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Camrath posted:So where do frigates fit into the naval ship hierarchy? Both historically and in the present day. I'm phone-posting at 2.15am, so this will be brief, but if no-one has done so I'll try for a fuller answer tomorrow. In the Age of Sail a frigate was a fully-rigged ship with a single gun deck ('fully-rigged' meant it had three masts all carrying square sails - the complexity of Age of Sail ship classifications is that it could be done by sail plan, hull type or intended role...or all three) with a hull designed for speed, handling and good sea-going qualities. They were intended for use as cruisers, for harassing enemy merchant trade, for scouting for a battle fleet, running messages and despatches, carrying troops for landing parties and lurking off enemy coasts on reconnaissance duties. In the 19th century the advent of steam propulsion and armoured hulls led to a proliferation of new types (or at least new classifications) and frigates were replaced by ironclads, steam sloops, cruisers and so on. The term re-emerged in WW2 when the Royal Navy needed classifications for the multitude of new escort types it was building. There were already 'sloops' in service as general-purpose light warships but they were more like large destroyers or small cruisers in design and build. The smaller, slower, simpler escort types intended primarily for combatting submarines needed a different designation and the historical term 'corvette' was adopted (originally a French term from the Age of Sail for a ship that was similar in design and role to a frigate but smaller and not always ship-rigged). When larger anti-submarine escort types were developed they were classified as 'frigates' since they were larger than corvettes. To this day in the Royal Navy frigates are general-purpose warships with ASW as their primary role while destroyers are general-purpose warships with air-defence as their primary role. Frigates are smaller than destroyers but it's the roles that make the difference. Other navies (like the French and Russians) use the term frigate for an all-purpose warship that is bigger than a corvette (a frigate usually packs a missile system of some sort, which a corvette or an OPV does not) and smaller than a destroyer. However, some (i.e. The Netherlands) don't have destroyers and their frigates are equipped for air-defence work while also being general purpose. Basically outside WW2 a frigate just means a small-mid-sized multi-role warship that can do everything except slug it out in set-piece battles with stuff bigger than it is. And that's the short answer...
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Dec 7, 2020 03:33
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Alchenar posted:The thing about the transition from age-of-sail ship classes to modern ship classes is that a sailing ship can just keep going for months if it has the provisions, and then the composition and deployment of your fleet is really just a question of 'how big and how many can you afford'. Once you need bunkers to keep your ship moving then suddenly everything becomes a question of how much coal-later-oil you have available at your staging areas to support operations. Neptune's Inferno points out that the reason that so much naval fighting in the solomons was done with cruisers was because while the Battleships were available on both sides, nobody had the fuel readily available to sortie them that far out more than once or twice without causing significant problems. Hence you opt to build a mixed fleet so that you always have the right sized ship for the job. And this is why the term 'frigate' quickly fell out of use once steam power became the norm. The Gloire- and Warrior-classes were originally 'armoured frigates' - armoured because they were ironclad and frigates because they were large full-rigged ships with a single full-length gundeck, of the same size and hullform as an existing frigate design. But their armour and rifled guns meant that they could easily fight a ship-of-the-line or another ironclad if needed, and while they had a fully practical sailing rig so theoretically their range was only limited by their stores and water capacity, they could not really be used for long independent cruises or blockade like a traditional frigate. So you see the term 'frigate' drop out of use since they can't be used for the normal frigate duties. By the mid-1870s the availability of coaling stations around the world and through the colonies of the imperial powers, and the increasing reliability, power and efficiency of steam engines, sees the need for a sailing rig disappear and frigates become cruisers, with greater range and endurance than battleships but still limited to a matter of weeks by their bunker capacity and the requirement to wash out the boilers and overhaul the engines, not the months or even years that a sailing frigate could cruise so long as it could restock with provisions and make occasional repairs. if we're doing effortposts: These are the only ones where I've purposely sat down and done a long-form post. Both were off-shoots of some freelance magazine writing work I did, so they're the result of research around a specific topic (the history of the T-6 trainer and the history of the Royal Naval Reserve in each case) so neither is a proper full-breadth look at the general subject. Allied fighter pilot training in WW2, the T-6 advanced trainer and a brief look at the Luftwaffe training scheme as a comparison British naval officer training in WW2 and the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve And here's one about the life and times of the Lockheed Hudson/Ventura aircraft family, which lives in AI but was linked in an earlier MilHist thread: These ones are just oridinary posts which got a bit out of hand: The Portsmouth Naval Riots of 1906 A little one about Operational Research in RAF Coastal Command and how decreasing the aircrafts' availability allowed them to fly more missions Some quotes from Heinz Schäffer, the German U-boat commander who took his boat to Argentina rather than surrender to the Allies in 1945, and was part of a discussion about German morale and viewpoints in the last months of the war Did you know the Royal Navy had an operation at the end of WW2 to capture all of the Germans' military sailing yachts? I didn't! A visit to Lepe Beach, one of the main departure points for the D-Day landing fleet to look at what's left there One about the Royal Navy's battle against shipworm and galvanic corrosion Wherein I get schooled about the truth behind the myths about Rolls-Royce Merlin engine production
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Dec 7, 2020 15:29
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Zorak of Michigan posted:In frigate chat, nobody's mentioned Humphreys' diagonal bracing system, which made the US frigates far less vulnerable to hogging than other designs of the time. I always thought that was a big deal, but this is far from my strongest subject. The diagonal scantlings allowed the US heavy frigates to be slightly longer than a conventional 90-gun two-decker but without (obviously) the extra weight or the extra beam needed to provide stability due to the higher centre of gravity. This allowed them to keep the traditional 'frigate-built' proportions of a long waterline and a narrow underwater hull section which made them both seaworthy and fast. Conventional construction limited a single-deck ship to about 140ft on the waterline with 32, maybe 36 guns. Multi-deck ships could be longer because the extra decks gave the hull relatively more strength - a two-decker could be about 180ft and a three-decker about 220ft. The heavy frigates were 175ft on the waterline and 200ft overall. Waterline length determines a ship's maximum speed and the heavy frigates' scantlings and heavy planking gave them both the length and displacement not far off that of a seventy-four, but with the slimmer hull, lower freeboard and lower centre of gravity of a frigate, which allowed them to carry more sail than a normal frigate and make best use of the added power. As was mentioned upthread, the same thinking was behind the advantages of a razee ship, which had the build, length and hull form of a ship-of-the-line but after conversion had a much reduced windage and weight. The US heavy frigates were sort of 'new build' razees.
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Dec 7, 2020 19:31
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This bit reminded me of something I read recently:Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, sorry, I just noticed. Which laid out how the Luftwaffe's pilot shortage did not begin with the Battle of Britain (closely followed by Barbarossa which took a heavy toll on the inadequate contingent of new pilots coming out of the training system to replace those lost in the BoB). It actually began with the Low Countries campaign and the widespread use of the Ju52 as a paratrooper platform. The Luftwaffe did not have enough experienced transport pilots to fly the number of Junkers proposed for the paratrooper campaign, and there was also pressure for new fighter pilots for the coming battles over France and Britain. So the Luftwaffe took would-be fighter pilots from the final stages of the training system and deployed them as co-pilots in Ju52s so they could get the required air-time before going to the operational training squadrons. Result? A large portion of the Luftwaffe's new fighter pilot contingent was lost as the Ju52 suffered heavy loses over the Low Countries, hollowing out the training system even before the losses of the Battle of Britain start biting. From spring 1940 the Luftwaffe was always playing catch-up with its fighter pilot numbers and never managed to make up the lost ground.
