Dick Trauma posted:

Alchenar posted:

My recollection (and wikipedia's assertion) is that this actually became a big thing when the Soviets reverse-engineered the B29 into the Tu4, because the B29's materials were all measured in Imperial units and the Soviets used metric - they struggled to get a conversion that a factory could use.

It's interesting to consider how an essentially arbitrary way of thinking - how do we assign value to a unit of distance? - has fundamental implications like this in the real world.

ArchangeI posted:

That makes me wonder: Can anyone talk about how Lend-Lease was actually handled at an organizational level? Did the US government decide what to send based on what they decided they didn't need but could be useful for others? Could other states just send in a wish list like it was Christmas and Uncle Sam might bring a nice country its very own Sherman 76mm? Was there a shopping catalogue? Was there a system of value, so that you could get B-25s OR Shermans, OR a few B-25s and a handful of M3 Stuarts? Who decided what went where?

P-Mack posted:

The strong post what they wish and the weak read what they must.

P-Mack posted:

The strong post what they wish and the weak read what they must.

Suspect Bucket posted:

Okay, tried to photograph grandpa's scrapbook, but it got put away somewhere. In the mean time, have a souvenir he made for himself of his service.




(click for big)

Looks like he just bought a model kit of a Balao in 1973 and modified it a bit and made a plaque, but still cool.

Suspect Bucket posted:

That is awesome to know! Thank you very much. Some of the parts are looking a bit tatty, it's great to know that they're replaceable. The paint is crackling and flaking in spots, and the diving planes are stuck in place, I was hoping to restore it.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

I'm always up to talking about planes. May not have a lot on Japanese Air Force tactics, unfortunately.

lenoon posted:

Inter-War British Foreign Policy Part 3: 1931-35
the ...urgh... "National Labour" Government

lenoon posted:

By 1935, Ramsay is on the way out. His health is rapidly declining and his speeches in Parliament are becoming literally incomprehensible. Pressure, and age, have rendered him very vulnerable – but he's still pretty much ideologically pushing for demilitarisation. This is the absolute perfect time to go to Italy and try bring Mussolini on board.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

The Kawanishi H8K "Emily"

HEY GAL posted:

is that...good?

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Didn't know about the non-featherable props, which is quite surprising considering, like you said, the increased drag. That flying porcupine bit is intriguing, do you have a link? I've never heard of it being a myth and it would be neat dispelling that.

Phanatic posted:

And what happened to the electrostatic armor? Outer plate charged up to some fuckoff voltage, a dielectric, and a grounded inner plate, when the HEAT jet bridges the gap you get a big current pulse through it that breaks it up. There've been live-fire tests where it appears to work pretty well, but I guess it never went anywah?

HEY GAL posted:

you guys wanted to know what (middle class and up)(civilian)(dutch) beds would have looked like in the period, right?
http://www.sandragulland.com/a-treasury-of-information-on-daily-life-in-17th-century-holland/
of course you do

HEY GAL posted:

hello friends
tias, were you wondering about harmonious proportions?
there are extremely harmonious proportions behind this link, click here
[url]http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mk-_nR7XtHAJ:https://www.asu.cas.cz/~had/val/val...2JKuPgAbMjLTQDQ[/url]

Trin Tragula posted:

Maximilian Mugge is now thinking he might as well be sent up the line, if his skill with languages isn't actually going to be used.

Splode posted:

It's been awhile since I did the class at uni that briefly touched on it, but the exhaust pipe does have an impact on the performance of the engine. I'm not sure if they cared in 1916, but it's not completely impossible that putting on a reasonably long pipe would've reduced the tanks engine power when it was already fairly slow. Probably wrong on this, hopefully an AI regular can elaborate. Also an exhaust pipe is just begging for a grenade, perhaps the designers figured the soldiers wouldn't be in the tank too long and could cope rather than add a weak spot to the tank.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Frontline experience. The Ferdinand was expected to be a hell of a lot more common than it ended up being. I don't know when/if the GRU discovered that production was very limited, but the IS-4 was envisioned as an anti-Ferdinand tank.

Ensign Expendable posted:

You don't *have* to, but it helps. The advantage of driving your tank with an electric motor is that you can simply adjust the value of a resistor to change how much current goes to the final drive. No clumsy gearboxes or discrete gears, only nice smooth continuous luxury. The downside of this is you have to use two tons of copper per tank, which is all sorts of unacceptable, especially at wartime when you can't even get enough nickel for your armour.

