Scolopax

From EEs blog,  this one here. 
http://tankarchives.blogspot.com/2013/06/lend-lease-impressions-pershing.html
 
Sorry was using phone before. 

I don't recall when or why, but the Russians did receive one example of an M26 before the war's end.
 
More on this page, courtesy of one of our resident Commie tank hacks.

I'm so sold on the idea of a big-ass plane able to travel the world handing out missiles and bombs to everyone like a big, black, evil Santa Claus.

Missile truck gogogo

Moar
 

Trials of German tanks captured by the Western Allies. My favourite part is when the Tiger II loses a race to a Valentine.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGAYdq6eakc&feature=youtu.be

Neat video showing off how HEAT shells work. The guy detonates 4 charges, one that's just explosive, one with explosive that has an indentation in it, then one with an explosive that has an indentation in it that's filled with metal, and finally, the same charge as in part 3, but at a small offset to focus the blast.
 

Well, I was the senior manager of a chain of paintball fields in the Phoenix area. We hired and fired loads of "kids".. Some good some bad.
Anyhow, one of the better kids came up to me as I was counting the drawer, and said "Some crazy guy out on the field just told me he'd suck my cock for a dollar".
 
This of course drew some laughter. Which ceased when I unlocked my desk and pulled out the Mk VI. The place had been robbed before, and the almighty fuck be upon the asshole who tried when I was on shift. 
Anyhow-
 
Went on the field (indoor in an old warehouse) and found this scrungy Aqualung looking old fucker who immediately said "I CAN BE HERE! I KNOW THE OWNER!". I thumbed back the hammer and said "Get the fuck out, and never come back".  The rodent immediately found a loose panel and exited the AO most ricky-tick.. I grabbed one of the other managers, and we secured the loose bit of tin, and what others we found by the light of my Olds.
 
Next day, the owner (Someone I got along with really well, and was basically a very conservative Tony Bourdain clone, literally) came in and said "So I hear you pulled a 44 mag on a bum. Was that needed?" To which I said " Your info is wrong. It was a Mark Six Webley, in .455", modified for .45 ACP, and loaded with 274 grain swaged wadcutters. And yes, when the bums start coming on the field and trying to suck the cocks of my charges, it is necessary."
 
His reply was- "Okay! Long as you have the place ready by the next day of business, you do what you have to".
 
Ron was a good guy.
 
I did end up having a couple more "incidents" all of which ended up in a similar manner.  One of which had a MCSO deputy asking "Why didn't you shoot the fucker"...

Seriously folks, go get a copy of Robert Forczyk's "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt."  It's only $1.99 for the digital version on Amazon right now.  

I am obligated to post this response.
 

T-64 does not approve

Trying to make a looping gif

"Results so far ... indicate that thick German armour is very much more variable than British, but has, on the whole, about the same resistance to normal attack, and considerably less resistance to oblique attack." 

Turns out the traditions of tanks in Russia went further back than anyone originally thought.
 

 

This has been going around recently, and it's a pretty interesting look at how lopsided residency for US population is.

OK, maybe this is unfair to Robert Zubrin, but here's my drunken, late-night ranting on WHY HAVEN'T WE GONE TO MARS? WAAAAAH.

Ready for the short answer? OK: It takes a fucking long time to get to Mars.

(hopefully not too) Long answer:

Many people thought the Mars landings would be the natural follow-on to the epic Lunar landings of the late '60s and early '70s, and they weren't necessarily wrong. I still feel the Mars landings are a natural follow on, but there are some reasons besides shinking budgets, a loss of romance, and ennui that I feel are worth examining. I am not an expert, and I welcome anyone who is stepping in and telling my I am wrong, but I will nonetheless do my best to get this stuff right.
 
So, it might feel like a Mars mission would be just like a Moon mission, but with a bigger rocket and maybe a habitat and stuff, right? Well, that's accurate, but it's not everything. I don't claim to know everything about a Mars mission, but here's some stuff to think about. 

First, we have to understand that a hypothetical Mars mission is not like a hypothetical Lunar mission, and the most important differences have nothing to do with Mars itself! A trip to the Moon takes about three days. Coincidentally, a human can survive about that long with no resources whatsoever except air. This means that a Lunar mission needs to take along on-board supplies lasting for six days, and oxygen for six, and that's enough for the mission plus contingency. Now, the important part here is that the Lunar mission doesn't need to develop any living techniques to complete its mission. Simply, they can easily bring along what they need to survive.
 
