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Nebakenezzer posted:I thought your post was very good and interesting, so let me demonstrate this by raising a contrarian pinky at the one bit I disagree with. Actually I should say you might be right about Brit/French tank production, I just want to bring up that mass production was not a total unknown in Europe. In fact, much like in the late 90s outsourcing was seen as something close to literal magic, Fordist style mass production was seen in Europe in the 1920s and '30s as economic magic - something that if mastered could square the circle of economic and material difficulties. Of course, you're right in saying that the actual adoption of all these practices was the key - the Soviets learned them while Germany by in large didn't. This might be a good time to right a factual wrong I inflicted on a previous version of this thread, where I waxed lyrical about Rolls-Royce's 'arts and crafts' production methods - hand-finishing parts to match bearing shells to crankshaft journals, using spanners and delicate human feel rather than mechanical torque wrenches etc. etc. All coming about because I had committed the research sin of not following the trail back to the primary source and assuming that just because it appears in a lot of books and articles it must be true. And, knowing what I know of how Rolls-Royce built its cars in the post-war period, it 'feels' right. As does the anecdote about Packard getting the Merlin blueprints and saying that they can't make them not because the tolerances are too fine but because they are too great. Running my over-enthusiastic and under-researched trap in a thread on a sub-forum of Something Awful in the 2010s is one thing but at the tail end of last year I made the mistake of repeating the 'fact' in print, and via my editor received a polite but very firm letter, written in beautiful cursive writing, from a former test engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment who handed me a slap-down. In short, looking at the numbers makes it impossible for R-R to have built engines this way. By the end of 1941 Packard had built a grand total of 45 V-1650s while Rolls-Royce had built 23,000 Merlins - enough already to make it the second most-produced aero-engine in history up to that point. Nearly all those had been built at R-R's Crewe and Derby plants where, if the myth is to be believed, elfin-like craftsmen rubbed down components with rough leather cloths to lap them together to micron tolerances gauged only by a sensitive fingertip. Over five years R-R averaged production of 18,000 Merlins per year, when in 1935 they built 1000 engines per year. As my correspondent said, Rolls' apprenticeship programme must have been a bigger enterprise than the factory if they could train people to the supposed standards to built that number of engines at that rate! In the end Rolls-Royce in the UK (which, in legend, is a cottage industry) made twice the number of engines that Packard (supposedly a brutal lesson in Yankee Fordist production methods for the stuffy Brits) did, while also dealing with material shortages, bombing raids and workforce shortages. Even with the Merlin designed and built for mass production, the crankshaft's blueprinted tolerance was 0.004 inches, which is a level of precision about half that of a modern automotive engine. It was also a tighter tolerance than the Daimler-Benz 600 series. While I was suckered into the idea of Merlins being assembled without torque-wrenches by sensitive-handed fitters using spanners, the actual Merlin assembly manual not only lists specific torque figures for each fastening but lists different commercially-produced torque wrenches that should be used for various types of bolt and screw (my correspondent here puts an aside that in the 1930s it was, if anything, the Americans who built engines without torque wrenches, because their mass-produced cast iron engines were strong and overbuilt enough to just have everything whacked up with high-power air wrenches...). And it was Packard that had to make announcements to its workforce, threatening fines or dismissal to anyone found just 'nipping up' V-1650 nuts and bolts with a hammer or caught with a file in their tool box (that anecdote is sourced to a 1984 RAeroSoc lecture by C.E. Harrison, former Rolls-Royce engine test engineer). In fact Merlins were, from the very beginning, assembled from mass-produced and closely-toleranced parts. Each engine was built in its entirety by a small team of fitters who, in a break from true Fordist methods, built up the entire engine rather than performing one action per engine, but it was still mass-production from interchangeable parts. In fact a key factor of the Merlin in both its design and its production was that any of the four factories designated to build the engine in the UK (Derby, Crewe, Glasgow and Ford's Manchester works) could supply parts and assemblies to each other, although in practice the Glasgow plant at Hillington was set up as a parts supplier to the other three factories which focussed on assembly. More than half of Rolls-Royce's employees were at Hillington, which was only built in 1937 and featured an almost entirely new-hire semi-skilled workforce. Which again doesn't square with the oft-repeated legend that everything was hand-fettled, blueprinted and balanced on precision scales. And neither does the fact that parts were interchangeable between UK- and US-built engines, or that Rolls-Royce continued to supply service parts and overhaul services for Packard-built