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bewbies posted:I think I made an effort post about this a while back, probably more detail in there. I'd agree with what you said. My additional two cents would be this: The Fw 190 and the Bf 109 managed to stay on par with allied fighters, and the Fw 190 was also very flexible; with the BMW radial you could use it for ground attack and close air support. The Bf 110 was a failure as a fighter but just coincidentally a good ground attack aircraft and did well in the night-fighter role until 1944. This was more a lucky coincidence for the Germans than any sort of design virtue, though - even if it had been marginal in those jobs, the replacements for the Bf 110 just didn't appear. The Me 210 was a F-35 style multi-mission disaster, and when they finally unfucked the program, it was the later part of 1943. The Me 210 had such a vile reputation in the Luftwaffe that they actually had to rebrand the resulting product the Me 410. This was produced in significant numbers - about 1000 - but like the Panther tank, the Bf 110 had to remain in production due to the Nazis needing that production. I've read that the 410 was a good light bomber and a good heavy fighter, but that the bombing aspect meant many airframes were being used just as bombers, because of various senior Nazis believing in attacking all the time, forever. The He 219 was a great night fighter, and one that possibly could have been adapted to wider roles - but was only produced in small numbers. The Ar 240 was a fully pressurized high flier that also worked as a dive bomber and was flying by 1940. It was totally state of the art - but when the Nazis leared they'd need all-new machine tooling and a new factory to build it, they said "gently caress that." There's also the Ta 154, which was just a shitshow. A lone aircraft that bucked this trend was the Fw 189 recon airplane, that saw its role creep from tactical recon to ground support and even night-fighting thanks to a very robust airframe design. The Ju 88 was another lucky break for the Germans, as it was good at a fairly astonishing variety things - I'm not sure there was a medium bomber elsewhere in the war that took to so many roles so well. This was just about the only luck the Germans would have with bombers, as it turns out. The Do 17 and the He 111 were old designs by the time the battle of britian was over, and attempts to replace them and the Ju 88 with a new "bomber B" program produced nothing. The Do 217 and the Ju 188 were successful medium bombers, but were done by the manufacturers as an attempt to field a more modest replacement program that didn't rely on vaporware engines. The Ju 87 Stuka and the Hs 129 were good at close air support - but were sitting ducks for enemy fighters, and could only operate in environments where the Luftwaffe could control the sky. Their replacement was supposed to be the Me 210. (One successful but little known airframe the Luftwaffe had for close air support was the Hs 123 biplane, which proved extremely capable of strafing and light bombing on the eastern front. It was so effective in this role the Nazis almost restarted production of it.) Heavy bombers were a total clusterfuck under the Nazis - I gotta pick on something Bewbies said, here - as they paid all the costs of developing a heavy bomber, but still didn't have anything in the end. The He 177 'Grief' was an attempt to build a heavy bomber that would use technology to overcome the fact that the Nazis couldn't really field thousands of heavy bombers, as they didn't have the fuel, or the right engine. (Or, if you prefer, enough production of a powerful enough engine.) The engine problem was solved with a "power pack" of four engines driving two propellers - this was fine, it had worked in testing without problems - but somebody commanded the He 177 should also be made to dive bomb. This combination of ambition was doomed to failure, and the Nazis spent years trying to make it work, because the He 177 was too big to fail and the Nazis didn't have a backup to this over-ambitious plan. By the time somebody said "gently caress it, let's lust make a bomber with four engines driving four propellers" it was too late to start over. The production was something like a thousand airframes, and only half of those ever saw operational use. The British, by contrast, introduced the Short Sterling, used it for bombing till it was obsolete, and then withdrew the Sterling from bombing, to replace it with two new four engined designs, all while the Germans were struggling with engine fires and dead test-flight crews. The Naval flyers were, ah, interesting. Y'know how the German Military was all "don't declare war in 1939, we need at least two more years for all out war with Britain and France?" German Naval aviation suffered especially because of this, because most of the aircraft it had assumed that its job would be to keep the Baltic secure from French Naval forces. They had a variety of Dornier flying boats, and the BnV 138, which were good airplanes as far as they went. The Germans also had a gigantic flying boat in the form of the BnV 222, and several air transport records were broken with the "Viking" during the war - but they made a grand total of 13 or 14 airframes. The fact that the BnV 222 had started as a civilian project meant that it really was not suited for combat. The Fw 200 Condor was a improvised stop-gap airplane until the He 177 arrived. (shameless promotional post) I've written about it here at some length.  TL;DR it was a marginal combat aircraft that had a run of extraordinary success thanks to good officers in the wing that flew them, and big tactical errors on the part of its opponents. The Ju 290 was a late war addition to the naval flyin' crew, and it was (I think, anyway) a excellent aircraft with a lot of versatility. Of course, only about 50 were ever constructed. I've also written about the Ju 290 in some detail (once again, ) for the interested.e: fixed URL Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Jul 15, 2015 |
