They Laughed At His "Impossible" Tube — Then It Killed Every German Bomber Over The Convoys !
Darkest Docs and war docs
I don't know how much trouble German airplanes caused Allied cargo ships, the I suspect the main threat was from the German submarines. However, it would nice to have something if you had a German airplane bearing down on you. I wonder that pilots would even be able to see something as small as a gernade, but evidently the thing did least stave off a few attacks.
One of my favorite topics. Thought I had pretty well covered it, but he's got a lot of stuff I hadn't heard of.
I'm always amazed at how much heavy metal was produced during WW2. It doesn't seem like we are doing that anymore. We're probably spending more money on making stuff, but our money is only worth one percent of what it was back then, so that's not telling us much. We are building stuff like cars and trucks and trains, but I suspect it's mostly just to replace stuff that's worn out. We are building roads and buildings, but it seems like it's just incremental, we aren't engaged in any ginormous projects.
Somehow Israel got all of enemies generals to all be in the same place at the same time which meant that they could wipe them all out with one blow.
"Still, as impressive as the nuts and bolts of the plot were, it's how thought-out this all was that's truly incredible. It's one thing to place fake calls through Iranian back channels. It's another to have every general who answered the phone fall for the ruse.
"How did that happen? The answer lies in how antiquated and authoritarian Iran's military structure was and remains. When you serve at the behest of an Islamic dictator who tortures and kills people who step out of line, you aren't exactly in a position to question an order. When the calls came in to head to the bunker, wondering if things seemed a little suspicious wasn't an option. So all the generals blindly listened."
Our hero, Ferrar, is a Spaniard living and working as a lawyer in Paris, France. A civil war is going on in Spain between Franco and the Republic. Ferrar's sympathies lie with the Republic. Somehow he gets roped into working for the Oficia Tecnica in the Spanish Embassy who are charged with buying armaments for the forces of the Republic. This is a little difficult because of the non-intervention treaty that most western countries have signed.
The war is not going well for the Republic. They are preparing for the battle of Ebro which will be their last chance of defeating the Franco. The Fascists have a big advantage - they have aircraft, the Republic doesn't have any. The Republican forces do have a bunch of Soviet anti-aircraft guns, but they don't have any ammunition. The Soviets, as you might expect, have plenty of this ammo, but they won't sell any. They are hoarding it against the prospect of going to war against Hitler, which is likely to happen any day now. Nobody else has any because they are all geared up for making ammo for their own anti-aircraft guns. The machinery could be modified to make the Soviet ammo, but that would take time, time they do not have.
Ferrar is working with Max, and Max comes up with the idea of hiring some gangsters in Odessa to steal the ammo from a Soviet warehouse. The gangsters are very clever. They pose as agents of Stalin's secret police, tell the warehouse manager this is a secret operation and he is not to discuss it with anyone. And since everyone is terrified of the secret police and dare not question anything they say, the manager gladly complies. And then the gangsters show up with a fleet of trucks and haul all 60 tons of this aircraft ammo to a ship waiting at the dock.
The ship sails to Valencia, the ammo is off loaded and delivered to the army of the Republic, so now they have a fighting chance against the Fascists. The battle does not go well, the Republic is defeated and Franco takes over for the next 30 odd years.
Proximity Fuze – The 3rd Most Crucial Development of WW2
Curious Droid
I've been aware of the proximity fuze for a while now, but I just checked and didn't find anything about it in this here blog, so here we are. Curious that he doesn't mention the Norden bombsight, but then it didn't depend on new technology, it was just mechanical engineering developed to a fine pitch. However, the cost to develope the Norden bombsight was of the same magnitude as the atomic bomb. Sounds like the WW2 version of the SLS.
The Ukrainians have a radio-frequency weapon about the size of a rifle that they can use to interfere with a radio-controlled drone's signals. It runs on a battery so it has a limited firing time but it should be enough to confuse several drones.
I don't particularly care for the narrator's breathless delivery, although I do wonder how he manages to keep it up, video after video. However, he does give us some good footage of CRAM's (Counter-Rockets, Artillery and Mortars) in operation. It's hard to get a sense of how big these things are from the video. This picture fixes that.
