cargo ship, the Kano Maru, which had been active during World War II. Hoping to authenticate the document, Lane posted it on a Japanese naval historical website, asking if anyone could help. He was contacted by Yutaka Iwasaki, a Japanese naval historian, who not only authenticated it, but suggested he knew what happened to the Grunion. Lane contacted ComSubPac, and their public affairs officer, Darrel Ames, posted the information on ComSubPac’s Grunion website. Sometimes a $1 book and some internet cooperation goes a long way. Splode posted:Not only that, but literally none of the torpedoes exploded: they got killed by their own dud! Amusingly enough, getting hoisted by your own torpetard happened often enough and in many navies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tang_(SS-306) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tullibee_(SS-284) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Trinidad_(46) (a destroyer, not submarine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-377 And there could be more, but there are many subs that were lost and cause of sinking never revealed. Then there is this blurp from March 24, 1918  But there's also this article from 1995! http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-torpedo-that-thinks-its-a-boomerang-1600329.html Nenonen fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 01:11
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Nenonen posted:Oh come on, this is way obvious. Two guys who belong to a hypermasculine class and also dress prettily are compelled to immediately ride to meet each other whenever they are around the same corner of the empire, supposedly duelling but failing to decide the deal in 30 battles, only stopping 19 years later when one of the guys is getting married? I believe that they were swinging at each other, but with meat swords. QED. I had it in my head when I read the original post but, welp... 
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Nov 28, 2016 01:17
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OwlFancier posted:"Lost surprise attack against unarmed merchant ship by shooting self in own periscope with torpedo" has to be the most embarrassing way to die to be honest. Only because the Toilet Incident didn't kill anybody. 
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Nov 28, 2016 01:54
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Nenonen posted:A part of this story that is just as amazing is how this was discovered: Oh yeah, torpedoes are dangerous as hell, but there's something particularly degrading about being killed by a dud torpedo. Especially when you fired it, and especially when your target was hit by two duds and was completely fine.
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Nov 28, 2016 09:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:Did the League of Nations ever do anything useful back in its day? It settled the Åland crisis and had some successes in the beginning! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85land_crisis
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Nov 28, 2016 13:49
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Splode posted:Oh yeah, torpedoes are dangerous as hell, but there's something particularly degrading about being killed by a dud torpedo. Especially when you fired it, and especially when your target was hit by two duds and was completely fine. The entire torpedo department at BuOrd should have hung.
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Nov 28, 2016 14:16
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MrYenko posted:The entire torpedo department at BuOrd should have hung. The Mk14 story should be a required course in business and engineering schools. People goof on the F-35 development, but this was like four levels of design flaw, compounded by BuOrd refusing to even look into it, for a year into the world's largest actual shooting war. For casual readers, the submarine torpedo the US used pretty much throughout WWII was the Mk14. There wasn't a budget for much real testing when it was developed, so the Bureau of Ordnance shot off a few with concrete dummy warheads and called it a day. It had a fancy new magnetic trigger, so you could fire it off below the draft of your target and it would blow up under the keel. Much more effective to break a ship's back than to punch a hole in it, plus it circumvents any belt armor on a larger warship. Except Torpex and concrete don't have the same mass, so they consistently ran about ten feet deeper than they were set, which never tripped the magnetic trigger. Captains were instructed to set it to impact instead of magnetic influence mode and set it to run on the surface, which put it about ten feet underwater, decent depth for holing a target. Except when they did everything they could to line up a perfect 90º hit, most of them failed. The contact trigger's firing pin had so much inertia that a perfect hit would cause it to deform in its mechanism before it could set off the warhead. Finally, the gyros sometimes got screwy and instead of maintaining a straight course, they'd just spin around in circles, which, given relative speed and turning radius, means it will hit you. Throughout this all, BuOrd continued to blame submarine captains for the duds until some very conclusive tests forced them to sulk back to their offices and try to turn it into a torpedo that wasn't poo poo. hogmartin fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 14:47
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The problem with the magnetic trigger wasn't (entirely) about depth issues, which could be worked around, it was also about miscalibration of the system - the exploder was affected by the local magnetic field of the Earth, which was very different between where the torpedo was tested and where it was used.
