Lawman 0 posted:

What's the year or time period you guys believe that western europe pulled decisively ahead of the rest of the world in military technology and tactics?

Ensign Expendable posted:

What's so hellish about buying up whatever the US or UK write off?

FrangibleCover posted:

With the notable exception of the CF-18 contract in the early 80s the Canadians have hosed up every single tactical aircraft procurement since the Clunk. All of them. Ask me about one and I'll tell you why it was the wrong choice.

Nebakenezzer posted:

C-17?

FrangibleCover posted:

With the notable exception of the CF-18 contract in the early 80s the Canadians have hosed up every single tactical aircraft procurement since the Clunk. All of them. Ask me about one and I'll tell you why it was the wrong choice.

ChubbyChecker posted:

The Clunk?

ChubbyChecker posted:

The Clunk?

Nebakenezzer posted:

BEFORE the F-18

So just outta curiosity, mr. cover, what's your opinion on the NSS?

Polyakov posted:

This thing

blackmongoose posted:

Sometime between the end of the Great Turkish War and the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_K%C3%BC%C3%A7%C3%BCk_Kaynarca, everyone has their own favorite point at which they feel the Ottomans were officially in decline but most of the choices are in that range.

HEY GUNS posted:

yes their military history is 95% pure failure

edit: but they DO own the Meissen Sword

Lawman 0 posted:

What's the year or time period you guys believe that western europe pulled decisively ahead of the rest of the world in military technology and tactics?

Beamed posted:

We've narrowed it down to about 1396 now, thanks for asking

zoux posted:

Bright as 100 suns at almost 10km - what radiance could you actually stand to look at with the naked eye?

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

hot take: the ottomans are essentially western europeans

Libluini posted:

Now I'm curious, is the Meissen Sword made from porcelain?

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3898006&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

I don't go to GBS but this goon propaganda thread is a pro-click for anyone who enjoys both milhist and The Something Awful Forms

ChubbyChecker posted:

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/wellerstein/status/1170416239707086849

Bright as 100 suns at almost 10km - what radiance could you actually stand to look at with the naked eye? Also, interesting that the second flash is almost a full second post detonation, I though it was fractionally later and required machine detection or film analysis, if you were far enough away that you weren't blinded or dazzled by the first flash you could discern the difference between the first and second flash.

How does radiance scale with yield

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3898006&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

I don't go to GBS but this goon propaganda thread is a pro-click for anyone who enjoys both milhist and The Something Awful Forms

quote:

Siemens four-mirror oscillograph. There we found various models: two-, four-, and six-mirror models. Without them, conducting research on rapidly occurring dynamic processes is impossible. This is a new epoch in the technology of measurements and engineering research. In Moscow, at NII-1 we had only one six-mirror oscillograph for the entire institute. And these Germans had so many!

quote:

For us it was a novelty that the company List, which specialized only in the development and mass-production of multi-pin plug connectors, existed and flourished among the Germans. They had produced hundreds of thousands of connectors for German aircraft and rockets. The concept was very simple, but the engineering and production involved were fundamentally new to us.This innovation developed in response to the extreme complexity of the electrical circuits used in flying vehicles. The connectors enhanced rapid assembly and allowed electrical components to be connected and disconnected reliably during the repair and testing of individual compartments.

The very term shteker, or plug connector, made its way into the Russian language from the Germans after the war. Throughout history much has been transferred to the victors from the vanquished. Only after the war did we come to appreciate what a tremendous technical role such a seemingly simple device as the plug and socket connector was destined to play in aircraft and rocket technology! The Germans spent years developing reliable connectors, and introduced into aircraft and rocket technology the standard List shteker, which had from two to thirty pins.We needed three years to reproduce connectors that were as reliable. However, during our first years of mastering rocket technology they gave us a lot of trouble.

Now our industry produces connectors—both tiny and enormous, airtight, onboard and ground-based—to connect and remotely disconnect more than one hundred electric circuits. Despite all of these achievements, the problem of connector technology remains one of the most complex in the entire world.This is why there are booths at every international aerospace exhibition advertising hundreds of modifications of quick and reliable cable connectors. Dozens of powerful companies in many countries produce them by the millions.

quote:

Much later—in early 1946 as I recall—a German artist came from Erfurt to speak to General Gaydukov, chief of the Institute Nordhausen. He brought a large collection of watercolors and pencil drawings depicting subterranean production activity at Mittelwerk. According to the artist, any photography or filming of the factory and the surrounding areas was forbidden on the threat of death. But the leaders of the A-4 program believed that a creation as great as Mittelwerk should somehow be immortalized.

They had sought out the professional artist and caricaturist, and with the help of the Gestapo, had brought him to the factory to draw the entire primary missile assembly process and do as many sketches as possible in color. He labored diligently, but at times he got so carried away that drawings appeared of prisoners being beaten, executions, and visits to the factory by high-ranking guests such as Ernst Kaltenbrunner himself. We looked intently at these drawings filled with doomed individuals in striped uniforms, among whom were certainly dozens of heroes whose names humankind will never know.

