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Platystemon posted:Every element heavier than iron (element twenty‐six) has an unstable nucleus, though lead at eighty‐two and most of the things in‐between have isotopes so long‐lived they’re never been observed to decay and likely never will. The light elements are vulnerable to proton decay, but that will happen long after the universe is in heat death and there is no energy around to run a player or a mind to appreciate it. Are you sure about that, and that you're not mixing it up with iron being the end-point of (non-supernova) stellar nucleosynthesis? Tin has 10 stable isotopes, only three of which are suspected-but-not-yet-seen to decay
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 03:38 |
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# ? Jun 2, 2024 14:23 |
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MadDogMike posted:While folks are debating counterfactuals, one I ponder sometimes is if Japan would have had better results in the "make the US give up on fighting" victory plan by just hitting the Philippines and not striking Hawaii. People were talking about how the US treated it like an existential war no matter what the practical actual threat Japan posed, and I wonder how much of that is because they hit a part of the official US that hard. If they had just kept the fighting to US possessions, would they have had a chance to make the US decide "it isn't worth it to fight over a bunch of islands way over there" like they planned if they hadn't made a straight up major attack on the US directly? Admittedly I don't know how not hitting the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor first would have worked militarily for them, though. That is not how Japan's military leadership worked or how they understood war and geopolitics.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 03:39 |
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GotLag posted:Are you sure about that, and that you're not mixing it up with iron being the end-point of (non-supernova) stellar nucleosynthesis? Yes. I wish I had a better source at hand, but here’s how someone on Reddit describes it: quote:Any nucleus up to iron that you would look up in a table that says "stable" is absolutely stable (barring proton decay, which has never been observed and does not occur in the Standard Model). This means that it will never decay to a smaller nucleus because it is already in its lowest energy state. All other nuclei are unstable to a certain degree because either
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 03:54 |
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Even if we don’t count US led but Filipino manned units, such as the Scouts, the US army and navy footprint in the Philippines is very significant. No way an attack on the islands alone wouldn’t also trigger war
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 04:06 |
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GotLag posted:Are you sure about that, and that you're not mixing it up with iron being the end-point of (non-supernova) stellar nucleosynthesis? Yeah. Alpha decay, spontaneous fission, all that stuff is a quantum tunneling effect. The nucleons in an atom are deep inside this potential well created by the nuclear binding energy each one brings with it, but the protons are all strongly repelled by each other. Without taking quantum effects into account, then they'd be stuck there, but they're allowed to quantum-tunnel out of that potential well. Usually you just see this with the heavier elements, spitting out an alpha particle or occasionally splitting into multiple chunks all on their own, but on cosmic time scales it can happen with everything. It goes the other way, as well: lighter nuclei can undergo cold fusion by means of quantum tunneling. Absent proton decay (which we're reasonably sure doesn't happen), then everything will eventually end up as iron. But the timescale for this is well beyond what we normally talk about when we refer to an isotope as stable, it's many many orders of magnitude longer than the universe has been around. On even longer timescales, all that iron will tunnel down into black holes, which will then evaporate by Hawking radiation, and you wind up with everything consisting of photons, neutrinos, and electrons/positrons.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 04:45 |
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I'm thinking like 1000 year time scales here, not the degenerate matter end state of the universe
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 04:53 |
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Someone post something about pikes or cataphracts or something
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 04:55 |
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https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/status/1182847547645276160 How many TYW mercs could Hairy Mary take in a fight?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 05:10 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Older technology like that inherently requires very simple technology to read. It's implicitly not hard, merely expensive. All sorts of obscure magnetic tape data formats have had their first working readers in decades constructed anew - but of course you might say that since we've continuously used the same basic magnetic reader designs going back 70 years we've never really had to build such things wholly from scratch. For instance, you can make a Tefifon reader simply by using an appropriately sized needle on a standard record player, so long as you find a way to pass the continuously running tape under it (the player arm will do just fine staying in the groove). Magnetic wire can be read against magnetic tape heads, your big problem is keeping it from getting snared and breaking. And well, all of these formats are in fact well documented, even obscure ones are usually a case of 'we can start getting the image/audio back based off other formats, but it might take a bit to ensure we're getting the correct playing speed/colors/etc".