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Jul 15, 2015 01:59
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Ofaloaf posted:So Germans during WWII couldn't stick to a standardized frame for anything, partially just because it seems they liked tooling around, and partially because the hierarchy was so hosed up and full of weird administrative fiefdoms that everybody was ordering designs for different things and interfering with all sorts of poo poo, right? There were many factors at work: the Nazis went to war about two years earlier than anyone expected, and the aircraft industry was at maximum effort several years before World War 2 even began - to the point they were curtailing RnD because the anti-semetic brass felt they just couldn't spare the engines. And as Jobbo_Fett said, they actually had some really good multi-purpose airframes to boot. The heads of the RLM, the Reich Air Ministry sketched some plans on the last weekend of peace aboard Hermann Goering's yacht to rationalize production down to just four types: the Bf 109, the Ju 88, the Me 210, and the He 177. In another smart rationalization later on (that like the last one was never realized) the Ju 290 was planned to become a whole family of aircraft: the Nazis were planning on using the basic design for everything, and scaling it up to six engines when necessary. So some people in power were acutely conscious of the need for that sort of standardization - it just was never realized. Political infighting was a factor as well, but the main block at the RLM was that the top of the Nazi hierarchy was straight up incompetent on these issues. Consider that two of the RLM heads literally killed themselves in despair over how messed up aircraft procurement and production was, and you are starting to understand how bad things were.
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Jul 15, 2015 22:15
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Zorak of Michigan posted:When my daughter asked me about the Pacific Theater in WWII, I told her it was easiest to understand if you assumed that Japan never had a war plan in the sense we mean it. They had a conviction that Heaven would ensure their victory, and a rough scheme for putting Heaven in an excellent position to intervene in their favor. I always assumed that the plan was "take decadent western resources in the Pacific, then take Hawaii. Make peace with weak American ape-men by giving back Hawaii, keep empire." Your version though is hilarious and is kinda what they thought anyway, I just might steal it
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Jul 16, 2015 20:35
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jng2058 posted:Eh, I don't think it mattered how hard they hit. They fact that they hit the USA at all, with a surprise attack no less, inflamed public opinion so much that total war to unconditional surrender was pretty much inevitable. Taking out all the PacFleet carriers in '41 or '42 wouldn't have changed the public opinion enough to get the negotiated settlement the Japanese wanted. All those Essex class CVs were rolling off the shipyard and into the war no matter what happened to their predecessors. I think that you are right; but one small thing I've learned hanging around the mil history circles is that if you are in a position where you think you have to go to war, your military will make up a plan where you could conceivably win. It don't really matter how realistic it is, or how much of a long shot it is. The Iraqis in the first Gulf War had a plan, and they thought it was a good one, based on 1) their experiences in the Iran-Iraq war, and 2) decadent westerners not willing to take casualties. So they dreamed up this scenario where the Allies were going to have to fight World War 1 style battles in the desert, and they'd surely quit when the casualties started to mount. It's kinda the same way with the Japanese in World War 2.
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Jul 16, 2015 21:26
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JcDent posted:Britain not stabbing the natives on the first chance they had? What the hell? In the British Era the natives were treated well, in that the crown made treaties and actually kept them. With the Americans treating native populations so badly, it was a smart political move.
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Jul 17, 2015 16:34
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Dear Mr./Ms. P-Mack, I've read all your taiping posts and they are wonderful, I love them. I cannot wait for the next one. P-Mack posted:Also, I've noticed the Taiping seal is roughly av shaped. Any suggestions for text? "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." "Revolution is no tea party." "We came too early." (Boom! Phrasing!)
