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There's a lot of degrees of this sort of thing with various classes of people. It's not just rock-bottom serfs and then the ruling aristocracy who do not dirty their hands with labor. Confusing the matter is the fact that when the powers that be go out searching to raise an army, a lot of people can just choose to join up if they're not specifically prohibited. There were plenty of weird ad-hoc measures in various places and times that muddled up the already often indistinct social order. But also it's not exactly uncommon for people to decide to not go out a-fightin' during a season when there was a lot of work to do on the farms. Some times of year it's easier to skip out on work than others.
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Aug 29, 2023 06:21
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Xiahou Dun posted:And those guys are only good for defending and maybe loving up those fucks on the other side of the valley, because they all need to be back in time so we don’t all starve to death. Tomn posted:Worth keeping in mind that prior to industrialization the basis of wealth was agriculture, and the basis of agriculture was a combination of land and people to work that land. Using peasants to fight would have been sort of like loading bomb bays with factory parts in WW2 - yes, it does sorta work, kinda, but it's not very effective and you're cutting the knees off your economy every time you do so. This is something worth reinforcing. Lazy pop-history and bad fantasy novels have created this notion that "medieval" peasants were fundamentally valueless, and the nobility didn't care how many died because there were always plenty more of the filthy rabble where the first set came from. In reality, peasants and serfs were valuable. They formed the cornerstone of a polity's wealth, and thus were important assets. There were situations where a ruler might decide those assents needed to be expended, but any ruler who didn't do so with great care had a tendency to ruin himself in the process.
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Aug 29, 2023 10:38
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Nessus posted:If you mean stuff like the $200 hammers, I assume some portion of that is because the military has unusual needs which may include reliability and that gets rolled up into everything. I have no idea if the military hammers are better, however. I usually make them out of silver to save on steel bars. https://www.govexec.com/federal-news/1998/12/the-myth-of-the-600-hammer/5271/ The hammer was $15. quote:The military bought the hammer, Kelman explained, bundled into one bulk purchase of many different spare parts. But when the contractors allocated their engineering expenses among the individual spare parts on the list - a bookkeeping exercise that had no effect on the price the Pentagon paid overall - they simply treated every item the same. So the hammer, originally $15, picked up the same amount of research and development overhead - $420 - as each of the highly technical components, recalled retired procurement official LeRoy Haugh. (Later news stories inflated the $435 figure to $600.)
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Aug 29, 2023 10:44
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Koramei posted:Is there any push for introspection into how some weird procedural technicality is causing absolutely boneheaded amounts of waste in the military? Has this really been going on for decades? When I was in there was a squadbay on Pendleton that was used exclusively for CG (Commanding General) inspections. It was amazing. It's hard to describe, given the already shocking levels to which the military takes cleaning. But imagine a squadbay that just glowed. Everything was just absurdly polished; imagine a concrete floor that had been waxed over and over again several times per week for decades - it just shined. When word came down that your unit was standing for a CG inspection the 1st Sgt would get the keys to that squadbay. You'd spend the week prior to the inspection re-cleaning the already immaculate barracks. Then you'd bring in the uniforms and equipment that you had already purchased (yes, I spent thousands of dollars on uniforms that I never wore) and perfected for the inspection and hang them up in wall lockers or lay them out on bunks that had been lined up with laser-pointers to make sure everything was perfectly straight. Prepping the uniforms took weeks or months; no, I am not exaggerating. When the inspection happened the doors were opened, The General and his entourage swept through, maybe asking a question or two - "where are you from, son?" ("New Jersey, Sir!") Notes were scribbled on clipboards by Majors in the entourage - "Lint on underside of mattress cover." Everything was Very Serious until the inspection ended and The General left. Then all of the gear and uniforms were carefully packed away for the next inspection, the barracks was re-cleaned and locked up, and the keys were sent to the next unit. Was the General stupid? No, he'd inspected that barracks last week. This week it was A Co 1st Armored Assault Bn, last week it was K/3/5, the week before that it was some unit from Landing Support Bn. He knows it's the same barracks. But everyone plays the game. And no one is going to be the first company commander to say, "naah, gently caress my career, hold the inspection at the regular barracks on Del Mar, the one with the crappy cars in the parking lot, piles of beer cans spilling out of the trash dumpsters, and black mold growing in the pipes."