Problem is the Centurian is shooting zillions of 20 mm bullets and those bullets aren't cheap. According to John Hoh on Quora, each 20 mm shell costs $27. Since this gun fires 75 rounds per second, a full second of firing costs like two grand. You can buy a drone with enough carrying capacity to carry a small bomb for about one thousand dollars. The cost of the fuel oil and fertilizer necessary to make the bomb is negligible, and jihadists work for free, so turning a drone into a bomb costs almost nothing.
C-RAM is pretty effective, I don't think any of those bursts of fire in the video lasted a full second, so the cost of shooting down a bomb laden drone is about the same as the cost of the drone. However, that doesn't include the cost of the weapon system, or the cost of operating it on the other side of the world where everything, including the ammunition has to be shipped in.
US soldiers are paid something like $40K a year. However, it costs about one million dollars a year to have a soldier in the combat zone. Using the same multiple of 25 (one million divided by 40 thousand), I'm guessing it is costing us in the neighborhood of $25,000 to shoot down a drone. I would say that at that rate with a zillion cheap drones the ragheads could force us into bankruptcy. Well, they could if we were spending real money, but ever since the mint got that tune-up on their printing presses, we can print another zillion dollars in the time it takes you to sneeze.
With the proliferation of drones as weapons, it's not surprising that the military has come up with a method to combat them, and since it's the US Military, it's not surprising that we've got a system that looks like massive overkill for the gnats that are commonly used. While a shotgun can be effective against hobby shop drones, they only hold a few rounds and have limited range so can easily be overwhelmed by a small number of drones flying at high speed. Also, people are building bigger and faster drones that fly at higher altitudes, so basically you need an anti-aircraft gun for a range of small stuff, attackers that don't warrant sending a missile.
Could we have drone shooting competitions? Not necessarily real drones, but skeet flying at 100 MPH, 20 feet off the deck and headed right for you. Here's an opportunity for shotgun enthusiasts to come up with a shotgun with longer range. A punt gun might be just the ticket, if it didn't weigh 100 pounds.
You might ask why we need a zillion dollar anti-drone system when drones can be had for petty cash. Well, a little drone equipped with an explosive payload can do a heck of a lot of damage if it finds the right target. So the question is, how much are you and yours worth? That's how we figure out how much to spend on defense.
Talks between India and China have broken down and two are preparing for a high altitude fight. India has upgraded their L-70 anti-aircraft gun to be able to shoot down drones. The L-70 is basically the same Bofors 40mm gun that has been in use since the 1930s. What got my attention is that it can shoot 300 rounds per minute. Actually it is extremely unlikely that it could keep that up that rate for more than a few seconds. Shells come in clips of five which are loaded by hand. You would need a well trained crew to keep that thing fed if it was firing continuously. And if you did manage to fire for more than a few seconds, overheating the barrel would become a problem. A better measure would be five rounds per second. If you can't hit a drone with five rounds, more is not going to help. I looked for a video, but I did not find a good one. Here's a good pic.
P.S. Google read my mind and served up this video on YouTube. It's pretty good.
The bad guys are shooting rockets and mortars at the US Embassy and the C-RAM automatic defense system shot back. I couldn't detect any incoming shells in the video, but then I don't have magic RADAR vision.
What you are seeing in the video is a dense string of M-940 20mm Multipurpose Tracer-Self Destruct (MPT-SD) rounds. The ammunition is specially engineered to self-destruct at a certain distance so that the string of shells doesn't take out a city block miles away. - Tyler Rogoway at The Drive
There is only a tenuous link between this video and this post.
coding game dot com has a number of programming puzzles. One program I attempted required generating permutations of a small number of digits. This is a common enough requirement that I figured someone had already sorted it, and a quick Google search delivered up an example.
The example was just what I needed, but being a bit thick at the time I failed to grok just why it worked, so I set out to write my own version based on how I would generate permutations of, say, four digits. I made a couple of attempts, but no success. I put it aside.
I've been playing a game called 0h h1. It's a relatively simple logic game that involves filling a small checkerboard with red and blue squares according to some rules. After I had been playing it for a while, I started noticing that a line containing some combinations of just a few squares had only one possible solution, while others with more spots taken still had a number of possible solutions.