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Jul 20, 2015 01:08
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bewbies posted:EW is more effective: the Russians have been soft-killing Ukranian UAS with some manner of targetable EW to great effect. I feel smug because I'm kinda surprised nobody's used this technology before this point. bewbies posted:4) Infantry vehicles are death traps. Not surprised by this, either - the technology of blowing stuff up advances hella fast.
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Jul 20, 2015 18:21
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P-Mack posted:Salty dogs OK, dumb question about the salt trade thing: did people not know they could evaporate seawater and have all the salt they could ever need? I can sorta understand the Romans not knowing this, but this is China in the 1800s. I mean c'mon
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Jul 22, 2015 19:16
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Slightly smarter question: back when I was spergin' 'bout the Ju 290, I did a post on the rumors that the Germans had made a flight or flights to Manchuria during World War 2. (TL;DR: these flights didn't happen because despite the Germans at one point having aircraft all ready to start these flights the Japanese would not agree to them. It comes down to us today because these rumors were repeated in some very reputable sources, including Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich.) Anyway, a little while later a goon sent me a PM about a part of the story I'd missed:StandardVC10 posted:So yeah I thought of your posts about supposed flights between Germany and Japan in World War II when reading a book (Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War, by René J Francillon) I just got, because it mentions an airplane called the Tachikawa Ki-77, originally created so a newspaper could make a record flight from Tokyo to New York, but later apparently used to attempt a flight from Singapore to Germany. However it was lost over the Indian Ocean. I was just wondering if you came across this aircraft while researching those posts. I guess it's possible that there's some bullshit in the book I'm reading too - but Wikipedia does back it up, for what that's worth (nothing.) Wikipedia posted:In response to a flight made by an Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.M.75GA which flew to Japan in July 1942 with stops in Russia and China, the Japanese decided to forge a link with Europe, but wished to avoid Russian-controlled airspace and development work was restarted. The first of two prototypes flew on 18 November 1942. The Ki-77 suffered from persistent oil cooling problems which required many changes before being solved, delaying any flight into July 1943. While working on the problem, Tachikawa built a second aircraft. The easiest route was that taken by the Italians, following the great circle route, but General Tojo opposed this because it implied a violation of Soviet airspace. Japan was not at war with the Russians and Tojo wished to avoid either provoking them or asking their permission. Anyway, googling about gave further bits of the story: that this Ki-77 was shot down by RAF Spitfires off of Burma. People talking about this have a specific Allied message decrypt as well: ULTRA CX/MSS 2867/T8. So, does anybody know how to confirm this though the ULTRA intel archives? Is this true? It seems plausible in a way that lots of flights to the east rumors just are not (IE it is sedate and was a failure.)
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Jul 22, 2015 19:33
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Baracula posted:Britain went to war with Iceland over cod in 1958. The might of the royal navy versus the Icelandic fishing fleet. They went to war again in 1973. This time it was the British fishing fleet vs. the Icelandic coast guard. Iceland won.
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Jul 24, 2015 16:40
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count_von_count posted:Pro click right here, the whole set is fascinatingly bizarre. Detailed depictions of civilians getting dismembered by bombs, and then this: I'm wondering if maybe the manufacturer was not ethnic Chinese.
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Jul 24, 2015 16:44
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Shut the gently caress up about video games, for the love of God. QFT, real history is cool The Germans in the late 1930s constructed an airplane called the Me 261. It was a fully pressurized high flyer that had gob-smacking range; it was built to fly from Berlin to Tokyo nonstop. It was at the time the world's best reconnaissance airplane. It was never put into production, however, as it had been built to transport the Olympic Torch to the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo, and the start of World War 2 cancelled the Olympics. So the Nazis were all like 'meh' and dropped the project.
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Jul 28, 2015 18:06
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ArchangeI posted:Goon's Uplifting Primer To The Thirty Years War And The Taiping Rebellion 'Spergin about : Military History Stories told by the SomethingAwful forum Goons (A 'Spergin about Book) e: Scratch that, the book is called "'Spergling Rush: Long form posts on Military History" (A SomethingAwful.com book) Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 30, 2015 |
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Jul 30, 2015 16:26
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Splode posted:Chinese Romanisation systems are probably a big part of why hardly anybody outside China knows any Chinese history. Pinyin is a train wreck. I was under the assumption that the reason for this was that the guy behind Chinese Romanization was some unbelievably eccentric Oxford don type who defended the right to write down "Daoism" as "Taoism" till his dying breath and he was just exhausting to deal with and in the end nobody could be bothered.