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 05:11 |
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Platystemon posted:https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/status/1182847547645276160 She was killed and her body burned by assassins hired by relic merchants who were afraid that she would eventually inflate the price of Locks of Virgin Mary's Hair and cause booming European economies to crash.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 09:34 |
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FastestGunAlive posted:Even if we don’t count US led but Filipino manned units, such as the Scouts, the US army and navy footprint in the Philippines is very significant. No way an attack on the islands alone wouldn’t also trigger war Yep. It was US sovereign territory aa an American colony just like Singapore was a British colony or the Dutch East Indies a Dutch colony. The exact same considerations would apply regardless. Also, hawaii is also 'a bunch of islands way over there' too, you know. It's not exactly NYC feedmegin fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Oct 12, 2019 |
# ? Oct 12, 2019 11:25 |
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Cythereal posted:It also hurt the RN's use of carriers that their approach to designing carriers severely limited the number of aircraft they could each carry and launch. The Japanese and especially the Americans designed carriers in different ways that allowed them to carry significantly more aircraft at the cost of being more vulnerable to damage. Royal Navy carrier doctrine made perfect sense for the war the Royal Navy ended up in. The armoured flight decks proved their worth on the carriers that had them, allowing Illustrious to survive bombing that would have entirely knocked out any other carrier in early 1941, letting Formidable absorb two 1000kg bomb hits in the Eastern Med and shrug off two Kamikazes in the Pacific which did so little damage that the carrier was operating again within hours of each hit. Victorious took two Kamikaze hits and Indefatigable one with similar results and Indomitable bounced a 500kg bomb during Pedestal. In summary, every single British AFD carrier but Implacable was protected from a hit that could have proved fatal to another ship and I am happy to claim that Illustrious, Formidable and Victorious would have been lost or written-off if they had American style hangar-deck armour. For a Navy that had ten proper fleet carriers at any point in WW2 and fewer than that at any given time the preservation of three ships is completely worth it.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 14:15 |
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Was there any country (except for the nazis) that made their naval aviation group part of the airforce? And similarly, was there any post ww1 military that left ground based aviation as part of the ground forces?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 14:48 |
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VictualSquid posted:Was there any country (except for the nazis) that made their naval aviation group part of the airforce? quote:And similarly, was there any post ww1 military that left ground based aviation as part of the ground forces?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 15:21 |
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FrangibleCover posted:The United States of America, most notably.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 16:16 |
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VictualSquid posted:Huh, I never knew that. If the air force only split up after naval aviation really took off, why didn't they take over those too? American naval aviation was always under Navy control, and still is. The US Army Air Force became a thing unto its own during the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2, primarily.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 16:26 |
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Cythereal posted:American naval aviation was always under Navy control, and still is. The US Army Air Force became a thing unto its own during the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2, primarily. loving marines.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 17:05 |
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LingcodKilla posted:loving marines. Marine aviation is another thing entirely. Yes, the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all have their own separate aviation divisions.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 17:39 |
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Cythereal posted:Marine aviation is another thing entirely. Also coast guard but that makes more sense.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 18:10 |
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Cythereal posted:Marine aviation is another thing entirely. At least the USAF doesn't have its own infantry. Unless you count PJs. poo poo.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 18:18 |
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LingcodKilla posted:Also coast guard but that makes more sense. The Coast Guard also aren't part of the Department of Defense anymore.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 18:23 |
