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PittTheElder posted:Having some spin being good is somewhat obvious, gyroscopic stabilization is the whole point of rifling to begin with; it seems all but certain any gun/projectile designer would have been aware of this. The problem is that as projectile length:diameter increases the spin rate needed to gyroscopically stabilize it becomes higher, and as long rod penetrators want to be all length and no width you’d have to spin them at impractically high rates for stabilization. The slight spin rate imparted by their fins doesn’t stabilize them gyroscopically, it lets them rotate enough so that any aerodynamic asymmetries are rendered symmetrical to the flight path and won’t lead to a constant deviation.
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Jan 11, 2021 21:31
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I'm reading today that Soviet troops were provided with 2,4-Dinitrophenol tablets in WWII in order to "keep warm." This is a substance that, in addition to being a militarily useful high explosive, was sold as a diet pill in the 1920s. And it actually does make people lose weight, but it does so in a horrifically unsafe fashion: by uncoupling oxidative phosphorylation and inhibiting the function of your cellular mitochrondria. Basically your metabolism becomes less efficient, and you need to burn more calories to, well, live. So your body temperature goes up, and you feel warmer. Trouble is that sometimes your body temperature goes up too much and you die. It also caused cataracts, organ failure, all sorts of bad things. And ultimately, side effects aside, this seems like a dumb thing to give soldiers because while they might feel warmer now you also need to feed them more. And while I say that I'm reading this today, I'm reading it in a source that's really untrustworthy in general: https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/drug-russians-took-beat-nazis/ And I see some references to the practice in medical literature, but they only describe it anecdotally. Is there any real evidence that this was a Soviet Army practice or is this just mil-UL bullshit?
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Mar 4, 2021 18:20
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aphid_licker posted:Yeah the references seem to all point to this 1986 article that you probably refer to and that I can't seem to find a full text of rn: https://europepmc.org/article/med/3788046 One of the references I saw that pointed to that article even specifically stated it the reference to the practice was anecdotal: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550200/ quote:After 1938, medical prescription of DNP stopped and cases of poisoning due to medical intake were no longer reported, but case reports of deaths associated with the ingestion of DNP still emerged [14, 15]. It is anecdotally reported to have been prescribed to the Russian soldiers during World War II to keep them warm [16]. 16 is that 1986 article. So right now I'm inclined heavily towards "Bullshit!"
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Mar 4, 2021 19:29
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:that risk is hardly unique to the pontoon—it applies equally if not more so to any large troopship, of which the QM happens to be an exceptionally large example. And even to ships carrying POWs torpedoed by submarines from the nation the POWs are from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jun%27y%C5%8D_Maru
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Apr 29, 2021 15:27
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Cessna posted:The Vietnamese claim more were shot down than USAF records support (17 is the most reported number v. 34 claimed by North Vietnam) but it's hard to blame them, such things are notoriously hard to document. If they claim they shot down only double what they actually did, that's probably a pretty modest overestimate.
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May 4, 2021 04:01
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karoshi posted:e: Brussels is full of European bureaucrats, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Just leave Bruges alone, please. And pay for Cantillon and 3Fonteinen to relocate.
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May 4, 2021 19:47
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BalloonFish posted:..only to find that somewhere along the chain the item number had been messed up and what was actually being delivered was a large refrigerator. poo poo like that always reminds me of the guy who ordered a light bulb and got 7-ton anchor https://apnews.com/article/109da053cbc45f6c2d3d28647e6e5416
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May 11, 2021 17:06
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LRADIKAL posted:They're pretty cool, but you have to tack a bunch of electronics on to integrate them, You absolutely do not. Mechanical integrators were a fundamental part of the analog gunfire control systems of the time. The ones on the Iowas were good enough that they weren’t even touched during the refit. https://youtu.be/GZI-PydfsQs
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Jun 1, 2021 16:13
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Bagheera posted:An earlier iteration of the thread took time to laugh about Midway, the 2019 war film directed by...Roland Emmerich. The director famous for such stunningly accurate war films as Independence Day and The Patriot. I went into this expecting all the pre-Shattered Sword myths and was pleasantly surprised.
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Jun 2, 2021 15:54
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quote:See that Ticonderoga in the front of the fleet? She has torpedoes. A direct impact to the sides won’t do much but if the torpedoes run deep, and explode under the battleship, it will do some damage and could penetrate the keel. That will damage or even destroy machinery. I've wondered this a lot and I've never found the answer to it: Do ASW torpedoes like the Mk46/Mk50 even have the capability to engage surface targets?