HEY GAL posted:

for the past few years i've been really into things that are less flashy/sexy, more workaday, utilitarian, or durable. dashing cavalry charge: no, digging a trench in the right place: yes. so this post pushed that button. tank good?

Captain von Trapp posted:

This is neither air power nor cold war, but when I happened to see it on the Wikipedia main page today I thought the thread would enjoy the history of the Swedish warship Vasa. She was a new kind of flagship, armed to the teeth and decorated decorated to the gills. Her maiden voyage was on 10 August 1628. A little over one kilometer into that voyage, she encountered a breeze, tipped over, and promptly sank. Wikipedia's description of the subsequent inquiry is the fun part:

quote:

The Council sent a letter to the king the day after the loss, telling him of the sinking, but it took over two weeks to reach him in Poland. "Imprudence and negligence" must have been the cause, he wrote angrily in his reply, demanding in no uncertain terms that the guilty parties be punished.[28] Captain Söfring Hansson, who survived the disaster, was immediately taken for questioning. Under initial interrogation, he swore that the guns had been properly secured and that the crew was sober. A full inquest before a tribunal of members of the Privy Council and Admiralty took place at the Royal Palace on 5 September 1628. Each of the surviving officers was questioned as was the supervising shipwright and a number of expert witnesses. Also present at the inquest was the Admiral of the Realm, Carl Carlsson Gyllenhielm. The object of the inquest was as much or more to find a scapegoat as to find out why the ship had sunk. Whoever the committee might find guilty for the fiasco would face a severe penalty.[28]

Surviving crew members were questioned one by one about the handling of the ship at the time of the disaster. Was it rigged properly for the wind? Was the crew sober? Was the ballast properly stowed? Were the guns properly secured? However, no one was prepared to take the blame. Crewmen and contractors formed two camps; each tried to blame the other, and everyone swore he had done his duty without fault and it was during the inquest that the details of the stability demonstration were revealed.[29]

Next, attention was directed to the shipbuilders. "Why did you build the ship so narrow, so badly and without enough bottom that it capsized?" the prosecutor asked the shipwright Jacobsson.[30] Jacobsson stated that he built the ship as directed by Henrik Hybertsson (long since dead and buried), who in turn had followed the specification approved by the king. Jacobsson had in fact widened the ship by 1 foot 5 inches (c. 42 cm) after taking over responsibility for the construction, but construction of the ship was too far advanced to allow further widening.[30]

In the end, no guilty party could be found. The answer Arendt de Groote gave when asked by the court why the ship sank was "Only God knows". Gustavus Adolphus had approved all measurements and armaments, and the ship was built according to the instructions and loaded with the number of guns specified. In the end, no one was punished or found guilty for negligence, and the blame effectively fell on Henrik Hybertsson.[31]

Ensign Expendable posted:

Not just a box tank, a box tank with rivets. It took ages to get into production, but even in 1942 the British were already comfortable with casting and welding, so it's very weird why they'd put out such an archaic design.

Arquinsiel posted:

I should probably effortpost on British tank designs sometime, you can see a lot of incremental improvements with some false starts along the way and a general trend between the Tank, Cruiser, Mk I (A9) and the Challenger II.

feedmegin posted:

Hmm. My granddad was a welder's mate in World War 2 (and manned AA guns in his free time), so it's certainly not like the concept was unknown. Granted, he was building ships not tanks. In general I'd be very surprised if 'union rules' would be an issue for something like that in wartime, both because patriotism on the part of the workers and because the government wouldn't gently caress around with unions disrupting the war effort.

Ensign Expendable posted:

It could have been worse.

Xerxes17 posted:

LostCosmonaut posted:

People are horribly bad at understanding military history and equipment in general, the other day I had somebody online tell me that the Pak 44 was equivalent to the M256.

For those of you who aren't modern military equipment spergs, this is what an M256 is stuck on;

hogmartin posted:

I'm guessing "no, I do not like to pretend I am dead" was the correct answer in that case. I kind of wonder about who exactly that kind of test weeds out.