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Cythereal posted:The Coast Guard also aren't part of the Department of Defense anymore. DHS?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 18:53 |
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zoux posted:DHS? Yep.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 18:55 |
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Randomcheese3 posted:This isn't quite right; the British had experimented with multi-carrier tactics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and generally planned to keep their carriers together in a fleet action. This was used in action early in the war - Ark Royal and Glorious operated together during the Norwegian campaign, for example. However, due to a scarcity of carriers (exacerbated by the early losses of Courageous and Glorious) compared to the amount of tasks that required a carrier, the RN rarely got to concentrate their carriers until 1942-3. The Japanese only really adopted massed carrier groups from late 1940, as the IJN digested and interpreted the lessons of the Sino-Japanese war. Another weakness IMO of British Carriers is that they didn't develop very good carrier aircraft. I'm not sure if this was a product of their "always buy local" aircraft industry, or lack of expertise by the Admiralty, or just a lack of willingness to invest. Whatever the reason, the Italian ground based aircraft many a time saturated and overwhelmed the carrier aircraft and could attack like the Carrier was not there in the first place. Also I've a vitally important argument to start: what's the best version of Mutiny on the Bounty? I pick the 1930s version as Bligh is the biggest rear end in a top hat yet emotionally complex
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 19:23 |
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Cythereal posted:Yep. The law reassigning it was written so that the President can put it back under the Navy at will, though.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 19:24 |
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FrangibleCover posted:Royal Navy carrier doctrine made perfect sense for the war the Royal Navy ended up in. The armoured flight decks proved their worth on the carriers that had them, allowing Illustrious to survive bombing that would have entirely knocked out any other carrier in early 1941, letting Formidable absorb two 1000kg bomb hits in the Eastern Med and shrug off two Kamikazes in the Pacific which did so little damage that the carrier was operating again within hours of each hit. Victorious took two Kamikaze hits and Indefatigable one with similar results and Indomitable bounced a 500kg bomb during Pedestal. In summary, every single British AFD carrier but Implacable was protected from a hit that could have proved fatal to another ship and I am happy to claim that Illustrious, Formidable and Victorious would have been lost or written-off if they had American style hangar-deck armour. For a Navy that had ten proper fleet carriers at any point in WW2 and fewer than that at any given time the preservation of three ships is completely worth it. There's the open question of how many strikes were prevented by larger air wings from becoming hits. Considering how desperately needed fighters were during the early carrier battles, with scout bombers getting pressed into service before the folding wings on the F4F-4 allowed 18 plane squadrons to become 27 planes, I'm not sure I fancy trying to field a strike and run CAS with the relatively few planes the RN carriers could field. It's also worth noting that the bomb hit on the Franklin was a pair of 250 kg bombs, one of which tore through two decks, including the 2.5 inch armored hangar deck. So carrier deck armor getting penetrated was hardly unknown. Also, this http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-030.php alleges that the majority of the armored carriers had suffered permanent deformation in their structure from fires contained within the structure, and they were in fact written off quickly as a result. And as far as 'could have proved fatal to another ship' and 'would have been lost or written off if they had American style hangar-deck armour', that's rather at odds to the volume of hits it took to kill the Yorktown and Hornet. Franklin burned like she did because the bombs hit in the middle of arming and fueling procedures with no warning, making it the only hit I can think of where a British style design would have had a decisive advantage by not having the same amount of kindling, though it likely would've warped the hull girder permanently. Lexington took a decisive amount of damage from torpedo hits, and the Japanese experience with submarines doesn't indicate enclosed hangars would do particularly well there. Nebakenezzer posted:Another weakness IMO of British Carriers is that they didn't develop very good carrier aircraft. I'm not sure if this was a product of their "always buy local" aircraft industry, or lack of expertise by the Admiralty, or just a lack of willingness to invest. Whatever the reason, the Italian ground based aircraft many a time saturated and overwhelmed the carrier aircraft and could attack like the Carrier was not there in the first place. The F4F-4 was specifically developed with significant input from the British, which led to the adoption of six guns rather than four with more total ammunition, a change the USN pilots absolutely hated. One of the differentiating factors of earlier British carriers was that they had 14 foot hangar decks which led to problems with bigger American carrier planes. There's also a sheer numbers factor to getting swamped as well. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 12, 2019 |