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Dec 16, 2020 16:30
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White Coke posted:Source? [Re: German pilot losses in Ju52s over The Netherlands] This is the problem with finding interesting stuff after falling down a rabbit-hole of links and archived .pdf papers on ww2aircraft.net - I can't track down the article in question. I'll keep looking. Cessna posted:This was pretty much what the Allies expected at the time and had prepared for. Such an attack would have run right into the French armor and may well not have even achieved its limited objectives. It would have left the German army dangerously exposed to a counterattack. It certainly would not have caused the fall of France, and who knows how things would have gone from there. Wasn't part of the problem also that Belgium declaring absolute neutrality in 1936 also greatly upset the French plans to resist invasion and make best use of the Maginot Line? As I recall the plan, stemming from the post-WW1 Franco-Belgian defence pact, was that (assuming forces from Germany went around the top of the Maginot Line as intended) the Belgian Army would take up a strong defensive line along canals and rivers to resist the initial advance while the French Army moved across Belgium to reinforce, ideally before the invaders broke through the original defense and at the very least halting them before they reached French soil. When Belgium withdrew from that pact that gave the French less preparation time and so they met the Germans on a weaker line well west of the Meuse.
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Dec 17, 2020 21:00
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SeanBeansShako posted:Until the nineties in the UK at least the armed forces had a sort of physical fitness drill tournament against each other which did have soldiers setting up and moving traditional artillery pieces. The Field Gun Competition is still around, but only as a long-standing private competition between various RN teams. The 'official' RN Command version, which included having to get the disassembled gun and crew across a chasm and over a couple of walls, hasn't been run since 1999, but a couple of civilian teams still do it. The gun is an 8cwt 12-pounder, complete with carriage, wheels, limber, ammunition and (in the Command version) a pair of spars and lifting tackle to get it over the chasm.
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Dec 23, 2020 16:25
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Greg12 posted:"The Cruel Sea" by Monsarratt makes it seem that any realistic movie about naval battles will involve hours and hours of men sitting in chairs, their nerves ragged from being awake 36 hours, straining to hear anything through the hydrophone or standing at watch post with binoculars, straining to see a periscope peak above the water. Indeed, and I think the film of the book actually gets that across very well; at least as well could be expected for a wide-release studio war movie, anyway. I'm thinking especially of the bit where Compass Rose has to spend a quiet, calm, clear summer's night alone and adrift due to a bad propshaft bearing and the crew spend eight hours of gradually-increasing tension waiting for what seems to be the inevitable torpedo. The whole point of the scene is that nothing happens...but it could happen and it comes across very well in the way the different characters respond to it. And the later sequence when Saltash Castle spends a night and a morning off North Cape hunting for a submarine, just hours of 'mowing the lawn' back and forth. Even in the greatly-compressed way its presented in the film, the boredom and exhaustion (mental and physical) is portrayed very astutely, accompanied to the empty pinging of the Asdic...and when the echo finally returns it actually makes you jump.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:03
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:This jives with my memory too, but I also can't cite a source atm. Something in particular about Russia finishing double-tracking a bunch of railroads into Russian Poland/Galicia to considerably speed up their mobilization to the Austrian/German frontiers. More rapid mobilization would make Germany fight a two-front war from the outset instead of the two, one-front wars in rapid succession the German High Command saw as their best chance of victory vs the Franco-Russian alliance. I have a print-out of a brief article by Zbiginew Tucholski that actually deals with the Soviet use of railways in WW2 but has a section on WW1 as part of the background and buildup. It says that while the Russian rail network was greatly expanded and improved during the late 19th century (mostly with French capital), the planning and approval of the new lines was controlled by the Russian General Staff. They saw a future war with Prussia/Germany and Austria as being focused on the Vistula, with the Vistula Country becoming Russia's main area of mobilisation and supply for the expected front line, jutting as it did between German and Austrian territory. Despite the expectation of the region being such a hub, the General Staff didn't want to present a future enemy with a good logistical base to capture so deliberately restricted the development of railways in the region. Instead railways would deliver troops and supplies to the eastern edge of the Vistula Country, which would be defended by forts and fortified river crossings. The same article gives some numbers that may be of interest: In 1914 Russia had seven railway lines leading to the German frontier, none of which were double track (maybe these were the ones which were planned to be doubled which the Germans saw as such a threat to their plans?). These lines had an estimated capacity of 223 trains per day, or 0.25 trains per day per kilometre of border. There were nine lines leading to the Russian border with Austria-Hungary, five of which were double, with an estimated capacity of 260 trains per day, or 0.4/day/km of front. By contrast the Germans had 13 doubled lines heading to their Russian border, with a capacity of 660 trains per day, or 1.5/day/km. Tucholski also notes that by 1914 the major upgrades to the Trans-Siberian Railway - the route around Lake Baikal (removing the bottleneck of the train ferries) and the section along the Amur valley which allowed a faster and more secure 'all-Russia' route to Vladivostok rather than the final section having to go via the Northern Manchurian Railway, were either complete or under construction. These greatly improved the ability of Russia to move men and material from its interior and between the Pacific and the Baltic, reducing many of the capacity issues which plagued the route during the war with Japan.
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Dec 27, 2020 19:52
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Pyle posted:This is the beach end of the trench: And here is the view slightly inland, to seaward, at the end of the trench system proper:  I'm pretty sure it was Charles Douie in his Recollections Of A Subaltern of Infantry - if not it was another British junior officer who was stationed on the front at Nieuport - but he said he made a point every day during evening rounds of walking along the trench right to the end until the sandbags and barbed wire on the beach blocked him so he could be 'the last man on the Western Front' at the end of the system from the Swiss Border. IIRC he said that he sometimes thought of himself instead as the 'first man on the Western Front' depending on the mood.
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Jan 12, 2021 13:11
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Trin Tragula posted:The chap you're thinking of is another subaltern called Paddy King who was in a very Territorial Territorial Battalion, the 2/4th Useless Fat Bastards or something like that. Thanks TT.
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Jan 12, 2021 20:13
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Similar problems with various fighter production - fighters produced and sitting because they didn't have instruments, or guns, or sights. The extreme distribution and workshop methods meant a lot of French equipment was pretty expensive. The S35, again, was a pretty great tank, but it cost almost a million francs. The Morane-Saulner MS406 being a case in point. Production officially began in mid-1938 but only 12 had been delivered to the AdA by the start of 1939. The rate increased from there, with just over 1000 406's being delivered before the fall of France. The lack of Hispano-Suiza engines was the big problem, but M-S simply lacked the capacity to build airframes at the required rate and a second production line was set up at the state-owned SNCAO plant. The dispersed and rushed production led to all sorts of quality and reliability issues with the fighters in service - the electro-pneumatic gun controls tended to lag, the cockpit canopy panels would fall out of the frame, the rudder hinges corroded, the screws holding the engine cowlings on failed, the radios frequently broke and the engines lasted half the expected time between rebuilds. In the end the French government started placing large orders for American Curtiss fighters, which were not only more readily available than the domestic product but generally superior. By 1940 the AdA had 1036 MS406s which claimed 296 kills against the Luftwaffe, while 'only' 316 Curtiss H75s claimed 230. Fewer than 40 Dewoitine D520s notched up 114 - that was a much better fighter than the Morane (and arguably also the Curtiss) but had also been blighted by lengthy dithering and politics over its specification and procurement, was hampered by a lack of high-power aero engines and also suffered big production problems.
