Jeeps_Guns_Tanks

it was a pressurized cabin testbed P-38 if I recall right. it may have also had airframe changes for compressibility testing. I'll go look it up in the P-38 bible.

Pretty sure the enterprise took one, but I haven't confirmed it yet.

And you keep acting like a ship that took 10 months to repair, and was still a shitty carrier by almost every measure, is not overrated because it survived a big bomb. If anything, your ravings about the 1100 pound bomb, while ignoring all the major flaws in the ship's design, proves my point about them being overrated. Taking bomb hits and kinda surviving, but never making full speed again, does not make a ship good. A ship with a larger air group with decent aircraft could have shot down all the Stukas unless you want to argue Stukas are hard to shoot down or something.

I'd say 30-degree slope is probably right, now this was for that wonky 105mm prototype tank with the funny mantlet? I don't think the regular 75 Shermans had this issue. Note, this says it used the Westinghouse Traverse, this was an all-electric unit, that was notorious for being more sensitive to out of balance turrets, and turret ring gear damage. The Oilgear unit was supposed to work better all around, it was hydraulic, with its own electric motor driven pump, and the Brits required the Oilgear unit on the Firefly tanks, that may have been because it fit the gun better, but could be the prefered unit because it worked better.

NM he lived

It's kinda lame, last years sub event was better.

Will it be manned by Jawas?

What kind of weapon of mass slaughter was used to get into the bin? With such a destructive device, thousands of lives could be in peril!

So I just noticed on the American Desert Town map, there is a train. At some point, the train decides to leave, and you can shoot it, and if you shoot the Engine, it has a damage model like the tanks do, so it shows your round doing damage to the train inards! I thought that was cool. included for giggles, this is me killing a Nashorn right in front of the Tiger...

