The Spielberg WWII Cinematic Universe

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 27, 2024 10:08

Madurai posted:

I'm sad they don't have the veteran interviews at the start, but I can understand why.

It's kind of refreshing to see early-model B-17s--I wonder when the changeover to the -G will happen.

Also: day fighter Ju-88's?

1944, they were throwing everything up in the air.

Adbot · # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:37

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 27, 2024 13:28

Open Source Idiom posted:

This show is 10000% selling itself on Austin Butler's matinee idol vibe. I mean, those opening credits alone...

He's a handsome devil with hair to match.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 27, 2024 23:06

joepinetree posted:

Reading around the reviews online, I think Allan Sepinwall is the take that is closest to mine. The thing he says about you being able to describe every character in a single sentence is true.

BoB was no different two episodes in. Most of the characters had barely had a word said other than banter.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 29, 2024 11:52

XYZAB posted:

I thought that one crew chief was going to set those kids on fire by accident what with the fast and loose gasoline pouring and little girl wearing what looked like a burlap sack.

As was the style at the time.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 30, 2024 02:07

BIG HEADLINE posted:

Actually, in this instance I believe the guy is a German but all the women in the village come out of the woodwork to harvest the parachute silk before the Home Guard comes and scare the poo poo out of him because they all have knives and scissors.

I unfortunately can't remember the title of the movie either.

Hope and Glory?

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 30, 2024 03:27

I can't find anything that would have a reason for a drain hole to be aft of the DF loop, or any emergancy rope. Could be a pull cord maybe for the forward hatch. Never seen one before.

quote:

We saw the Tuskegee Airmen in some of the trailers

We know they didn't get their mustangs until june 1944, and all the long range escorts they did were with the 15th out of Italy. So who knows they fit in, they very much weren't welcome in the 8th or England.

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Jan 30, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 31, 2024 06:13

Arc Hammer posted:

Just finished the series this evening. Very entertaining and of course when a German tank shows up in Africa it's an M60. Some things never change.

WW2 Movies using the wrong tanks dressed up as the right tanks is dying art. A bridge Too Far using Landrovers and Volkswagens with plastic shells on them should be the gold standard until the end of time.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Jan 31, 2024 15:17

Arc Hammer posted:

It'll always be the T(iger)-34s from Kelly's Heroes for me, love it whenever those show up.

But really, I was happy to see a Patton in Rogue Heroes because it reminded me of Patton where all the tanks are played by Pattons regardless of whose Patton they're Patton-ing.

So many German T-34s in some of the Yugoslav movie footage in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWWLM3xOi9Q

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 1, 2024 06:00

Arc Hammer posted:

I wonder if any of the Spanish Buchons will make an appearance as 109s intercepting the bombers. It would be nice.

Can't be many of those suckers flying around, there was only 6 in 2016

George H.W. oval office posted:

Has anyone read the source material book this is based on? The show just feels so disjointed and quick.

I have both the ebook and the audiobook and i can't get either in the rotation, something better always wins out. The audiobook is 25 hours, which i imagine is a lot of technical stuff and history dumps

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 1, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 1, 2024 13:28

Remember when Peter Jackson was going to get Weta and the Wanaka warbird restoration guys to build a full size Lancaster for a Dambusters movie? And it got kiboshed because the commander called his dog the N word

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 1, 2024 14:43

Batcat posted:

Throttling up the engines on the left side pushes the nose back over to the right so at that point he's fighting the wind and his own aircraft to keep the side-slip going. The whole sequence isn't great, he doesn't even straighten up as he crosses the threshold, just bounces the thing down at a 45 degree angle but since we now know the landing gear on a B-17 can survive smashing into the edge of a cliff I suppose it's fine.

Yeah it's all over the place, I found it hard going at times it's just 500 pages of who did what and when, if there is a narrative thread in there it's with the senior command's politics and their reactions to events. There are some incredible individual stories in there but most of them don't amount to more than a page or two and we haven't seen any in the show so far.

I found this the other day when i was curious about the crosswind landing scene. Cool to read a forum post from someone who flew one.

