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Cyrano4747 posted:You'd be amazed how little low-level informants and spies get for their trouble. The Rosenbergs and a bunch of the people who were charged in conjunction with their case were alleged to have gotten pathetic little dribbles of $500 here, a couple thousand there, etc. all adding up to maybe somewhere in the low five-figures for each person. Admittedly those are 1940s dollars, so figure maybe low six-figures today, but not nearly enough to go to the electric chair over. I don't think what they got paid matters as much as what they provided, when it came to their sentencing.
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Oct 15, 2012 18:04
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Depending on the extent to which their systems are hardened, that directed energy weapon could be devastating against warships.
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Oct 27, 2012 11:23
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http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ This link came up on a Goon gaming jabber server. It allows you to get a sense of just how much space nuclear weapons can affect by overlaying blast radii on top of Google Maps. It was rather chilling to discover that a third of my home province can be covered by the largest yield device.
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Feb 12, 2013 13:52
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evil_bunnY posted:If you nerds had listened when the teacher taught about displacement you'd have stuck bubble wrap in the hulls like the cook kids. Or bought the lego kits that came with waterproof hulls and mounting points for small battery powered motors.
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Feb 12, 2013 23:11
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Sjurygg posted:On the bright side, one of the perks of operating the Leo in an Arctic climate is that you can just drape one side of your tent over the engine hull and it'll keep your inside temperature nice and snug all night long even in a crispy winter. I talked to an old Canadian Centurion crewman who said that setting up a sleeping pad over top of the engine compartment at night was a great way to keep warm. That, and the remarkable ease of gunlaying were the his two favourite features of a tank he referred to as an "Agony Wagon" for the hellish torment it put its crew through while driving.
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Jun 5, 2013 02:31
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grover posted:Boeing build 15 YB-17/B-17As, 39 B-17Bs, 38 B-17Cs, and 42 B-17Ds all of which were pre-war early production aircraft the war department was begging congress for, each instantly rendered obsolete when the next version came out. I recall reading these were all relegated to secondary (non-strategic bombing) missions once B-17F/G became available. And yeah, production ramped up considerably once US got involved in the war and decided to strategic bomb Germany into submission. ...Except the strategic bombing campaign didn't really bomb Germany into submission. Germany's war production, the primary target of allied strategic bombing, hit its all-time peak in July 1944 and only really began to fall away once the Reich started to lose territory in the East and West as the allies took it. Arguably, the campaign's greatest accomplishments were to 1) tie up an enormous number of interceptor aircraft and then draw them out to be destroyed, and 2) tie up an enormous number of high-velocity guns (somewhere around 100k of them as I recall) and prevent them from being used to blunt the Russians in the East.
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Jun 11, 2013 00:23
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priznat posted:Sooooo Sikorsky is up to $86million in late penalties with the CH-148 Cyclone contract for the Royal Canadian Air Force. It has been said, and with good reason, that the Canadian Forces would struggle to procure chlamydia in a whorehouse.
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Jun 24, 2013 20:43
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mlmp08 posted:DFAS is quick to take and slow to pay. I've been fortunate in only being shorted by DFAS twice, once to the tune of $250/mo which took about 3 months to fix, and once by about $100/mo which they actually fixed automatically the next month. One of our Soldier's pay got all kinds of hosed up when our CSM put him on a ship transiting from one of the Carolinas to Bahrain, during which time the Soldier's contract ran out. Canada uses PeopleSoft to manage its pay system, and aside from the implementation surrounding this system several years ago from what I have seen there have been relatively few fuckups, but we're also only paying around 90-100k Regular Force and Reserve personnel.
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Jul 10, 2013 11:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well, it kind of was. sonar and surface radar getting the kinks worked out is a huge part of what hosed over the U-Boat fleet in WW2 so badly. There were definitely some water column refraction issues off the coast of Canada during the war that affected SONAR. I don't think those were properly figured out until late 1944.
