Donward

On this day - or night rather - of December 25-26, 1776, General Washington and remnants of his Continental Army crossed the Delaware in a surprise attack against Hessian mercenaries in the town of Trenton. Thus proving once again that Germans cannot into Winter fighting or military Intel. According to legend, the commander of the Hessian forces, Colonel Johann Rall, was given warning of the Continental attack but instead pocketed the letter in order to keep on drinking.
 
This victory was instrumental in cementing Washington's role as the first Wehraboo-beast hunter in US history.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trenton
 
STRONK!
 

Bruno Ganz, most famous for playing Hitler in downfall is dead:
 
 

Over the years I just kind of learned to accept the AK for what it is. Cheap garbage intended to be issued to conscripts and nothing more.
 
But then my tastes changed, I asked for forgiveness, admitted I was wrong, and I kind of went off the deep end.
 
I've even scored a rare, 7.62x39 Finnish RK62 in proper FDF pattern. About 200 were imported before they realized that in the 60s there was no 7.62x39 anywhere for purchase so... way to go Valmet!
 
Anyways this is going to be more or less a photo journal showing the minor and major differences between various Kalashnikovs. I realize this is information many of you know already but some of the measurements even surprised me.
 
 
So I'll kick it off with a proper Type 3 AK47 vs. an AKM. So the quintessential AK47 vs. what everyone incorrectly thinks is the quintessential AK47. Top is a 1970 Russian kit build, bottom is a Polytech Legend (100% factory made straight out of factory number 386).
 

 
 
The Type 3 here is a little lighter than a Russian Type 3 because chu wood is famously light. It also dents if you look at it funny.
 
 
 

 
 
AKM Lighter:
 
 

 
 
And just some receiver photos:
 

 

 

 
 
Also that lovely triangle that lets you know you overpaid, as well as the Y stamp that lets you know you really overpaid. For the uninformed, Russian kits are a no-no, and foreign "military barrels" were banned in 2005. I bought this gun mostly because of the Russian parts (especially the barrel):
 

 
 
So the Type 3 Doesn't have a bayonet lug. It clamps onto the muzzle nut. The AKM's bayonet slides on easily. You have the be pretty deliberate to throw the pig sticker on your T3:
 

 

 

 

 
 
Also I never realized how heavy slabsides are. Holy Jesus:
 

 

 
 
Also one of the best bits. The AKM's stock is much more inline with the barrel making them a shit ton easier to control (not all AKM's had a slant brake, I believe this was a change made in 67 or 68):
 
 

 
Type 3 pistol grip fat and with shit texture. AKM grip textured well and slimmer:
 

 
 
 

No. THIS makes a burlesque from this Forum.
 

 
 

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/iran-revolutionary-guard-bombing-1.5017567?fbclid=IwAR3hzlYobBnKoPkuH4r3JSXuVM9dZ65iO9LjU07MQ1Kckyu2VKAyFDnDNUA
 
20 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard killed in a suicide bombing in Iran. Al Q being blamed.
 

No. THIS makes a burlesque from this Forum.
 

 
 

Remember. This isn't a Reign of Terror.
 
At Sturgeon's House, we allow the condemned a five minute smoke break while digging their own graves.

Hey all! T___A  here,

 
You may, or may not be acquainted with me. In case you don't I mostly post in the Soviet Tank thread here in MW. I do read most of the content on the rest forum however. To be frank with you all: I have been disappointed with the quality of this forum. So has @Sturgeon. So our glorious leader in a fit of drunken anger has appointed me the Reich Plenipotentiary for the Administration of the Four Plan of the Final Solution of the shitpoasting question.
 
Seriously:
Dumbass slap fighting in the wrong thread will no longer be tolerated Neither will anime avatars. This is a rule that not even OG Alter Kämpfers are exempt from. You know who you are and I will be sending a PM to you. As always SH's most important rule applies: referte avt morimini  
In video form:
 

Wait a second, I thought all those memes about weed chilling people out were true?

https://needtoknow.news/2019/02/sheriffs-in-washington-state-are-receiving-death-threats-over-their-refusal-to-enforce-gun-control/
 
Looks like a crazy person is threatening to kill sheriffs who don't enforce Washington's new gun control laws.
 
At least this lefty is honest with his intensions.

I can only speak for newspapers since that is what I worked at. Television news has something similar where producers are the ones who do all the work of actual journalism and they get good looking people to be in front of a camera in order to say lines.
 
But newspapers are an actual technologically sophisticated entity that involves a team of individuals working like an orchestra to transmit bales of paper that comes in 500 pound rolls into little folded sheets with writing and pictures on them that are delivered to your doorstep. And as such, a lot of different tasks have to be accomplished by differently trained individuals who have various deadlines to hit.
 