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Aug 29, 2023 15:20
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Cessna posted:Was the general stupid? No, he'd inspected that barracks last week. This week it was A Co 1st Armored Assault Bn, last week it was K/3/5, the week before that it was some unit from Landing Support Bn. He knows it's the same barracks. And the general can testify that the unit or service is (capable of being) disciplined and tidy. I’ve posted before on the USS Ranger’s (CV-4) reputation for good food. In 1935, during appropriation hearings, the Navy shared ‘random’ menus from the Ranger to show how well it spends its Subsistence of Naval Personnel appropriations. I’ve reproduced the testified menus below for the thread’s review of how far $0.45 per man per day goes. Select Menus of 1935 February 25 posted:- Wednesday Breakfast = fresh fruit, assorted, cereal, fresh milk and sugar, pork & beans, catsup, bread, butter, and coffee
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Aug 29, 2023 18:31
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Do you have some of the other menus for comparison sake
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Aug 29, 2023 18:32
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Cessna posted:But everyone plays the game. Why does this sound like Russia? And I was reminded of the time I was training some rookies in the barracks and noticed movement on the corner of my eye. The base commander with some general in tow had just waltzed in through the back staircase.
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Aug 29, 2023 18:59
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zoux posted:Do you have some of the other menus for comparison sake I wish! Sadly, the Navy didn't share any other 'random' menus at that hearing  I mostly spend my time in Records of Naval Operating Forces, Records of the Bureau of Construction & Repair, and the General Board. Might not have poked around the right L series files, but I'm skeptical that menus have been generally preserved. Here's hoping still!That reputation I spoke of is mostly documented by newspaper articles, memoirs, oral histories, and reflected records rather than comparative menus.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:01
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Saukkis posted:Why does this sound like Russia?
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Aug 29, 2023 19:03
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Saukkis posted:Why does this sound like Russia? Because we all grew up with boomer rear end memes about pointless self sustaining hierarchy being a function of communism but it turns out capitalism creates it just fine.
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Aug 29, 2023 20:42
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So if everyone knows it's bullshit, there still has to be at least one high ranking guy who thinks it is not bullshit that everyone is trying to placate with the barracks theater. Who is it?
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Aug 29, 2023 20:44
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zoux posted:So if everyone knows it's bullshit, there still has to be at least one high ranking guy who thinks it is not bullshit that everyone is trying to placate with the barracks theater. Who is it? When your opinion matters at all in something like that it coincides with no longer being very interested in changing the system that has made you powerful and well off.
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Aug 29, 2023 20:53
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zoux posted:Do you have some of the other menus for comparison sake This isn't quite the same time period, but since it is Battleship New Jersey, it is a pro click. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxpVP4tFXV8
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Aug 29, 2023 21:20
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zoux posted:So if everyone knows it's bullshit, there still has to be at least one high ranking guy who thinks it is not bullshit that everyone is trying to placate with the barracks theater. Who is it? Dunno, but he probably died in 1960.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:27
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Chesty Puller!
