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Sturgeon's House

DogDodger

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Everything posted by DogDodger

  1. Oh personally I quite enjoyed it. Couldn't end up posting the video, though.
  2. Years ago, my girlfriend and I were at Ft. Knox for their annual Memorial Day open house (she's very patient with me). We stuck around until the end of the event, as I had learned in the past that the vehicles would be driven back to the motor pool at that point. The crew of the Abrams that was on display fire it up, and I start recording video since this was the first time I had seen an Abrams moving around in person. They drive the tank from the grass onto the one-lane road bisecting the display area, then pivot the tank so it's pointed down the path. My poor girlfriend, only having previously been exposed to cars and not knowing tanks were capable of this, unleashes a surprised "Holy fuck!" Footage ruined.
  3. Great stories. Somewhat relatedly, the US actually looked into a jumping armored car in World War II. The National Defense Research Committee in spring 1941 initiated research on a series of armored cars featuring a suspension that could squat and then release the stored energy, jumping the vehicle over obstacles. No actual cars were manufactured, but a one-wheel test rig built by the Baker Manufacturing Co. indicated the machine could clear a 49" vertical obstacle or a 49-foot ditch if it was traveling at 40 mph. In typical understatement, Hunnicutt opined that "...under estimating the dimensions of the obstacle might have been disastrous."
  4. Modern turbodiesels and gas turbines are fine and all, but nothing beats the sound of those old large displacement gassers in my opinion.
  5. The protagonist makes it to Korea. I saw the entire film on Youtube with subtitles. If it's still there I'd recommend checking it out.
  6. The M60's turret is quite similar to the M48's, but the M48 seems to have a more pronounced housing for the ventilator in the rear (which upon further inspection may have been the camo playing tricks on my eyes). But, the TC's cupola on that vehicle looks to be the Chrysler unit fitted to the original M48s and found on the M48A5T1/2, yes?
  7. IMHO, the turret definitely looks M48 instead of M60.
  8. I have those as pdfs but I like having physical copies, too. The maps at the back look like a cool feature.
  9. Size comparisons are fun. Edit, while we're on a roll here:
  10. The vast majority of the "old Patton Museum collection" is currently at Ft. Benning, though? I wonder if Garry Redmon over at Armor for the Ages would know.
  11. Agree on the howitzer turret, but the hull looks like a non-Jumbo to me. M4A3E2s didn't have headlights or sirens, for example.
  12. Of course. That was just a poorly worded attempt at levity.
  13. The fluid on the return roller, road wheel, and tracks is slightly disconcerting when combined with the position of the right-hand soldier...
  14. I was privileged to attend the USMC Tiger Comp gunnery competition in 2002 at Ft. Knox with other members of the TankNet forum. The M1A1s were assembled out of sight behind a hill, and as we were waiting for the first one to appear, we heard a sound quite similar to a multi-blade helicopter. As we were scanning the sky, the first tank emerged from behind the hill to take up its position; the sound we heard was the sprocket engaging the tracks. The group even contained former Abrams crewmen who didn't recognize that the sound was coming from a tank.
  15. 105 mm. And thanks, hope so. There seems to be some nice work going on. Unfortunately that book, along with the two mentioned by Martel, the one by Mitchell, and 30ish others, are still on the to do list. I'll keep you posted when I get to it. Thanks. They were actually all gifts, and came pre-assembled (making them toys, perhaps? An interesting semantic quandary...). I have neither the skills nor patience for modeling.
  16. Agree about the dearth of pre-1970 tank books if you're talking about technical or scholarly research, but there were some decent histories and memoirs you might consider tracking down, especially if Mildred Gillie's book interested you. For the British, Stern and Swinton for example have both written about their role in the tank's development. Martel wrote a memoir and a history of the first 15 years of mechanization in the British Army. Fuller was of course prolific (his Memoirs is very readable, and his acerbic wit comes through in several instances), and Liddell Hart's 2-volume history of the RTR was published in 1959. That's not getting into the combat memoirs, e.g., Frank Mitchell in WW1 or Guderian and Crisp in WW2. Have some dead tree substitutes as well.
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