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Jul 31, 2015 03:22
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Keldoclock posted:The U.S. in the late 40s is not a nuclear power like the U.S. in the 70s. Yeah, in the very early Cold War, America didn't have a Nuclear stockpile. Los Alamos was mostly abandoned for a time after World War 2. When Truman was trying to bluff the Soviets during the Berlin blockage, he asked how many nuclear bombs could be made at Los Alamos, and got back the answer "Maybe one" in a short amount of time. There were only sixteen B-29s with the "silverplate" modifications to drop a nuclear weapon, and none of those were sent to Europe during the crisis. This caused some changes - a new team was assembled to turn the Nagasaki bomb into something with safety features and interchangeable parts, and to crank up production. Still, in the late 1940s, the bomb was more a bluff than a reality.
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Aug 1, 2015 16:03
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LostCosmonaut posted:I know this thread occasionally spergs about tanks, but has it ever sperged about the T-72? A friend of mine is trying to do a writeup on the history of the T-72 as a whole, and I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas for sources besides searching DTIC and the like. If you can find then, model-nerd books are actually very good for this. Publishing houses like Osprey will have books written on just the T-72. e: looking at that link, I can answer one of those questions, viz. "Export variants and variants produced outside the Soviet Union. How do they stack up? Exactly what variant(s) of T-72 were the Iraqis using in 1991?" Generally, export variants and versions produced outside of the Soviet Union were slightly worse than the ones produced internally - I think the T-72M1 (the initial export version) had steel armor on the turret, as opposed to composite armor. (Somewhat hilariously, the Soviets also wanted to see how their Warsaw pact allies would manage production without the Soviet Union backing them, as if war actually came they figured production of T-72s would be simplified and streamlined anyway.) The gap between T-72s becomes huge when the Soviets (via Syria and a captured Israeli M60) discover that the Americans have developed a new high velocity gun that can punch through the T-72 at any angle. The Soviets begin a large upgrade program, making a thicker composite turret and liberal use of ERA armor. This changes the gap between Soviet and non-Soviet T-72s from pretty small to very large, as most export T-72s never see any of these improvements. As for Iraq, they had T-72M1s. I know Osprey has a book called M1 Abrams vs. T-72 for the Iraq war, and it's a very interesting read; while on paper, the two vehicles are not all that different, incremental improvements in American technology and tactics lead to the most one-sided victory in modern military history. P-Mack posted:Little direct combat takes place, as the remaining rebels mostly flee the city, and the imperial troops rushing in to occupy are much more concerned with looting, burning, raping, and killing the hapless inhabitants of the city than with chasing down the rebels. By the time it is over several days later, half the city is in ruins; a stark contrast to the nearly bloodless seizure of the city with which the revolt began. Man, civil war is bad enough without troops like this. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 01:44 on Aug 3, 2015 |
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Aug 3, 2015 01:33
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Tias posted:There's a great many factors that come into play, but key among them were: I think you should add that by this point, all the Soviets knew that the Nazis were going enslave/kill every slav they could get their hands on, and that this was a 'war of annihilation'. When you know the enemy is genocidal toward your country, that's one hell of a reason to fight.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:41
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bewbies posted:In other words I totally get why this pissed off republicans, it is way too academically honest and based in fact to align with modern conservative politics. It reminds me of this Paul Krugman post on the right's political correctness. TL;DR - the right have gone Soviet
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Aug 5, 2015 16:50
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Deteriorata posted:Short answer: the invasion of Okinawa demonstrated pretty conclusively that invading the home islands was going to be a horrific bloodbath for everyone involved, so an alternative that would induce the Japanese to surrender without an invasion was badly needed. Instead of DnD, I'd dig through this site: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ Dude *really* knows his stuff.
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Aug 10, 2015 01:19
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Kemper Boyd posted:Strongly agreed, he's buried in the cathedral here in Turku and his tomb is p fantastic though there's no good photos of it online apparently: Is it this guy?  Dumb confession: I've been reading old Life Magazine for the past few years and clipping images from it. I've actually learned quite a bit of history doing this - seeing how people at the time saw, say World War 2 is really interesting. (In the buildup to the Nazis attacking the Soviet Union, for example, all the experts are unanimous that Germany's next move is to secure oil in the middle east, possibly by invading Turkey.) Also good "gently caress you, Hitler!" images:    The eternal struggle:  People were giving watches to the Soviet Union (watches were extremely rare there, and were handy in the military:  Speaking of the Soviets, once they become allies, they get a positive treatment in Life - one one case, possibly a little too positive:  Things I learned from Life - the Pacific War had some racist overtones:  And there's a bunch of stuff that makes you feel ashamed about the direction the West has gone since the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks:    
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Aug 10, 2015 17:43
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Cyrano4747 posted:That "The NKVD is basically the same as the WW2 era FBI" might be the funniest piece of unintentional near-truth I've seen in a long time. Specifically in World War 2? Or in the Hoover era generally?