This leads to my writing a program to calculate the number of possible arrangements for a single line. It took me a day or so to figure out how to do it. It was mostly a matter of the way I framed the question. I was thinking there should be a magic formula for calculating the number of possible combinations you could use to fill out a line, and there might be but I haven't figured out just what it would be. Yet. My program counts the possible solutions and I am reasonably confident that the number is correct.
Length Permutations 4 6 6 14 8 34 10 84 12 208
The constraints are that you cannot have more than two of the same symbols in a row and each row contains an equal number of each symbol.
Coding this program opened my eyes to a way to solve the original permutation problem, which I did and it worked. I was kind of hoping that my method would be faster than the standard method, but no such luck.
I now have three different programs that all do variations of the same thing. Half of each program has the same basic elements, so I combined them into one program and added a switch to select which version to run. I uploaded it to Github. You can find it here.
The possible number of permutations of a number (N) of unique digits (or any other symbols) is N factorial, or N! in math speak. Factorials grow very fast. 12! is the biggest factorial you can fit in a 32-bit integer. (A 32-bit integer on a computer can contain a value of four billion and change.) 64-bit integers are now pretty standard. They will hold 20!. My program should handle up to 20 digits, though no one will ever know as it would take a zillion years to generate all the possible values.
Anyway, now that I've got the permutation thing sorted out I can go back to working on the original problem.
The analogue computer Whitney used to create his most famous animations was built in the late 1950s by converting the mechanism of a World War IIM-5 antiaircraft gun director.
I'm thinking WW2 anti-aircraft guns and the 'computers' used to aim them were the very peak of mechanical technology. The machinery was 16 kinds of complicated, the range was the very limit of what can be done with a gun, the whole operation had to be performed in seconds and there were hundreds, if not thousands of operating guns. There may have been some cold war stuff that was more complicated, but much of it was done with electronics, and none of it was ever used as much as AA guns were used during WW2.
Update December 2018 replaced missing 1966 video with a similar one from 1968.
Update April 2024 replaced missing 1968 video with original from 1966.
FLAK: Evading Anti-Aircraft Fire for World War 2 Pilots (Restored 1943)
Good overview of WW2 anti-aircraft gunnery and 'evasive action'. I always thought 'evasive action' meant jinking randomly, give 'em the old dodge and weave. Turns out it is carefully choreographed. The film is for Allied bomber crews attacking Axis targets. The Brits had their own similar anti-aircraft installations all over Great Britain. Previous posts about anti-aircraft.
Title to be taken in the same vein as "high on pot" or "high on life", even if doesn't make much sense.
I finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing! One of the myriad things that happens in this book are these these philosophical discussions of the most abstract (abstruse?) nature. I was able to follow at least some of them (I think), but the interesting part was not the discussion, or even the topic, but just that the way they were presented made them very entertaining. Suffice it to say the book had a big impact on me and I will probably have to read it again, maybe even several times.
Since then I have started reading several other books, but they are not quite in the same league and while they might be very good books, in my current state of mind they are not quite compelling. So I've been bouncing around. Two of the books (Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and The Postmistress by Sarah Blake) both start at the beginning of WW2 and the Blitz on London. A couple of days ago I got confused and wrote that the bit about the girl reporter with anti-aircraft gun crew was from Gravity's Rainbow when in fact it was from The Postmistress.
Something about these stories tickled my brain and I started researching anti-aircraft guns. If you've watched any old war movies, you have probably heard anti-aircraft guns referred to as "ack-ack". I've always made the connection between the term and the item and so I never worried about where it came from though I might have thought that it came from the sound the guns made, kind of like little boys yelling bang! bang! Turns out the Brits had their own phonetic alphabet and their term for the letter 'A' was 'ack'. So ack-ack just meant AA, which is short for Anti-Aircraft.
Then on 12 O'Clock Highthere was always the problem of flak, which I always took to mean the exploding shells that decorated the sky with puffs of black smoke around our glorious American bomber planes. Turns out flak is German shorthand for the ack-ack guns that fired those shells. I'm still not entirely sure whether it is a descriptive term or a brand name. Those Krauts do funny things with their words.
Then there's the problem of how to shoot down an airplane that is seven miles above the ground. The mechanical engineering crowd had a field day with this one.