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Aug 29, 2023 21:29
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the yeti posted:Because we all grew up with boomer rear end memes about pointless self sustaining hierarchy being a function of communism but it turns out capitalism creates it just fine. Anyone who's worked in at least moderately sized corporation couldn't possibly argue that our system doesn't foster a pointless self sustaining hierarchy. And since your job almost certainly doesn't allow voting, you spend most of your day under an authoritarian bureaucracy that can dismiss you or run itself into the ground at a whim.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:33
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skooma512 posted:Anyone who's worked in at least moderately sized corporation couldn't possibly argue that our system doesn't foster a pointless self sustaining hierarchy.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:39
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zoux posted:So if everyone knows it's bullshit, there still has to be at least one high ranking guy who thinks it is not bullshit that everyone is trying to placate with the barracks theater. Who is it? the yeti posted:When your opinion matters at all in something like that it coincides with no longer being That's true, and certainly a big part of it. Another consideration is that it's drat hard to reform a system like this, especially with the military's "zero defect" mentality. Everything MUST be perfect except MAYBE under very specific circumstances, then it must be restored to perfection immediately. We've all heard the stories of old Victorian naval ironclads that had beautiful paint-work on the guns that they were afraid to scorch by shooting those guns in training. What's the answer? Well, give that unit a set number of rounds that they MUST fire every year. Sounds like a good solution, until you realize that the unintended consequence is that then you end up with absurd "Shoot-ex" operations like the one I described above. So, what's the next step? "Make a rule saying, "Your must shoot at realistic targets?" Okay, sure, we do that a lot of the time. "You must shoot at realistic targets with X percent of your ammo?" I guess. Then you end up messing up someone's career because they couldn't find an opening to book time on the "Realistic Target Range" before the end of the year. Etc, etc - it's an endless spiral.
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Aug 29, 2023 21:41
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Nessus posted:How’d the general take it? The face-gaining way to handle this is to scream “battalion! attenTION!” at the top of your absolute lungs while saluting
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Aug 29, 2023 21:43
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what exactly is weird or embarrassing about the general passing by while troops are training?
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Aug 29, 2023 22:08
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You have to be training perfectly.
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Aug 29, 2023 22:32
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VostokProgram posted:what exactly is weird or embarrassing about the general passing by while troops are training? Because the audience isn't supposed to see the heel and baby face chatting it up in the locker room. It's kayfabe you see.
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Aug 29, 2023 22:32
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VostokProgram posted:what exactly is weird or embarrassing about the general passing by while troops are training? Chance encounters don't allow for the construction of the perfect potemkin village
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Aug 29, 2023 22:35
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I assume any general will be completely unsurprised at the depravity and vice of the Enlisted.
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Aug 29, 2023 22:39
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Similar inefficiencies crop up in just about any big and old organization, and in theory smart and determined leaders and bureaucrats can dive in and root them out and reform things. Although that is a whole lot of work that won't earn many friends, and if the whole thing is already performing adequately, the relative advantage to rooting out problems like that might not be worth it anyways. The fact that the things congress wants out of the military don't match what the military wants out of the military doesn't help either.
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Aug 29, 2023 22:50
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Cessna posted:So, what's the next step? "Make a rule saying, "Your must shoot at realistic targets?" Okay, sure, we do that a lot of the time. "You must shoot at realistic targets with X percent of your ammo?" I guess. Then you end up messing up someone's career because they couldn't find an opening to book time on the "Realistic Target Range" before the end of the year. Etc, etc - it's an endless spiral. I would base the ammo budget on the 10 month average consumption, the months with least and most consumed excluded. At least it would require a bit more planning to game the system. The same system I would use for the departmental budgets at work.
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Aug 30, 2023 00:25
