Maybe yes, maybe no. Meanwhile I’m looking for a sale on sails while thinking that you can’t lead a lead pipe to water while you can splatter a leader, or a can with lead & rum’s not what I drink.
Sigh. Turns out there’s a “duplicate” button next to the “delete” in the back panel. I thought I’d deleted one and moved one…. yeah.
Now fixed.
And no. Don’t drink in the morning (Or much the rest of the time) but it was the sort of morning I think lovingly of drinking, so….
Since I have an aunt to drink Jameson almost to exclusion (though WHICH Jameson sub-version does vary…) that is one I am saving to (eventually) relay. Though the idea of having it hot or warm seems… a bit strange. Cold, or even ‘room temperature’ seems the more likely. I suppose there is Winter and a version/variation of the Hot Toddy.
When I was a wee lad of 40% angsty teen, 40% book nerd, and 20% can’t-wait-to-get-growd-up, there used to be a trend, let’s say, of girls playing at being rather stoopid to attract guys. The colon thing reminds me of that.
I don’t miss that particular little fad. At all.
The guys, on the other hand, at least I know they came by it honestly. Guy hormones make your brain go on vacation along with your common sense when it comes to attractive women. It is especially bad during puberty.
It might say something about me that it took a rather depressing amount of time to link ‘colon’ and ‘cologne,’ though. I mean, that kink exists, somewhere out there, I’m sure…
And I’m quite pleased with my own ignorance on this fact. So much so that I plan to enjoy it for the rest of my life if possible.
I was informed by a dear, well-meaning lady that the reason I never found a husband is because I’m too openly smart and scared away all the guys. SIGH She was very serious, and trying to be helpful. Facepaw
Well, to be fair to the woman in question, she’s not wrong- if you’re after hunting a rather particular sort of man, that is.
One with a bit of insecurity, perhaps. Or a lack of self confidence. Or perhaps just plain to blinkered enamored of his own intellect to the point he cannot stand any challenge to it.
My own question would be what’s that man to do if he ever gets sick? Or old? Injured? Or just plain needs a bit of help now and then? We all do, as none of us is perfect.
Competence and true, raw intelligence are very much lacking in this world. A wise man knows he oughta snatch up a smart wife. Better still if she’s smart in are he’s weak in. Shore up each others’ weak spots, make better decisions overall.
Of course that’s coming from a man that’s actively avoiding marriage like a bad smell, so take that with a pinch of salt. Find someone you can stand to be around, with your values more or less, and a good head on his shoulders.
And make babies. That’s what the older generation tells us, usually around family reunion time, if I’m not mistaken. The world needs more good people, and they only come about one way I know of.
Couldn’t find one to match up to you? One gal actually told me that I was so smart I was intimidating. I rather wish she had hadn’t been scared off; she was nice. Then there was the one that had a mind like a steel trap…or was it her personality?
$BigBoss was shocked that I don’t watch TV to speak of (nor stream much if at all) and do this crazy thing: read. But that’s where the most, most enduring information is! And a picture is NOT worth a thousand words at 24/30/60 frames/second. I get that sometimes one needs to SEE, so sometime video makes sense. “Podcasts” are annoying as they waste my time. I don’t listen to them while doing “housework” as they get in the way. And my ‘commute’ is.. under 10 minutes, so… let me skim the transcript already!
One site had an advert for something that might have been useful, so I did the clicky thing. It lead to a video (filled with red flags, so nope) that wouldn’t let me skip around, and the flogger of this particular stuff was going to take forever to get to the point. Yes, I know the problems associated with trying to fix this problem is, but why don’t you get to the sales pitch for yours. Arggh.
Eventually, I looked at the URL, went to the website and got the details. Definitely nope.
I have the bandwidth to download podcasts. I do not have the patience to listen to them.
Written word also limits the data to what is relevant– I mean, sure, I can listen to Alan Rickman read the phonebook. However that doesn’t make the numbers right.
What Sarah calls the “fan dance” is possible in text, but it’s HARDER than in audio, and audio plus visual is even easier. (which is why it’s great that I loath listening to politicians speak, almost uniformly, don’t really know why)
That, actually, is a pretty fair working definition of ‘socialist’. Their policies generally go something like this: ‘X has never been tried, but it would obviously work perfectly because Trust Me. Therefore I want to make it compulsory for the whole of society.’
I spent the first half of the episode yelling things at the computer. :D
Discussions here about various psych frauds have taught me PATTERN RECOGNITION!
Yes. It took a couple of minutes to figure out WTF the girls were writing about. (Gets brain bleach to destroy the memory of one of Anthony Bourdain’s meals in deepest Africa. He got better after a round of antibiotics…)
It’s… disturbing?.. how many DnD/gaming things I ‘get’ despite having never played, nor cared to. Alright, at one gathering I did participate in a game of ‘Nuclear War’. The fellow who brought it was aghast at how fast we managed to not only get things started, but ENTIRELY FINISH OFF the world. “I’ve seen this game go SO FULLY DESTRUCTIVE SO FAST!” Yeah, we’re SCARY I think we ALL adopted the ‘Samson’ Option: I might be doomed, but now SO ARE YOU!