At smaller publications, many of these are performed by one overworked and underpaid and soon to either quit or get fired or move to another job employee. But at larger publications, there are different departments. And we're not just talking the sports department or the photographers but a variety of ad staff who are trying to sell ads. And you have the ad production people with the graphic arts knowledge to make the ads. Classifieds team. Legals team, which are in charge of putting together the legal notices that appear in papers. Secretaries. Security guards. A newspaper librarian. And going in the opposite direction, you have various copy editors, assistant editors, editors of various departments (sports editor, photo editor, etc). You'll have the news editor who is in overall control of the news reporters. And a managing editor who oversees the entire creative department. And that person will report to the publisher who oversees the financial running of the paper (ad sales, distribution, liaisoning with owner/investors).
 
Getting to the original topic. Graphics designers are essentially Arts majors. Your average news reporter will not possess the skills to also be a graphic designer. They're basically English majors. And even if they did have the skills, they don't have the time or the inclination. Their job is to pound out stories, get them written by various deadlines, and make any factual corrections to the story that is needed. Afterwards, a block of text is directed towards the newspaper layout team (copy editors and various department editors) who then produce each section of the paper. News. Local. Sports. Editorial/columns. Lifestyle for instance. Each department will be producing little mini-newspapers that go together when they are sent down to the printing department. In the old days, this was all done manually with linotype, which are big contraptions which had molten lead which were formed into letters and words which were then transferred in trays to the press. I was involved with the final days of offset printing where one would physically print off a dummy of the paper, where you would physically cut and piece news stories together along with photos and headlines and the masthead and whatever.
 
This dummy paper would then be taken to the print shop where it would be... umm... printed. It involved a fucking HUGE camera which took giant negatives which were transferred onto transparencies which were fed into the printing press and I never really got into it in too much detail because the whole thing stank and spit ink and the guys working there looked the sort who paid for sex a bit too frequently.
 
Graphics design programs like Pagemaker and Indesign and whatnot allowed you to do all that work on a computer which sped up the tempo and you no longer needed to print off paper dummies but could just send off the digital file to the printers who could do whatever it is they did with it.
 
At a daily newspaper, generally the deadlines for stories which occurred that day are the late afternoon, early evening. Sports department is a bit later since baseball games frequently end at 10 or 11 pm and a hole in the paper is held for those sort of stories. So the reporter is done with their story like at 4pm to 7 pm and is gone home or is drinking or sleeping with an intern at the mayor's office. The people who are putting together the actual paper are working into the evening. And those are your assistant editors and copy editors and the sort who are forced to work late nights. One can imagine their quality. This is usually when the graphics stuff is getting finalized. Photos and infographics and things like that. So you can see the reporters don't really have a chance to talk and work with that department. 
 
Sometime around 11 pm to 1 am (depending on the size of the paper) the paper is "put to bed" as far as the editorial team is concerned and  a final product is delivered to the printing room. At that point the printing press fires up (actually it has already fired up and is printing the classified ads and sections of the paper with earlier deadlines like Lifestyles and the Editorial section). Front page news goes through, local section and then sports. Sometime at 3 am or thereabouts, the papers, folded, bundled and stacked by automated machinery (assuming it didn't break down) get sent to distribution where they are loaded onto trucks which deliver them to grocery stories, paper machines and your doorstep or post office box.
 
Now the world that I described is essentially one that existed up until the mid-2000s. The hey day of newspapers were in the 1990s where newspapers in major metro areas would sell for a half billion dollars or more. Now the only reason newspapers can stay in business is because many of them are selling their real estate assets to pay the bills. Or they become a vanity project like Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com buying the Washington Post so he can use it to smash his enemies.
 
Now newspapers still go through the same dance that I mentioned. But now they have webpages where newsrooms are in a constant race to give away their product for free by posting it online as quickly as possible with almost zero fact checking of articles that way consumers aren't forced to buy newspapers and which makes it so they no longer have to deal with pesky things like making revenue from advertisements or classified ads.
 
As such, you run into instances where mistakes are made on the newspaper's webpage which are run by the webpage goons who no doubt spend most of the day masturbating to anime. I never had much experience with that world. And when I did, the guys smelled of stale semen and despair. 
 
So if you are interested, you too can go to school to become a journalist where, if you're lucky and the right sort of minority, you can be hired and exploited for five years until financially you are no longer able to endure the work schedule and quit. Whereupon you'll be replaced by another indistinguishable ethnic sounding byline. 

I see Mahk is taking a swipe at Gillette!
 

I see this thread is overrun by Loooser's commie human wave propaganda! How do we stop it?
 

 
 
Also we need this as a new emoticon!
 

 
 

I think UK carriers suffered from battleship admiral syndrome really badly in the UK.
 
When all your high-ups can think of for a carrier to do is act as a spotter/fighter cover screen for the main gun line, then trying to make it as much like an armoured cruiser as possible makes sense. You don't need 70 planes for the job, after all.
 
You can see this in the fleet air arm carrier fighters - all of the ones the RN got a hand in designing ended up with 2-3 crew so the could do double duty as spotters.

Yeah, for the Illustrious class, they had an Air Group of 36 planes for 23,000 tons and 30 knots and a rather sad range of 10,000 miles at 10 knots.  Even if you're generous, and give them the late war, Americanesque deck parks, they only got to 56 planes.  
 