So I picked up a copy of Dave Hobbs, British Aircraft Carrier Design, and read up a little on the "Armored Deck" Carriers, and boy, I may have been wrong about them being overrated, they simply may in fact, just be horrible designs. One thing he mentions, is the Royal Navy designed the armored deck carriers, not with the Med in mind, though that at least gives a decent argument for these bad designs, it's wrong if what Hobbs is saying is true, they designed these ships, thinking no amount of CAP could ever stop a raid from getting to the ship before they could attack. The carrier could also not get its interceptors launched, and high enough to stop the attack, so it decided armor and AA guns were the way to defend the ship. This was only a valid idea pre-radar, and even then, they didn't get enough AA firepower or armor on these ships for it to help much. The few times the armored deck was tested, it didn't really live up to its reputation. Once radar was a thing, even the Brits realized this would allow enough time to launch interceptors once the tech matured, and by wars start radar was there. Now, this gets us into Fleet Air Arms aircraft choices, and this whole area is a nightmare, of poor planning, doctrine, and interservice idiocy. So the only real test of the Armor came when the Illustrious, was attacked by Stukas, supposedly, elite ship hunters, in January of 1941. Since her CAP got suckered down by a low-level attack, the Stukas had a free hand, and they hit the Illustrious six times, four 1100 pounders, one was a dud, and three 550 pounders, one near miss. What's interesting here is only one bomb hit the armored deck, and it went right through the armor, and blew up in the hanger, causing serious damage to the ship's structure. The near miss may have damaged the hull. She limped to Malta on fire and took another bomb a week later. Once they got her Sea Worthy, they eventually had to send her to the USA for a rebuild. Even the US Shipyards could not fix the ship all the way, she suffered vibration problems from these attacks that eventually required the center shaft to be removed, and the ship limited to 26 knots, later the vibrations got bad again and she had to be limited to 24 knots! She was out of action 10 months and was never right again. Even the argument that these carriers were good for the Kamikaze threat is a myth since the US Navy deemed them almost not worth the trouble of having around, because of their small air groups, small bunker stores, and stupidly small avgas and ordnance storage. People do not think about the logistical side of the carrier much. The US Navy designed their carriers around an 80 to 90 plane air group, with enough gas and ord to operate them about five days of moderate operations before they need to refuel and rearm. The Essex class could do 20,000 miles at 15 knots on 6160tons of fuel oil. The Illustrious class was 12,000 NM at 14 knots with 4640 tons of fuel oil. That means the Illustrious class had to pull off the line and refuel, a lot. The Essex class had 240,000 gallons of avgas. The Illustrious class only had 50,000 gallons of avgas! That's a small gas load even for a small air wing. It was stored very safely though... Now, this problem is bigger than you think, because they realized the errors in their thinking and did everything they could to increase the air group size on the ships. They eventually got them up to about 60 planes, Corsairs, and Avengers, and Spits later... They did this by adopting the American style deck storage, and a multi-barrier landing system. This made problems worse in several ways for these ships, the first, they were already cramped, by packing in more pilots and ground crew to work on the planes, they ended up packing these things like sardines, and their living standards were NOT up to US Navy standards. Maybe US Navy WWI standards. This also made the fuel problem almost unworkable. They would have to take on Avgas daily! Or they would if they could keep any airplanes working. So another problem with these ships is their layout. For some reason, the Brits decided these things needed two story hangers. Why? Who knows, on the first four ships, the hangers were different heights, but still to short for good planes. One was 16 feet and one 14. Only the 16-foot hanger could take clipped Corsairs. Why not one larger normal sized hanger deck? No idea. So the British figured out these were not great ships after the first four, and in the next four tried to fix them, and messed them up much worse. They decided the armored box concept was too much and thinned out the sides. They also decided 30 knots was to slow, and added more boilers and a fourth shaft, in an only slightly bigger ship. This compounded the low living space problems. They did not really increase the bunker fuel or avgas loads much. Even better, they made both hangers 14 feet, so now they could operate Seafires or Hellcats, but the US Navy didn’t have enough kitties to go around, so they operated the Spits, or more crashed them over and over into the deck, destroying them far faster than enemy action. If you look at these ships post-war, the ones that took damage didn’t get rebuilds, the ones that did still didn’t operate long after the war. Granted the Brits were broke, but the Essex lasted in US Service well into the 90s and were a bargain compared to a new forrestal class. Another point was made that the Armored deck Carriers were supposed to take bomb damage better, and then US Carriers get shit talked for their wooden decks. As if they didn’t have an armored deck in the Hanger. They also forget the Enterprise, the greatest carrier in history, took three bombs, four near misses, and retired under her own power and was back in action in a little over a month. Later in the Battle of Santa Cruz, her terrible wooden deck took two bombs but was repaired, during the fight, and she was able to land her aircraft and the Hornets and continued to operated. When she retired from the fight, she was only laid up ten days for repairs before going back out for operations. One of the selling points of the wooden deck was ease of repair, and her machinery was all just fine after all that. Granted, two Essex class Carriers caught bombs or Kamikazes at the absolute worst possible time and suffered horrendous damage. That still doesn’t make the case for the Brit Armored CVs being good since they never got tested having a whole, loaded for a strike, deck park going up on them. I bet neither the Bunker Hill or Franklin took ten months to fix either, and both were in “New” condition when mothballed. I think the US Navy was right, they did a bunch of studies that said the carrier would need to be 60k tons of more to have a viable armored deck, and usable airwing, and thus the Midways were born. Sources: Anotomy of the Ship, The Aircraft Carrier Victorious, Anatomy of the Ship The Aircraft Carrier Intrepid, British Aircraft Carrier Design and History by David Hobbs, and Fleets of WWII by Richard Worth plus that armored carriers apologist site.

Poor doggo is probably already dead in that fascist land...

California Panther?

I wonder how many calories they got during the Blitz?

Plus, a Carrier, particularly an armored Deck carrier, requires YEARS to produce and requires way more resources than hundreds of airplanes. This is why they are overrated, what good is a full-size CV with a CVE sized air wing...

Weld lines, on early Shermans the front plate was welded together from a bunch of smaller ones.

I going to lean towards and M4, those padded lift points on the front hull look like this one. This is an American locomotive M4. But they also made M4A2s that looked a lot like this.

Yeah , I think that's one of only maybe two or three running M4A4s with the A57 motor. I missed the ones on Facebook, and you probably have the ones I have.

I like continuing the last comps world as well, it was amusing.

I was thinking the same thing! The Melon Center for Good Business!

looks great!

Yeah the US Army up-gunned a bunch of M4A3, and M4A1, 75 tanks with 76mm guns post-war, and then gave them out to various countries as defense aid. They had E4 added to the to their designation, IE M4A3E4. It was not an ideal gun install, but it was better than the Firefly, as far as gun handling went. http://the.shadock.free.fr/sherman_minutia/m4a3e4/m4a3e4.html

Does that mean the Nimitz is also being retired?

LOL nice, have you read his Iremeber interview?

Let the Revolt commence.

Is that the next Ford Class CVN going together?