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Jan 19, 2021 01:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:Actually, here's a question about propaganda the Third Reich and conquored regions: I know radio broadcasts from the BBC were covertly listened to. How factual were they? If I were in change of programming the German/French BBC broadcast, I'd keep it as factual as practical to counter Nazi propaganda to build credibility. This is exactly what they did. In 1942 the BBC took the decision (or rather, was permitted) to broadcast impartial news at home and abroad - still subject to wartime oversight, censorship and security approval of course, but the ethos of 1939-42 of positively 'spinning' everything to the British/Allied advantage was gone. Of course in 1942 things looked much more secure favourable than in previous years, but the value of a reputation for factual, truthful news in a sea of blatant propaganda was clear. Even if this meant acknowledging defeats or setbacks for the Allies. The exceptions were the BBC India and Eastern services, which remained on a tightly biased leash to counter German and Japanese attempts to stir up conflict in the British imperial possessions and weaken the commitment of those territories to the Allied cause. Apparently a lot of Europeans developed a habit of listening to the BBC from the war and the immediate years afterwards. When the Beeb shut down its Italian service (originating as a wartime broadcast to fascist Italy) in the 1980s on the assumption that no one would care about it anymore they were surprised at the backlash and found that it still had regular audiences for individual programmes well into six figures.
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Feb 3, 2021 01:38
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I forget, was this because of the Tobruk fiasco? Churchill ringing the bells for it or something. I don't really know. I vaguely remember something about the fall of Tobruk being especially bad for morale because the relentlessly upbeat press coverage didn't tell the troops on the ground, let alone the people back home, how the situation in North Africa was actually going. So it came as a much bigger shock than it should have been. Maybe that (coupled to the victory at El Alamein?) made the Ministry of Information decide that, as far as the Home Front was concerned, it was better to be essentially honest than to distort things and then have defeats not only be more shocking but lay bare the untrustworthiness of the reporting?
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Feb 3, 2021 02:26
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Having a fixed sight isn't a bad idea as a backup if the reflector sight breaks for whatever reason. Most American fighters up to late 1943 had fixed sights - a ring-and-cross just in front of the windscreen and a ball on a spike further down the nose, both usually offset so the reflector sight was on the centerline - as a back up to the reflector failing in some way. They were removed when aerodynamics became more important and the reflector sights were proving reliable. The P-38 never had them as far as I can tell and P-51D didn't have them, although the earlier turtle-back ones did. It was probably a better back up solution than the RAF, which fitted early-war fighters with three spare bulbs in the cockpit which the pilot was somehow expected to change in flight, possibly in hostile skies! The American Volunteer Group had problems because their P-40s were mostly to RAF spec and intended to have RAF reflector sights and armour-glass behind the windscreen. The AVG were able to get a stock of USAAC-spec reflector sights but they weren't compatible with the armour-glass so they had to jury-rig up some brackets and even then it involved hooking the reflector to the pilot's grab handle so every time they climbed into or out of the aircraft they knocked the sight out of alignment. There also weren't enough reflector sights so the some AVG went into action over Rangoon with only the ring-and-bead fixed sight.
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Feb 17, 2021 18:31
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bewbies posted:I'd argue the Type IX U-boat was the most effective pound-for-pound weapon of the entire war, though serving on one would have sucked serious rear end. Type XXI descendants are still in service, though its service with the Germans was less than spectacular. No doubting the Type IX's effectiveness and it was a good design for the use it was intended for and put to. Much better than the old-fashioned and undersized Type VII. But the Type IX was still really just a double-hulled take on submarine design from WW1 and was only slightly bigger than a USN S-boat. The Germans called the Type IX a U-Kreuzer while the USN considered the S-boat barely fit for Pacific service. And the Type IX was much closer to the S-boat in terms of technology than it was to something like a Gato. And none of the Type IXs had properly sorted engines. I know we're not just talking about Wunderwaffen, size, sophistication or technological innovation, and the Type IX was a good boat, but it was far from cutting edge. The Type XXI was conceptually brilliant, a technological leap forward and is rightly considered the ancestor of all modern naval submarines. But it was massively flawed through a combination of Nazi political boondoggling and late-war labour, material and production problems. Putting crucial parts of your hydraulic system outside the pressure hull where the crew can't get at them isn't great. Many of the systems were over complex and unreliable due to having to use more simplistic technology in place of more advanced but more user-friendly equipment. The diesel plant was underpowered and based on an old engine design stretched too far. The modular out-sourced construction led to massive quality problems. Over 100 boats completed, only two made a patrol. The idea was great, the execution was utter garbage.
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Feb 17, 2021 22:44
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Nebakenezzer posted:So is there some conversion I can do to understand inches in pressure of mercury to, I don't know, pounds of boost? InHg and PSI of boost are measuring a different thing. Or rather, they are describing the same thing in different ways. Both are measuring the pressure in the engine inlet manifold between the throttle plate and the cylinders - this pressure is as good a proxy as any for 'power' and the higher the reading the more power you are making. The Americans, Soviets and Germans measured absolute manifold pressure (in inHg for the Americans, kPa for the Soviets and bar for the Germans, I think). This is how much pressure there is relative to absolute vacuum. So with the engine off and everything at equilibrium the gauge will read atmospheric pressure of about 30inHg. With the engine running at idle the needle will probably be hard against the bottom stop at about 5inHg because with the throttle closed there's a huge vacuum in the intake. Without a supercharger or turbo no engine can show more than atmospheric pressure even at full throttle. Push the throttle wide open on a supercharged engine near sea level and you could easily generate 70+ inHg of manifold pressure and swiftly grenade your engine. Early war take off power was usually about 40 inHg with climb being 35ish and cruise being 20-30. Later on you had climb power getting into the high 40s, cruise power being 30-35 and emergency power with water injection etc. being in the 60s or 70s, with much higher outputs bring used on a semi-official basis in squadron service. The British and the Japanese calibrated things in terms of negative or positive pressure ('Boost') in relation to a standard atmosphere. So where an American aircraft would show 30inHg the British one would show Zero PSI, and 45inHg would instead be about +7 PSI boost, while 20inHg would be -5 PSI on the boost gauge. Early Merlin engines were limited to +8 Boost, with +12 possible on 100-octane fuel for short periods. Which would translate to 44 and 52 inHg. By 1944 the Spit MkIX was cleared for a maximum standard power of +15 and emergency power of over +25 (59 and 79 inHg) With high-grade late-war fuel and anti-detonation/water injection equipment the practical limits on power that could be squeezed out of an engine in a pinch were way, way higher than even the official 'emergency' settings. Air-cooled radials especially tended to be limited by how quickly they could shed heat rather than their physical robustness, and up in the deeply sub-zero air of 30,000ft over Europe that left a lot of room for making frankly ridiculous amounts of power. More humbly, the Allison V-1710 was never officially cleared to produce as much power at it could physically take (Allison designed the internals of the engine to run at 4000rpm, and no V-1710 was ever rated for more than 3000rpm). In 1941/42 pilots in the Desert Air Force routinely ran their Tomahawks way, way over the redline in terms of manifold pressure for long periods (we're talking 'needle all the way round the dial and hitting the underside of the zero peg' levels of overboost) when fighting Bf109Fs, as that was pretty much the only way to make the Tomahawk competitive with the Messerschmitt in one-on-one combat in that theatre. In terms of intercoolers, these were only needed when two-stage supercharging came along, as otherwise the intake air became too hot as it was compressed through both stages. The two-stage Merlin had a liquid-to-air intercooler which was very compact and key to fitting the Merlin 60 into the slim Spitfire airframe. By contrast, the main reason the P-47 was such a chubster was because the fuselage had to accommodate a massive air-to-air intercooler between the supercharger on the engine and the turbocharger in the rear fuselage, plus all the ducting to move the air between them all. The busy P-47 pilot had to manage the overall manifold pressure (with the throttle, and as mentioned the USAAF were very slow to fit automatic boost control to its aircraft) turbocharger speed (via the manual wastegate control), carburettor air temperature (via the manual intercooler shutter control) and keep the cylinder head and oil temperatures within limits with the cowl and oil cooler flaps. By contrast the Merlin in RAF service had an automatic boost limiter from the very start and by the middle of 1940 had full automatic boost control. Edit: Partially beaten already. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Feb 18, 2021 |