engines in preserved warbirds until well into the 1970s. So where does the myth come from? Partly because of Rolls-Royce's very real reputation for exactly that sort of hand-finished craftsmanship on its cars, which was very much the way it also built aero-engines when demand and volumes were low in peacetime. The Kestrel was built that way, and so especially were the 'R' racing engines from which spawned the Merlin and the Griffon. Packard had to have a new set of blueprints not because they had to fundamentally redesign the engine for mass-production but because the existing ones were not drawn to the standard (as in 'accepted standardised format' not 'level of competency') that the American motor industry had long used. R-R blueprints didn't feature dimensions and tolerances on the actual drawings, for instance, but instead numbered each dimension and then the actual value (plus tolerance) was provided in a separate index. And there were no third-angle projections of the parts and assemblies which Packard also expected and required to set up its production line. Packard ended up dismantling their sample Merlin and measuring and drawing each part to its own standards - this is where the myth came from. As an aside, each Packard engine was shipped from the factory with its own toolkit consisting of a set of AF taps and dies, a micrometer, an adjustable wrench, two sets of AF sockets and a set of T-handle nut spanners. When the engines were fitted to an aircraft the toolkit(s) followed the aircraft to its service squadron and this was one reason why Packard-built engines were much more popular with ground crews than 'genuine' Rolls-Royce ones. This was just one of those little indicators of how productive and resource-rich the American war economy was; no-one else could afford to send each engine into service with its own dedicated precision tool kit. Let the record stand corrected! Randomcheese3 posted:The Royal Navy used two main methods of air spotting. The first, 'ship control', saw the spotter giving information on the fall of shot relative to the target. The gunners on the ship could then walk the shells onto the target. The other, 'air control', had the spotter instruct the gunners onto the target, telling them to aim up, down, left or right, and by how far. There was also fire support from Sexton SPGs (and other types no doubt - the source in front of me is dealing with Sword Beach) firing from the open LCTs lying off the beach waiting for the clearance to go ashore. Direction for these was provided by an officer and assisting NCO with the neccessary radio gear stationed on the Navigation Leader boats (usually HDMLs) lying off the beach and using both direct observation, feedback from shore-based spotters and the HDML's radar set. Those Navigation Leaders had a nasty job - they went out to the beaches the night before to mark the entrance to the mineswept zones off the coast (in turn they fixed their position by a mix of radio and visual bearings and a rendevous with an X-craft which had been out on the spot a day already and been lying on the bottom) and then had to lie in a precise spot off the French coast to guide the first wave of assault craft into the beaches. Those HDMLs then spent a month at sea, refuelling and resupplying from depot ships and passing landing craft - the one I'm reading about was then tasked with trudging up and down spotting leaks in the PLUTO pipeline, snaring landing craft and Mulberry harbour elements that broke down or loosed their moorings, and maintaining the patrol line at the edge of the landing zone to stop U- and E-Boats getting in.
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Apr 28, 2020 00:12
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Another advantage of conscription is that you have no shortage of the kinds of talent an all volunteer force has to pay out the ear for to gain as "consultants". Anyone with technical skills or knowledge can be put through basic and then pointed towards the appropriate specialization for their skills.
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Apr 28, 2020 00:43
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BalloonFish posted:Let the record stand corrected! cool thanks. Yet I fear this is only the beginning of the arduous task of correcting the record, do you have the fortitude to repeat yourself again and again for years, every time some one comes back from the gym for the first time in ages to repeat a half-remembered version of your original anecdote? Because that's what its going to take! 
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Apr 28, 2020 00:44
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Valtonen posted:Well, if we start talking of iffy medal of honor citations the twenty MOH’s awarded from wounded knee massacre - mostly just for ”bravery” or ”directing fire” - win the cake.. Sure but that’s true of about 90% of the pre-1900 awards. Kidd’s stands out for coming in an era when the standard was broadly comparable to today’s
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Apr 28, 2020 01:25
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BalloonFish posted:Running my over-enthusiastic and under-researched trap in a thread on a sub-forum of Something Awful in the 2010s is one thing but at the tail end of last year I made the mistake of repeating the 'fact' in print, and via my editor received a polite but very firm letter, written in beautiful cursive writing, from a former test engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment who handed me a slap-down...
