Recent content by swampyankee

Is this an attack on American exceptionalism?

One point that's being missed in the comparison between Hawai'i and the Falklands is that the people in Hawai'i have a right to reside in the Continental US; the Falklanders did not have the right to reside in the UK. I'm not sure there is a US possession with a comparable status to the Falklands.

There was a 15 mm (0.59 in) BESA based on the Czechoslovakian ZB-60. About 3200 were manufactured (Wikipedia: Besa machine gun - Wikipedia). I can think of several reasons why 14 or 15 mm guns weren't considered by the RAF, the first being that several 20 mm guns suitable for aircraft use were...

Plus the NATO allies

Not mutually exclusive.

The radio guys should have stayed. The head of the department head should have been sacked. Omniscience is not granted with the MBA. A chemistry class on somebody whose job requires knowledge of the chemistry of water treatment should have taken high school chemistry.

One wonders if the law could be interpreted to prevent crop spraying (mist does affect intensity of sunlight) and the use of aircraft for fighting forest fires. After all, any significant discharge of chemicals (a noun which includes such dangerous substances as water ; ) ) will affect the...

Any votes against him are evidence of voting fraud. Sounds familiar. In any case, autocratic regimes can last a very long time as long as the bulk of the elites and the security services are supportive and even vaguely competent. The rest of the population an be kept in line unless it's both...

Complicated question. Neglecting the fact that the German right, which dominated the security services, absolutely despised the very idea of a democratic government, so it would require some very serious (and possibly non-democratic) actions to get internal and external security services to be...

I'd place the time a bit earlier than the Great Game, to the [Un]Holy Alliance, created to maintain autocracy and social class in Europe.

Earlier, in the biplane era, they did, e.g., the Boeing FB. They even operated a carrier-capable twin, the Douglas T2D.

Ukraine stopped Russia with a lot of externally supplied hardware. One hopes that the president who takes office on 21 Jan 2025 isn't the one who thinks that solemn treaty obligations can be discarded like used toilet paper, that is same person is also noted to be one who has shown a perfect...

There was also one bad reason: internal, i.e., uniformed, politics within the US Army.

The USN was dissatisfied enough with the 0.5" Browning to field some Corsairs with 4 Hispanos, and evaluated them as roughly three times as effective, i.e., 4 x 20 mm approximately equal to 12 x 0.50". The problem was mostly that US production of the 20 mm for aircraft was botched. Postwar, the...

Other than the Jumo 206, there were engines from Fairbanks-Morse and Doxford. Napier had a license for the Jumo 205, but never really used it.