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Feb 18, 2021 02:51
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HookedOnChthonics posted:To that end point about how much P-47 pilots had to keep their eyes on, the ui design of WWII aircraft is always so interesting to me b/c it's a major moment for machine interfaces becoming complicated enough that it starts to make a really, really big difference in a way that people noticed and began to comprehensively study and engineer for. It's very interesting to compare, say, the cockpit of a P-47D, where not only is virtually everything manual but it is laid out pretty much at random, with a P-51D where more effort has been put into grouping controls and instruments by both function and frequency of use, and you see the beginnings of what would now be HOTAS thinking with the gyro gunsight controls being integrated into the throttle handle. Only two years separated the introduction of those aircraft. Of course the Fw190 had its Kommandogerat, which was an electro-mechanical system which automatically adjusted prop pitch, fuel mixture, ignition timing and boost in relation to movement of the throttle control, making it true 'one lever' operation as far as the pilot was concerned. The later P-47s did at least automate the oil cooler and intercooler shutters with thermostatic controls so they would at least look after themselves to some extent. Nebakenezzer posted:I'm more than halfway through now, and the author gets checked out on a Canadian built DH Mosquito. One thing he noticed that was very different from what he was used to was that the mossie had some "magic brain" that handles engine boost automatically. As thinking worst case all the time has kept him alive, his comment is "hope it doesn't break." Other comments include "Holy poo poo, is it tight on space in here and the ergonomics are kinda wonky", "WTF no dual controls for the radio operator" (he's given a check flight by a RAF dude named Rust with the author sitting in the RO seat. A few days later Rust declines the same RO seat as it just makes him too nervous to fly without dual controls) "oh and liquid cooled means you have to take off right away or else you'll boil your engine coolant, one point to air cooled", "goddamnit britain why doesn't the rear wheel lock in a straight position" and "hooollllyyyyy poo poo does this thing have power." I wouldn't describe British automatic boost control as a 'magic brain' - it was a fairly crude system where the throttle lever actually just altered the tension on a spring, the other end of which connected to a pressure-sensitive diaphragm which read manifold pressure/boost and was mechanically linked to the actual throttle plate on the engine. The pilot effectively set the boost they wanted with the lever (with reference to the gauge) and then the pressure sensor adjusted the throttle to keep it sensing that pressure as best it could. With virtually all liquid-cooled fighters it was a race to get off the ground before they overheated, and a similar one to get them parked and shut down after landing. British aircraft were especially prone to this for similar reasons that they tended not to have tailwheel locks - most of them were originally designed to operate from grass airfields, whereas American aircraft were intended to fly from hard-surface runways. This meant they also had to be able to taxi to and from those runways and be more capable of operating in crosswinds. British aircraft would be towed round the perimeter track so they could be started, warmed up and then take off straight into the wind regardless of the direction. While we can rightly crap on a lot of German stuff for outright shoddy design and construction, the British were well in the running for making stuff that was somehow both really crude and massively over-engineered, and which either failed to consider the human element at all or which seemed to actively loath it. 1930s British aircraft could be especially shoddy, and the Hampden was one of the worst. Apart from when it was the Hereford which had the added bonus of having over-complicated and desperately unreliable engines. The British were at least fairly ruthless about quickly eliminating the worst designs from service once the war (and especially Lend-Lease) got going, or at least moving them to secondary roles, and then really cranking out the stuff they had which was good. Although they never did redesign the Spitfire so the pilot didn't have to change hands on the stick to raise/lower the undercarriage, or realise that you could fit a master electrical switch like everyone else rather than having the battery permanently live and giving every electrical item its own switch - want to check the fuel level? You can't just glance at the gauge, you have to press a button to activate the gauge, look at it, then release the button.
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Feb 18, 2021 10:18
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Cessna posted:
This is the basic trend for the RN as well. From the original A-class Holland-type subs in 1903 to the L-class in 1918 all had simple alphanumeric class+number designations. Even the stuff like the K-class which were very large proto-fleet boats and rather more than a submersible torpedo boat which needed the support of a tender to remain operational for any length of time. The exception was the one-off Swordfish, which was another go at the long-range fleet boat concept and was stripped of its proper name when it proved disappointing in trials. Then in 1927 you get the first post-WW1 subs with the O/Odin-class which were big boats for the time (bigger than a WW2 Type IX) and intended for Pacific operations. From then on, and all the way through WW2, British subs were named, with the names starting with the letter of the class. The exception would be the decidedly non-independent midget sub types which went back to the alphanumeric designations. When nuclear subs entered service they were given names previously allocated to capital ships, reflecting their importance and their true independent nature. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Feb 19, 2021 |
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Feb 19, 2021 18:06
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Just as an aside, I've always liked the naming system that has all members of a class share the first letter. So much easier to tell at a glance what you're dealing with. I agree, although you have to make sure you have enough names in the hat when you commit to a big class. The S-class started well with Swordfish Sturgeon, Starfish and Seahorse but by the last batch you get the impression they were rather desperately flicking through the 'S' section of the dictionary with Sanguine Sleuth, Stratagem and Subtle. Same with the late T-classes : Trump, Tiptoe, Tiara and Token
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Feb 19, 2021 19:55
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The UK also was challenged to name the various destroyer classes in a similar convention, although I think most DD classes were a shorter run. Good point. While the S-class subs were being delivered there were also S-class destroyers coming into service, which used up the names Savage Scourge, Success and - perhaps one which would be great for a submarine - Shark.
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Feb 19, 2021 20:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, our own bewbies has commented before on the Germans actually getting a lot out of their existing aircraft engines. While looking through WW2 Life Magazine, they had a shot of a Bf 110 in a British field, commenting on its weird "fuel" "injection." From what I know I'd also agree with the basic premise that German aero engines were decent-through-to-excellent, but with development and production increasingly hampered as the war progressed by fuel, material and labour shortages. In 1940 the DB V12 not only had fuel injection but a variable-drive supercharger, while the Merlin and the Allison had carbs and a fixed-speed blower. The DB601's fuel injection has been rather over-egged. It was crude even in comparison to the injection systems put on cars in the 1960s, never mind a 1980s EFI system. It was basically just a fixed nozzle feeding a stream of fuel into each cylinder via an individual plunger pump - adapted diesel truck engine technology - and it was pretty a 'dumb' setup. It poured more fuel in the more the pilot opened the throttle and it had a barometric device which wound the fuelling back a little to compensate for altitude. It didn't sense engine speed, charge air temperature, manifold pressure, exhaust mixture, cylinder knock, fuel temperature or anything like that. It worked reliably under negative-G (but the oil system still didn't work for sustained periods inverted), it let the engine start easily (especially in cold weather) and it reacted better to sudden and large changes in throttle setting. In return it was hugely more complex, skilled and arduous to make, used more fuel-per-hp and reduced the maximum boost that could be applied to the engine and thus the maximum power output. By the time the injected DB601 was in service most carb-fed aero engines also had automatic mixture adjustment. Rolls-Royce looked at making a fuel injection system along the DB lines and concluded that it wasn't worth it - the cooling effect of the stream of atomising fuel coming out of the carb sucked 25 deg. C of heat out of the intake charge, allowing the supercharger boost to be higher and significantly increasing power - the 27-litre Merlin made 1300hp and the 34-litre DB601 made 1100hp. Yes, the Merlin had its issue with faltering under negative-G but it could be circumvented with simple tactics (half roll before pulling into a dive), was alleviated by the fitment of 'Miss Shilling's orifice' to the carb and was solved completely by the development of a pressure-action carburettor which had all the advantages of fuel injection while being much simpler, quicker and less material-intensive to produce.