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Saukkis posted:I would base the ammo budget on the 10 month average consumption, the months with least and most consumed excluded. At least it would require a bit more planning to game the system. The same system I would use for the departmental budgets at work. I think we are much better at ammo management now. I’ve been directly responsible for ammo management as a battalion opso and indirectly responsible as a battalion and regimental assistant opso and I’ve never had much issue with ammo. Most units have an 85% idea of what they’re doing next fiscal year so they can forecast appropriately. Plus units don’t truly own their ammo, it’s really owned by division and mef (corps) so as your schedule changes through the year you can request more or notify you have excess. Not to say ammo flows freely; an artillery unit isn’t getting as much hand grenade allocation as an infantry unit and if they need more after burning though it in a month there’s no guarantee they’ll get it
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Aug 30, 2023 01:29
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Myth of Hangar Equivalence I was reminded today to  Instead of holding this back until I craft more of an interpretative post for it that probably won't come, I’ll share with y’all a recent spreadsheet project as is. The short backstory is boy howdy do some people in the corners of the internet debate aircraft carrier measurements, particularly hangar measurements. I don’t think any of them will ever prove what they really want to prove, but I decided to run some numbers myself.Thought I might be able to even add something special by using the scan I have of a US Navy General Board study from 19 April 1939 showing the US Navy’s computation of the total effective aircraft operating area on each of its carriers that were in commission or building by that date. Indeed, I then fired up FreeCAD and took my own measurements of carriers with freely available scans of record plans. However, I quickly ran up against almost no carrier except US Navy carriers having record copy scans of their plans freely available online. The  Methodology: 1. US carriers had their dimensions as given by Norman Friedman, Royal Navy carriers had their dimensions as given by David Hobbs, and Japanese carriers had their dimensions as given by Mark Peattie. Any specific bias by these authors in inflating figures for their personal subject matter was hoped therefore to cancel out. a. Total Effective Area of a carrier was found by multiplying the extents as given by Friedman, Hobbs, or Peattie and then subtracting out elevators from the flight deck and subtracting out internal elevators from the hangar. b. Dividing a carrier’s Total Effective Area by its operating complement of aircraft gives the Total Effective Area per Plane. c. That basic efficiency number can then be compared to any other carrier to see which is more or less efficient than the other. This study compared every carrier against Langley because Langley’s effective area was entirely concentrated in its flight deck. 2. Aircraft operating complement is the largest total number of embarked & operated planes each carrier class achieved in its wartime career. Almost without exception, that number is from 1945 unless the full carrier class was sunk before then. Spares were specifically excluded as the study was meant to examine how efficiently each carrier class operated its total area rather than total potential stowage. a. The prewar Royal Navy carriers are included primarily to illustrate within the Royal Navy the difference between prewar and end-of-war operating practices. All the classes except Colossus and the armored carriers have limited air groups for their size due to the two factors of 1) striking below each plane fully into the hangar before landing the next and 2) using only the hangar to stow planes. b. None of Japan’s wartime construction were included for two reasons. First, information on such vessels are even spottier than the prewar carriers. For example, does anyone know what the width of each of Taiho’s hangars are? Second, aircraft production and pilot training were such an issue for Japan that after 1943 practically none of their carriers could be said to have operated with a full complement of planes. As this study very specifically does not use design figures, there’s no fair number to use. Even still direct comparisons between Japanese and other carriers is difficult because Japan’s operating practices never incorporated the deck park. 3. Frankly, maximizing the published numbers was intended to allow for the maximum total area any individual partisan could care to believe in. This is because a purpose of the study was to show that simply believing a particular carrier had more area does not necessarily translate into aircraft operating complement. Instead, aircraft operating complement being a known fix fact means identifying excess area tends to show as inefficiency. 4. I ran the numbers an extra two times comparing against the Yorktown because everyone wants to be Enterprise. I ran those numbers twice because I know some people don’t believe Enterprise truly operated 90 planes. Yes, this means I altered the study a second time to specifically ameliorate the concerns of people who are skeptical of the US Navy in particular. Places of Known Error: 1. All figures of area computed from Friedman, Hobbs, and Peattie are over estimated. They range from a -0.2% difference for Wasp to a +22% difference for Lexington. This averages an error of as much as 7,144ft2 which can be visualized as the area that 9 Avengers occupy. 2. All figures I computed in CAD range in over- or underestimating by ~3.4%. On average this is an error of as much as 2,702ft2 which can be visualized as the area that 3.5 Avengers occupy.  