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Gonna agree that episode 3 felt pretty good, especially compared to the first two. It also showed just how tricky this sort of thing is to shoot. Air combat is by its nature insanely chaotic, and there's very little for the audience to orient themselves around. No landmarks, no front lines, the enemy can and will just come from every direction at once. Also doesn't help that every actor is identifiable only by voice and eyebrows. Considering those limitations, I gotta give them credit for making the air combat feel quite gripping and entertaining. Compare that with e.g. BoB's assault on the artillery position, where they could lay out very clearly where the protagonists were in relation to their objective and enemies, and how they're gonna move from A to B to C. That's a downright luxury in comparison.
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Feb 3, 2024 11:34
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As far as I remember pretty much any cut of Das Boot is solid and worth watching, with the arguable exception of the theatrical cut. That one just cuts it to the bone so hard that it loses quite a bit of impact. The Director's Cut is probably my favourite, sticking with the characters that much longer and feeling the tension and desperation build makes the finale hit all the harder.
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Feb 4, 2024 22:15
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Dr.Radical posted:The speeds here are interesting because it reminds me of reading how a Bf-109 ace (can’t remember his name) said that one of the reasons he got so many kills was that he would wait until the enemy plane filled his windscreen before he’d fire. That makes it all the more insane if he was flying that fast while doing this. Of course he was downed more than once due to debris IIRC that probably would've been Hartmann. But he was in a somewhat different context, going up against relatively lighter planes with less defensive armament on the eastern front. As he told it he preferred ambush tactics, where he would come in from behind in a blind spot, so the relative velocity wouldn't have been quite that fast. Still a decent clip, though. This also illustrates the benefit of the B17s' defensive armament and formation. Against them, such a (relatively) slow and close approach would be near suicidal. Instead, attacking fighters are forced to make their attack runs at much greater speeds and more oblique angles, making it quite a bit less likely for them to land hits. But of course that still only goes so far, especially without escorts.
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Feb 8, 2024 18:26
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Really enjoyed this episode. I felt it really helped that it stuck with particular planes much longer at a time. Gave me a much better structure and feel for the actual sequence of events. That said, I still suffer from acute goon face blindness and cannot tell anybody apart except for captain handsome, captain dickhead, and Crosby.
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Feb 16, 2024 18:05
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At the time, people in charge were also still quite optimistic about the potential effect of strategic bombing, as it was still a fairly new development. Many genuinely believed that any month now the bombing would critically break Germany's ability and/or will to sustain their war effort. Weighed against the prospect of shortening the war by months or even years, the severe losses of the bomber force would have seemed entirely worth it. It wasn't really until after the war that people figured out that a lot of the raids had less effect than hoped for, and that an industrialized nation is quite capable of absorbing that kind of damage while sustaining a war.
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Feb 16, 2024 19:34
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The whole Tuskegee thing is frustrating because in a better show it could have worked quite well. Getting a look at how a raid pans out from the escorts' side of things could be a great complement to the bombers' perspective, and while you're at it you might as well use a unit with historical significance like the Tuskegee. The whole thing with using the bombers as bait for the Luftwaffe could have have been illustrated really well by following the perspective of some fighters as they pounce upon Luftwaffe interceptors at their airfields while a raid is ongoing. But instead of fighter pilots being awesome in the air we get fighter pilots being sad on the ground.
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Mar 9, 2024 11:00
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BIG HEADLINE posted:It didn't help that Hitler considered the 262 a strike aircraft first and foremost and not a fighter, and that really hampered its development and fielding because Messerschmitt then had to put R&D on making a strike fighter instead of just an interceptor. And that they had lost so many of their most experienced pilots by the time it was operational. AND the fact that it ate its own engines wickedly fast. One dumb thing I also love about Luftwaffe R&D is that at one point somebody showed that dive bombing is quite accurate, and from then on out standing orders were to try and cram dive-bombing capability into every loving airframe they could. Yes, even the long-range heavy bomber He-117 that had a similar weight as the B-17. 