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Jun 3, 2021 17:45
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Uncle Enzo posted:Yeah, it really seems like that would be a suuuuper basic thing to cover. Like a really basic oversight, especially seeing as torpedoes are historically the way for smaller vessels to meaningfully engage larger ones. Those smaller vessels using torpedoes to engage surface vessels were using big torpedoes, not torpedoes designed to kill submarines where the water pressure will do most of the work and hence only carry a dinky little 40-kg warhead. The torpedoes carried by WWII PT boats carried warheads 4-5 times as large and modern ASW torps. Sonarwise, trying to track a surface target with active sonar is very different than trying to track a submerged target, since by definition there’s a big impedance mismatch that results in reflection, so it’s definitely not a given that you’d design what is an antisubmarine weapon with the capability to engage surface target, pick it out from the waves, etc. Any situation where you’d be engaging a surface target with a Mk46 is pretty contrived. And anyone trying to kill a submarine that manages to drive it to the surface is going to be pretty happy with that state of affairs so surfacing as means of defeating a Mk46 or a Stingray is not going to be a winner.
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Jun 4, 2021 02:46
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Kemper Boyd posted:Then again, recorded forums history. It’s also hardly classified that various SAMs have a surface-attack mode.
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Jun 4, 2021 13:23
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aphid_licker posted:Can they hit something that close? Ie do they do the crazy cold start thing where they just barely jack-in-the-box out of the launcher and then point themselves in the direction where they wanna be going? How far away was the Saratoga from the Turkish destroyer it blew the poo poo out of with Sea Sparrows? According to the JAG report first missile was fired at 0004:41 and impacted at 0004:58. I can't make out enough detail on this chart to see what the distance is but perhaps someone here more familiar with the format could tell?  Cessna posted:Wouldn't the bridge be armored? Depends. Like, in the middle of the bridge there's the conning tower, and if you were expecting action you'd be in there and closed up and behind something like 20" of armor. But if you just poofed into existence a mile away from an angry DDG you'd be vulnerable for a little bit .
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Jun 4, 2021 18:23
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Is it just me or does this review basically boil down to "war is absolutely immoral and therefore discussions of the relative immorality of modes of warfare are without value" without really addressing that, y'know, everything in the book is wrong? It’s the New Republic, which recently published an article on how PTSD is a bunch of posturing and how Vietnam vets with it were all just bullshitting to protect their white male privilege.
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Jun 6, 2021 13:11
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Nebakenezzer posted:
Yeah. Freddie De Boer’s takedown of it is justifiably brutal. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-tell-me-the-cruelty-is-the-point
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Jun 6, 2021 17:55
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Taerkar posted:By the time those rounds fall to earth they're almost certainly at their terminal velocity, which is going to be far slower than what they're fired at. Might still kill, but the chance of that I would imagine to be rather low until you get to cannon-sized rounds. Terminal velocity's still pretty potent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Dog_(bomb) bewbies posted:one time we had a helicopter drop brass on us and one poor fucker got a casing between his helmet and body armor and wound up having to go back to Germany for a month due to a third degree burn on the back of his neck. My buddy at the range once had a .45 case eject back and lodge right between the right temple of his shooting glasses and the very corner of his eye.
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Jun 14, 2021 03:02
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human garbage bag posted:There's nothing wrong with theories, and with enough evidence theories become accepted as laws. Einstein's general theory of relativity only had evidence to support it appear after he published his theory; that doesn't mean he did a bad thing by publishing before there was physical evidence supporting it. There was a bunch of physical evidence supporting it when he published it. Observing physical evidence is one of the things he did in order to arrive at it. And theories do not grow up to become laws. Theories are an explanation of a diverse set of observed phenomenon as arising from a smaller set of physical laws.
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Jun 15, 2021 18:29
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feedmegin posted:I feel like there may be laws around the gun (and ammunition) The gun would be a Destructive Device but as long as you're just firing solid rounds, not HP or incendiary or AP, you're good to go.
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Jun 20, 2021 20:17
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Raenir Salazar posted:People who don't like their HOA's. 
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Jun 21, 2021 00:01
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Tiger Crazy posted:What was the treatment of wounds and amputations in WWII prior to the availability of penicillin? Sulfonamides. If you’re watching a WWII movie and someone rips open a pouch and sprinkles powder from it on a wound, that’s sulfa. These were the first antibiotics and date back to the thirties. Basically they inhibit folate synthesis, and thereby inhibit bacterial growth by depriving them of this essential nutrient. This is different from penicillin, which disrupts the formation of the bacterial cell wall. So first off, penicillin is more generally effective, in that it kills bacteria rather than just slowing growth. quote:Did they allies notice a increase in recoveries from wounds after it's introduction? Did the Germans rely more on amputations or other medical treatments. The Germans were actually the ones who developed the first sulfonamides. By the time penicillin rolled around there were a number of bugs that had developed some resistance to them. Also, penicillin had a broader spectrum of action, including to some very broad classes of bacteria, like strep and staphylococcus. Also also, about 3% of the population has severe reaction to sulfa, up to and including anaphylactic shock. Life threatening reactions to penicillin are far rarer.