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Aug 10, 2015 17:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, I'd say the Hoover era in general was pretty slimy, but I wasn't exactly making a nuanced argument with my glib observation. No worries. I just thought I might be missing out on the FBI doing some extra-crazy poo poo.
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Aug 10, 2015 18:07
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JcDent posted:What do you mean by that? Is it something on the lines "America isn't war. The Marines are at war, and America is at the Mall"? Yeah, something like that, though the government is to blame far more than the people - they are the ones who freely invoke WW2, but then ask for nothing - save civil liberties. Imagine if the WOT imposed a 95% tax rate on people who make more than a million dollars a year? Because that happened in the United States in World War 2. Imagine if the government announced today: "OK, because we are at war, and we need rubber badly, you can't buy tires for your car anymore." Or how about "gas rationing means you only get 25L of gasoline every two weeks." Also that last image is of a editorial responding to people who said 'reporting problems aids our enemies' and the leading line is "The soft people want good news, the strong people want truth." Can you imagine how enraged people would get if any media outlet had the balls to write that today? Or for that matter: "These people are dying for you. Are you in fact worth it?
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Aug 11, 2015 01:08
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:None of the rationing poo poo would have a material impact on the success or failure of the current US conflicts. In an existential industrialized war, sure, but not in the current low grade optional insurgency bullshit. So you are saying the problem here is people who believe all this WOT "clash of cultures" nonsense, and believe "this is the baby boomer second world war, where we stand up to evil"? and then don't get the vast disjunction between brushfire wars and existential ones? Because let me tell you, I'm down with that
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Aug 11, 2015 04:24
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Davin Valkri posted:I'm a stupid American and I know that a Polish parachute unit dropped at Arnhem. Did the IWM not have the appropriate patch on hand? I have a more general question, if anybody knows the answer. I know the Allies often had other nationalities fighting with them, like the free French. The French I get, since they were evacuated at Dunkirk; what I understand less is how nations like Poland and the Dutch actually had significant forces fighting on the Allied side. How did so many Poles make it to Britain?
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Aug 12, 2015 16:40
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Has Lettow-Vorbeck already defeated the British through the dastardly use of weaponized bees?
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Aug 12, 2015 21:23
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Nope. If you feed your enemy's civilian population they'll turn on their leaders and make them surrender to you. This is literally his reasoning. Wow, it's the strategic bomber thesis, but with food instead of bombs. As for the logistics of it, I'm gonna say no you could not feed the whole country, especially with the Japanese, you know, trying to shoot down your aircraft. That said, the food situation at the end of the war in Japan was desperate, and it was a few years before it improved back to a level approaching normal. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 14:14 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 14:11
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chitoryu12 posted:The Chinese invented gunpowder and the first cannons and proto-muskets, but they relied on "cold" weapons like swords, pikes, and bows/crossbows until quite recently. The Ming Dynasty I believe made significant use of cannons (including imported European guns and later copies of them) but preferred their common soldiers to use crossbows, which were faster and more reliable than matchlocks. They simply lacked the need to develop advanced infantry firearms, as they didn't face opponents for much of their post-gunpowder history who would actually require advances in weapons. China spent quite a long time as the big kid on the block in East Asia. Dumb question: didn't China get taken over by the Mongols at one point? Alchenar posted:The BEF was notable for being almost 100% motorised. And then everything had to be left behind at Dunkirk. I'm now picturing Germans on the eastern front riding into battle on Bren gun carriages.
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Aug 14, 2015 16:33
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Goddamn - the Taiping revolt. We had to kill 1 person, but we killed 29,999 more just to be safe?