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Apr 28, 2020 01:34
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BalloonFish posted:Each engine was built in its entirety by a small team of fitters who, in a break from true Fordist methods, built up the entire engine rather than performing one action per engine, but it was still mass-production from interchangeable parts. Cool correction! So, do you know why production was structured like this? Total assembly line too expensive/fragile/take too long to develop? Some mash of the three? Small teams, even individual constructors of engines you can find today in high-end cars - and usually marketing lets you know because the engine is signed by them. I only know a little about manufacturing, but just for clarity, 'fordist' style mass production is to break all actions down in manufacturing to make them as simple and specialized as possible, and then crank up your production line to as fast as is tenable without burning out your workers/screwing up quality. Henry Ford (who would be the single strangest motherfucker mentioned ITT if this wasn't the milhist thread) was kind of obsessed with it, and his...blanking on the name, River Rouge? Model T factory complex was the apogee of this process. Barges would deliver Iron ore and sand at one end, and out the other end would roll finished model Ts. Everything - glass, steel, etc was manufactured on site. This sort of manufacturing is very capital intensive up front, and if you have quality control problems, you may have warehouses full of flawed products once you figure it out, but the advantage is that the finished product can be made in astonishing numbers very cheaply. The world watched as cars went from 'rich frippery' to something most [north Americans] could afford, which was a pretty jaw dropping chain of events to the world's economies at the time. This was particularly relevant in the 1930s, when European nations who knew the problems of attacking economies much larger than themselves hoped fordist style production could level the playing field. Actually, speaking of Nazi and mass production, Ford was of course a big Hitler fan, and the feeling was mutual, and there are some singularly crazy photos out there of the Nixon-Elvis handshake moment of Ford meeting Hitler. Hitler then of course had a people's car designed by Dr. Porsche, and it was the VW Beetle, etc, etc...... Oh, and Willow Run went through an extended period of under-performance. While the idea of mass producing something with over a million parts was great, a poo poo-ton of mostly self inflicted wounds coming from Henry Ford meant that it wasn't until 1944 that Willow Run was firing on all cylinders. I'd be interested if anybody knows more: it sounds like it went from building sub-components to in late 1941 to total assembly, and then took a year before production started.
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Apr 28, 2020 01:37
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BalloonFish posted:There was also fire support from Sexton SPGs (and other types no doubt - the source in front of me is dealing with Sword Beach) firing from the open LCTs lying off the beach waiting for the clearance to go ashore. Direction for these was provided by an officer and assisting NCO with the neccessary radio gear stationed on the Navigation Leader boats (usually HDMLs) lying off the beach and using both direct observation, feedback from shore-based spotters and the HDML's radar set. The British used Sextons, while the Americans used Priests. They were intended to provide so-called 'drenching fire' on the beachfront, hitting targets relatively close to the waterline. It was only vaguely effective as long as the Navigation Leader boat was present. Off Gold Beach, the boat intended to guide the LCTs carrying the 147th Field Regiment never linked up. As a result, the regiment's SPGs fired on (and landed on) the wrong beaches, hitting La Riviere rather than Le Hamel as originally planned. This may have contributed to the casualties suffered at Le Hamel, but it's hard to tell. Beyond this, you also have the fire laid down by the various gun-armed landing craft offshore - Landing Craft Gun (LCG), Landing Craft (Flak) and the various types of Landing Craft Support (LCS). For Normandy, these were not tied into the systems of fire control used by larger ships, and nor were they guided by navigational leaders like landing craft. Instead, they fired on targets spotted visually by the gunners and crew of the boats. As such, they were relatively ineffective.
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Apr 28, 2020 02:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:Sure but that’s true of about 90% of the pre-1900 awards. Kidd’s stands out for coming in an era when the standard was broadly comparable to today’s Didn't a bunch get it in the ACW for reenlisting? Is that the sort of thing you can call backsies on or maybe slap an asterisk at least
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Apr 28, 2020 02:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:Oh, and Willow Run went through an extended period of under-performance. While the idea of mass producing something with over a million parts was great, a poo poo-ton of mostly self inflicted wounds coming from Henry Ford meant that it wasn't until 1944 that Willow Run was firing on all cylinders. I'd be interested if anybody knows more: it sounds like it went from building sub-components to in late 1941 to total assembly, and then took a year before production started. The pro-Fordist book Arsenal of Democracy goes into great detail on Willow Run. From memory a large part of their problems stemmed from the location Willow Run was built, being too far from decent housing with the wartime travel restrictions. The workers lived outside the factory in unsanitary conditions and by the time someone was trained up for their job they would move on.