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Aug 1, 2013 14:47
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Dead Reckoning posted:What sort of swans do they have where you live? Like, what weird-rear end swans or heavy acid have to be involved to look at a giant, wide bodied, swept wing jet fighter with canards and a tail boom thundering across the sky and think I wish the swans that lived where I grew up fit that description. That'd be pretty awesome.
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Aug 31, 2013 00:43
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It's been a bad year for collisions and the like. ATHABASKAN wound up draped over some rocks while under tow from the refit yard in Quebec, and WINNIPEG got rammed by a large deep sea trawler while alongside in Victoria. Both are apparently almost totally repaired; ATHABASKAN's got sea trials starting in a few days.
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Aug 31, 2013 19:17
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Flikken posted:was that the way they were trained AT THAT TIME though? I was told by a DC guy that damage control training and SOP changed drastically after Forrestal and Enterprise. Canada had a serious engine room fire in HMCS KOOTENAY in the 60s that forced us to make some serious changes to how DC was handled. As memory serves, it went from "that's what a few guys in the engine room do" to "that's what everyone loving does until we stop burning/sinking."
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Sep 18, 2013 02:56
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priznat posted:Starfighters had terrible loss rates but a lot of that was using them improperly. They're pretty cool looking. Is that the one pilots and crews nicknamed "Lawn Dart?" If it is that's something I'd sooner not fly, personally.
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Nov 10, 2013 04:20
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FrozenVent posted:I miss when Discovery and History channel aired actual documentaries. Nowadays it's just "After the End", Pawn Stars knock off #46, Mythbuster Knock Off #192 and Canada's Worst Driver... Ok, Canada's Worst Driver is redeemable on account of being funny as poo poo. Don't forget "Ancient Aliens" and other similar bullshit.
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Nov 10, 2013 05:26
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Anyone else see a toilet on a pylon on that Skyraider's wing?
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Nov 10, 2013 14:34
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grover posted:
According to one of my uncles (who was an RCN/RCAF pilot aeons ago) Canadian Sea King crews used to... uh... "refill" boxed lunches with their own additions and then drop them out of the sonar buoy chute while flying over the Soviet SIGINT trawlers usually loitering around Halifax. At least, I hope they were Soviet SIGINT trawlers. Fearless fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Nov 10, 2013 |
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Nov 10, 2013 14:43
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I really hope the whole crew involved took dumps in that before strapping it on.
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grover posted:Way to just spoonfeed enemy spies critical intelligence on fleet nutritional readiness Having eaten a CF issued boxed lunch on many occasions, I can tell you that one filled with excrement is a marked improvement over what they initially contain.
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Nov 10, 2013 15:14
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Snowdens Secret posted:I'm sure 'all-weather' was thrown in there, too. One of the British V bombers, the Valiant, developed serious stress fractures from it being forced into the low-level strike missions that the RAF had it flying. It was taken off of nuclear missions as a result about 10 years after being introduced.
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Nov 11, 2013 02:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:I agree wholeheartedly and think that it's doubly bullshit when the person being honored is still alive. At least Reagan was dead by the time he got his boat, but the GHW Bush? Come the gently caress on. Apparently every hull from CVN-80 onward will perpetuate a WW2 carrier.
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Nov 11, 2013 23:23
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Mortabis posted:We named a sub after Jimmy Carter who was an objectively worse president (hell at least it was a sub so it's out of sight) so meh on the Gerald Ford thing. States would make sense, though to be fair at least the presidents in question had at least some connection to the USN.
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Nov 11, 2013 23:33
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Throatwarbler posted:How could anybody seriously believe there was a "gap" of any kind of ship with the USSR? Didn't the USSR only start really building a navy in the late Brezhnev era? The USSR had pretty consistently maintained a strong submarine service, and had great masses of destroyers and cruisers as well but didn't really contemplate building something analogous to a USN supercarrier until the late 70s or early 80s. That said, the West also fairly consistently overestimated Soviet military might for most of the Cold War (see, for instance, the grossly inflated figures for nuclear weapons in general, and ICBMs in particular). Fearless fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 16:26
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Agean90 posted:You do realize Grad Teton is french for Giant Tit, right? What's more American than big ol' titties?