# ? Oct 12, 2019 19:42 |
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xthetenth posted:There's the open question of how many strikes were prevented by larger air wings from becoming hits. Considering how desperately needed fighters were during the early carrier battles, with scout bombers getting pressed into service before the folding wings on the F4F-4 allowed 18 plane squadrons to become 27 planes, I'm not sure I fancy trying to field a strike and run CAS with the relatively few planes the RN carriers could field. I have no idea how British damage control stacked up, but American damage control during WW2 was the class of the world. The lighter construction and open hangars above the strength deck on American carriers also made repairs much easier because permanently warped structural members could simply be cut away and replaced.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 19:45 |
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xthetenth posted:The F4F-4 was specifically developed with significant input from the British, which led to the adoption of six guns rather than four with more total ammunition, a change the USN pilots absolutely hated. One of the differentiating factors of earlier British carriers was that they had 14 foot hangar decks which led to problems with bigger American carrier planes. I read that for a second as 'F-4 Phantom II' and then got irrationally angry at USN aircraft nomenclature
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 19:55 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:I read that for a second as 'F-4 Phantom II' and then got irrationally angry at USN aircraft nomenclature Before the Tri-Service designation system in 1962, the Phantom was the F4H.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:09 |
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https://twitter.com/alexburnsNYT/status/1183096444561035265
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:10 |
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Thanks for the media format posts. I've been watching Technology Connections and Techmoans lately and I got the thirst.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:12 |
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I'm working on sketching out a list of all of the techs I want to have in my naval combat game. As a quick refresher, this is a build-your-own-warship arcade naval combat sim, not super-focused on realism, but I want to have all of the really major DD/CA/BB technologies of WW1/WW2 and sometimes beyond. Here's what I have currently:quote:Anti-submarine warfare If any of y'all have recommendations for things I'm missing, please do chime in. I'd also like to hear what iconic ships from the four major naval powers (US/UK/DE/JP) I should include. And if you have details on what major advances were made in the area of naval armor, I've had some trouble digging up details. I remember reading that when the US started mass-producing ships in WW2, one of the big changes they made was to weld the hulls together instead of using rivets, for example, but I've no idea if that was a performance improvement or just an economic one. Thank you!
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:20 |
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xthetenth posted:There's the open question of how many strikes were prevented by larger air wings from becoming hits. Considering how desperately needed fighters were during the early carrier battles, with scout bombers getting pressed into service before the folding wings on the F4F-4 allowed 18 plane squadrons to become 27 planes, I'm not sure I fancy trying to field a strike and run CAS with the relatively few planes the RN carriers could field. quote:It's also worth noting that the bomb hit on the Franklin was a pair of 250 kg bombs, one of which tore through two decks, including the 2.5 inch armored hangar deck. So carrier deck armor getting penetrated was hardly unknown. quote:Also, this http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-030.php alleges that the majority of the armored carriers had suffered permanent deformation in their structure from fires contained within the structure, and they were in fact written off quickly as a result. In summary, the carriers that were written off quickly had generally been in constant war service for years and now had no role in the middle of a major economic recession, of course they were paid off in the 50s. Enterprise, Ranger and Saratoga, the only three remaining American