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Jun 25, 2021 00:41
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Perestroika posted:Regarding gun development goals: Wasn't there also a whole series of projects focused around trying to improve hit probability, especially on targets that are only visible for a fraction of a second? Stuff like flechette rounds, stacked bullets, extremely rapid-fire bursts, small-scale grenade launchers? Is that still considered a "problem" to be solved, or were all the prototypes too much of a dead-end? Yes. A number of them, going back to the 1950s. The goal was, as you say, to increase first-round hit probability. All the fancy-rear end stuff mainly came from the ACR program in the 1980s, which wanted double the first-round hit probability over the M16. That's where you got HK's G11 and its fast-as-hell cyclic rate, Steyr's fletchette rifle (which was still just single shot but had a muzzle velocity of like 5000fps), Colt's ACR with stacked bullets, etc. It's not that the prototypes were too much of a dead-end, it's that nothing was able to meet the requirement of doubling the first-roundhit probability of the M16, which is a pretty accurate rifle. This failure in turn led to the OICW and it's fancy air-timed minigrenades. Which also was canceled. When you can get a vehicle mounted weapon to fire those things reliably it seems pretty terrifying, though: https://youtu.be/4UolMYY7QaA?t=71 What about something that really sucks? What are some weapons that were selected, adopted, placed into wide use, and then wound up in the trash pile a short while later?
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Jul 12, 2021 21:57
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the clever feature of "there's a window so your assistant gunner can see when they need to swap mags" didn't help the mag situation but they were so poorly made that probably even if they had been solid the gun would have still had feeding problems. overall a good gun (especially in context!) just not well suited to its environment due to one major design and production flaw. That wasn't even as bad as it got. 18000 of them were made in .30-06, and the manufacturer hosed up the chamber dimensions and the guns just didn't work at all.
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Jul 13, 2021 14:34
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Hardly a fault of the gun or the original design. Oh, definitely true, I'm just saying it probably goes a way towards explaining the reputation. Give a bunch of guns to AEF guys and then when they go to shoot them don't work and they throw them away and pick up anything to replace them, it's going to cement a "that gun sucks" notion.
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Jul 13, 2021 16:19
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PeterCat posted:Kinda funny how the Supreme Court decided that the 1st and 13th Amendments didn't apply when the US entered WW1. We likewise ignored the 3rd Amendment when the US entered WWII. http://volokh.com/2011/10/18/a-historical-violation-of-the-third-amendment/
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Jul 13, 2021 20:08
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SubG posted:This was enough of an issue with WWI aircraft to have spawned countless urban legends about pilots getting the runs from uncombusted castor oil in the engine exhaust. Shitter's full.  Elissimpark posted:Knowing little of airplane engines, or engines in general, that seems a bit Wiley Coyote. What's the reasoning with that? Power:weight. You've got better cooling, the engine itself acts as a flywheel so you don't need to add one to smooth it out, keeps weight down. They were a dead-end but had advantages at the time.
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Jul 20, 2021 16:22
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Looking for a good book about the creation and development of East Germany. Any recommendations?
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Jul 27, 2021 13:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:Naimark is pretty much required reading if you're interested in how the East German state came about, though. That sounds perfect, thanks.
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Jul 28, 2021 00:45
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fartknocker posted:I don’t see why another two months would break them at a time when they were still fully committed to preparing the defense for an eventual invasion and holding back tons of resources solely for that purpose, notably aircraft and fuel. Food. Japan’s rice crop in 1945 was bad, and anti-shipping campaigns had virtually annihilated Japan’s ability to import food and crippled its ability to move it around internally. Even after the surrender, mass starvation was only averted by serious efforts on the part of the occupiers and even then many people were literally beginning to starve, with calorie intakes of roughly 1000/day. Hell, it’s not coincidental that the US effort to mine Japan’s water routes and harbors was called Operation Starvation. Large parts of the population were already beginning to starve in 45, each additional month would have been an additional horror even if we did nothing. We were even seriously talking about using herbicides against the rice fields, holding back only because we figured that those rice crops would become very important during an occupation.
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Aug 7, 2021 15:05
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Museums aren't going to have weapons in usable condition Demolition Man lied to me?
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Aug 19, 2021 00:06
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Am I alone in thinking that while Saving Private Ryan had some amazing special effects it was mostly a bunch of mawkish Hollywood bullshit and was totally eclipsed as a "war movie" by Band of Brothers?
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Aug 25, 2021 23:57
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Argas posted:One of the critical differences between the beaches is that the majority of their DD tanks sank at sea (deployed too far out) at Omaha. But that is one of the reasons things got bogged down. One of my irrationally-irritating movie moments in that film is when Hanks his hiding behind an obstacle that a combat engineer is about to clear to make a path for the tanks, and Hanks says "All the armor is foundering the channel!" How would he know that?