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Nov 28, 2016 15:09
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Fangz posted:The problem with the magnetic trigger wasn't (entirely) about depth issues, which could be worked around, it was also about miscalibration of the system - the exploder was affected by the local magnetic field of the Earth, which was very different between where the torpedo was tested and where it was used. True. IIRC the Kriegsmarine also had a lousy time with their magnetic triggers around Norway because of ferrous ore deposits in shallow water.
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Nov 28, 2016 15:14
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hogmartin posted:The Mk14 story should be a required course in business and engineering schools. People goof on the F-35 development, but this was like four levels of design flaw, compounded by BuOrd refusing to even look into it, for a year into the world's largest actual shooting war. I haven't been a proper engineering student since 2002-03 but the examples they used at UCF back in my day were the challenger disaster and some structural stuff (galloping gertie bridge, an arena that was designed with external supports attached via lovely bolts and a sagging roof that ended up collapsing under the weight of heavy precipitation, that one hotel skywalk thing), but I bet Columbia is part of those "don't gently caress up like this, consider as many externalities and details as you can, and then go back and check historical data" stories. The Mk14 saga is probably a good critical thinking study because it seemed like they were ignoring things at every turn.
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Nov 28, 2016 15:30
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hogmartin posted:Throughout this all, BuOrd continued to blame submarine captains for the duds until some very conclusive tests forced them to sulk back to their offices and try to turn it into a torpedo that wasn't poo poo. Wasn't one of the "very conclusive tests" a bunch of disgruntled captains ramming a live torpedo into a wall without it detonating in front of some BuOrd staff
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Nov 28, 2016 15:43
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It's actually even better than what is related above. The MK 14 magnetic exploder was considered so secret that it wasn't even issued to the fleet until just before the outbreak of hostilities, and was issued without significant training in maintenance, and without manuals. Anyone familiar with any kind of machinery knows where this story is headed, even if the engineering was well-executed. When patrol reports began to note significant anomalies, the squadron commanders immediately pinned blame on the aggressiveness of the captain, on incompetent fire control parties (in some cases, they'd place blame on skippers and fire control parties that had won fleet-wide competitions during peacetime,) and on just about any and everything else but the weapons themselves. It took almost a full year of combat before the issue began to even be taken seriously as a POSSIBLE problem with the weapon. So not only did the torpedo run deeper than set, the contact exploder did not work properly, the magnetic exploder failed to detonate under a target, and it would occasionally also predetonate the weapon prior to even being near the target, thus giving away the submarine's presence and relative bearing. It was like going into infantry combat with a rifle that only shot blanks, but would also occasionally launch a starshell up in the air that spells "HEY LOOK AT ME!"
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Nov 28, 2016 15:47
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The additional farce is how this interacts with the prewar political struggle within the navy, where there was a hard fought doctrinal change to declare unrestricted submarine warfare immediately at the start of the war instead of waiting for a suitable provocation or even a proper legal opinion. All that hullabaloo about putting the economic stranglehold on Japan ASAP ended up just letting US skippers bounce faulty torpedoes off the sides of Japanese merchant ships for months and months.
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Nov 28, 2016 16:04
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hogmartin posted:
This was compounded by the fact that BuOrd was the sole source. They were responsible for the design, the testing, and the manufacture of the weapon. So as hosed as the F-35 has been, imagine Lockheed being in charge of all the testing for it as well. quote:It had a fancy new magnetic trigger, so you could fire it off below the draft of your target and it would blow up under the keel. Much more effective to break a ship's back than to punch a hole in it, plus it circumvents any belt armor on a larger warship. Except Torpex and concrete don't have the same mass, so they consistently ran about ten feet deeper than they were set, which never tripped the magnetic trigger. Captains were instructed to set it to impact instead of magnetic influence mode and set it to run on the surface, which put it about ten feet underwater, decent depth for holing a target. And at that point the magnetic detonators turned out to be too sensitive and were detonating the torps too early. So captains started ordering the magnetic detonators removed/inactivated, and just used the ordinary contact fuses. And then: quote:Except when they did everything they could to line up a perfect 90º hit, most of them failed. The contact trigger's firing pin had so much inertia that a perfect hit would cause it to deform in its mechanism before it could set off the warhead. Finally, the gyros sometimes got screwy and instead of maintaining a straight course, they'd just spin around in circles, which, given relative speed and turning radius, means it will hit you. Throughout this all, BuOrd continued to blame submarine captains for the duds until some very conclusive tests forced them to sulk back to their offices and try to turn it into a torpedo that wasn't poo poo. Here's a good bit of detail on it: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/BuOrd/BuOrd-6.html Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 16:30
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WW2 Data And the British Explosive Ordnance is live! What markings were used for British bombs? What colours were assigned to which types of bombs? Which British bomb was actually a US model, and how was it modified? All that and more at the blog!