That the one from Flying Buffalo Games where you play three rounds face down in advance, and have a spinner for yield?
I picked that one up from some nuke sub crew guys, who played it endlessly. Scary folk – a little too quick to mention that if their crew mutineed, they’d be the world’s number 3 nuclear power.
Same publisher. Can be stand alone, or combine with Nuclear War. Dice instead of spinner.
More mayhem.
There was also a computer game version of Nuclear War. The intro was a bomber with the manufacturer’s logo. It drops a bomb with a cowboy, facing backwards, saying “yahoo!”. Build the 100MT warhead and a crowd says “oooooooooo”. Decent gameplay for late eighties Amiga.
There was also one in the late 80s called “Global Thermonuclear War”. It was noteworthy for three things:
1. It was the first multiplayer game (more than two people) I ever saw.
2. Which probably had something to do with the fact that it was released on Novell Netware, only. Novell Netware was basically networked MS-DOS.
3. The geopolitical; biases of the developer were obvious for the time.
a. The Soviets always won.
b. You lasted longer if you let the Soviets win at their pace.
c. The author was obviously worried about “the China card”, because $20 million in military aid to China would trigger an instant first strike.
I own the first two. Didn’t realize there was a third. But this is the very first group I’ve been associated with who is even familiar with the original! Lots of good company here.
Ahh Nuclear War, what is known by grognards as a beer and pretzels game (i.e Not taking the focus of say Squad Leader or Star Fleet Battles, played at the end of the evening when everyone is tired). It was a favorite at my college apartment. Ah the joy of getting the Saturn Missile and the 100 Megaton bomb :-). In a similar spirit are the modern Munchikins and Exploding Kittens.
““Matty Groves” is a great old traditional song, and lots of people ask for it. The big problem with “Matty Groves” is, it’s big. About four hundred and seventy verses. Fortunately, with a little creative editing, it can still be chopped down to a reasonable size…say, talking blues?”
Then there’s the alternative version “Garnet’s home made beer”. We left one of his concerts singing it on the way out the door and he shouted “Wait!” and chased us down and told us the story about the party it commemorated. Sounded like quite the time!
“Garnet was smashed with a gut full of dregs, and his breath set fire to both me legs…
God damn them all,
I was told this brew was worth it’s weight in gold”
I believe the LGOP is the best description I’ve seen of the difference between US Military culture and the rest of the world’s militaries.
For instance why the Movie Kelly’s Heroes would never work with any other country’s soldiers as the characters. (Unrealistic, yes, but at it’s core, every member of the US military has felt, or knows teammates, that you could say “Yeah, I could see him doing that”)
See also Down Periscope. The tech was laughable, but anyone who’s ever been underway underwater can point to the characters (especially on the Stingray) and go “knew him… knew him… had a friend who sailed with him… had that asshole as my Dept head…”.
One they didn’t show was the Smitty, every ship had a Smitty. One time in Japan our Smitty left the ship in a US naval uniform, he came back in a Japanese Naval Uniform. we never did get the story out of him about that little adventure.
To be fair, that was probably a case of being one of those characters that you can not include in a story because no one will actually believe the reality.
It actually kind of works with Canadians, too, because that’s pretty much our military’s SOP: ‘We’re sending you into battle with three blank cartridges, two MREs, and half a roll of duct tape. Figure something out.’
Look up the history of Leo Major, if you’re so minded.
Instead we had dogged persistence, immunity to what Europeans imagined was ‘bad weather’, and an unlimited willingness to scrounge useful kit instead of the duff equipment our Army pawned off on us.
We went into the Great War with Ross rifles, which were good sniper weapons but jammed if you so much as said the word ‘mud’ near one, then threw them away and traded our souls, our grandmothers, or (if available) our virginity to get Lee-Enfields instead. The British government had refused to sell Lee-Enfields to the colonies and wouldn’t license the design, either, so we got stuck with a homebrew design that had never been properly tested before the war.
This set the standard for Canadian military procurement over the following century.
That was the straight-pull, right? I’ve read that the Ross, while accurate and fast to operate, had the unfortunate tendency to blow the bolt back through the head of the firer if not reassembled correctly. And apparently it was very easy to reassemble INcorrectly…
That may be; I’m no expert. But it wasn’t what caused Canadian infantrymen to throw their Rosses away by the thousands. It was the simple fact that they jammed at the least exposure to mud, and guess what the whole Western Front was made of?