Formosa Training Camp, Brazil. Oct. 29, 2014. Brazilian Marines shoot an anti-aircraft gun during military training in the state of Goias, north of Brasilia. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
I'm trying to read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It's not really my style, but the story line has promise. Anyway, somewhere early in the book we are in London during the blitz (WW2) and an American girl reporter spends the evening with an anti-aircraft battery. Then I saw this picture with multiple shell casings in the air so just had to post it. I don't think you can really understand the experience unless you are there when the gun is firing a thousand rounds, and you probably can't truly understand it unless you have enemy aircraft trying to stop you from doing that.
Lots of girls and guys interacting in this book, to put it mildly.
Security forces said Sunday that tens of thousands of forces have pushed into Sinai and its villages near Egypt's volatile border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, seizing vast stockpiles of weapons, including shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, known to the US intelligence community as MANPADS.
MANPADS? What happened to Stingers? Seems MANPADS (Man-Portable Air Defense Systems) is the new catch-all term for Russian and American hand carried, anti-aircraft missles. The FAS (Federation of American Scientists) has a page on the subject. The first 20% of this page gives a brief overview of the existing weapons, the threat they pose, and some blather about what can be done. The remaining 80% is a list of documents that also talk about the subject, which is kind of telling all by itself. Typical bureaucrats, one fact can generate a whole encyclopedia of discussion.
Talk about a Pandora's box. We give the infantry these weapons to counter the threat from enemy aircraft, but if you let even one slip out of your control, everyone who ever flies is at risk of being shot out of the sky by a crazy person, i.e. a Jihadist. And we were handing these things out to the Taliban back when they were fighting the Russians.
Even if we could corral all the loose anti-aircraft rockets, that isn't going to eliminate the threat. Terrorists are building their own rockets and bombs and it probably won't be too long before the technology trickles down to the point where amateurs could build these things in the garage.
Which makes me wonder: what makes a person so crazy that they would want to shoot down a civilian airliner?
Once I got about 3/4 of the way through, I started having a lot of trouble with this book. I could only read a page or two, or sometimes less, before I would have to put it down for a bit. I am not sure why. Perhaps because the situation was getting tense. It was really kind of odd.
The story had some similarities to the Bond movie Never Say Never Again: big wheeler dealer, big yacht, beautiful girl. I suppose the yacht was the key point. Most of the book revolves around internal political struggles between the various British spy agencies, in particular one run by the nefarious Darker and the other run by the straight arrow Goodhew. Goodhew's agency is concerned with enforcement, Darker's interest is "pure" intelligence. The villain is trying to broker a deal to swap modern weapons to Columbia in exchange for a boatload of cocaine. Darker's agency sees no problem with letting the deal go down, after all they're getting a cut, which is going straight to their offshore accounts. They throw up a smoke screen of reasons for not interfering, not our jurisdiction, can't expect any real cooperation from Columbia ("it's propping up the governments of Columbia and Peru"), it's bringing money into the country - they're buying weapons from our manufacturers.
One of weapons they are selling is the Stinger anti-aircraft missile. Raytheon charges the US Government $40,000 for each one. These are the weapons that convinced the Soviets to leave Afghanistan (Charlie Wilson's War). After the Soviets left, the Americans tried to buy back any left over Stingers. They were offering a hundred thousand dollar premium. No telling how many they got back, or more importantly, how many they didn't get back. All this makes me wonder what they are worth on the black market. I mean, if you were under attack by modern military aircraft, how much would it be worth to you to be able to knock one of out the sky? I suppose it would depend on how much damage they could do to you. If they are shooting at you in particular it might be worth all you have to stop them. In a battle like this though, one is unlikely to be sufficient.
Incredible Footage of B17 Bomber Destroyed by Nike Missle (1954) | British Pathé
War Archives
This video shows a four engine, propeller driven bomber being destroyed by a Nike missile. I wonder how they were able to record this. I imagine this was a test and the bomber was unmanned. The bomber could have been on autopilot, I mean autopilots have been around forever, but how did they get the plane far enough off the ground to engage the autopilot? And who was filming this? Another unmanned drone? And how far away would you have to be to ensure that the aircraft with the camera wasn't the one targeted by the missile? This is another fine example of the Cold War mentality gone wild.