Ark Royal's flight deck with the broad dimensions overlaid as quoted from Hobbs. Inset is my own personal measurement of the flight deck area using FreeCAD. Disclaimer: I should emphasize that none of these carriers were truly awful carriers. Take Kaga for instance. Although it is the most inefficient user of massive space, its air group of 72 operable planes was a cornerstone of the Kido Butai. The only carriers arguably without a useful aircraft complement are Royal Navy carriers sunk before new operating practices could be implemented. Truly, the only absolute weirdo on the list is Furious whose survival through the entire war without any known increase to its air group is surprising. Much of its use during the war was as a training carrier, but it still saw occasional action through 1944 yet without any obvious change in operating practice. Generally, any carrier that could operate at least 20 planes was broadly useful because of how much aviation every fleet needed in WWII. None of this is slam-dunk evidence that a carrier was bad. At best this is a data point for measured criticism of certain classes. Everyone who dislikes the findings of this study is welcome to fully ignore this as being instigated by general grumpiness. Except for pointing out how problematic broad dimensions are as comparative figures, there’s nothing particularly rigorous about this study. I’d just appreciate it if someone would fix the Illustrious-class Wikipedia page. That thing reeks of insecurity. Half of the text paragraphs mention the US Navy or US Navy carriers in some fashion. I think it’s pretty obvious that’s why it is a “C” class article on Wikipedia’s “quality” scale. I think it would go a long way if that page stopped trying to ride the coattails of Enterprise and simply argued its own significance.   Case Studies: 1. Langley is a perfect reference point as it functionally had no hangar. While it had an elevator, that elevator did not directly service a hangar. Instead, planes struck down from the flight deck via the elevator then had to be craned off the elevator to be placed in the hold – a tedious process that prevented use as a regular feature of aircraft operations. It makes the perfect case study to evaluate if hangar space directly equals or exceeds the flight deck area for efficient operable space. 2. Wasp is another good bellwether. It has a larger hangar than Yorktown and nearly the same total area. However, it never achieved an aircraft operating complement of more than 72. This is a good indication that its first-generation deck edge elevator was not efficient. Further, it being less space efficient than Yorktown demonstrates that overall length in flight deck is superior to beam at the waist. 3. Lexington had the longest length flight deck until the Essex-class approximately matched it and the Midway-class exceeded it. The long flight deck was paired with the smallest hangar of any US Navy medium fleet carrier, yet it achieved in Saratoga an aircraft operating complement of 90 airplanes. It demonstrates that even in carriers massively larger than Langley that flight deck length is the first consideration in aircraft operating efficiency. 4. Implacable. I still don’t know why Implacable has an aircraft operating complement of 81 when Indomitable only has a complement of 57. It’s an unexplained outlier as the only other feature I know it has as an outlier is hangar height. The hangars of Implacable were very short at 14ft high, but I struggle to believe that a 2ft shorter height than Indomitable allows for such faster elevator operations as to allow for 24 more planes. Truly, I can only believe that Indomitable is shorted somehow. 5. Illustrious demonstrates the effect of elevator placement. Although in comparison to Wasp it has the same number of elevators and relatively close flight deck length, Wasp operates its space more efficiently than Illustrious having an aircraft operating complement of 72 to Illustrious's 54. The elevators of Illustrious are set at the ends of the hangar. This might appear to provide the advantage of allowing the largest unimpeded hangar space, but instead it is generally the least useful position for an elevator. The positioning was governed more to minimize the unarmored elevator’s opening into the armored hangar than for efficient use. 6. Kaga & Akagi are the only carriers with three hangars each. Those hangars are then served by three elevators on each carrier. Thus, they demonstrate maximum verticality in hangars. Their relatively low aircraft operating complement versus their total area demonstrates the difficulty of servicing planes from many hangars, especially with a ratio of just one elevator per hangar. 7. Ark Royal - if there is anything I was hoping to see out of this study was some insight into what Ark Royal's aircraft operating complement might have been were it not sunk long before it could have participated with the British Pacific Fleet. To my disappointment, it looks like Ark Royal's elevator arrangement might have been so tricky as to preclude it from operating a proportionally exciting complement in comparison to Illustrious, Indomitable, or Implacable.   The effect of crediting Yorktown with a smaller aircraft operating complement can be seen to do no favors for other nations' carriers. If Yorktown is less efficient, then that means Essex is comparatively more efficient as a carrier and then all US medium and large carriers become more efficient than all other nations' carriers. Whereas a more efficient Yorktown credits the Implacable as more efficient than Essex in operating its total area. This is your reminder to build your own significance rather than trying to tear down others with regards to historiography and historic preservation.  And here is the smaller comparison of the contemporary US Navy's far more precise measurements and my own measurements for the additional carriers I could find freely available scans of record plans. I'd particularly like a readable set of Colossus plans if anyone can point me to some.