"I will do everything in my power to sell secrets and then drive a bus full of kindergarteners off a bridge"
- strongly agree
- agree
- neither agree nor disagree
- disagree
- strongly disagree

Is there someone who really wants to do treasonous and immoral poo poo but has a personal code that keeps him from lying about it on a Scantron form?

bewbies posted:

Is there a useful measure of how much a medieval castle cost in modern terms? Cathedrals too, for that matter. They seem to me like they must've been projects on the order of the Hoover dam or the international space station or something

HEY GAL posted:

actually i think almost everyone i study was a better person than nixon and everyone who hung out with him

metternich, kemper boyd, any thoughts?

SeanBeansShako posted:

Big armies equal bigger logistical headaches, invading huge land masses that are notorius for having stretches of barren steppes and wasteland does not help this. Insert that quote from Princess Bride here.

Disinterested posted:

So, I said I would post about the book I was reading and have been quoting from here and there. The book is Operation Typhoon: Hitler’s March On Moscow, October 1941, written in 2013 by David Stahel. Stahel is an AUS/NZ Historian. He has also written about Barbarossa and the Campaign to take Ukraine in early 41, and he’s writing presently about Nov.-Dec. 1941. He’s a self-proclaimed Glantz follower, and Glantz appears to like his work.

Disinterested posted:

Almost all the panzer and motorised units could not repair their own vehicles and frequently abandoned their vehicles to preserve their pool of fuel in order to continue offensive operations. By late October the 600,000 trucks that the Germans had for Typhoon was reduced to approximately 70,000, and the number of horses declined similarly.

Disinterested posted:

There were other associated psychological phenomena, particularly this concept of ‘will’: people who complained too much about logistical issues or the need for their men to rest for coming fighting were regarded as defeatist (inasmuch as victory was assumed to be imminent) and also insufficiently lacking the will to victory: ‘will’ is taken to be capable of overcoming any obstacle or difficulty, and people who grumbled about difficulties or realities on the ground were regarded as lacking this crucial quality.

lenoon posted:

Why wouldn't war literature be appropriate? Views of war, cultural understandings of war etc etc are as much a part of military history as talking about the width of a bullet or the thickness of a tiger's glacis plate.

HEY GAL posted:

is it as good as this thing?


Memento mori with death's head of Wallenstein, ivory, wood, and stones from his tomb, Science Museum, London
http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display?id=92948

HEY GAL posted:

justus lipsius if you want something more theoretical (it's not even about armies at all, it's about controlling your emotions in a time when the world sucks. and everyone read it.)

Polyakov posted:

This catastrophe for Germany greatly informed its policy after WW1, having lost the naval struggle with Britain it turned again to being a land power and its desire for Lebensraum in the East, they wanted the great grain producing plains of western Russia and Ukraine to give security in food, indeed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk you can see that the CP occupied the large grain fields of Ukraine.



Hitler was to write after the first world war that Germanys trade rivalry with Britain had provoked the war, it was foolish to contest Britain at sea and Germany should focus on a continental empire, any war against Britain would need Russian food and other supplies, and any war with Russia would need British neutrality in order to not impede German access to international markets for the very same supplies, this thinking would contribute to the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum and eventually the Second World War.

HEY GAL posted:

but that's not what you prepare for, you prepare for the worst-case scenario whether or not it'll actually happen

quote:

"It's absolute nonsense,” Hitler shouted. “If the figures of 5000 a month were right, you would be right too. In that case, I would have to withdraw from Eastern Front forthwith, and apply all resources to air defense. But they are not right! I will not stand for such nonsense.”

Kemper Boyd posted:

Rommel's problem wasn't as much the lack of port capacity but this:

- His supply could be intercepted, which happened a lot
- He didn't have the logistics to actually get stuff to the front. The US could afford to burn (fictional example) ten gallons of gas for every gallon that gets to the front, but Rommel couldn't afford that.

HEY GAL posted:

you just need to hire a guy to follow him around and go 'but what if you're wrong' every minute of every day. like a roman triumph.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

As for Rommel, iirc, he became well known after "Ghost Division" made important gains in France. Coupled with his performance in World War 1, he was seen as a good propaganda tool. He would've probably been captured in Africa had he not been sick from stress/work.

Cythereal posted:

For all his faults, Yamamoto was very innovative and is one of the big men to think of for transforming the aircraft carrier from a curiosity into a serious weapon of war. Certainly it took the Americans with their mammoth industrial capacity and vastly superior (and less literally murderous) organization and leadership to fully mature the carrier division into its modern incarnation, but as long as someone's around to rein him in I think Yamamoto is one of the premier guys for carriers in history.

HEY GAL posted:

Athena Lied Hector Died