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Nov 12, 2013 19:08
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quote:During the Apr battle the need for a second MG was felt, as angry little men climbed on the top of the tks and beat on the hatches with fists and rifle butts. One answer was to charge through a mud house, but this was NOT thought to be the real answer, as it increased the shortage of houses already made obvious by zealous gunners. It was thought further that it was better to stop people getting on in the first place. This is beautiful. Military publications have lost something in the past few decades.
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Dec 18, 2013 01:31
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25497013 Mikhail Kalashnikov died today, at the tender age of 94.
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Dec 23, 2013 18:41
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Cyrano4747 posted:Hah, so the East German model then Japan's major political parties prior to WW2 were also literally the Imperial Army and the Imperial Navy, for what it's worth. Military expenditure had so completely consumed the Japanese government that the rival services formed political parties to better ensure that they got the resources they needed.
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Jan 6, 2014 16:03
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More-or-less single party politics backed up by the continued presence via long-term basing of a big loving army owned by a recent occupier and only slightly less recent enemy.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25753040 Further problems with the ballistic missile crowd in the USAF, I gather. That said, my dad's parent's survived the German occupation of the Netherlands. Several of their family members were not so lucky. Oma's family was quite active in the resistance and she lost at least one cousin to the old fake surrender trick that some German troops pulled during the latter days of the Second World War. Opa's family sheltered Jews who were trying to flee continental Europe, or at least stay out of the clutches of the Nazis. Opa and his siblings were always told that the people staying with them were relatives whose homes had been destroyed by bombing-- they never knew who they really were. About 20 years ago, the son of one of the couples that passed through Opa's home contacted him to say thank you and to hopefully let his parents (who were by that point long dead) know that they had survived, had a family and made a very nice life for themselves. There was at least one other couple, but I don't think anyone ever heard from them again. I hope that they made it away and lived a long and happy life together, but we just don't know. Mum's family were farmers in Atlantic Canada. They could have opted to largely remained on the farm as there was an exemption from the draft for farm labour but my great-grandfather was something of a tyrant and by the sounds of things everyone got out as soon as they could. A couple of my great uncles joined the army and saw heavy combat along the Rhine, another was an engineer in the navy, two of my aunts (both of whom were beyond brilliant) did code work for the RCN and the last that served joined the RCAF as a firefighter and did a lot of rescue and recovery work during the Blitz. He went overseas in 1939 not long after having gotten engaged and came back in 1946 to discover that his fiancee had married another man and had children... without bothering to tell him otherwise. He never recovered from the war or that and ended his life in the 60s, with the family spending the next fifty years in denial. We only found out what truly happened a couple of years ago. I had a maternal great grandfather fight at Vimy Ridge in 1917 too, but that's a story for another day.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:poo poo, the military's been spouting lines like that since time immemorial. During the interwar period the loss of three RN battlecruisers at Jutland was closely analyzed to figure out what went wrong and hopefully fix the remaining vessels so that they didn't suffer similar fates. Piss-poor protection over the magazines was found to be a major determining factor, but meaningful armour refits were rejected in the 20s and 30s on the grounds that "enemy shells have no business in British magazines." Mercifully, some of them got refits in the early 40s that largely corrected the issue, but HMS HOOD didn't and... welp.
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Jan 25, 2014 01:39
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The next generation of heavy bombers is going to fly so high, so fast, and have so many guns on it that escorts will be completely unneeded even during daylight attacks! With our new precision bomb sights we can practically put a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet with little collateral damage!
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Sperglord Actual posted:There have been some avowed Maoists running an insurgency in parts of India for a while, if memory serves. There are some in the Himalayas as well. Apparently they use whatever they can get their hands on in terms of weapons, including ancient British muzzle-loaders.