For a Mars mission, it's several orders of magnitude more complicated. The mission takes a minimum of 130 days one way, if you have awesome high speed rockets. More realistically, 260 days is your one-way trip. That's close to 9 months of travel there, then 9 months back. Asking "how much weight of supplies would you need to supply one human on that trip?" is so complex as to be almost meaningless. Let's look at just water. A human needs several quarts of water per day to survive, just to drink. So for 260 days, one person would need about a metric ton and a half of water. That's for hydration alone, and more would probably be needed. It would be difficult to calculate exactly the delta-v needed to move a steadily-venting metric ton point five of water to Mars and back, but this alone represents a problem.

Can you do a Mars mission via supply alone? Clearly you can theoretically-speaking, but consider that the weight of daily supplies needed for a Mars mission would be 87 times that needed for a Moon mission, and then recall the size of the Saturn V rocket that took us to the Moon. Then add in the weight of ancillary supplies like medicine, etc, that would be needed because a Mars mission can't just abort. Being on a spaceship halfway to Mars is the remotest man has ever been by well over three orders of magnitude; a doctor in Antarctica by comparison has instantly available help. 
 
This is all to say a Mars mission has to be a self-sustaining ecosystem, barring mind-boggling available delta-v and awesomely huge launch vehicles with which to launch a tremendous amount of supplies. One hundred and twenty man-months' worth of MREs and water doesn't seem like such a big deal until you see how big the rocket(s) needed to take it to Mars and back have to be.

So we've recharacterized the problem. Clearly, getting to Mars isn't so hard. We've visited it by proxy loads of times. But now we realize that those probe missions weren't NASA just dicking around, they were actually dramatically lower intensity than a supplied Mars mission. To bring humans to Mars, we need to replicate the human ecosystem, and stick it on top of a rocket, or more likely in pieces atop multiple rockets. Replicating the human ecosystem sounds straightforward... Until you actually try it. This is Biosphere 2 (Biosphere 1 is Earth, yes, I know, nerds ruin everything):


 
Biosphere 2 was one of the first major projects in trying to replicate Earth's ecosystem apart from itself. I am not going to say that we learned nothing from Biosphere 2, but in the context of preparing for a Mars mission, Biosphere 2 did not result in a viable system for space exploration, so far as I can tell. For a start, Biosphere 2 is much, much too large to launch atop a rocket!

It sounds like I'm getting down on Biosphere 2, but I actually respect the effort quite a bit. It just isn't the result we need to get to Mars by 1995. However, there is another human habitation that has given us a much greater head-start towards a Mars mission than Biosphere 2:
 

 
Good ol' Alpha. I feel as though the public perception of ISS has been a little harder on it than it should be. A space station feels unglamorous. It doesn't feel daring, like stepping on the Moon was, and it doesn't feel dangerous or brave. ISS has gotten more popular in recent years, as its competition for the spotlight (particularly Shuttle) has faded, but it still never captured people's hearts like Apollo or even Shuttle did.

But really, ISS is kind of the Apollo 9 of the Mars effort. OK, that analogy doesn't go very far, but ISS is a crucial experiment - a long term one - in the process to going to Mars. We're putting people in space for very long periods of time, and seeing what exactly it is they need to survive up there. We now know exactly what technologies we need to perfect to supply and keep alive people during the twenty-month Mars mission, because we've already kept people alive in ISS for that and longer. And, we're making very significant strides:



To avoid getting into too much detail, and recognizing that I think I've made my point, I'll leave it there, adding one final thought. NASA is staffed by people who want to go to Mars. Every single person at NASA, from Charlie to the janitorial staff, probably hold as mankind's finest achievement the Apollo Moon landings, and they want to see that achievement topped by landing human beings on Mars. I would be willing to bet that NASA could get a direct order from Congress to in no way pursue a mission to Mars, and we would still make progress in deliberate, calculated, secret ways towards that goal. The perception (which I have been guilty of, too) that NASA is sitting on their ass and needs to get on with it, is probably less justified than we want to believe. Going to Mars will be hard, and there's no guarantee that we'll make it the first time. There are a lot of problems that need solved, a fuck ton of engineering to realize those solutions, and industrial quantities of bravery needed to execute them.

Putting people on Mars will be the greatest achievement in the history of mankind, until the next. Not because it is easy.
 

I present an alternative for worst StuG III vismod:
 

 
Base vehicle being a BMD-1 here