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Aug 17, 2015 18:09
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P-Mack posted:no I think you just found your sig Tias posted:Much of WW1 was riddled with terrible sunk cost fallacy types of reasoning. It broke their hearts at the time to send so many men to their deaths at the time, too, but that was all the more reason to keep sending guys, so that the first ones did not die in vain! One depressing but useful thing I've learned from World War 1 is how dangerous ignoring feedback mechanisms can be. In war, some casualties are unavoidable, but going into a battle all the time thinking "and victory will come with mountains of corpses" is a bad idea. Casualties tell you how successful or unsuccessful your current tactics are, and if you are a general that ignores them, you are ignoring one of your most important feedback mechanisms. It's not an iron law or anything - I imagine anyone reading these words can think of counter-examples. (Two that spring to mind just from World War 2 are the Normandy invasion and the second battle of E Alamein) but in the First World War, it seems battles go on for a horrifically long time after it is clear that in any sort of military sense the battle is useless.
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Aug 18, 2015 14:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:gently caress, for that matter the Holocaust only entered into American cultural consciousness as the capital-H holy gently caress that's the worst crime ever Holocaust because of a late 70s miniseries. Sure, plenty of informed, educated people knew how bad it was especially after poo poo like the Eichmann trial but for the average guy with no personal connection to it it was lumped in under the general category of "bad poo poo Nazis did" and had the same rough moral standing as events like the Malmedy massacre. This really does blow my mind. Reading through old Life, the holocaust does come up in a pictorial that if posted here would warrant a  tag. So I kind of figured that slotted in as the start of that cultural consciousness you are talking about. I mean, poo poo, why did Americans think the Nuremberg trials were such a big deal?
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Aug 18, 2015 21:47
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Mirrors posted:The intention of The Somme was primarily to relieve pressure from Verdun. Territorial goals were secondary. Really? Wikipedia says the battle was long planned, and that the French were going to take a large role in it till Verdun started.
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Aug 19, 2015 15:57
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Splode posted:I have heard this exact story but for a different plane. The foxbat I think? It was apparently nicknamed the flying restaurant as a result. There were a lot of Soviet aircraft this story applies to - that said, the MiG-25 was apparently hauling a lot of alcohol to cool its radar electronics. Alchenar posted:The US army built a shitload of AA battalions for Normandy and they hardly fired a shot so by the time of the Bulge the vast majority were disbanded and the troops used for infantry replacements. Yeah, post Normandy the Allies had overwhelming air superiority - the Luftwaffe for the most part simply withdrew rather than fight. The German generals in Normandy described allied air power as "the new flank." The Germans actually tried to coordinate their attacks with bad weather, simply because it would deny the Allies their close air support.
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Aug 24, 2015 16:14
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Fangz posted:Do these generals in WWI tend to tour the front lines ever? I don't want to step on Twin's narrative toes here, but Sir John French burns himself out visiting BEF hospitals. But no, the strategic commander generals rarely are at the front.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:08
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I'll be damned; interesting. I figured French and Monash would be two guys in the thick of it. So, were German and French generals similarly disposed? I'm imagining that the Italian, Russian, and Austrian generals were a bit more remote. Also thanks Tevery Best for answering my Polish question. The trek of the Poles from Russia to Palestine sounds unbelievably epic. (TBH all the Polish leaving enemy territory to reform under the Allies sounds unbelievably epic.)
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Aug 27, 2015 18:59
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ArchangeI posted:So you're saying the ongoing tragi-comedy that led to the QE being built is not unusual when it comes to British procurement? I can see a list of top ten procurement clusterfucks. The QE class carriers warrant inclusion not only because of your reason - it's that the reason they can't easily convert between the B and C F-35 is because of either 1) massive incompetence of the government drawing up the contract or 2) straight up fraud by BAE leaving the British taxpayer on the hook for billions, and who are getting away with it because they promised the top government officials cushy jobs once they leave office.
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Aug 28, 2015 20:32
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The Me 210 and He 117 were procurement disasters, so they would count. Another one that comes to mind (though not a war vehicle per se) is this. Everybody reading this knows that Germany in the runup to World War 2 considered several ways to build a navy. One of these was called Plan Z; basically it was a plan to build a surface fleet of battleships, aircraft carriers, (etc) because challenging Britain again with a mighty surface fleet was obviously a good idea. It was approved and then later cancelled. Anyway, Adm. Raeder gets a phone call in early 1944 from Krupp. They say "the engine is ready." Raeder is all "what engine? I didn't order any engine." Krupp explain that the first engine for the first Z class battleship (think Bismark but bigger) is ready. Raeder apparently forgot, or missed, a engine contract when project Z was cancelled....