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Jan 25, 2014 06:08
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A couple of days old, but Dassault has been pitching the Rafale to Canada in a pretty aggressive way as a vastly less expensive alternative to the F-35: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/dassault-aviation-ramps-up-cf-18-replacement-pitch-1.2507029 There are also rumblings that elements of the new single-class surface combatant for the RCN will also be based on some of the newer frigates in French service as well, particularly the high use of automation to reduce crew size. Our new oilers are a German design, too. Fearless fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Jan 25, 2014 |
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Jan 25, 2014 14:48
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Nebakenezzer posted:Not surprising. As a cost saving measure in the 90s, the Liberals closed the naval architecture office, so Canada lost the ability to design new naval vessels. That and the restrictions on American arms exports has forced the RCN to look elsewhere for its needs. The recent FELEX program was affected by that I think.
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Jan 25, 2014 16:36
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fuf posted:drat that's a weird one. I didn't know POWs could join the Foreign Legion after the war. I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the post-war Legion had a lot of former Wehrmacht and SS members in it, though I can't verify that to a certainty.
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Jan 26, 2014 16:25
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ProfessorCurly posted:
My grandfather grew up in occupied Holland and remembers very clearly walking down a road with a friend while a German convoy passed, mostly carrying looted goods. All along the side of the road were remains of other convoys that had been strafed over the preceding few days, including earlier that morning. Sure enough, as they were shuffling along they heard the drone of aircraft engines and all hell broke loose as everyone dove for the ditches or ran like hell. Opa and his friend dove into a ditch and wound up landing in what had presumably been a couple of German soldiers until something powerful had more or less turned them to pulp. He would have been about 13 at the time. My great uncle was about the same age when he snuck off to watch the Canadians assault a German radar emplacement not far from where he grew up. He watched a rather odd looking tank towing a trailer roll up to the trench works occupied by the Germans and saw a massive gout of flame shoot from its front. It was a flamethrower, and he has told me that after hearing a couple of dozen Germans burn to death that he cannot bring himself to hate them. He and his family suffered during the war, but so did those men and as far as he is concerned hate is what helped bring about that whole mess in the first place. On the subject of myths of the Second World War, this video came up earlier in the thread and is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Clz27nghIg What shocked me is the notion that at the start of Barbarossa a massive tank battle took place that far eclipsed Kursk in terms of raw numbers, and yet not a thing has been written of it. Fearless fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 01:01
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FrozenVent posted:"First to Fire" might be my new favorite military motto. I've seen "It flies, it dies" on Canadian AD unit shirts. They're real popular in air bases like Greenwood.
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Feb 17, 2014 00:27
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Beardless posted:Berlin Wall hell, I was born a few months after Desert Storm. Desert Storm happened when I was in Grade 2 or 3.
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Feb 17, 2014 00:33
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Nebakenezzer posted:Now here is a dumb question: is the Blackbird black naturally, thanks to its Titanium alloy? Or is it painted black? Paint. Titanium is normally a pale silver, as i recall.
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Mar 2, 2014 19:55
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VikingSkull posted:Nope, the scariest is North Korea. Those motherfuckers are gonna use one one of these days. The thing that worries me about North Korea is that I doubt they really understand the kind of devastation that comes with a nuclear weapon-- for their target, or themselves.
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Mar 6, 2014 03:26
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It probably has less meaning to someone that isn't Canadian, but Vimy Ridge near Arras is well worth a visit. There are preserved trenchworks up there as well as the monument, war cemeteries and dozens of other things to do. It's also unearthly quiet.
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Apr 2, 2014 11:21
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I saw today that the US Army maintains a few ships for transport use, namely its Theater Support Vessel program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAV_Spearhead_(TSV-X1)). Knowing how territorial the various services are, how does the USN tolerate this, and who provides the crews?
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Apr 10, 2014 15:07
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Pretty sure that the main selling point of the Zumwalt class was its gun system and fire support capabilities (and capacity for upgrades to things like lasers and rail guns).
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Apr 14, 2014 12:42
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Snowdens Secret posted:Considering Lyndon "Jumbo" Johnson's propensities for public urination, philandering and often very literal dick-swinging, naming an extra-large surface naval combatant of dubious value after him is hilariously apt. Hopefully the poor cruiser has a better service record than LBJ did. Why was Enterprise the worst billet? Was she especially horrific to maintain?
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Apr 14, 2014 19:25
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