Axeman Jim posted:

And those stop-gap diesel trains? Those were the Intercity 125, probably the greatest modern train this country has ever produced, expected to have a useful life of 50 years or more.

Axeman Jim posted:

Crap British Trains – Back to the 50’s
BR Class 28



This charmless gargoyle of a diesel featured a noisy, unreliable two-stroke engine that was completely unsuitable for railway use and belched smoke like the steam trains it was supposed to replace – but that didn’t stop its manufacturers, Crossley, exporting similar power units to Ireland and Australia and loving up their railways too.

The class 28, bizarrely, featured a two-axle bogie at one end and a three-axle bogie at the other, meaning that what track it was permitted on depended on which direction it was facing. Also, its cab windows had a tendency to fall out of their frames at high speed and hit the driver in the face. The 28 soon found its way to the scrapyard.

Axeman Jim posted:

but that didn’t stop its manufacturers, Crossley, exporting similar power units to Ireland and Australia and loving up their railways too.

wikipedia posted:

The same engine, and some of its derivatives, were used the British Rail Co-Bo (BR Class 28).
Crossley Brothers, like many others at the time, were hoping to expand into railway traction. Their foray was an unmitigated disaster.

wikipedia posted:

The motors burnt oil, had underfed bearings, vibrated and popped heads and pistons. It was only the engineering excellence, and perseverance of Midland Workshops staff that kept the locomotives operating, and performance improving. In the end, over 600 design faults, mainly in the Crossley Engine, were overcome.

mng posted:

The original SA80 was terrible and had a bunch of serious faults. Once they got H&K to work it over, it actually became a viable assault rifle! I am still sad that the EM2 never took off, and I'm not even British. But the US stepped in, said "Adopt the 5.56mm cause we just built the M-16." Nevermind that the original M-16 had it's own major faults that had to be corrected by introducing the M-16A1, and a comic book to help the soldier maintain his new weapon. Whenever you hear a Vietnam vet calling the M-16 an unreliable Mattel toy, they're most likely talking about the first version.

fake edit: Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm going by memory here.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Well, since we're veering into the field of mechanical engineering, why not look at some hilariously failed tank projects? Namely, spherical tanks! They range from "oh god, why would you ever build this" to "oh god, why did you ever build this". http://tankarchives.blogspot.ca/2013/06/spherical-tanks.html





But wait, that's not terrible enough! Why not put an entire attack force inside the tank?



Of course, no one ever built these things. No one but the Germans, that is.





Neither of these possess any armament.

The Central Archives of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation contain all sorts of cool stuff that people sent in, like a tank catapult or rocket skis that would very much find a home in this thread.

Radio Help posted:

For the love of god please do British planes next.

wiki posted:

A year after entering commercial service the Comets began suffering problems, with three of them breaking up during mid-flight in well-publicised accidents. This was later found to be due to catastrophic metal fatigue, not well understood at the time, in the airframes. The Comet was withdrawn from service and extensively tested to discover the cause; the first incident had been incorrectly blamed on adverse weather. Design flaws, including dangerous stresses at the corners of the square windows and installation methodology, were ultimately identified; consequently the Comet was extensively redesigned with oval windows, structural reinforcement and other changes.

Axeman Jim posted:

Why would they need to? Just stick some spikes on them and drive them at the enemy.

stealie72 posted:

They do. And from the same era as the trains, they worked roughly as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Comet

Zereth posted:

I don't have a source, but I heard that the original M16 was presented as not needing to be cleaned, or possibly not needing to be cleaned very often.

This was completely false, but apparently when you hand a rifle to a soldier and tell them they don't need to clean it, they don't clean it. Surprise surprise, the guns experienced severe reliability problems!

Captain Postal posted:

Part of me really wants to say that the germans, either by interception or espionage, found out about this "project watertank" that was going to produce new armored mobile fighting platforms that would defeat trenches, and they thought they should get in on the act without really knowing what project watertank was. And the british might have helped it along with the 1914 equivalent of popular mechanics and the bullshit they produced in the cold war, by "leaking" these design drawings.