carriers of a similar vintage were paid off in 1946-47. Ranger didn't even take battle damage! Incidentally, is that the same Stuart Slade as The Big One and so forth? quote:And as far as 'could have proved fatal to another ship' and 'would have been lost or written off if they had American style hangar-deck armour', that's rather at odds to the volume of hits it took to kill the Yorktown and Hornet. Franklin burned like she did because the bombs hit in the middle of arming and fueling procedures with no warning, making it the only hit I can think of where a British style design would have had a decisive advantage by not having the same amount of kindling, though it likely would've warped the hull girder permanently. Lexington took a decisive amount of damage from torpedo hits, and the Japanese experience with submarines doesn't indicate enclosed hangars would do particularly well there.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:39 |
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For bridges, I'd add a divide between simple bridges and flag bridges. This was a subtle but important thing about the Pacific war when comparing Japanese and American command and control: Japanese ships had tiny, cramped, completely public bridges that the captain and admiral (if appropriate) had to share. American bridges on larger vessels were significantly larger, had separate bridges for the captain and the flag, the captain and flag bridges were both invitation-only to each others' staff, and the flag bridge even included a private cabin for the admiral to rest.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:41 |
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FIAT 3000 Queue: FIAT L6-40, [M13/40, M14/41, M15/42], Carro Armato P40 and prospective Italian heavy tanks, Grosstraktor, Panzer IV/70, SU-85, KV-85, Tank sleds, Proposed Soviet heavy tank destroyers, IS-2 mod. 1944, Airborne tanks, Soviet WWII pistol and rifle suppressors, SU-100, DS-39 tank machinegun, Flakpanzers on the PzIV chassis, Sentinel, Comet, Faustpatrone, [Puppchen, Panzerschreck, and other anti-tank rocket launchers], Heavy Tank T32, Heavy Tanks T30 and T34, T-80 (the light tank), MS-1 production, Churchill Mk.VII, Alecto, Assault Tank T14, S-51, SU-76I, T-26 with mine detection equipment, T-34M/T-44 (1941), T-43 (1942), T-43 (1943), Maus development in 1943-44, Trials of the LT vz. 35 in the USSR, Development of Slovakian tank forces 1939-1941, T-46, SU-76M (SU-15M) production, Object 237 (IS-1 prototype), ISU-122, Object 704, Jagdpanzer IV, VK 30.02 DB and other predecessors of the Panther, RSO tank destroyer, Sd.Kfz. 10/4, Czech anti-tank rifles in German service, Hotchkiss H 39/Pz.Kpfw.38H(f) in German service, Flakpanzer 38(t), Grille series, Jagdpanther, Boys and PIAT, Heavy Tank T26E5, History of German diesel engines for tanks, King Tiger trials in the USSR, T-44 prototypes, T-44 prototypes second round, Black Prince, PT-76, M4A3E2 Jumbo Sherman, M4A2 Sherman in the Red Army Available for request: T-54 T-44 prototypes T-44 prototypes second round T-44 production Soviet HEAT anti-tank grenades PT-76 modernizations T-34-85M IS-6 NEW German anti-tank rifles 15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf) Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles Pz.Kpfw.IV Ausf.H-J Lahti L-39
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:51 |
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Cythereal posted:For bridges, I'd add a divide between simple bridges and flag bridges. This was a subtle but important thing about the Pacific war when comparing Japanese and American command and control: Japanese ships had tiny, cramped, completely public bridges that the captain and admiral (if appropriate) had to share. American bridges on larger vessels were significantly larger, had separate bridges for the captain and the flag, the captain and flag bridges were both invitation-only to each others' staff, and the flag bridge even included a private cabin for the admiral to rest. What I'm hearing here, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that once Japan got past the whole pagoda-bridge thing, their bridges tended to be compact and difficult to work in? It's difficult for me to translate "has room for an admiral" into game mechanics, given that crew won't even be a thing outside of cutscenes. My current plan for bridges is that they provide some basic radar/sonar/fire control points, and most of the rest of the space provides "volume", which is basically currency that can be used to buy more miscellaneous systems (superstructure parts also provide volume, but nothing else). So I could represent this divide as "Japanese bridges tend to have poor stats, but they're small so you have more room for other stuff; meanwhile US bridges take up more space but give better stats in exchange." That said, looking at this photo of the Yamato, it sure doesn't look like it has a small bridge. Or are you talking specifically about the command center, vs. the overall structure that the command center is in? Maybe my terminology has been incorrect?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:51 |