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Nov 28, 2016 16:38
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FAUXTON posted:I haven't been a proper engineering student since 2002-03 but the examples they used at UCF back in my day were the challenger disaster and some structural stuff (galloping gertie bridge, an arena that was designed with external supports attached via lovely bolts and a sagging roof that ended up collapsing under the weight of heavy precipitation, that one hotel skywalk thing), but I bet Columbia is part of those "don't gently caress up like this, consider as many externalities and details as you can, and then go back and check historical data" stories. Citigroup Center is another classic engineering example in that vein, albeit a near miss instead of an actual disaster. Short version is the building was changed from welded joints to bolted joints to save cost, and the design hadn't been tested for diagonal winds, only orthogonal. These two factors pushed it well out of it's safety margin. A college student doing a project on the building contacted the designers to ask how it would be able to withstand a hurricane force wind, which is when they realized it wouldn't, a year after it opened. They were able to secretly reinforce it and fix the problem, but if not for some lucky breaks we could have had a sixty story building collapse in the middle of NYC.
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Nov 28, 2016 16:56
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The Mk14 is probably the biggest reason that the US has the whole JCIDS setup nowadays....the naval bureaus were basically little fiefdoms unto themselves with practically no oversight from even the Navy, let alone from the War Department or Congress, and lo and behold things went pretty terribly. We all make fun of JCIDS and rightly so but it is a consequence of much worse results.
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Nov 28, 2016 17:14
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Didn't the problem with torpedoes running in circles get patched by making them explode if they started to turn sharply after getting the launch command, and then a submarine have one that stayed in the tube, which promptly blew up when the sub turned?
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Nov 28, 2016 17:21
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xthetenth posted:Didn't the problem with torpedoes running in circles get patched by making them explode if they started to turn sharply after getting the launch command, and then a submarine have one that stayed in the tube, which promptly blew up when the sub turned? Yes, USS Scorpion. That's one of the theories for why she was found headed away from her actual route. Turning 180º was supposed to shut the torpedo down in case of a circular run, and people have suggested that it's what they were trying to do. It was supposed to shut down and sink though, not explode. That theory says that the hot run in the tube or on the racks is why she turned, and the hot-running torpedo started a fire which set off a low-order detonation of the warhead. hogmartin fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Nov 28, 2016 |
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Nov 28, 2016 17:36
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hogmartin posted:Yes, USS Thresher. That's one of the theories for why she was found headed away from her actual route. Turning 180º was supposed to shut the torpedo down in case of a circular run, and people have suggested that it's what they were trying to do. It was supposed to shut down and sink though, not explode. That theory says that the hot run in the tube or on the racks is why she turned, and the hot-running torpedo started a fire which set off a low-order detonation of the warhead. USS Scorpion. Thresher was an engineering casualty during a test dive.
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Nov 28, 2016 17:38
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MrYenko posted:USS Scorpion. Thresher was an engineering casualty during a test dive. You're right, I caught myself after posting. It's corrected now.
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Nov 28, 2016 17:42
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This is going back 100 or so posts but I just wanted to comment on how someone mentioned it being a bit of a mind gently caress to consider war in terms of lives cut short: Survivor bias is a very real issue in history. All those cool stories we have come from the people who e everything went right for. This is something I hammer on when I teach the Holocaust. A lot of survivor stories sound ludicrously implausible. Someone survives the round up because they're walking home on a different route than they do every day, then the only farmer in Poland who is ok with Jews hides them for a few months, then they get captured and get slotted for a work camp arbitrarily, then they get assigned to a good work detail, them they get sick at precisely the right time to miss out on the death march when the Red Army gets too close - any earlier and they would have ended up in the ovens. You find poo poo like that all the time and it sounds implausible be ause it is. The thing is that the only people who survive to write a book that gets read by college freshmen are the tiny percentage who have everything go perfect every time for years. Everyone else is dead.