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Feb 20, 2021 03:25
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Pryor on Fire posted:If you want to take apart that Merlin engine this is a fun way to kill a few hours Seconded (although it's a real resources-hog - rather like a Merlin on a warm summer day my PC kept overheating trying to run it at a decent setting). Soon you too will be venting frustration at Rolls-Royce putting over 40 tiny screws holding the valvegear covers on, and experiencing the authentic rage of RAF ground crews at why early Spitfires required all the panels on both the upper and undersides of the wing to be removed (and then replaced, with half a dozen awkward fixings each) to restock the ammo. Here's the real thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HIFc9xpguc The original, much longer and more detailed version is also on YouTube, but in multiple low-quality parts.
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Feb 20, 2021 13:22
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Greg12 posted:"the only time a submarine beat the royal navy's destroyer screen" I think the implied sentence is "the only time a submarine beat the royal navy's destroyer screen [that was protecting a battleship]"
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Feb 21, 2021 18:21
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Nenonen posted:WW2, the sinking of Royal Oak. Two U-boots did try to slink in during WW1 but they failed. But Royal Oak wasn't protected by a destroyer screen (just barrages of blockships, booms and nets operated by tugs and a few patrolling trawlers, motor launches and requisitioned yachts inside the Flow) and the newsreel doubly-qualifies its statement by saying that the Barham was the only RN battleship sunk at sea by a German submarine. Ignoring other RN capital ships sunk by U-boats and battleships sunk bt other forms of enemy action, of course...
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Feb 21, 2021 22:28
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My YouTube recommendations threw up some Pathe footage of the scuttling of HMS Implacable (ex-French Duguay-Trouin, present at Trafalgar and captured in the aftermath of the battle), and the last surviving seventy-four in existence. It turns out Pathe covered the old ship quite often in her last years: Some silent newsreel of Implacable undergoing maintenance/light restoration at Devonport in the 1920s The ship entering harbour during her move to Portsmouth in 1932 for use as a civilian cadet training ship, passing HMS Victory Newsreel with sound covering her sinking by explosives in 1949 A longer - and somewhat more bombastic - Gaumont newsreel covering the sinking Edit: The BBC Archive twitter feed has their own coverage (mostly with the same shots, but some unique ones of the actual sinking) https://twitter.com/BBCArchive/status/1070369712238940160 I think the YouTube algorithim has finally noticed that I subscribe to Drachinifel and taken that as the cue to fill my timeline with archival navy footage. Going into more recent naval history, is this film All of One Company, covering an early deployment by HMS Coventry in 1980, made all the more poignant by the fact that the ship would be sunk in the Falklands less than two years after the film was made. The opening scenes of the ship leaving harbour also include a brief shot of Foudroyant (the ex Leda-class frigate Trincomalee of 1812) at her traditional anchorage in Portsmouth, where she would have been alongside Implacable in the 1940s. This was only the year after Warrior had been taken into restoration after sitting in Pembroke dock as an oil hulk for 50 years - it's always amazing how long these artifacts lingered along in some sort of service. Especially in the case of the British, it's pretty much the only way they made it into preservation, rather than by any active decision to keep them for historical value. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Feb 26, 2021 |
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Feb 26, 2021 13:59
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HookedOnChthonics posted:
I can immediately tell this is the American edition of Incredible Cross-Sections because the title for the caption detailing the lack of 'facilities' on the T-34 is 'Where's the john?' while the British edition had What, no lav? That and the detail of the commander's guts being included in the cross section were the two things that always stuck in my mind about the T-34 spread from the hundreds of times I read that book.
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Mar 6, 2021 03:58
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Nenonen posted:Bombing railroad depots, on the other hand? Steam locomotives range is limited by the need to refill the boiler. But for that you only need a water supply of any sort - a bucket and a river will do. You only need to get water into the tender or tank, the equipment on the loco will get it into the actual boiler. And watering equipment wasn't only at workshops and depots - any wayside station with a good water supply would have a water crane. Although bombing (by both sides) caused significant disruption to railways, they proved hard to entirely disable. Especially in Europe where there was a genuine network so trains could be re-routed around damaged sections of track. It was also easier than planners anticipated to get a temporary track or bridge down and get traffic moving again. While having to cross a repaired bridge at only 5mph, or having one side of a double-track section inoperable significantly restricted capacity, it still allowed several thousand tons of stuff to flow back and forth a day.
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Mar 14, 2021 21:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:THe real question is what their capacity for creating new stock is like. Building out and expanding a network is one then when you can import poo poo or when you've got a time table of a few years to spool up your own production. Locomotives are also durable goods that tend to last a while, so even in peace time replacing them all at once isn't really an option. You see new poo poo phased in and the oldest poo poo phased out. Then you have all the track infrastructure, all of the various coaling and switching equipment, etc. Just poo poo tons of equipment and tooling that last quite a while once you make it, but which takes a while to make. Some numbers for illustrative purposes: The USATC's standard general-purpose steam loco, the S160, was built by all three of the major American manufacturers and they churned out 800 examples during 1942 and 1943, all intended for shipment to Britain as long-term preparation for the invasion (and rebuilding) of Europe. Half of this amount were put into service by the UK railways, ostensibly for testing and running-in purposes but actually to make up for shortages of motive power in Britain. The other half were stored in a yard in South Wales to wait for D-Day. Over 1400 more S160s were built in America and shipped elsewhere either for use with the USATC or as Lend-Lease. Meanwhile, between 1943 and 1945 Britain built over 900 standardised Austerity locos, of which well over half were in service by D-Day and all but three of those 900 engines were shipped to Europe either during the war or immediately after it. So that's 1700 locomotives produced across three years by five manufacturers in two of the largest industrial economies in the world, and both already preeminent in designing and building railway equipment...just to bring some semblance of operations back to the rail networks west of Berlin.
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Mar 15, 2021 15:18
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Nebakenezzer posted:Attention: Jobbo_Fett, bewbies, Balloon Fish I already have this, but thanks for the heads-up. I can confirm that it is excellent - more than enough detail to satisfy my engineering/machinery geekery, but not at all impenetrable. It's like 'Vees for Victory' but covering all the Western combatants.
