Recent content by mikemike

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    Top of the World (1955)

    If you are interested in aircraft of the late 1940s, try "Jet Pilot", starring John Wayne, Janet Leigh and aircraft that were cutting-edge in 1949/50 when most of the film was shot but already obsolete by the time the film came into the cinemas, due to Howard Hughes fooling around with it - he...
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    Better luck for the RN carrier force 1939-1941

    Doesn't seem to have percolated down to the people at the front - hence Force Z. Or maybe they just didn't believe the intelligence (everybody knows the Japs can't build real planes). James Bond may not have had the standing then that he has now. If those details didn't comprise the...
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    Better luck for the RN carrier force 1939-1941

    So you think, if Glorious, Courageous, and Ark Royal had survived, the Allies might have won WWII? Intriguing idea... But seriously, I think you disregard the enormous luck the Royal Navy had that the German torpedoes were performing subpar throughout 1939 and most of 1940. Ark Royal might have...
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    In retrospect, were the BMW radial engine developments a mistake?

    Some other posters also remarked that BMW had no experience with big radials, but don't forget that BMW had a shotgun wedding with BRAMO, also known as SEM or Siemens-Schuckert, who had been working on such contraptions. Bill Gunston writes that the Twin Fafnir, a 14-cyliner two-row, developed...
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    Midway with expanded Kido Butai?

    The Japanese - Yamamoto in any case - knew that, too. Their hope from the beginning had been that the USA might tire of the effort of full war against Japan - a forlorn hope after Pearl Harbor.
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    Kaiser skips his navy

    I may have overstated the extent to which Churchill was the driving antagonist to Germany, but he was an important member of the imperialistically-thinking group around Grey, who were eager to intervene on the continent on behalf of France, even if they were not always certain if Russia was not...
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    Midway with expanded Kido Butai?

    One thing to keep in mind is that the air groups on Japanese carriers were very much a regular part of the crew, just like the gun crews on a battleship, so they were trained very specifically for operations from their home carrier and would not easily have been able to operate from a different...
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    Kaiser skips his navy

    I think you're overlooking what happened around Germany at the time. It was obvious that France was eager to revenge the defeat of 1870/71, and France had a bigger fleet than Germany at the time. Britain, indeed, at the time saw France as the most likely enemy in a future war. And, to the East...
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    50s aircraft that originated during World War II

    Don't forget that much of the rapid progress in aircraft development postwar was due to captured German wind tunnel data that were not available to the genius British and US designers before May 1945 - Germany had six supersonic wind tunnels and all of the Allied powers combined exactly none...
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    Flettner Fl265

    Obviously meant to be "Turm Bruno" or Turret B as in Bruno (German spelling alphabet at the time). British designation would have been "X" Turret.
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    The Bombing of Nuremburg

    I own the Middlebrook book, and he has a copy of the target map in it. There was a lot of important industry in Nürnberg, including MAN, who built most of the diesels for U-Boats. But the aim point was smack on the densely-populated and highly flammable medieval city core, with "bomb creep" (a...
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    How to pull off Para drop at Falklands

    As far as I remember, it was 11 tankers each way, a total of 22 Victors, they mostly refuelled other Victors on the way. Must have run down the remaining life on the planes quite significantly. Now, if the Argentinians had waited another 6 months to launch the operation, Iron Maggie would have...
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    Mammut Radar - German 1943-45

    The info from Snautzer01, obviously wartime intelligence, is a curate's egg - good in parts. All Luftwaffe Mammuts had four pylons, the ones belonging to the Navy had three pylons. So both variants were series-produced. The dimensions of the antenna array are off. The prototype had an array that...
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    Twin Screw supercharger on an aircraft?

    I think twin-screw compressors were used to produce high-pressure compressed air, for instance in submarines. There is also a faint recollection of them being used as stationary compressors for gas pipelines.
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    WW2 Bomb Explodes in Munich

    I've seen estimates that as much as a third of all HE bombs dropped on Germany were duds. As bombs were a seller's market (never enough of them available) manufacturers got away with mediocre quality. Some years back, not far from where I live, they found an 8000 lbs "Cookie". These things were...
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