DicktheCat posted:

Oh my god, my grandfather has one of those guns! When I was a kid, he told me all about how much it sucked! It is sooooooo loving heavy! Long story short, we actually found the damned thing, and kept it out of novelty. Too rusty to fire, though.


I didn't expect to see something I'd come face-to-face with in this thread!

Edit: He often used it as an example of why French people suck at war. My grandfather is... uh... Special. Yeah.

Phanatic posted:

It's it's still fully-auto it's also a felony to even possess unless it was registered prior to 1986, so don't actually try to sell it to anyone. The ATF are complete killjoys.

DicktheCat posted:

Even if it's not functional? Because this thing will NOT fire. At all. Ever.

You'd have to basically completely remake the thing to fix it.

Phanatic posted:

The ATF are complete killjoys.

Axeman Jim posted:

British Rail Class 31/4

Now the class 31, despite being a noisy, underpowered, overweight and sinfully ugly bucket of rivets was actually very successful. It was fast, easy to maintain, and, (once they'd replaced the original engines with ones that actually worked) very reliable.



Well British Rail weren't going to let that kind of poo poo go on for long, so they set about ruining one of their better diesels in ingenious fashion.

With the demise of steam on BR in the late 1960's it was increasingly pointless to have passenger carriages heated by steam. Most 1950's diesel designs had boilers for this purpose, which were a maintenance headache and increasingly unnecessary. So both coaches and locos were converted to electric heating, usually by tapping some amps from the loco's main generator to feed batteries in the coaches. To offset the loss of traction power this caused, some designs (like the very successful class 47) allowed the driver to temporarily interrupt the train supply when full power was needed, such as when starting or climbing hills. Not so with the class 31.

First up, the genuises who planned the conversion decided that the class 31 needed to be able to generate a massive amount of electrical power, despite being a pathetically underpowered rustbucket to start with. The idea was that Class 31s would be attached to crack expresses before they set off to heat the coaches while the bigger, express locos, hung around the green room snorting coke or whatever it is big express locos do instead of pre-heating their own drat carriages. In the event, this almost never happened. Worse, unlike all the other types, there was no way to turn the ETS system off, so the class 31 lost 500 of its meager 1500Hp permanently, whether it was hauling passenger cars, freight, or just crying in the toilets about the loss of a third of its manhood. The 31/4 was so underpowered that in the 1990s, several unconverted examples were re-built with through ETS wiring (as 31/6), to allow one class 31 to heat the train whilst the other actually pulled it. Embarrassing.

kastein posted:

Pretty much this, iirc they have even charged people with crimes who had defective guns that bump-fired on them unexpectedly.

Devyl posted:

I love obsolete car technology. I hope you all do too

In the fall of 1954, a new revolution in car design was revealed on The Milton Berle Show. Up until this point, car designers thought of the windshield as another piece of glass. However, the 1954 Buick Special changed all of that. The car featured the very first ever "wrap-around" windshield. At the time of the Specials' reveal, wishields were one or two straight pieces of glass with a large pillar to hold up the glass, like so:



While this design worked well to hold up the glass, anyone that has ever driven one of these older cars will tell you that this creates a big blind-spot. When stopping and checking for traffic, you often had to either lean your head over the steering wheel to see past the blind spot, or stop far enough back to watch crossing traffic. Both of these methods had their downfalls, and this blind-spot would often lead to car-related accidents. The windshield of the 1954 Buick Special was unique in the fact that it offered the driver no blind-spot in the area. Here's an example:



This new design not only increased safety, but also helped usher in the era of more fuel-efficient design due to the rounded shape versus the square-like shape of car design before. by the late 50's practically every automobile manufacturer caught on to the idea and sold cars with their versions of the windshield.

Skeleton Ape posted:

Nearly any semiautomatic is capable of bump firing. It's a dumb thing to do and a lot of ranges have rules against it, but it's not illegal.