"The B-17 does not like crosswinds. When it was designed in the 1930's, most airfields were big squares. Or they have 5 or 6 runways. So you could always land pretty close into the wind. There are fewer and fewer airports with crosswind runways these days. We are lucky because we have 16/34 and 09/27 runways at Meacham. That big tail and relatively small rudder give it about a 12MPH crosswind component. To make up for that you have to carry upwind engine in strong crosswinds to help keep the nose straight. Once you touch you don't pull all the power off right away or you just might head for the weeds. It is a ballet of rudder, aileron, upwind engine, and finally (after you have weight on the wheels) brakes that will get you stopped. " - Patrick Mahaffey

http://www.warbirdinformationexchange.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=27390&start=15

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 2, 2024 05:59

Arc Hammer posted:

So it wasn't the Black Thursday Raid yet, but it was the first Regensburg-Schweinfurt Raid on August 17, which was nearly as bad.

They kept calling out FW-190s attacking them and at one point I did see a 190 in the air, so they haven't been wrongly identifying Messerschmitts (though most of the enemy fighters are 109s from what I saw). However it looked like a long-nosed FW-190D version, which would be about a year too early for the raid.

Nitpicking though, because this was definitely the best episode so far. Putting it almost entirely in the air certainly helped.

For sure the A5's firing the rockets at 16:06

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 06:07 on Feb 2, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 2, 2024 06:29

I looked, but i couldn't find it.

e: if it's the one at 25:37 i think it's a 109, just reallly stretched out I can't even frame by frame grab it

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Feb 2, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 2, 2024 11:08

Open Source Idiom posted:

There's just something so loving funny about Austin Butler's look in this. The opening credits always make me burst out laughing.

He's got a purdy mouth

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 2, 2024 15:41

BigglesSWE posted:

Ball turret worst turret confirmed.

The death of Curtis (Barry K) was a real shame. Quite effective in how they set it up, having him almost make it, but then I guess something snagged the front of his fort, pushing it into the ground at an impossible angle. RIP to a real one.

The B-24 loving Liberator ball turret could be retracted, to reduce drag and so it could take off/land. It had cute little slots for the guns to slide through. Plenty of these badboys made the trip to Germany too. They built so many of these during the war, they should be on the 100 dollar bill.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 2, 2024 15:46

BigglesSWE posted:

B-24s were hella neat but apparently less resilient to damage so crews tended to prefer the Fortresses.

They were also slower, and more expensive. They flew a gently caress load out of africa and italy with the 15th.

E: actually not slower, just harder to fly in formation

They made a dent in the U-Boat fleet, that's for drat sure.

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Feb 2, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 3, 2024 02:37

BigglesSWE posted:

Yeah the 8th had it rough. The Combined Bomber Offensive was a truly spectacular thing: spectacularly bloody, materially costly and something that could only really be feasible with the full might of the American wartime industry. Apparently the B-24, a stupendously modern and expensive airframe, was sometimes produced at a rate of one per hour. That is *insane* and I wish I could�ve gotten similar numbers in HOI4.

Air crew are obviously less replaceable, but even here the allies had an advantage, something they intentionally pushed on in �44. I�m guessing the show will get there eventually.

I hope we get to see some Liberators, because they copped a pounding with flak, not being able to fly as high as the Forts

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 5, 2024 01:54

Bulky Bartokomous posted:

I remember in my hayday of 90s flight sims (SWOTL will always be #1 in my heart) reading in PC gamer about dudes that played the Das Boot PC game in real-time. They'd do like 3-day long patrols and take naps during it, so these run times aren't a surprise to me at all.

That sounds like the subsim nerds playing Silent Hunter 3, doing math and jumping out of their chair half asleep when your watch guy is yelling "ALARM!"

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 5, 2024 12:46

mllaneza posted:

It was still the best SH3 experience. I just checked; the tracker is still up so I'm still seeding the GWX full install torrent.