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Apr 28, 2020 03:33
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Arsenal of Democracy's a p. solid book. And yeah, one of the biggest problems with Willow Run was how far away it was from everything. Spoiler alert, the old bomber plant is about fifteen minutes from where I grew up, which today is about a half hour drive from downtown Detroit via I-94. Of course the problem was, I-94 didn't exist yet, and the nearest town to Willow Run is Ypsilanti, which was (And somewhat still is) a somewhat small college town vastly overshadowed by Ann Arbor to the west. Edsel Ford, Henry Ford's son, was the main driver behind the bomber plant and at its outset planned for the factory to have up to 100,000 workers, with a planned community called "Bomber City" to house them all. But Bomber City never materialized, and from the outset the factory struggled to get adequate numbers of workers (ultimately peaking ~46K)—since not only was Willow Run in the comparative rear end end of nowhere, but Ford was competing with all the other factories popping up around the Detroit metro area that were recruiting from former auto workers, such as the Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren. Ford ultimately compensated by recruiting workers from the South to come up to Michigan to work at the factory, but the results were... mixed. Unlike the veteran autoworkers who had experience working on assembly lines in industrial environments, most of the new recruits had never even seen a factory like Willow Run before. This meant that workers had to be trained from scratch, and starting out made more mistakes. There was also labor and racial unrest among the workers on the assembly lines, sentiments that were not helped at all by Henry's psychopathic head of 'security', Harry Bennett, and Edsel's death from cancer in 1943 made things even worse. So yeah, there were a lot of problems. IIRC the first plane was supposed to roll off the line in April of '42 (After breaking ground in 1940), but it ended up taking until September. Even then, the quality of the first planes were so poor that they had to be completely rebuilt, and most of the first series of planes Ford ended up making, the B-24E, were used pretty much exclusively for training. It took a while for Willow Run to truly get off the ground, though when it finally did it was able to put out aircraft at a truly staggering pace.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:I don't know specifically about the naval artillery loving up armored units but the BBs were firing on the beaches for quite a while. One of them (Texas I think?) went so far as to flood some fuel bladders on her seeward side to give the ship a few degrees of list, elevate the guns that extra little bit, and get an little bit of range so she could support the advancing troops for an extra day or so. Texas did do this, yes. "USS [i posted:Texas[/i] war diary"] Emphasis added.
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Apr 28, 2020 04:35
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Apr 28, 2020 05:01
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Don't make me post Trump tweets again.
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Apr 28, 2020 05:11
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Milo and POTUS posted:Didn't a bunch get it in the ACW for reenlisting? Is that the sort of thing you can call backsies on or maybe slap an asterisk at least Sorta, that's the 27th Maine. One reason why it seems to have been given out freely during the 19th century is because the modern concept of awards wasn't quite in place yet. Broadly, in USA in the the 18th century there was only one award available, the "Badge of Military Merit," which later evolved into the Purple Heart. Period. (There was one other, the "Fidelity Medallion," but that was only awarded once, as an award given to three soldiers for a specific event.) This award fell out of use after the Revolutionary War ended. During the Civil War the country decided to give regular soldiers and sailors some sort of award for bravery. The one thus created was the "Medal of Honor." It was the only award available. As such, it was often awarded for reasons that seem odd today. For example, as you mentioned, in 1863 the 27th Maine Regiment was guarding Washington DC and was due to disband; the soldiers were asked to remain at their posts for a few more days. About 300 of them did - in return, all of them were awarded the Medal of Honor. It became pretty clear that some sort of "lesser" awards were necessary. After all, giving out 300 of the nation's only and highest award for four days of peaceful guard duty is a bit - off. As such, lower-ranked awards given for different reasons were created.
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Apr 28, 2020 05:12
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Don't make me post Trump tweets again.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:02
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Siivola posted:gently caress off with this bullshit. I didn't want this war.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:20
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:I didn't want this war. Then don't make it! report the dude and/or put him on ignore and move on, don't subject the rest of us to that poo poo just because you hate dumb memes.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:26
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in medieval china how easy is it to sail up a river? Like you read about all these big campaigns moving up and down the river system but I wonder how easy it is to go upstream against the current and how fast you could go, if sails would be practical or if you'd have to use oars.
