Fangz posted:

The sentiment that "the bomber will always get through" was around in 1932. Douhet in the 1920s was claiming that strategic bombers would be impossible to intercept. So, the idea of the fast bomber seems like a pretty obvious one.

CommonShore posted:

This logic perplexes me. What was that based on? Like, I know I'm thinking with 100 years of hindsight, but it seems as if you're looking at 2 planes designed from the same basic sets of capabilities, a bomber and an interceptor, and the bomber is full of big fuckoff bombs and heavy, that the interceptors would always at least be a threat.

CommonShore posted:

This logic perplexes me. What was that based on? Like, I know I'm thinking with 100 years of hindsight, but it seems as if you're looking at 2 planes designed from the same basic sets of capabilities, a bomber and an interceptor, and the bomber is full of big fuckoff bombs and heavy, that the interceptors would always at least be a threat.

Fangz posted:

1. Radar doesn't exist.
2. It's easier to stick more engines on to a bomber, and so make a bomber almost arbitrarily fast, whereas a fighter needs to manuever.
3. Once the bomber drops its bombs it gets a lot lighter.
4. Really unrealistic expectations of effective bombing from high altitude.

CommonShore posted:

This logic perplexes me. What was that based on? Like, I know I'm thinking with 100 years of hindsight, but it seems as if you're looking at 2 planes designed from the same basic sets of capabilities, a bomber and an interceptor, and the bomber is full of big fuckoff bombs and heavy, that the interceptors would always at least be a threat.

AFashionableHat posted:

this mortally wounds me

Nenonen posted:

It's not like the AWACS would call a fighter to scramble at Mach 2 to intercept back in 1930. Early detection was slow and haphazard, fighter planes were still slow and you couldn't radio instructions to fighters already in the air because *gasp* they didn't have radios. So if you had a bomber with enough speed and service ceiling relative to enemy fighter's capabilities then it would be nigh impossible for the enemy to climb to meet you before you had already reached the target.

Phanatic posted:

Even as late as the 1950s the B-36 had better capability at altitude than the fighters that would have intercepted it. Most interceptors couldn't even get up to 50000', and the ones that could would be perpetually on the edge of a stall and couldn't turn worth a drat up there. To successfully intercept one would take very good timing and coordination with controllers.

FrangibleCover posted:

And XB-70 went faster and higher than anything else again, necessitating the development of the MiG-25. Given how the Blackbirds did against MiG-25 interceptions I think even they wouldn't provide a full solution. In the end the fast, high bomber was killed by the surface to air missile, because you can have more SAMs than fighters per dollar so you can spread them around better. People say it was about altitude, but you can stand a 60s jet interceptor on its tail and get up to 60000ft no bother. The issue is having the jet interceptor in the right place at the right time.

Nenonen posted:

It's not like the AWACS would call a fighter to scramble at Mach 2 to intercept back in 1930. Early detection was slow and haphazard

quote:

The trio had a routine: first approach the Nazi men in bars, and, having successfully seduced them, ask if they wanted to 'go for a stroll' in the forest, where, as Freddie herself put it, they would be 'liquidated'.

'We had to do it,' she told one interviewer. 'It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people.' When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: 'One should not ask a soldier any of that.'

feedmegin posted:

To put it mildly. 1930 is before radar, remember (and Chain Home was still secret even in 1939). Detection back then was literally a bloke in a field seeing planes go overhead and picking up a telephone.

MrYenko posted:

zoux posted:

Presumably not Iowa though.

feedmegin posted:

Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_mirror which you can still go and look at in the UK, yeah. They're not very good though.

bewbies posted:

A bunch of first-order militaries still use acoustic systems for counterfire. It is actually incredibly accurate.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Have you read anything about the Soviets post-war fishing fleets? I'm reading about it right now, and it is *crazy* in several ways.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Another data point on the bomber altitude thing is the wing area. Big rear end wings help a lot with climbing up to altitude, especially in the pre-jet era.

bewbies posted:

A bunch of first-order militaries still use acoustic systems for counterfire. It is actually incredibly accurate.

Milo and POTUS posted:

Where you reading this

Cyrano4747 posted:

Another data point on the bomber altitude thing is the wing area. Big rear end wings help a lot with climbing up to altitude, especially in the pre-jet era.

Nebakenezzer posted:

By 1965, Soviets had 106 factory trawlers, 30 mother ships (not really sure, maybe larger storage/resupply ships) and 425 side trawlers. This fleet was catching 900,000 tons of fish per year in foreign waters, usually till the entire region's ecology collapsed.

BalloonFish posted:

I never think of the USSR as a major civil maritime power.

BalloonFish posted:

That is interesting - I had no idea the Soviet fishing fleet was so big. I'm aware this is a big gap in my own knowledge (among many...) but I never think of the USSR as a major civil maritime power. But I've just looked it up and the Soviet Union was building a million tons of merchant shipping a year in the 50s and 60s, and by the 1970s they had the sixth largest merchant fleet in the world

Does your source have anything about what proportion of these trawlers were packed with ELINT gear, trailed sonar/hydrophone arrays from their 'trawling gear' and spent a curiously large amount of time 'fishing' in the bits of the GIUK Gap and Western Approaches which NATO subs used to get in and out of the Clyde?

HEY GUNS posted:

My dude, I had no idea.

HEY GUNS posted:

My dude, I had no idea.

Nebakenezzer posted:

A good question. The book makes clear that unlike Newfoundland/Canada, the USSR was *very* into maritime research, both biology and physical, and were doing bathymetric surveys around Canada (say, Baffin Island) that Canada couldn't be bothered to do. It also mentions that the Soviet fishing fleet was so big off the Grand Banks that they occasionally had "spotter ships" that did nothing aside from use sensors to find fish. This is a rambly way to say I'm not exactly sure, but it seems like there was enough ships that the ELINT trawlers could farm out more mundane surveillance and survey to ostensibly civilian ships.

Also also would it be bad form to ask why precisely the USSR needed that much merchant marine

FuturePastNow posted:

https://twitter.com/madpadre1/status/1177404522806808576

steinrokkan posted:

People laugh at you for proposing Die Ratte, until this exact thing happens.

Carillon posted:

So this might be off base or I'm late to the party, but was the Trinity project name a pun? Like the Trinity, the atom was supposed to be indivisible. A friend and I were talking about it and I wasn't sure if that was a crazy reach.

quote:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy.
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Got a book called "Cod: the Ecological History of the North Atlantic Fisheries."

The Soviets post war went huge - enormous - into a high seas fishing fleet. So much so that they were building ships in West German shipyards to take advantage of it. They also apparently surreptitiously stole the British design for what would become the modern factory trawler, the Fairtry I. (Dragged a net from the rear instead of the side, massive refrigeration facilities.) By 1965, Soviets had 106 factory trawlers, 30 mother ships (not really sure, maybe larger storage/resupply ships) and 425 side trawlers. This fleet was catching 900,000 tons of fish per year in foreign waters, usually till the entire region's ecology collapsed.

The Soviets were the biggest, but most of Europe was doing the same thing, subsidizing the construction of vast fishing fleets that would wander the oceans taking whatever they could get. Iceland acting unilaterally to protect its own fishing grounds was the right move, because between around 1955 to 1970 there was basically no rules at all for fishing beyond four miles from a nation's coastline.