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Aug 30, 2023 02:44
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Urcinius posted:Myth of Hangar Equivalence
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Aug 30, 2023 02:52
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Hey Urcinius, I am going a bit OT since you said you did a bunch of test drawing in FreeCAD. I just wondered if you had it poo poo its pants at all on you. People like to turn off the lights, shine a flashlight under the chin, and tell horror stories about what that program will do while you use it. I may have had a peek of it when I tried to do some 3d print modeling, but it hasn't killed me in my sleep yet either. Edit: I guess this can be more on-topic if I asked how far you went with the drawings. If you just kind of did some 2d top-downs from those prints then you'd never see any major problems since that is simple. On the other hand, that kind of drawing could be messing with your actual estimates, or at least not explaining the wastage because it doesn't account for, say changed in ceiling height or something. Rocko Bonaparte fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Aug 30, 2023 |
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Aug 30, 2023 03:03
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It's wild to me to think of having to move around airplanes in tight spaces indoors and even have rooms to service them from different angles. Just a lot of cranes and carts because it's not like the things are made to move under their own power on the ground. Very awkward shapes too.
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Aug 30, 2023 04:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's wild to me to think of having to move around airplanes in tight spaces indoors and even have rooms to service them from different angles. Just a lot of cranes and carts because it's not like the things are made to move under their own power on the ground. Very awkward shapes too. poo poo they would literally store extra airframes and big spare parts (engines etc) in the rafters if the hanger spaces. 
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Aug 30, 2023 04:39
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SlothfulCobra posted:It's wild to me to think of having to move around airplanes in tight spaces indoors and even have rooms to service them from different angles. Just a lot of cranes and carts because it's not like the things are made to move under their own power on the ground. Very awkward shapes too. If we're talking WWII planes you literally just have a bunch of guys shoving them around by hand. This video is a great period piece on how to land a whole strike and prep it for the next attack https://youtu.be/bfkwjU8k6W4?si=ixGYG5-vldW9qfSG
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Aug 30, 2023 09:34
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Urcinius posted:Myth of Hangar Equivalence The Implacables were designed to have an American-style deck park 'as built', being fitted with flight deck outriggers and servicing/manoeuvering points from launch. That's where the 81 figure comes from - their hangar capacity was only 48.
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Aug 30, 2023 16:45
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Cessna posted:Post about shooting ammo So my father-in-law and I are getting some time together as we help my wife recover from a surgery. He was in the corp in the 70s. Forget exactly when. I read both of these stories outloud to him and it was the hardest I've ever heard the man laugh. His reply to the ammo shooting story was "I was the guy they handed the C4 to. I threw some of it in a tank and it blew a hatch off. I didn't notice until I head a THUNK behind me. It must have blown it a couple hundred feet in the air" Cessna posted:Post about inspections He basically said "yeah, we would get everything ready and then sleep on the floor". He laughed especially hard at the hypothetical of the guy losing his career because they inspected the barracks at Del Mar with the lovely cars out front and beer cans spilling out of the dumpster. Thanks for both of these stories, I didn't know it when I first read them but they provided alot of levity into a tense few days. (Everyone is fine now btw).
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Aug 31, 2023 04:19
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Urcinius posted:Myth of Hangar Equivalence If there's a better impetus for an academic study, I'd like to hear it.