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Mar 17, 2021 18:05
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SerCypher posted:Sheffield is interesting as it is the other side of the coin to Stark. If they had a way to get the fire under control they probably could have saved it, just like Stark. RN damage control training and methods in 1982 had got a little slack, and certainly a bit over-focussed on dealing with torpedo hits since these were seen as the main threat in an era when the RN's primary role was ASW in the North Atlantic and GIUK gap. As has been said, for various reasons Sheffield failed at the main part of anti-missile 'damage control' which was not to be hit in the first place by being at an inappropriately low alert level. Later in the war Glamorgan survived an Exocet hit by virtue of better preparation/mitigation. On Sheffield the crew were not sufficiently trained and drilled for the sort of damage the missile caused. The Type 42 suffered from cost-cutting specification and equipment levels, so a lot of the DC/firefighting gear was stored in one place. The ship's fitted firefighting system was insufficiently protected and didn't have enough redundancy and so quickly failed, and instead of numerous small portable fire pumps there were a small number of very powerful but very heavy gas turbine pump units which took too long to move and set up and couldn't fit through certain hatchways and bulkhead doors. Equally, many of the through-deck hatchways were sized to an outdated standard so weren't big enough to allow sailors wearing modern breathing and firefighting gear to get through them. The ventilation system was cheaply designed and didn't provide enough positive extraction of smoke while allowing smoke to pass between compartments if the vent system was even lightly damaged. The interior was full of fittings like cable insulation, seat cushions and mattress filling which gave of toxic fumes when it caught fire. The RN's new easy-to-iron nylon working uniforms melted into the skin when they burned, causing horrific deep burns. The Formica bulkhead cladding in the accomodation and mess spaces shattered during the missile strike and showers the compartments with vicious splinters. In the aftermath, the RN ramped up its damage control training, widening its scope and requiring all rates, ranks and specialities to go through the new general course which covered flooding, fire, collision, grounding and in various combinations. The two Damage Repair Instructional Units (DRIUs), Hazard and Havoc, were designed and introduced as part of the response to the Falklands War to provide as accurate a simulation of 'real' DC situations and techniques as possible. The exercises and situations used by Fleet Operational Sea Training to 'work up' new or re-comissioning crews and ships were also significantly overhauled, intensified and 'punched up', while it became fleet-wide standing orders to carry out some form of exercise for the first response emergency party every day on every ship at sea or in port. Damage control and firefighting equipment was no longer as centralised onboard ship, with every compartment having basic equipment and multiple lockers containing a standard set of more 'serious' equipment being placed around the ship. There was a huge review of materials used and permitted aboard ship, the uniforms went back to being pure cotton (they still are) and new standards for hatchways, ventilation and system resilience and redundancy were laid down. And it worked, because (for all the lack of another war with an air force lobbing missiles at its ships) the RN hasn't lost another ship due to fire or flooding - both Nottingham and Endurance were saved from very serious flooding by high-quality damage control from the entire ship's company.
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Mar 27, 2021 23:23
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Because the world of mid-1930s aircraft was filled with examples that carried one or two rifle-caliber guns. Not only was it difficult to catch a bomber, but downing them as well was also quite difficult. Since you can get more destructive power out of a bomb while keeping the weight down... relatively anyways. See further - the proposed Miles M.20 and the Boulton Paul P.94 (a Defiant without the rear turret) both of which were specified with twelve .303s. Even the eight-gun layout had proved lacking when firing brief bursts of rifle-calibre rounds at metal aircraft. You can also see the progression in the Curtiss fighters. The original P-36 had 2x .30s, then one .30 and one .50, then 4x .30s, then 2x .30s and 2x .50s (shared with the early versions of the P-40). The final French versions had six 7.5mm guns. The P-40B and -C went to 2x .50s and 4x .30s. After receiving intel from the air combat over Poland, France and Britain the USAAF required the proposed P-40 replacement (XP-46) had eight .30s and a pair of .50s in the nose. But instead the P-40 was up-gunned with the classic six .50s which proved to be the sweet spot for reliability, weight, ammunition capacity and hitting power (unless the wing was massive like the P-47 when you could install an octet of them). The RAF knew from the start of the Battle of Britain that cannons were the only really effective way of stopping bombers, but there were problems getting the Hispano cannon to work reliably in flight so you had the compromise of the Spitfire and Hurricane Mk.IIs with four Brownings and a pair of cannons.
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Apr 15, 2021 22:40
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xthetenth posted:A lot of things happened right before WWII. Monoplane fighters with comparatively streamlined designs really came into their own, armor and self sealing fuel tanks started to be viable additions to planes (this is actually happening at the exact start of the war, a lot of early war planes had their performance utterly trashed by the addition of self sealing fuel tanks and armor See again the Curtiss XP-46 I mentioned in my last post. It was originally designed to be little more than the P-40 in a smaller, lighter fuselaged designed around the Allison V12 engine. It would share the same armament and features as the then-current P-40 - a pair of .50s in the nose and one .30 in each wing, no armour, no bulletproof glass and no self-sealing fuel tanks - standard stuff for American fighters of the time. By the time the first prototype flew the USAAF had updated the specification to increase the firepower (to 2x .50s and 8x .30s) and then, in light of the reports from Europe, came the requirement for self-sealing fuel tanks, a sheet of armour-glass behind the windscreen and armour plate ahead of and behind the pilot. All this added loads of weight, making the XP-46 little more than a heavier P-40 with less wing area and very slightly more power, so it offered no improvement in climb, virtually no improvement in top speed, a significant degradation of its turning performance and a huge decrease in operational range. PittTheElder posted:I'm thinking of that transition from biplane to monoplane fighters at the tail of the 30s; did "modern" monoplanes (say the Bf-109 or Hawker Hurricane) capable of matching or exceeding the climb rates of the biplanes they replaced? In general first generation of monoplane fighters had slightly inferior sustained climb rates (as in, the climb rate possible when leaving the ground and reaching a set altitude such as when on a scramble) than the last generation of biplanes. The biplanes could pull higher manoeuvering climb rates, such as comes into play in combat. Due to their lower wing loading biplanes were much more agile than virtually any equivalent monoplane, making them better classic dogfighters. Of course to be any good as a bomber interceptor you have to actually be able to catch the bomber (and same goes for dogfighting - you can have the best dogfighter in the world but if it's 75mph slower than the less maneouverable monoplane it's essentially pointless) but that was why some air forces remained wedded to the biplane fighter. Notably the Italians and the Soviets who misread their experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where combat had generally between between very good biplanes and very early monoplanes which just needed a couple more years' development to reach their full potential, and concluded that biplane fighters were still viable. But by 1939/1940 advances in engine, fuel and propeller technology had generally given monoplanes the brute power to have higher (or at least equal) sustained climb rates than the last of the biplanes while retaining the massive speed advantage. Some comparisons of sustained climb rates (big caveat that, obviously, these figures are not derived from tests under the same conditions. Some refer to rate obtained at a standardised altitudes and others to the aircraft's best climb rate [over a given time period, which can also vary from tester to tester] at whatever altitude that was): Heinkel He51: 2200ft/min Bf109B: 2020ft/min (with fixed-pitch propeller) Bf109E: 3280ft/min (with variable-pitch propeller) Gladiator Mk1: 2300ft/min Hurricane Mk1: 2810ft/min (with fixed-pitch propeller) Hurricane Mk1: 2120ft/min (with two-pitch propeller) Hurricane Mk1: 2640ft/min (constant-speed propeller) (This is a good demonstration of how the British lag in propeller technology hobbled their fighters in the late 30s.) Boeing P-26: 2220ft/min Seversky P-35: 1920ft/min Curtiss P-36A: 3400ft/min Curtiss P-40B: 2650ft/min Fiat CR.32bis: 1822ft/min Fiat CR.42: 2320ft/min Fiat G.50: 2730ft/min (This really shows how Italian engine technology lagged in the mid-30s, since the early monoplane still usefully outclimbs the biplanes) Polikarpov I-15bis: 2688ft/min Polikarpov I-153: 3000ft/min Polikarpov I-16: 2890ft/min Yakovlev Yak-1: 2982ft/min (This shows what happens when you share engines between a biplane (I-153) and a monoplane (I-16) in the same era, especially when both have retractable undercarriage). The monoplane is a better climber than the 'traditional' biplane (I-15) but is bettered by the equivalent biplane. Then the Yak-1 with its more modern engine and aerodynamics splits the difference in terms of climb rate but is much faster than the I-16. The requirement for radar and other early-detection systems was more to do with the relative speeds of bombers and fighters rather than the climb rates of biplanes v. monoplanes. Obviously for intercepting bombers climb rate is important, but the problem identified in exercises and war games was that having monoplane bombers cruising at nearly 200mph were virtually impossible to intercept with standing patrols of monoplane fighters which cruised at 230-250mph, let alone biplane ones which cruised at about the same speed as the bombers. Interception relied mostly on luck, with the fighters having to cross paths with the bombers at the right time, the right place, the right angle and the right height to even attempt a single pass, and then often not being able to effectively make a second pass. The speed at which everything happened with modern aircraft, the small relative speed advantage of the fighters over the bombers and the minimal range at which the bombers could be detected by the defender, made it essentially impossible to a tactically useful degree. With an early warning and tracking system of some sort (it didn't have to be radar - Claire Chennault implemented a very effective 'warning web' in southwestern China and Burma that used ground observers communicating with a central control room by telephone and radio) intercepts could be plotted with enough warning to be useful and fighters could be sent up and vectored onto the incoming bombers almost every time.