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Aug 29, 2015 05:58
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Klaus88 posted:A brief list of British procurement successes. If talking aircraft from world war 2, there are a bunch - just for starters, the Spitfire. The Mosquito should be accompanied by David Bowie's Heroes every time it is mentioned. They had a whole range of four-engine strategic bombers that Germany just couldn't produce - the Short Sterling, the Halifax series, and the Lancaster. . While it's something of a quirk of fighting Germany, the Swordfish torpedo bombers was so good in its role that it stayed in service when its replacements didn't. The Short Sunderland was a great flying boat, despite the fact it was developed from a prewar airliner. I imagine you can find failures in World War 2 Britian, but yeah, they fielded a lot of good stuff. The post-war is where the modern malaise slowly set in. To be honest, up until the end of the 1960s, procurement was still pretty strong. The V-bombers soon became obsolete, but were good designs for what they were. The EE Lightning was a great interceptor, and the Hawker Hunter is still flying today. The Jaguar was a good ground attack airplane. e: Ensign Expendable posted:The Valentine and Matilda were solid tanks, the Tetrarch wasn't bad either. The Vickers Mk. E was fantastic, but naturally the British army didn't buy any. Now, I've heard that the Valentine and Matilda were under-gunned and built shitily because union rules insisted on riveting things rather than welding them. This is why American tanks were welcomed in N. Africa - they had a much better build quality. (I'm not trying to argue here - I don't know much about it - I'm just curious as to why you think they were solid.) I'd say the Sherman Firefly was a excellent idea. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Aug 29, 2015 |
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Aug 29, 2015 22:36
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Agean90 posted:Yeah, in the South the Civil war was very much a rich persons war, and a large chunk of the population there knew it. Admittedly this is because by the time Union armies were in the south to talk to these people the true believers would be dead of disease and shrapnel, but still. This was the President that when he was under impeachment proceedings he was busy at the white house trying to befriend the while house mice, right?
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Aug 31, 2015 22:45
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BurningStone posted:Double American Civil War post. When it comes to causes, don't forget that tensions had been ramping up for decades. That's lots of time to read in the local press (the only source of news) about how terrible those monsters in the North/South are. When you look at things like "bleeding Kansas," it's more of a surprise that the war didn't kick off earlier. This is true. Slavery was a constant source of tension in American politics. I want to say that slavery was completely incompatible with the US constitution, but clearly not everybody felt that way. This is weird: I'm a Canadian but have an interest in American politics, and once read a book of the administrations of all the Presidents. One theme running from Andrew Jackson to Abraham Lincoln was how much trouble the slavery issue caused the presidents. When candidates for President were picked, they were often scrutinized for being 'correct' on the slavery issue. BurningStone mentioned "bleeding Kansas." Franklin Pierce, the president over that clusterfuck, was originally picked as a democratic candidate because the was 1) a Northerner and 2) didn't hold with messing with Slavery. (The convention had taken about 50 votes at this point, to try and nominate somebody who was palatable to both the Northern and Southern Democrats. The North was full of abolitionists, and the south obviously wanted slavery forever. Pierce was very much a compromise candidate.) Pirece is now regarded as one of the worst Presidents, and he won like his fellow bad president Warren Harding because he looked like a president. His four years in office saw a single genuine success, (something about negotiating a border extension with Mexico), but was otherwise a series of almost incredible disasters. Kansas was one of these. Pierce saw the creation of Nebraska and Kansas as states, appointed a bunch of pro-slavery people to positions there, and then said that elections would decide if the states held with slavery or not. Of course pro-slavery people flooded the state, and then then anti-slavery people flooded the state, and both tried to set up their own governments as the "true" government of Kansas, and soon a mini civil war was brewing. In Congress, a Republican senator, Charles Sumner gave a speech later known as "Crimes against Kansas", which was open in its use of rape imagery, and the next day a pro-slavery relative of one of the southern senators Sumner had involved in the extended rape metaphor nearly beat Sumner to death, with a cane, on the senate floor. Troops had to be called in to keep Kansas from becoming the first battlefield of the civil war, and sporadic fighting continued until the civil war actually happened.
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Sep 1, 2015 22:06
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