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Aug 31, 2023 05:11
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Timmy Age 6 posted:I'm honestly a little surprised that the ships originally laid down as battlecruisers aren't appreciably in their own grouping as compared with the ships built from the hull up as carriers. Were the rebuilds really that comprehensive, or does it turn out that a battlecruiser hullform works pretty well for a carrier? I suppose that would also make sense - carriers also need to be able to move fairly fast to get airflow over the deck for takeoffs and landings. Before directly answering, I’m still going to emphasize that, just as the numbers don’t directly deem a carrier bad, the numbers don’t expressly deem a carrier good either. The numbers are an indication in how efficiently the carrier operates the area it has. A carrier that is capable of launching & recovering just one aircraft could look very good here if it did so with very little operating space. Now with that said, I’ll address your surprise that the converted battlecruisers are not inherently inefficient with their aircraft operating area. You are correct that the class usually makes a decent base for conversion to an effective carrier. Not only do they tend to be fast, but the desire to mount battleship scale weaponry on them generally forces that speed to be achieved with a great length-to-beam ratio without sacrificing the beam. The result is usually a vessel of great broad dimensions that can accept a large flight deck. How efficiently those broad dimensions then operate aircraft is still up to operating practices and design of aircraft handling features as with any other carrier. We can see how Lexington, Courageous, and Akagi generally run the gamut in those operating practices and aircraft handling features. To paint a picture of size, Lexington was the largest US Navy carrier by dimensions until Essex broadly matched it. Yet, every US Navy carrier was larger than all the old battleships. Ranger is approximately the dimensions of North Carolina (BB-55); North Carolina is particularly deeper in draft than Ranger and Ranger’s flight deck looms over North Carolina's navigating bridge. The speedy Iowas ultimately matched Essex in broad horizontal dimensions, and then Midway and every subsequent carrier dwarfed even Iowa. Incidentally, what made the art of constructing carriers a learned skill was the massive size yet comparatively light displacement of carriers. Still, the converted battlecruisers were mostly massive money, time, and tonnage sinks compared to their performance. Lexington & Saratoga took up nearly half of the United State's treaty allotment of carrier tonnage and cost over $40 million each. Subsequent purpose-built carriers would cost about half that. Their expense in tonnage and dollars cast a long shadow over the US Navy's building program. Then the US Navy had so few carriers that it struggled to find the opportunity to take Lexington and Saratoga out of service to modernize them circa 1940 - another major expense. Akagi and Kaga did similarly by taking up the majority of Japan's allotted treaty strength and later requiring massive rebuilds. I think Courageous-class was the only one to be reconstructed at fair cost and for okay treaty tonnage, but they benefited from Furious having forged the way. Even so, I was surprised as well by the relatively decent positions on the chart converted carriers and particularly of smaller converted carriers of Independence and Shoho. Indeed, many of the smaller carriers go to show that at the end of the day it’s not pure size but how you use it (ahem) when speaking only with regards to efficient use of space. Rocko Bonaparte posted:Hey Urcinius, I am going a bit OT since you said you did a bunch of test drawing in FreeCAD. I just wondered if you had it poo poo its pants at all on you. People like to turn off the lights, shine a flashlight under the chin, and tell horror stories about what that program will do while you use it. I may have had a peek of it when I tried to do some 3d print modeling, but it hasn't killed me in my sleep yet either. Yeah, for this study I worked strictly in 2D for measuring the plans of Langley, Essex, Independence, Saipan, Ark Royal, and Illustrious because Friedman's, Hobbs's, Peattie's, and the historical US Navy measurements are pure planar measurements. I'm not too worried about my estimates of hangar area with regards to ceiling height as my estimates were uniformly smaller than the historical US Navy measurements when I practiced on the vessels the US Navy measured for me. FreeCAD has been okay to me. Mostly it's only a bother because it works in metric and the US Navy & Royal Navy figures are in imperial. Had decent success with 3D printing some 1:350 model parts, but I specifically focused on simple parts. It's appreciably less capable than what I'm familiar with in AutoCAD, but for personal use the pricing is ridiculously better. Might still shell out someday for a better program because the clunkiness of FreeCAD generally discourages me from some of my hobby projects. MikeCrotch posted:If we're talking WWII planes you literally just have a bunch of guys shoving them around by hand. Always an excellent watch for understanding WWII flight deck operations. Also useful for demonstrating that although US Navy carriers had tractors, the primary method of recovering and spotting planes on deck was simply crewpersons.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:11
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Oh, for some visual enjoyment here is the US Navy exploring air groups for the Yorktown and Lexington classes. I'll let you guess the year based on the planes. 
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Aug 31, 2023 20:21
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Love the couple where they're just like gently caress it, let half the tail hang out the side of the carrier.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:27
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Urcinius posted:Oh, for some visual enjoyment here is the US Navy exploring air groups for the Yorktown and Lexington classes. I'll let you guess the year based on the planes.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:30
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