Krispy Kareem posted:

I guess that fits with other obsolete technology, because as far as I know no automakers use wrap windshields anymore. Maybe they just aren't necessary, but sometime around the mid-1990's the trend moved to flatter windshields.

I always figured it was cost related. Flatter windshields would be easier to ship. But I guess it's possible structural advances improved pillars or shifted them around so they didn't block lines of sight.

MrChips posted:

If anyone's interested, I've got a bunch more stories of bad aircraft and the bad people who designed them

Crankit posted:

I'm think he meant to say slam fire. The only case I'm aware with someone being prosecuted for having a gun that slam fired was a guy who lent it to people so they could enjoy the AK slam firing like a full auto weapon.

Axeman Jim posted:

British Rail Class 370 “APT” – Expensive Crap

By the 1970s, British Rail were the laughing stock of the world railway industry. They had rushed to replace steam with a motley assortment of unsuitable and defective trains, the tracks and stations were underfunded and falling apart and punctuality was literally a national joke. BR decided that it needed to show the world exactly what they were capable of. The APT did exactly that, but not in the way they intended.

The problem that the UK railways have, which other railway systems don’t, is their age. The British built railways first, when passenger numbers were low and trains were slow. So the UK railway system has all kinds of sharp curves and bottlenecks that didn’t bother Victorian trains that would putter around twice a day at 30mph, but are a real loving nuisance when you’re trying to run a 125mph service at 15-minute intervals.

The French had a similar problem, which they solved by building new lines, and giving a Gallic shrug to anyone whose house got demolished or who suddenly had 180mph TGVs blasting along the bottom of their garden all day and night. Well, that might be all good and well for the frightful Frogs, but we’re British, dammit, and we love our countryside too much for all that frightful line-building. (Plus we were broke.) So the challenge was on to find a way of raising speeds on the existing lines.

The solution BR came up with was to design tilting trains that could take curves faster. This had only been tried once before, in Canada, where it was a dismal failure. So this was precisely the sort of project for BR to get its teeth into.

The Advanced Passenger Train (APT) was originally going to be powered by gas turbines, but by the time pre-production trains were built that had changed to electric power. The APT was going to be so advanced that almost every component – power systems, tilt, brakes, controls, everything, was going to be totally new and radical. Not evolution, revolution! And it looked pretty cool in an 80's sports car sort of way:



The rest of BR told the Research division that that was all well and good, but they needed new trains and needed them right now. So they threw together some fast diesel trains to stop the other departments whining and got down to their revolution.

The problem with the APT was that not only was every single component new, it was also untested. In its first year of operation, it failed to complete a single test run without going wrong. The problem was that a different brand new and untested system would go wrong each time. The brakes would seize, the tilt mechanism (which made people feel sick) would jam, the power would go out, the controls would misbehave, each and every time necessitating a humiliating trip back to the depot and the drawing board. Even if the problem was fixed, it proved impossible to work out how each new system talked to each other system and any problems that would arise from the emergent behaviour of so many systems under test at once.

Eventually though, BR were confident enough to let some journalists ride it. And of course it broke down almost instantly on leaving the terminus. The write-ups sealed the APT’s fate, and the programme was abandoned, with billions wasted.

The tilt technology was sold to Fiat, who realised that if they just developed the tilt technology on its own without literally reinventing the wheel they could make it work, and suddenly perfectly functional tilting trains were running all over continental Europe. And in 2002, in one of the biggest ever embarrassments for the British rail industry, Fiat sold tilting “Pendolino” trains back to Britain, which now run, 20 years later, on the same timetables that the APT was supposed to follow.

And those stop-gap diesel trains? Those were the Intercity 125, probably the greatest modern train this country has ever produced, expected to have a useful life of 50 years or more.

Axeman Jim posted:

I am OK posted:

I physically shuddered when I scrolled down. So many memories. All of them horrific.