Onealex still does the job, takes 5 mins to install. The mod runner is Ukrainian though and he's been dark for some time.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 5, 2024 23:20

Cojawfee posted:

He says it in the scene. He didn't want to sit out the rest of the war in a pow camp if there was a way for him to make it to Africa.

They'd have a pretty good chance of being picked up by allied shipping in the med during late 43. But why risk a water landing when you are still flying.

Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Feb 5, 2024

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 6, 2024 04:43

Open Source Idiom posted:

Speaking of repetition, I thought the second episode was really bad about using voiceover to underline the differences between US and UK bombing approaches. They have that scene with the fight, whose conflict is largely premised on this tension, and then have Anthony Boyle summarize the conflict again immediately after it's all over. I thought that was really lame.

They didn't really go into the reasons why beyond it's suicide. The british had a lot of bomber types, the war office threw any design with wings past the prototype stage. But only had two bombers that could reach 20 thousand feet, and they weren't exactly fast or particulary durable.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 6, 2024 05:33

Cojawfee posted:

I do think it's funny that they act like the bomb sight is this super amazing device when it really wasn't. Yeah it lets you drop bombs on the target, but it wasn't as accurate as they acted like it was, which is why they were still pretty much carpet bombing. It could account for the plane's speed, and the wind at altitude, and the side slip and all that, but it couldn't account for any winds between the plane and the ground. They were still dropping dumb bombs from tens of thousands of feet and had to hope that some of the bombs dropped in the formation landed on the actual target. It got the job done, but Norden advertised it like it could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel.

The germans already had the plans for the Norden and recovered sights from bomber crashes, they just never used it for various reasons. But it was more accurate than theirs.
it was g-14 classified for most of the war

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 6, 2024 06:14

George H.W. oval office posted:

Being a combat videographer in a b17 sounds absolutely horrifying. Like at least kinda in ground combat you can duck and hide somewhat

If you watch the combat cameraman news reel from Operation Tidal Wave that was basically ground combat they were so low. It makes it sound like a feat of absolute success. When it was a clusterfuck of epic proportions with 50+ bombers lost, and achieved the opposite effect desired with them increasing the fuel production because they rebuilt the refineries better.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 8, 2024 05:09

feedmegin posted:

Turns out it's suicide no matter what you're in if you don't have fighter escort all the way in, though. Pretty sure the RAF would be doing the same thing if they had B-17s.

The Lancaster also carried a rather larger bomb load (at the expense of defensive armament, which as we have just been seeing in this series only gets you so far) - about twice that of a B17. They were the backup option for carrying nukes to Japan if the B-29 hadn't panned out for that reason.

Edit: also in the show's defence, they don't say the Norden bombsight is super amazing tech, just that the USAAF thinks it is. Which is absolutely true, they wouldn't even share it with the RAF.

I dunno, the Brits were notoriously fickle about American planes. They had plenty and either chose not to use them in any great numbers, or they did but palmed them off on the Africa theater, navy and coastal defence. They weren't particularly fond of the alison engines or the the american radial engines

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 8, 2024 08:24

MrMojok posted:

WHAT?!?!

They wanted to shoe horn a Merlin into just about everything that came with an Allison because of performance issues, they threw all their eggs in the Bristol basket because of Roy Fedden (regardless of the fact the company was run by feckless idiots.)

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 8, 2024 08:43

Bloody Pom posted:

In their defense, the Centaurus was a ludicrously powerful engine for the time.

Yeah, it helped get Roy Fedden knighted, and then they loving fired him before it entered service.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 8, 2024 11:12

Bloody Pom posted:

The RAF made up for the lack of precision by just making their bombs bigger. :V

And that's not even the biggest one, the high-capacity 12,000-pounder had a filling-to-weight ratio of 80%. Pilots even developed a technique where they'd drop a 1,000-pound bomb immediately beforehand, so that the initial shockwave would detonate the larger bomb in mid-air for an airburst effect.