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Apr 16, 2021 10:19
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feedmegin posted:Let no-one malign the Swordfish Indeed not. The thing is that the Swordfish was effectively replaced by helicopters rather than monoplanes. The likes of the Skua, Barracuda and Avenger had already made it obsolete as a fleet strike aircraft but it had the biplane advantage of being able to lift huge amounts of stuff from very short flight decks at very low speeds in appalling weather conditions. Which is why it lingered for so long on escort carriers, where it could essentially land vertically if the carrier steamed fast into a brisk wind.
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Apr 16, 2021 12:25
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Gort posted:I vaguely recall reading some stuff saying the British didn't think much of their post-BEF troops and that lead to stuff like the "advance across no-man's land at the walk" commands when BEF troops would have been doing fire-and-manoeuvre tactics that these greener troops were thought incapable of. Yes, I remember something similar. Also that the 'walk across no-man's land' thing wasn't about strolling into machine gun fire, it was a doctrine that rested on the German machine gun posts (and machine gunners) being destroyed by the massive preceding artillery bombardment, so the infantry would just have to walk across, take possession of the German front line and then have cover to resist a counter attack and press the advance. In such a situation, with inexperienced and hastily-trained soldiers and difficult communication the moment a unit left its own trench, it made sense on its own terms. Just the main supposition proved to be false!
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Apr 24, 2021 21:56
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Is there a really good way to tell who is going to be an effective combat commander without seeing the elephant? I realize this is a critical priority for pretty much every military organization ever so I presume that a lot of work has been done on it. Just to throw into the mix - I've been reading 'Four Weeks In May', the (excellent) account of the Falklands War by the commanding officer of HMS Coventry. He says that one of the things that surprised him most in his crew after they'd been on a combat footing for 10 days or so was the number of men who had previously been seen as stalwart, capable, committed naval sailors didn't rise to the challenge as well as he would have expected two weeks previously, and equally how men who he had previously seen as a bit mediocre and listless absolutely shone and shouldered the load brilliantly. He also has a great anecdote of a helicopter flying in to Coventry from one of the support ships, in between Argentinian air attacks and vicious squalls to deliver a spare part for the ship's torpedo decoy noisemaker...only to find that somewhere along the chain the item number had been messed up and what was actually being delivered was a large refrigerator.
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May 11, 2021 14:03
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Count Roland posted:I'm getting towards the end of the Aubrey-Maturain series and it's heavily focused on the looming end of the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting lack of ships/career prospects for the sailors. It doesn't sound like the Royal Navy had a mandatory retirement age. The RN didn't have a retirement age until 1864. Before then the only way anyone - rating or officer - could leave the navy was to be discharged or to die. From the rank of (Post) Captain upwards promotion was strictly by seniority - when the Admiral of the Fleet died (or was convinced to resign), everyone below them on the Navy List moved up one space, the Admiral of the Red became the new Admiral of the Fleet, the most senior Vice-Admiral of the Red became the new Admiral of the Red and so on down the flag ranks, while the most senior Post Captain became the most junior Rear-Admiral of the Blue. The exact numbers of officers at each flag rank could change as the size of the navy and the disposition of the fleets and squadrons changed but the seniority remained absolute. Since this inevitably led to the situation of the ranks becoming top-heavy with surplus and aged admirals, in the 1740s the concept of the 'Yellow Admiral' was introduced, whereby flag officers could be re-assigned or promoted into 'ranks without distinction of squadron' which meant that they were not active sea-going posts and were either effectively a retirement with a pension (your 'pay' as an admiral without a squadron) or a shore-based administrative post. There was also the rank of 'Rear-Admiral without Distinction' into which old or ineffective Post Captains could be moved to free up space below them on the list for younger and more promising officers. In 1864 it was finally made possible for naval officers to retire by the creation of the Retired List. Since it was not yet legally possible for an officer to voluntarily resign his commission, retired officers had to stay on the navy's books but no longer clogged up the top of the Navy List (now officially the Active List) and no longer drew pay. An exception was made for officers who commanded a ship during the Napoleonic Wars, who would be retained on the Active List on full pay, which caused issues when Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo Wallis, who had commanded HMS Shannon for six days during the War of 1812, lived to the age of 100, causing a backlog of promotions at the top of the Active List in 1880s and 1890s. On the matter of commissioning from the ranks - the Royal Navy has done this since 1912 when the Mate Scheme (later the more evocative Upper Yardman Scheme) was introduced by Admiral Louis of Battenburg. It was originally intended primarily for engineering and technical ratings to be able to advance to officer ranks, carrying their training and experience with them rather than (horror!) requiring gentlemen to learn a trade. These days commissioning from the lower deck goes two ways - if you're under 25 you go on the 'Commission & Warrant' Scheme, whereby you join a standard new-entry officer cohort but commission as Sub-Lieutenant rather than a Midshipman. If you're over 35 you become a Senior Upper Yardman and carry over your seniority in your specialisation ,but not your rank. I believe there's also now a special version of the UYS for warrant officers to encourage them to commission rather than serve out the rest of their career as SNCOs. About a third of the new officer intake each year in the RN is through the UYS.
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May 21, 2021 18:59
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Cessna posted:Huh. In the British/Commonwealth forces WO's are 'just' are the the most senior SNCOs (and those inverted commas are doing a lot of work, since SNCOs are the backbone of the entire military machine!). In terms of the NATO rank scale British WOs are 'other ranks' - OR-8 for WO2s and OR-9 for WO1s. There isn't the whole extra domain of WO-x ranks that the US uses. Warrant officers fill a similar role - being very experienced and usually having some specific training or expertise in a particular field - but they're still SNCOs. I guess this is why commissioning from the ranks is relatively unusual in the US military? There's a whole additional class of ranks, with its own progression and structure, specifically for SNCOs to advance to where they can take on executive and leadership roles without becoming commissioned officers. While British/Commonwealth WOs can - and certainly do - hold important managerial and executive roles at a unit and staff level, they are definitely encouraged to go for a commission if they want to take their career down that particular direction. SubG posted:Yeah, I imagine private yacht owners are, as a class, shitheads. Yeah, precisely. It doesn't matter that it seems that most (if not all) of O'Brian's claimed sailing and sea experience was either greatly exaggerated or entirely fabricated. I'm lucky enough to have a lot of sailing experience, some of it in the open ocean, and O'Brian's writing in terms of technical accuracy, illustrative description and the ability to conjure an emotional response to the situations he's writing about are absolutely spot on - far more accurate and evocative than many other writers in the genre who indisputably have years and tens of thousands of nautical miles' of experience to draw on. I don't care if O'Brian never so much as went on a cross-Channel ferry - the long chase between the Leopard and the Waakzaamheid is a pinnacle of nautical writing, whether he cribbed it from contemporary journals, got descriptions from the old sailors who went on the windjammers through the Roaring Forties or the words just spilled out of his brain and happened to be right.