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Aug 26, 2021 02:04
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Cessna posted:One of the best descriptions I've heard is that the book is told from the perspective of an admiring child, not a historian. I'm fortunate enough to have met a number of those guys at various points. Bill Guarnere, Babe Heffron, Buck Compton, Don Malarkey, and a few others. My sister used to see Babe on the bus in Philly and he'd still get up and give his seat to women. Bill in particular was a riot, thick South Philly accent and everything; my buddy photographed him for a book on soldiers' tattoos. I mean, Buck Compton played football in the Rose Bowl, played on the same baseball team as Jackie Robinson, volunteered for the paratroopers, jumped into France and Holland, got wounded, then after the war he turned down an offer to be a pro baseball player and became a cop, went to law school at night, become a lawyer, became a prosecutor, put away the guy who assassinated RFK, became a judge, and he and his wife adopted two kids and had grandkids. It's difficult to *not* be an admiring child when you meet folks like that. Unrelated: https://twitter.com/LaocoonofTroy/status/1430866692964589573
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Aug 26, 2021 15:59
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Unreal_One posted:I mean, it's also because it's an alpha emitter, which is extremely damaging as long as you don't have something that can block it (like, say, skin) in the way. Even a milligram left in the body would be a significant danger. It wasn’t so much that they pumped his stomach. It’s that since he was the expert in plutonium chemistry it was his job to recover as much plutonium as possible from what they pumped out of his stomach. (Don Mastick was the guy in question.)
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Sep 2, 2021 04:33
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Cessna posted:TCs in my day would wear a flak jacket and a comm helmet. The comm helmet was/is useless for protection, Including protection from the press.  (Image searching that fed me an article on that whole debacle which I'd never seen before:) https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/dukakis-and-the-tank-099119/
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Sep 13, 2021 19:32
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bewbies posted:I always wondered why the hell they didn't adopt something like a hockey helmet, which was WAY more comfortable and provided much better protection for all those times you bang your head on stuff (which for me was pretty frequently). Didn't Delta and other specops units specifically use Pro-Tec hockey helmets?
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Sep 14, 2021 15:33
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quote:They didn't talk about the specifics of how they found him, or gave fake cover stories, but that's how intel works - you don't give away your secrets. But as far as killing the guy, there was no media blackout. Right, but it wasn't "we sent a bunch of fighters on a coordinated long-range mission with the intercept planned out to the minute to kill this guy," it's was "We shot down a couple of bombers and this guy happened to be in one, what a lucky break!" The claim wasn't that we didn't talk about killing him, it's that we didn't talk about it being a planned assassination.
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Sep 22, 2021 15:35
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Libluini posted:. As a rule of thumb, you should always keep a loaded gun at hand at all times, so you can shoot time travelers who suddenly show up and tell you they want to manipulate time for the greater good https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3266#comic
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Sep 23, 2021 14:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Wait, multiple air forces I get it, that was normal at the time, but you're telling me the Army built its own navy? The Luftwaffe had its own army.
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Sep 27, 2021 23:18
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feedmegin posted:I mean this literally was a thing after World War 1 - people had plans for new, shinier, better guns but there are 50 million Lee Enfields and the ammo for them lying around in our warehouses and also it's peacetime and also we're broke so you'd better have a VERY good reason for trying to replace all this poo poo we've already got with, for example, a nice modern semi-automatic rifle instead of bolt action. And the Garand was originally .276 but MacArthur said “we’ve got all this .30-06 lying around in warehouses, redesign it.” Then cue decades of various militaries trying to move towards smaller cartridges and the US saying “No, .308 forever,” and fast-forwards to today where the US is again looking at rounds that are ballistically quite similar to .276z
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Sep 28, 2021 14:20
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Scratch Monkey posted:Wasn't that a thing from Saving Private Ryan? Yes, but it was based on a real occurrence. http://www.americanairmuseum.com/media/35970 quote:After what seemed like an eternity Pratt’s glider slowly rose into the air. Warriner, a member of the 72nd Troop Carrier Squadron, was not aware that the gen-eral’s staff, fearful for his safety, had ordered armor plating installed beneath the general’s jeep and under the pilot’s and copilot’s seats for protection against enemy flak and ground fire. Murphy would not learn of the armor plating until just before takeoff. With this considerable extra weight, plus the additional weight of the jeep radios and extra gasoline, the glider was probably over the safe load limits, but of greater import was the fact that the center of gravity had been altered significantly. Murphy said the glider was overloaded by 1,000 pounds, and handled like a freight train.
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Oct 20, 2021 17:51
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