The Yorktown's are so much better and proved really tough.  On a Yorky you get, an Air group of 100 aircraft, though for 19,900 tons, and 32.5 knots and a range of 10,000 miles at 15 knots.   
 
There are some operational problems the Armored deck carriers had as well. They did not have as big of magazines and aviation fuel supplies as the American Carriers, and their lower rangers really hampered their usefulness against Japan.  I've read many US Navy officers opinions at the time, after operating with the Royal Navy off Japan, the British Carriers were almost more trouble than they were worth, since they barely bettered the CVE and CVLs int he US navy in A/C capacity, and were a pain in the ass to refuel and rearm at Sea. 
 
 
 
 
 
Clearly, the UK and the Royal Navy had many poor thinkers on the future use of the Carrier. The Navy had them too, but an awful lot of the best and brightest int he US Navy learned to fly.   I think the operating in the Med, so we had to have small air groups and armor was a silly argument, and the aircraft Carriers they produced were garbage. The armor was only good for 500 pounds, and the ships took structural damage instead of lighter deck damage, permanently affecting at least one of them.  Putting the main structure deck like the Armored deck on Brit CVs that high on a ship of that size just compromised everything else about it, and didn't give it great damage resistance.  For an Armored deck like that, you need a Forestal class size ship or bigger to make it work, and some super secret to this day structure magic to make it work with deck edge elevators. 
 
I mean come on, you want to operate CVs in the med and you can choose 4 Yorktown or four Illustrious class ships?
 
92,000 tons and 144 planes For the  Illustrious versus 79600 and 400 planes for the Yorktown, granted there were not 4 Yorkies, but that's beside the point, you could do the job better with the three that did exist. 300 planes is an actual decent size strike force, capable of taking on land-based planes. 
 
This does not bother to take the Essex class into the comparison, because it was so much better than anything the Brits produced, by such a wide margin, it's just silly to do. 
 

RE: Mosins. Mosins are a whole group of rifles, and any specific one is going to be different. If you're shooting a 1942 production gun, it's not going to be as nice as a 1944 production gun, for instance, and a 1944 one won't measure up to an actual sniper Mosin (not the drilled and tapped standard ones that are sold as "snipers" for three times the cost). 
 
RE: shitty Mausers. Soviet trials of a sniper Mauser showed a dispersion of 10 cm at 100 meters. In your imperialist measurements that's 4 MOA, give or take, which isn't what I would call amazing for a sniper rifle. I don't have comparable trials for a Mosin, unfortunatelyю

If we wanted to talk overrated ships, the Armored Deck Carriers the Brits made were overrated. They were also nearly useless without American Airplanes. 

I'm kind of glad this little thread got resurrected for at least a little bit, if only as a reminder how superior most of the American (and much of the Allied) equipment was compared to their Axis adversaries. And even if there is a debate over whether a weapon was "overrated" it wasn't necessarily bad, and was certainly better in most cases than contemporary Axis equipment, assuming the Axis even had anything that was contemporary to it to begin with.

I only really know the outline, ie: it was the start of the 'get a spear, give a rifle' program which Italy had with the Ethiopians.

On the plus side, Jeeps has some damn impressive bridges to get under....

I so wish this were true:
 
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/01/26/breaking-china-iran-russia-turkey-recognize-nancy-pelosi-as-the-legitimate-president-of-the-united-states-of-america-cite-trumps-precedent-with-venezuela/
 
Viva President Pelosi! 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/oxford-scientists-successfully-recreated-a-famous-rogue-wave-in-the-lab/
 
In this latest experiment, the Oxford scientists generated two sets of waves in a circular water tank at the University of Edinburgh and made sure they crossed each other at various angles, the better to recreate the conditions under which the Draupner wave had formed. In these conditions, the wave doesn't break like you'd normally expect. Wave breaking usually serves to limit a wave's maximum height, but that limiting factor doesn't occur when waves cross each other at large angles.
The sweet spot turned out to be an angle of 120 degrees: when the groups of waves crossed at that angle, they formed a wave that scaled neatly with the height and length of the Draupner wave (albeit at 1/35th the size of the original).
 
...
 
Despite numerous anecdotal eyewitness accounts about rogue waves, there wasn't any hard scientific evidence for them, so such claims were dismissed as myths or legends. In fact, a French naval officer in 1826, Jules Dumont d'Urville, reported seeing a 108-foot-high wave in the Indian Ocean and was roundly ridiculed by physicist François Arago for his trouble. At the time, scientists didn't think waves could be higher than 30 feet.
 
...
 
In 1995, a powerful rogue wave slammed into an offshore gas pipeline platform operated by Statoil in the southern tip of Norway. Dubbed the "Draupner wave," it generated intense interest among scientists, since the platform's various sensors and instruments provided precise details about the wave's dynamics. Rogue waves had long been considered a myth, so those readings—combined with damage to the platform consistent with a wave some 84 feet high—provided crucial evidence for the phenomenon
 
 

No longer a rumor.
 
https://mobile.twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1088146315979251717