Talking about people shooting at blimps got me to thinking about people shooting at aircraft with small arms. I remember hearing something about how small arms fire was ineffective against aircraft. This always seemed pretty thin to me, but then I've never been in a position to actually try it.
I remember hearing a story about a couple of guys who were goose hunting in Colorado one year. Normally, goose hunting is done with a shotgun. Hunters shoot at low altitude when the geese come in to land. These two guys had been sitting in a blind waiting for geese to come in and land in the field where they had deployed their decoys, but no geese came. They could see the geese flying overhead, but they were too high up to reach with a shotgun. I imagine anything over a couple hundred feet would be too far. So one of them pulled out a rifle and took aim on one of the high flying geese. They pulled their triggers together, one the rifle, the other the shotgun, hoping the sound of the shotgun would mask the crack of the rifle, which was, after all, illegal for goose hunting. And they got their goose. So you can hit flying objects with a rifle.
I was just reading a book about Iraq and they are flying a C-130 Hercules from Kuwait to Baghdad at altitude of 200 feet. They are flying that low so as to avoid small arms fire. Just before they land they go up to 500 feet to deploy flaps and landing gear. This would seem to be the most vulnerable portion of the flight, but as it is near the airport, possibly also the most secure. The flying at 200 feet doesn't make sense to me. Anyone with a gun who was ready should have been able to hit the plane. If they were flying at even 10,000 feet of altitude I would think they would be out of reach of small arms. Perhaps high speed and low altitude does not give people on the ground enough time to get ready. You hear the plane coming and think, "it's American Imperialists, where's my gun?" and zoom, the plane has come and gone. Also, if you were flying at a high altitude, it would take time to descend and you would be doing that over the Baghdad, in full sight of a city full of people with guns.
So I'm looking on the web for information and I come across this document:
23RD INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON BALLISTICS
TARRAGONA, SPAIN 16-20 APRIL 2007
It's written by a couple of guys from China. The Chinese may not have stinger missiles, but they do have rifles and machine guns. Who said: "you don't go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have"? (It was Rumsfeld.)
I was talking to a blimp guy the other day and he mentioned that the blimps they built use a special low-permeability skin, and I thought that's what we need in inner tubes for bicycle tires, especially for road bikes. I mean, how many times should you have to pump up a tire? You need to inflate car tires maybe once or twice a year, if that. High pressure (100 PSI) road bike tires have to be pumped up durn near every day, or at least once a week. So maybe this blimp material would be good for bicycle tires.
Probably not, blimps don't run high pressure, they have enormous volume relative to surface area, and the skin doesn't need to be flexible. Actually, the less flexible the better. Still, you would think someone would have come up with a better material for bicycle inner tubes. This is one of the big bug-a-boos of high technology. We can build carbon fiber frames that weigh next to nothing, but we cannot build an inner tube that will hold it's pressure. I put this in the same category as shoe laces: places where high technology has fallen on it's big fat face.
The blimp guy also mentioned that the military had been looking at using blimps for aerial reconnaissance. Wouldn't they be easy to shoot down? Well, yes, if you have a weapon that can reach them, like anti-aircraft missiles or fighter aircraft, but regular small arms are not much of a threat. You don't have to be too high up to be out of reach of even a high powered rifle. WWII Bofors 40 mm anti-aircraft gun was effective up to about a mile and a half of altitude. Using our old reliable physics formulas, a bullet fired with a muzzle velocity of 2500 FPS (feet per second), could theoretically reach an altitude of 18 miles , but that's without considering air resistance. And air resistance is crucial. A high velocity bullet traveling horizontally initially loses one FPS of velocity for each foot traveled . So being a mile high should put you out of the reach of small arms, and still put you close enough to the ground to be able to see what's going, especially with most any kind of optics.
Bullet holes by themselves are not a big problem. The holes they make are small, the volume of the blimp is so large, and the pressure so low, that a single bullet hole poses no real threat. The promotional blimps you see flying around sporting events seem to act as bullet magnets for any yahoos in the neighborhood, so the blimp people are very familiar bullet holes.
The big problem with blimps is not with flying them, but landing and launching. A steady breeze they can handle, but when it gets really windy, you also tend to get gusts and changes of wind direction, and those kind of things make a blimp's life miserable. So small unmanned aircraft seem to be the military's preferred method.