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May 21, 2021 23:02
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Fuschia tude posted:How would two naval commanders on opposite sides of a Napoleonic-era conflict communicate if they wanted to negotiate something? Send a boat across the water, flying some sort of neutral flag? White flag? It was unusual for communications to happen once fighting was underway, but in theory it was as on land - flying a flag of truce and sending a party to communicate/negotiate. Usually a suitably ranking and responsible officer would come over in a ship's boat. It was more usual for such communications to happen between a ship (or fleet) in harbour and a ship/fleet blockading it outside. Messages and negotiations could happen both ways either by ship's boats under flag of truce or coming and going merchant and fishing vessels being given messages to carry, or having representatives put aboard to carry the messages in person. When Shannon was shadowing USS Chesapeake in Boston harbour, Captain Broke of the Shannon made sure that American sailors from captured prizes sent in their boats back to Boston carried an oral message to Lawrence of the Chesapeake inviting him to come out for a frigate duel. In the end Broke made his famous written invitation, delivered by sending on his own boats under a flag of truce, with the letter carried by an American civilian that Shannon had been holding prisoner but was releasing for the purpose. This was the way of doing things until well into WW2 - at Mers-el-Kébir the negotations between the British and French fleets were done by detaching a destroyer from the British fleet and approaching Mers-el-Kébir under a flag of truce, then sending an officer over to the French flagship by motor launch. Unfortunately the officer chosen had been selected due to his fluency in French and his experience as a naval attaché in Paris and was 'only' a Captain. The French CO took umbrage at being asked to negotiate with an officer below flag rank and required all talks to be conducted via his flag lieutenant, leaving neither of the men doing the negotiations with any actual power to decide on or agree to anything without going back up their chains of command. ==== I know this thread loves some info about military logistics. Some one on ww2aircraft.net has just put up an article from the December 1942 issue of Aviation Weekly, by an Allison rep about maintenance with the American Volunteer Group. Here's the whole thing: https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/threads/american-volunteer-group-maintenance.56118/ And here's the pertinent extract: Tye M. Lett Jr., Allison overseas representative posted:Cannibalism It's telling of how much of these threads I've read that my eyes scanned over "Japanese Army Supply Submarine" and it took me a few seconds to clock how ludicrous that would be in any other context. \/ BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 16:13 on May 23, 2021 |
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May 23, 2021 12:15
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:How did early modern ships even manage to find each other? A lot of the time they simply didn't - finding the enemy relied on predicting their aims and so being able to predict where they were going, and how weather and the need for supplies would affect their movements. This is why you rarely find major actions happening out in the middle of the ocean (that was usually restricted to lone frigates encountering each other by chance). Fleet actions tended to take place near headlands or ports or at key straights and other choke points, because the side pursuing the other will know that if so-and-so wants to get to [place], they have to go near [other place], so I'll hunt for them there. Or they know that if a fleet is at sea it has to return to one of a few ports before too long, so you wait near a prominent landfall or bay while the enemy is storming around the open sea looking for you. Or you lurk near the enemy fleet when it's in port, or at some other key point that it will have to pass once it's out, and the battle comes during the break-out. A full naval fleet would spread over many square miles of sea and have multiple rings of scouting frigates to increase the 'sighting range', with sloops and cutters to both provide more 'eyes' and to carry and relay messages between the outriders and the main fleet. Reports from merchant ships could yield vital intelligence, as well as any other friendly warships which saw anything useful. Rendevous were set up in advance ('meet in such-and-such a position between [x date] and [y date]) and always had a Plan B attached to the orders. As for orders, it was well-appreciated that anything written could take weeks or months to reach its recipient, and any set of orders could be rendered obsolete by changing situations. So orders at high level (such as staff command to flag rank) were extremely general and strategic in nature, essentially laying out what broad goal was required and what political and diplomatic red lines could not be crossed to acheive that. As orders were distributed down the chain, they became more specific but always left a lot of room for adaptation and initiative if those carrying out the orders were going to be working apart from the chain of command. By contrast fleet orders were usually extremely prescriptive due to the limitations of tactical communication which made fleet actions as hard to coordinate as strategic ones. Major naval powers maintained networks of packet boats or advisos whose sole purpose was to swiftly carry orders, documents and personnel between the major command points, and these were augmented by individual warships which would either be given sacks of despatches and mail to carry when they returned home or would, if needed, be detached specifically for such duties. Before Trafalgar, the Combined Fleet's escape from Cadiz was observed by a network of blockading British frigates which were able to quickly pass the word back along a chain of ships via flag signals. It was earlier in the Trafalgar Campaign that things went wrong - Nelson's loose blockage of Toulon (intended to encourage the enemy fleet to come out) ended up with the French being able to get a 27-ship fleet past Nelson's blockade and out the Straights of Gibraltar due to a combination of weather, Nelson wrongly assuming that Villeneuve was heading for Egypt and so heading off in the wrong direction, and (as a result of that) a massive time delay as word was passed from Gibraltar to Nelson (by then near Alexandria) that the French were actually out in the Atlantic. Nelson then chased Villeneuve's path across the Atlantic, to Antigua and then back again, gaining on him time-wise but still a week behind by the time the Combined Fleet was holed up in Cadiz. E: beaten with the good info. BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 22:36 on May 23, 2021 |
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May 23, 2021 22:30
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 19:28 |
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Tomn posted:Plus, decent weather is pretty likely because, well, they're sailing vessels and rely on the weather to move around - I'd have to check because probably there have been a few, but fighting a major naval engagement in the middle of a storm would be rare because of the sheer luck-of-the-draw danger involved, and even without a storm a very strong wind badly restricts options as the ship heeling over would cause the upwind vessels to be unable to fire their lower deck gunports since they'd be right up against or in the water with their available guns by default pointing lower at the water and thus having lower range, while the downwind vessels would be firing their full broadside at a higher angle and thus greater range. And in times of rain or poor visibility, without the ability to see other vessels an admiral's command and control over his own fleet would be badly restricted as well, relying as much as it does on flag signals, which means most commanders would be unlikely to be willing order a major engagement. As such, most naval engagements are likely to occur in conditions of good visibility - at least until the shooting starts and everything is obscured by gunpowder smoke except whoever you're dueling right this moment. The one that comes to mind is the Battle of Cape St Vincent (the 1780 one), which was not only fought through a succession of nasty squalls but most of the action happened at night. It was also an example of an admiral voluntarily giving up the weather gauge, for exactly the reasons you say - Rodney ordered his ships to pass on the Spanish fleet's lee side, which not only blocked their easy escape to harbour but ensured that the Spanish ships could not use their lower deck guns. What's interesting in the matter of speed is a) how low the average daily mileage of sailing warships in the 18th/early 19th century was, even by the standards of the most sluggish and underpowered modern sailing vessels (I've seen similar conclusions to yours - 5knts was a decent average passage speed, regardless of the type of ship) and b) how little the figures increased between 1700 and 1800. The introduction of coppered hulls only led to an average speed increase of something like one knot. But the biggest effect was increasing how fast ships could go in light winds. In heavier winds the limiting factors weren't really the drag of the hull but the stability and seakeeping qualities of the ship. But coppering allowed ships under full sail in light winds to go as quickly as they had previously gone under reefed sails in moderate winds.
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May 24, 2021 15:12
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