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Apr 28, 2020 06:40
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On the big rivers, sails and oars are good still. On smaller ones and canals you could see this: As you can see from one water buffalo pulling all that poo poo, it's fairly efficient. If the water was too deep I think they had ropes and they'd walk along the banks. Also pole barges for sure. When it got really rough and you had to get a boat upstream, someone with access to a lot of manpower could decide to brute strength it and tie ropes to a boat and pull it against the current. Horatius Bonar fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Apr 28, 2020 |
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Apr 28, 2020 07:17
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Cessna posted:Sorta, that's the 27th Maine. One reason why it seems to have been given out freely during the 19th century is because the modern concept of awards wasn't quite in place yet. This brings into mind a few questions about awarding medals. Wasn't that for a long a time mostly a thing for officers, up to until the the 1800's? You have the Order of the Garter and most European powers seem to have had multiple ones, Russia especially so. So you might get given a medal of Order such-and-such for various actions, but did these Orders actually exist outside the medals they gave out? Did you have weekly/monthly/annual meetings of the Order of the Garter, of of the Black Eagle in Prussia etc?
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Apr 28, 2020 07:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:I don't know specifically about the naval artillery loving up armored units but the BBs were firing on the beaches for quite a while. One of them (Texas I think?) went so far as to flood some fuel bladders on her seeward side to give the ship a few degrees of list, elevate the guns that extra little bit, and get an little bit of range so she could support the advancing troops for an extra day or so. post facto evaluation of BB gun support performance is that yes it was very nice and loud and big bangs etc but functionally didn't do that much
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Apr 28, 2020 12:41
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:post facto evaluation of BB gun support performance is that yes it was very nice and loud and big bangs etc but functionally didn't do that much Good for morale though. I recall reading accounts of Allied infantry thinking it sounded like cars were being shot over their heads.
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Apr 28, 2020 12:51
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Randomcheese3 posted:The British used Sextons, while the Americans used Priests. They were intended to provide so-called 'drenching fire' on the beachfront, hitting targets relatively close to the waterline. It was only vaguely effective as long as the Navigation Leader boat was present. Off Gold Beach, the boat intended to guide the LCTs carrying the 147th Field Regiment never linked up. As a result, the regiment's SPGs fired on (and landed on) the wrong beaches, hitting La Riviere rather than Le Hamel as originally planned. This may have contributed to the casualties suffered at Le Hamel, but it's hard to tell. Beyond this, you also have the fire laid down by the various gun-armed landing craft offshore - Landing Craft Gun (LCG), Landing Craft (Flak) and the various types of Landing Craft Support (LCS). For Normandy, these were not tied into the systems of fire control used by larger ships, and nor were they guided by navigational leaders like landing craft. Instead, they fired on targets spotted visually by the gunners and crew of the boats. As such, they were relatively ineffective. Interesting - thanks. For completeness, here's the source I was looking at; the recollections of Lieutenant Graham Rouse, commander of Fairmile B Motor Launch ML197 to the BBC: Lt. Graham Rouse posted:The crossing to Normandy on June 5th was without incident. I had a nasty moment when our navigational equipment became subject to jamming, but I remembered the advice on how to overcome this by changing the RF unit. The whole way over I was subject to what I have later learned is something known to all navigators as "DMS" (= Dry Mouth Syndrome). This is caused by the fear of making a navigational mistake resulting in the ship - or, in this case, the whole of S Force - ending up somewhere different from where they are supposed to be.
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Apr 28, 2020 12:58
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Cessna posted:Sorta, that's the 27th Maine. One reason why it seems to have been given out freely during the 19th century is because the modern concept of awards wasn't quite in place yet. So in short, the medal of honor is in reality just a sort of participation award?
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Apr 28, 2020 13:24
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Greggster posted:So in short, the medal of honor is in reality just a sort of participation award? In the ACW? Some were. In the modern era? Most emphatically no, with a couple of odd exceptions like Adm Kidd.
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Apr 28, 2020 13:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:In the ACW? Some were. In the modern era? Most emphatically no, with a couple of odd exceptions like Adm Kidd. Dugout doug managed to snag one, too, but yeah if they weren't that high up, it wasn't at all like that.
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Apr 28, 2020 13:45
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D-Day stuff just reminds me of the poor bastard who took a rocket from an LCI(R) while flying overhead.
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Apr 28, 2020 13:53
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Jobbo_Fett posted:D-Day stuff just reminds me of the poor bastard who took a rocket from an LCI(R) while flying overhead. There’s a pic somewhere of one of those little piper artillery spotter / observation planes the Army used that took a 155mm shell through the wing. I believe over the Rhine during the big buildup and bombardment for the spring 45 crossing. Basically it punched a hole through the wing without detonating and swatted it out of the air. It landed upside down in a field and the pilot and observer walked away.