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Cythereal posted:For bridges, I'd add a divide between simple bridges and flag bridges. This was a subtle but important thing about the Pacific war when comparing Japanese and American command and control: Japanese ships had tiny, cramped, completely public bridges that the captain and admiral (if appropriate) had to share. American bridges on larger vessels were significantly larger, had separate bridges for the captain and the flag, the captain and flag bridges were both invitation-only to each others' staff, and the flag bridge even included a private cabin for the admiral to rest. This is for the American battleships that had a flag bridge. They actually took secondaries off the battleships that were to have a flag bridge.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 20:56 |
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xthetenth posted:This is for the American battleships that had a flag bridge. They actually took secondaries off the battleships that were to have a flag bridge. More importantly than American battleships, this was how American carriers were laid out. TooMuchAbstraction posted:What I'm hearing here, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that once Japan got past the whole pagoda-bridge thing, their bridges tended to be compact and difficult to work in? It's difficult for me to translate "has room for an admiral" into game mechanics, given that crew won't even be a thing outside of cutscenes. My current plan for bridges is that they provide some basic radar/sonar/fire control points, and most of the rest of the space provides "volume", which is basically currency that can be used to buy more miscellaneous systems (superstructure parts also provide volume, but nothing else). So I could represent this divide as "Japanese bridges tend to have poor stats, but they're small so you have more room for other stuff; meanwhile US bridges take up more space but give better stats in exchange." Yes, Japanese bridges were often infamously difficult to work in - thread favorite Shattered Sword talks about it a fair amount with regards to Admiral Nagumo's behavior throughout the Battle of Midway. His working conditions were cramped, noisy, and constantly full of people so he was seldom free to express himself fully due to Japanese social decorum. Japanese carriers had very small islands for the ship's size, and this meant the ships' bridges were also necessarily tiny. Dunno about the Japanese battleships.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 21:05 |
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This is for sale at Wal-Mart. Since it has an open turret, would it be classified as a Tank Destroyer?
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 21:38 |
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# ? Jun 2, 2024 14:23 |
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If any of y'all have recommendations for things I'm missing, please do chime in. I'd also like to hear what iconic ships from the four major naval powers (US/UK/DE/JP) I should include. And if you have details on what major advances were made in the area of naval armor, I've had some trouble digging up details. I remember reading that when the US started mass-producing ships in WW2, one of the big changes they made was to weld the hulls together instead of using rivets, for example, but I've no idea if that was a performance improvement or just an economic one. Are you sticking to the Second World war, or are you going modern? There's a *large* break in technology between those two eras. Especially as Armor becomes obsolete, replaced with active defense systems and reengineering so ships could take a missile hit and not be impeded. Just throwing out random ideas: if these ships involce battleships, there's an extremely good and nerdy old article out there that tries to answer "what WW2 battleship would win in a fight with another WW2 battleship." Might be a good source as it tries to assign numeric values to attributes like fire control and damage control. http://www.combinedfleet.com/baddest.htm Another *major* change post world war 2 is that ship types get completely revised. The world war 2 era had a lot of bespoke classes for functions, (IE light vs. heavy cruisers, battlecrusiers vs. battleships, destroyer escorts vs. destroyers vs. corvettes) and this collapses into a few broad classes. One thing from the era that article mentions specificlly is that all battleships save American ones had an armored 'citidel' in their design; the best quality armor surrounding the most important systems. Only America was rich enough to build the entire ship out of this high quality but very expensive armor. Something in modern ships to consider is if their superstructures (as opposed to their hulls) are made out of steel vs. aluminum. Submarines similarly go through a complete revolution post war as nuclear power and nuclear weapons (not to mention submarines designed to stay underwater all the time) completely revise the type. Oh, and I did a series of posts on the Soviet Kirov class battlecruisers a few years ago, might give you some ideas.
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# ? Oct 12, 2019 21:39 |