Recent content by scifilovr

Definitely not trying to imply that the Russian peasantry was ignorant or backward or anything of the sort. I can't quote any specific anecdotes, but I feel like I remember instances of Russian peasants rejecting mechanization or improved crop-rotation or consolidation of communal strips. And...

I'm currently on a Russian history reading kick and working on an alternate history where I want to give Russia something of a redemption story, as it seems like Russia has kind of gotten the shit end of the stick throughout history. I believe there's something of a lens of historical...

Doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell from taking away funding from carrier aviation or submarines, which are the two most powerful lobbying groups in the US Navy. Besides that, the entire draw of an SSBN is that it is expected to be fully survivable. You're not supposed to know where it is...

Bro, you've got to respond to the last quote given, you totally skipped over the last guy.

Spoken by US President Lewis Strauss at the funeral of Chaim Rumkowski, former Marshall of the Polish Republic. While his career as an insurance agent during the early 1900s did not mark him out as a man of greatness, his ascent to political power began with the downfall of Imperial Germany and...

English expat Professor James Ingersoll, speaking at the 1977 Center for Strategic Objectivism. In 1929, following the Mundial War, which saw the Coalition (Britain, Saxony, Belgium, and Danubia) defeated and Britain stripped off its overseas empire, a violent Socialist revolution broke out...

I should have specified, I expect its more likely for more Japanese carriers to be hit. During most of the carrier battles, each side really only got one good punch in, but because the Americans operated their carriers dispersed in two separate task forces, the Japanese would be bringing all of...

What happens next after this hypothetical battle? I think the general consensus is both sides take pretty good punches; two to three carriers on the American side, two to four on the Japanese side, depending on who finds who first, the distribution of the strikes, and a fair amount of luck...

But would the IJN know about this? It’s the difference between Yamamoto thinking he’s bringing four against two versus four on four or four on three.

I was speaking about Yamamoto’s perspective. He believes he’s sunk two American carriers and there should only be two left. Can he know that Saratoga and Wasp are available? Yorktown was a surprise at Midway, it would probably be a surprise here.

That sounds like the RN was using courts martial as impromptu courts of inquiry, vice criminal proceedings (except in a few cases probably, the infamous Byng comes to mind of course). Probably big enough to cause some serious disruption to the war effort and some major consternation in the...

If you court martial every officer for failing in combat, especially at the beginning of the war, then you remove any possibility for those officers to learn from their mistakes and get better. In 1944 and 45, Halsey couldn't have been removed for the same reason MacArthur couldn't. He was a...

The USN does have a bad habit of giving a lot of deference to upper ranks and a definite reluctance to punish senior commanders or discourage bad behavior; often leading to poor officers getting high command and then being fired when they fuck up. Part of this is due to the way the Navy's...

I'm unable to find an exact timeline of the events leading up to the bombing of Franklin, I'd probably have to try and track down the ship's log or something, but reading secondary sources it kinda seems like Gehres ordered the downgrade just before (possibly minutes) the attack, so some of that...

Disclaimer, I am not an expert or well-read on the design specifics of USN or RN aircraft carriers, but to suggest that American carriers were more fragile because of design flaws (and specifically what about the avgas storage methods and piping made them susceptible to battle damage and what...