They still couldn't hit the broadside of a battleship with them

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 9, 2024 04:02

Barry Keoghan was on Hot Ones today, he's very Irish

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 9, 2024 06:20

Did we lose Bucky off screen, wtf? I'm guessing we get a flashback next episode and he's captured.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 9, 2024 07:18

Cojawfee posted:

Bucky was in London. Buck was the one who flew the mission and it seems like his plane went down.

REAL LIFE SPOILERS, NOT FROM THIS EPISODE:

Based on the real history Buck's plane went down and he ends up in a POW camp. Bucky's plane goes down on this next mission and ends up in the same POW camp. Buck is in the POW camp until January 1945, so this we probably won't see him fly a plane in the rest of the show. We'll probably get some episodes of them in the camp. I assume we'll see the bombing campaign from someone else's perspective considering we haven't even seen any Mustangs yet.

the B/C models didn't start operations until December, so we are a couple of months out

Yeah i constantly get them mixed up.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 9, 2024 14:31

Vampire Panties posted:

hey I didnt see this answered specifically in the thread but they armed the bombs by pulling the arming pins. The pins can go back into the fuse, but its dicey. Airfields dont want planes landing with potentially thousands of pounds of armed explosives

So far I like this show a lot

The RAF made the Lancasters fly home with their Grand Slam bombs, because they were so expensive and those could have turned the airfield into fairy dust

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 10, 2024 01:57

Lampsacus posted:

the difference in dates rule because in a depiction of ww2 you get to see a nazi get shot in the face

The German brain knows it's so stupid it can't let the fine motor control save it's life.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 10, 2024 03:56

The National WW2 Museum has a podcast going for the show, 3 episodes out so far. Tommy Hanks is the first episode.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfTt9Iv9fryUbTNMDBHeWQ1D9FxZ7YDKl

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 10, 2024 06:05

Cojawfee posted:

I just realized that the bombing of the Messerschmidt plant was like all the baby Messerschmidts swarming the bombers for attacking their mother. Really makes u think.

Kurt Tank probably leaked the location to the allies.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 10, 2024 22:42

feedmegin posted:

I know this show doesn't show the RAF in the best light but this still seems a bit harsh.

Leave the RAF alone, they are happy shooting .303 at armour plating. It'll work eventually.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 11, 2024 08:33

D-Pad posted:

Am I reading that last bit correctly that the Americans lost 41 bombers and 28 fighters and the Germans lost 208 fighters? Why such a big difference?

Germans were sending everyone up, by 1944 their pilot training was a joke and by november they had more planes than pilots. The escorts did their job too, and probably hit a shitload on the ground.

People tend to forget they were fighting a two front war, and the Luftwaffe was having a oval office of a time on the Eastern front too.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 12, 2024 06:30

That plane didn't get delivered until Feb 1945, so D-Day is out.

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 12, 2024 07:12

Interestingly B-17 G 48824 was a Pathfinder aircraft from the factory. It had a radar dome where the bottom turret should have been.
https://100thbg.com/aircraft/?aircraft_id=10090

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 12, 2024 14:56

They probably need 363 days maintenance for every airshow they do.

Adbot · # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:37

Stegosnaurlax · # ¿ Feb 13, 2024 01:08

Batcat posted:

Sally B is a regular on the airshow circuit and gets used for filming pretty often but as far as I can find out was only used for some promotional images and maybe a single fly-by, which is absolutely crazy to me because if you don't give a poo poo which model of B-17 you're featuring why not use the real thing? At least a few B-17F's were fitted with the chin turret so it's not that glaringly inaccurate, they even removed it for filming Memphis Belle. I find it hard to believe they couldn't have got hold of her for a few days instead of loving about animating this:

The show has been better the last couple of weeks but the problems are still there, maybe fleshing out the characters a bit more could have been done from the start instead of ramming it all into episode 4, it was an obvious budget saving episode though, those will always be a thing.

We're not going to see any B-24s when the shift to Italy happens, are we?

According to the records, the first G the 100th got was in October 43, still hadn't flown a mission until November when it's Pilot, Co-Pilot and Navigator took two nurses on a joyride and crashed it into farm buildings.

https://b17flyingfortress.de/en/b17/42-31035-hang-the-expense/