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Mar 10, 2024 19:58
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Stegosnaurlax posted:To be fair the British an the Americans did that too. All 4 major players found out pretty early that dedicated dive bombers were siting ducks. The Germans just had the advantage of air superority for the most part. The British were using the Hurricane as a dive bomber in the far east, and apparently it was prety good at it. Oh yeah, in principle it's absolutely a good thing to have a dive bomber design. It's just that perhaps you shouldn't insist that every single plane you design should be able to do it, especially not your 32 ton heavy bomber that's already creaking under the strain of level flight. Mister Bates posted:Ernst Udet, the guy largely responsible for developing the Luftwaffe's dive-bombing strategy and in particular the adoption of the Stuka, was almost shot down by French fighter ace Georges Guynemer in WW1. He had the guy dead to rights, but when he saw the German pilot's guns had jammed Guynemer instead came alongside, saluted, and flew away, in a display of romantic chivalry. Another notable Udet anecdote is that sometime in 41, he was sent over on a diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union to gauge how their air force was coming along compared to the Luftwaffe, in case hostilities broke out. He came back with a pretty realistic and honest assessment along the lines of "yeah they've got a strong program and are pretty much on par with us, or will be soon". That however was politically inconvenient, so Göring just reported that upwards as "Eh, we'll crush them in no time". Whoops, indeed. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Mar 11, 2024 |
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Mar 11, 2024 08:49
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twistedmentat posted:Is this true? Because that's really cool. It is! The angle of the propeller blades (blade pitch) can be varied in a lot of planes. It's usually used a bit like the gears in a car to keep the engine going at optimal rpm. At low throttle you keep the blades near vertical, so they have less drag as they spin and can go faster, while at high throttle you increase the angle to give you greater thrust.  , except of course on top of that there's a whole bunch of complicated aerodynamics that frankly go over my head.
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Mar 11, 2024 20:59
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I've cringed every time I saw the loving "Bucky hugging a flagpole" bit in the intro and now that I've actually seen it in the story was exactly as hollow and overwrought as I'd feared. Liberating a POW camp should've been such an easy emotional slam dunk and yet I've felt basically nothing. 
Perestroika fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Mar 17, 2024 |
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Mar 17, 2024 15:17
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a dingus posted:I've never heard this before. Is there any evidence for it or is this just goon stupids? While the Red Army was an absolute shambles during Barbarossa, it legitimately did improve drastically during the course of the war. Logistics, equipment, training, and doctrine all saw major improvements and by 1944 were easily on par with the other allied powers. One of its crowning achievements was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration, where the Red Army annihilated large parts of the Wehrmacht and recaptured a huge amount of ground in just two months. Importantly, this was not simply a matter of numerical superiority, but also very tight planning, preparation, and coordination that allowed that many troops to advance that quickly over so much area against stiff resistance.
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Mar 19, 2024 12:10
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Cojawfee posted:It's honestly astounding that the "Every important guy in Hitler's inner circle gets their own little army they get to raise up and do stuff with" wasn't a very efficient model of running a military. Even more surprising that culling entire groups when one of the little guys fell out of favor also hindered their efforts. What, you don't think that the Air Force should have its own army which in turn needs its own tanks? How are you supposed to defend your And in order to have the best possible equipment for this specific task, it should probably do its own procurement as well.
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Mar 25, 2024 14:46
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jisforjosh posted:I can't remember the exact lifespan and it may be apocryphal but the USSR found that the average combat lifespan of a T34 was measured days or weeks so just pump them out and don't focus on perfecting manufacturing. Yeah, that's touched on in the Kursk video above. The Soviets realized that the average tank, no matter how good, will only last for a few months of deployment, and only days if not hours of active combat. So they quite correctly realized that there was absolutely no point in e.g. building their engines to last for several years. Similarly, where the Germans constantly hosed with their designs trying to upgrade every single aspect, to the point of loving with individual parts of singular tanks while they were being produced. Meanwhile the Soviets kinda did the opposite and simplified where they could, reducing the number of unique parts and total parts used. The end result may have been somewhat worse, but it also meant that they almost halved the cost of their main tank design over the course of the war.
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Mar 26, 2024 13:13
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Cojawfee posted:We haven't really talked much about WWII movies besides SPR. I really liked Hacksaw Ridge. Mostly for "That's a great war uniform" because I wish he would have said "Thanks, I tried really hard on it." Maybe I should give it another chance, but when I first saw it Hacksaw Ridge didn't do a drat thing for me because it was just too stupidly over the top. It aims for "War is Hell" and shoots right past it into "War is a cartoon". A guy literally picks up a dismembered torso to use as a shield while one-handing his BAR to blast people away. People stand in an orderly line to get mowed down left-to-right. The style of violence is halfway between Rambo (2 and onward) and Tarantino. With that as the backdrop, the main story about the medic earnestly trying to protect his humanity in the face of war just fell completely flat.
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Mar 29, 2024 20:33
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ilmucche posted:In training??? With the technology at the time, taking off and especially landing was still very difficult and risky. Even a fairly minor miscalculation during a landing could easily end up being fatal. It was a tricky thing at the best of times, and would have been far more dangerous when trying to push through new recruits under accelerated timelines while also having to deal with mechanical problems of new plane designs. IIRC even outside of training as many as a third of overall WW2 aircraft losses ended up being due to accidents without enemy action. The Luftwaffe in particular had a lot of losses from accidents towards the end of the war, from a combination of over-engined fighters that were difficult to handle and a rapidly dwindling supply of experienced pilots.
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May 10, 2024 10:04
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