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Nov 28, 2016 18:52
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Hey, I am currently reading through "The Big Book of X Bombers and X Fighters" by Steve Pace. It had a lot of recommendations for being thorough if a little stiffly written, and so far it's impressive. If you're looking for what's basically a deadpan recounting of the USAAF/USAF making their way into the jet age (turns out Bell was slapping together jet fighter airframes on a prototype basis before D-Day and Lockheed was trying to make a flying wing happen since the 40s) it's pretty good and full of spec sheets and illustrations. I have the Kindle edition which I'm rapidly finding does not do the work justice. But hey, history of early (US specific) jet fighters/bombers. I'm just getting into the F-84 stuff so I'm fairly early.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:You find poo poo like that all the time and it sounds implausible be ause it is. The thing is that the only people who survive to write a book that gets read by college freshmen are the tiny percentage who have everything go perfect every time for years. Everyone else is dead. I can think of an exception, to be Frank
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Nov 28, 2016 19:19
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is going back 100 or so posts but I just wanted to comment on how someone mentioned it being a bit of a mind gently caress to consider war in terms of lives cut short: Yeah. I was going through that while reading a book on the Polish forces of WW2. Most every story seemed wildly implausible, but I guess to fight all the way through the worst human war and two major countries' attempts to wipe out either the existence or idea of Polish People, you're going to have nothing but such incredible stories. It can manifest in a lot of ways, too. If a German unit doesn't survive a large Soviet attack, or for that matter several, then there's nobody to tell the tale of that victory to the West after the war. If someone does survive and win against a large-scale operation, then that's another book citing soldiers saying "The Soviets threw wave after wave at us, and due to our side's inherent superior training/tactics/whatever, we cut them down" that fuel a lot of the misconceptions about the Eastern Front. Or for another example, the case of "Death Traps." Despite Shermans having an above-average crew safety record for tanks in the war, it gets the reputation for getting knocked out a lot, partly due to there being plenty of survivors to tell the tale of a combat loss. If it was most any other tank, odds are that most of the crewmen would have died eventually after one or more combat losses. It's then easy for some German tanker who either is the one guy who never got shot up and/or sat in their impregnable fortress snowflake tank that was off the frontlines half the time to talk about "Tommy Cookers" and "pregnated in combat." Or hell, just all of the Generals after any war who take all of the positive credit and no blame for the problems, preferring to throw shade on dead/retired officers who can't fight back.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:32
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Plan Z posted:Or hell, just all of the Generals after any war who take all of the positive credit and no blame for the problems, preferring to throw shade on dead/retired officers who can't fight back. Manstein and Guderian take the credit for the attack on France and throw the blame of Barbarossa failing at Hitler. Which is kind of funny except millions of people died.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is going back 100 or so posts but I just wanted to comment on how someone mentioned it being a bit of a mind gently caress to consider war in terms of lives cut short: Survivor bias I think might be an influence on our evolution; we all sorta think in dangerous situations we'll be one of the lucky ones. I guess that's a instinct helpful to survival.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:44
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Kemper Boyd posted:kind of funny except millions of people died. New thread title.
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Nov 28, 2016 19:55
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Speaking of is it bad that I'm reading Red Steamroller and seeing the SS show up makes me happy because it's an even odds bet of overequipped idiots playing soldier pissing away desperately needed tanks rather than boringly competent Heer formations acting like professional soldiers and not showing off for some Luftwaffe dudes by driving a Tiger out over ice or forgetting to recon?
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Nov 28, 2016 20:04
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FAUXTON posted:that one hotel skywalk thing The second you started listing things I knew this was going to show up. Simultaneously so innocuous and so dangerous a change, it truly is the greatest teaching case study of all. And for anyone who didn't study Engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse
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Nov 28, 2016 21:47
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:The second you started listing things I knew this was going to show up. Simultaneously so innocuous and so dangerous a change, it truly is the greatest teaching case study of all. I mean a lot of the intro-level case study stuff is just fellating the ego of aspiring engineers by making it seem like it's always going to be the engineer versus the rest of the world at the world's peril, but the skywalk collapse is squarely on the engineers for not even running the numbers on the revised design before greenlighting it over the phone. It's a great example of how even engineers are human and fallible, and should be required learning if not the core of a course all on its own.
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Nov 28, 2016 22:41
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