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Apr 28, 2020 14:03
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gotta love fabric and wood construction
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Apr 28, 2020 14:15
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Ataxerxes posted:This brings into mind a few questions about awarding medals. Wasn't that for a long a time mostly a thing for officers, up to until the the 1800's? You have the Order of the Garter and most European powers seem to have had multiple ones, Russia especially so. So you might get given a medal of Order such-and-such for various actions, but did these Orders actually exist outside the medals they gave out? Did you have weekly/monthly/annual meetings of the Order of the Garter, of of the Black Eagle in Prussia etc? Yes. Awards were seen as the sort of thing that a lord gave to their knights as an award for their bravery, or to show that they were besties, or to show that they had been in a particular battle. The idea that such a thing would be given to a common soldier would be odd, to say the least - unless it was given to someone who had done something amazingly exceptional, like save the sovereign's life, in which case the award would raise their social status so they weren't a common soldier anymore. And, yes, many orders were invites to social groups.
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Apr 28, 2020 15:19
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Greggster posted:So in short, the medal of honor is in reality just a sort of participation award? In 1917 they commissioned a board of generals to review past MoH citations and rescinded most of the dumb ones.
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Apr 28, 2020 15:20
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Those escalating Iron Crosses the Nazis had were pretty funny
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Apr 28, 2020 15:36
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aphid_licker posted:Those escalating Iron Crosses the Nazis had were pretty funny I am up for mocking Nazis at any time, but the idea of escalating grades went back to the Prussians, well before the Nazis came to power. There were "Classes" (1st class, 2nd class) in the Napoleonic wars. That said, the whole "Iron Cross with Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons, Orange Stars, and Green Clovers" thing was a Nazi invention.
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Apr 28, 2020 15:44
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Jobbo_Fett posted:D-Day stuff just reminds me of the poor bastard who took a rocket from an LCI(R) while flying overhead. I worked for a long time on fires integration stuff, and the idea of clearing shots through airspace was always ...contentious. Like, it doubles the time needed to execute a fire mission, but there's always a tiny chance that some poor pilot will occupy exactly the same airspace as an outgoing rocket barrage and get blowed the gently caress up. Artillery guys are of course strongly in favor of the "big sky little bullet" theory, or alternatively, just lets run the tiny risk of you getting blowed up. Also the skies in a high intensity conflict now would be several times more crowded than they were at Normandy, which kind of blows my mind.
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Apr 28, 2020 15:49
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bewbies posted:Artillery guys are of course strongly in favor of the "big sky little bullet" theory I imagine that's connected to them not being the ones in that big sky
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Apr 28, 2020 15:53
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The Russian Imperial Army had 4 classes of St George's medals and then 4 more of St George's crosses. The USSR simplified this nonsense down to only 3 classes of the Order of Glory.
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Apr 28, 2020 16:00
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Cessna posted:I am up for mocking Nazis at any time, but the idea of escalating grades went back to the Prussians, well before the Nazis came to power. There were "Classes" (1st class, 2nd class) in the Napoleonic wars. Yeah I wasn't thinking of EK eins und zwo, I was thinking of the mit Brillanten und Eichenlaub stuff.
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Apr 28, 2020 16:11
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Russians should have let Mendeleyev design the Russian equivalent to Iron Cross but starting from Lithium Cross and continuing in hierarchy through all solid elements until you get to Polonium Cross or whatever.
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Apr 28, 2020 16:24
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aphid_licker posted:Yeah I wasn't thinking of EK eins und zwo, I was thinking of the mit Brillanten und Eichenlaub stuff. I think the creep started with WWI; they introduced the "Grand Cross," then the Grand Cross with Star." It's all downhill from there. Personally I like the "Krzyz Powstania Warszawskiego." During the 1944 Warsaw Uprising the Polish Home Army took captured Iron Crosses, pinned a 1-Zloty coin over the swastika, and stamped it with the Home Army's insignia.  
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Apr 28, 2020 16:31
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Nenonen posted:Russians should have let Mendeleyev design the Russian equivalent to Iron Cross but starting from Lithium Cross and continuing in hierarchy through all solid elements until you get to Polonium Cross or whatever. Hey, doc, I feel dizzy when I wear my Uranium Cross.
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Apr 28, 2020 16:35
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