How did he manage to keep these pictures? “Very simply,” he explained. “A special officer of the Gestapo took some pictures from me. But he wasn’t interested in a lot of them. I was supposed to hand them over to the factory management, but I wasn’t able to—and now I would like to offer them as a gift to the Russian command.” General Gaydukov accepted this unexpected gift with gratitude.

Eventually the album of these pictures was sent to Moscow. But as to its whereabouts now, I do not know. Perhaps it is in some archives and someone willmanage to find them.

aphid_licker posted:

The multipin plug thing is really neat / wacky / interesting

Cyrano4747 posted:

That place is still a head gently caress and a half today. Worth a visit if you’re in the neighborhood.

quote:

After a five-minute drive on a cobblestone road going up a hill, we got out of the car on a small square by the main entrance to a three-story villa. The massive doors—plate glass behind ornamental wrought-iron bars—would not give. The Bürgermeister ran off somewhere and brought back an elderly German woman—Frau Storch. “She was a maid here. She knows everything and is prepared to help you.” Frau Storch had the keys. We entered. But where was the German pilot? Suddenly we were almost run over by a little kid about five years old on a tiny bicycle. He turned out to be the pilot’s son. We learned that the villa had another half with a second entrance. Isayev was outraged that part of the residence was still occupied. Rosenplänter [German rocket engineer deemed too unimportant to be included in Operation Paperclip] rapidly muttered something. I announced that the house suited me and let Alfred unload our meager luggage.

The villa was magnificent. The first floor had a large drawing room. It was a library with bookcases made of dark wood. There were deep armchairs in front of an elaborate fireplace and a separate smoking room with ashtrays of varying sizes. Passing from the drawing room through heavy doors, we entered a fragrant garden. There were magnolias, roses, and a pool with a fountain, which for the time being was not functioning.

“Aleksey,” I said, “the fountain—that’s your bailiwick. Let’s get some rest and then you can fix the jet.” Isayev promised he would.

A marble staircase led from the vestibule to the second floor. Here there were four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and two half-baths equipped with various lavatory sanitary facilities—four toilets in all! The floors were covered with large carpets, and the walls were decorated with ornamental rugs and paintings of local landscapes and scenes of nature. Heavy red velvet curtains hung at the wide windows. We entered the largest bedroom.The bed was mahogany and designed to accommodate, as we determined, four. It had snow-white featherbeds instead of blankets. And the ceiling! The ceiling was a mirror. Lying blissfully in bed you could admire yourself in the mirror. Isayev could not contain himself. He threw back the featherbed and plopped onto the bed, sinking just as he was, in dusty boots and full uniform, into the froth of feathery-white bedding. With a leisurely attitude, he pulled out a soft pack of his favorite Byelomorye cigarettes, which were in short supply here, and lit up.

“You know, Boris, it’s really not all that bad in this ‘fascist beast’s den of iniquity.’”

At that moment, alarmed by our long absence, Rosenplänter appeared, accompanied by Frau Storch and the Bürgermeister. Finding Isayev in the bed, they were completely dismayed. “Is Herr Officer very ill? Should we bring a doctor?” We calmed them down and announced that we would take the villa. We asked only that the other half be made available. “We are going to have a lot of guests!”

“Jawohl!” was the response, to which we had already become accustomed. The third floor turned out to be a mansard; Frau Storch said that sometimes the maid or guests spent the night there.

We asked, “Why isn’t there any hot water?”

“Oh, for that you need to go down into the basement and heat up the boiler.”

Isayev could not restrain himself. “Come on, let’s go light it now.”

In the basement there was a large bunker filled with coal. We heated up the boiler and each of us luxuriated in a separate bathroom. Next,wrapped up in fluffy bathrobes (where did they get this stuff?!), we went down into the library and celebrated our new digs over an improvised lunch.

Vorkosigan posted:

Alright, Big Headline said y'all might be interested in the, but MAH WAIFE's grandfather was a Pathfinder Navigator (381st Bomb Group, 535th Squadron, Ridgewell and 91st Bomb Group, 324th Squadron PFF, Bassingbourn). He wrote a big ol' history and got a bunch of buddies to contribute, and even made a CD of the memoirs that I've uploaded here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RPw8UCBj1X3qBYbGNShPYHdEn3u3kRd-

quote:

Russia’s Defense Ministry has declassified a trove of documents relating to a Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact signed 80 years ago which historians say paved the way for the start of World War II.

...

The Defense Ministry said it released the documents “not in chronological order, but in a sequence that will allow viewers to get the most complete picture” of what led to the pact. 

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

There's probably a certain amount of "I have decided that I support my nation, therefore my nation cannot ever be in the wrong" thought processes going on too. There's a term for that kind of thing, I just forget what it is right now. But you see the same kind of thing where e.g. some Americans will pretend that slavery or the abuse and genocide of Native Americans was a good thing. It has no possible impact on your life today, but means that you support a country that did bad things in the past, and that might mean contemplating the bad things it's doing right now, and introspection is hard so let's just pretend that there are no problems. Denial is much easier!