Witness the catastrophic SPLAT of the recent ‘Cleopatra’ miniseries. They portrayed her as a sub-Saharan African, a phenotype not found in Egypt at that date, never mind in the Macedonian ruling class. The critics yawned, viewers stayed away in droves, and the Egyptian government formally complained about the racist portrayal of their history.
The producers: ‘Bu-bu-but they’re African! Everybody in Africa looks just like American blacks! Why don’t they love our show?’
Someone who was criticizing the miniseries said that Sub-Saharans were in Egypt at the time, but they were a distinct minority and certainly weren’t marrying into the foreign ruling class of the time.
How black were the Nubians? The word is typically used to refer to dark-skinned Africans in general these days, even though Nubia itself was a specific region. Historically, Nubia, or Kush, shared a border with southern Egypt, and there were conquests in both directions over the centuries. I would expect that there was a Nubian minority in Egypt at the time.
From contemporary accounts there were quite a few; they were frequently in the military. But the Ptolemies definitely were NOT Nubians; they were Macedonian Greeks.
Yes, the Ptolemies had a very bad habit of relying on foreign mercenaries. Some were Nubian. The bulk of them, as I have read, were Jews. Closer at hand, easier to recruit, and many of them spoke Koine Greek and could therefore understand their paymasters’ orders. Plus, centuries of persecution and subjugation had made them tough. The general opinion seems to have been that only the Romans were tougher.
The Nubians, to this day, are considerably lighter-skinned than the West African peoples from whom nearly all American blacks are descended – though much darker than the Egyptians. But there was actually very little traffic between Egypt and Nubia at ordinary times: the cataracts of the Nile were a formidable barrier. (That’s why the conquests didn’t last, in either direction, and Egypt and Nubia always reverted to being separate countries and societies.)
Mostly they aren’t. Because people are stupid. They now have a bunch of people convinced Queen Charlotte was black because she MAYBE had a black ancestress…. does math 600? 700? years before.
They are insane.
Yeah, but let’s face it, by that rule almost all of us are black.
I have an ancestor way closer than that. BUT besides all that, the Moorish ancestress, if the rumor was true was probably Mediterranean looking and (Because Moors preferring Germanic concubines) likely redheaded or blond.
IIRC the original meaning of “Moors” didn’t refer to Black Africans and the actual people that were called “Moors” were Mediterranean in appearance.
Off topic, but that’s why I’m seriously annoyed at the Black Christ meme. As a Middle-Eastern Jew, he’d be Mediterranean in appearance, not a Black African.
Many years ago, a very pale, very freckled redheaded woman claiming to be a Native American applied for a tenure-track faculty position in the English dept. The grad students advising the hiring committe rhapsodized about this wonderful “woman of color”…until one guy spoke up and said, “What color?”
Seeing the gears grinding and smoke coming out of their ears was a wonderful thing. (She was offered, but didn’t take it. A “woman of color” with a decent CV has far better opportunities than podunk State U.)
In fairness (or completeness), I had one black-haired roommate who was as pasty white as me, but Native American (in a not Federally recognized tribe), but his sisters were the typically copperish tone one associates with Native Americans.
Yes, to be fair, she could have been an actual tribe member, probably was. Fakery wasn’t rampant then (that I know of), and she was very specific about which one (not that I remember it).
And somehow it conferred on this freckled redhead a magical quality of “color” that all other redheads lacked and only the “progressives” could see. I found it quite educational.
I’ve mentioned before we know a “kid” (in 30’s now) who is a year younger than son. He and his parents have documented proof of native genes (marriage and birth certificates), from recognized tribes, making him at least 1/4. Red hair and whiter than I am. Neither parent look native either. He wasn’t, but both parents were raised on the reservation. Their problem is “multiple tribes”. None of the specific tribes will recognize either him or his parents. (Dilutes the casino money, don’t ya know?)
I always thought Queen Charlotte was pigmented like my aunt, who is German-Russian, but is darker than everyone else in the family.
(For those that don’t know, German-Russian is the term for the German populace who moved to Russia by invitation then fled Russia, mostly before the revolution, when the Tsar started breaking promises. They never intermarried with the local populations and remained fully German until they got to the new world)
A number were Mennonite, and ended up in the US, Mexico, or Canada. Others were just German, like the “Saxons” of Transylvania [Siebenbergen] who went back to the 1200s-1400s.
The video game “Kingdom Come”, which is set in Medieval Hungary, and includes real life historical figures, was criticized for not having black characters. A couple of years ago, I read a serious article in one of the British newspapers that “explained” why there really were black Vikings.
Maybe not, but they have lots of other exotic cuisine to offer.
Like the street vendor who was arrested during the Beijing Olympics for selling ‘pork dumplings’ that were actually filled with cardboard soaked in lye. The scary thing is, he probably would have got away with it if the Chicoms hadn’t been so obsessed with saving face and making the city look squeaky clean.
The one about “Lead me not into temptation…” made me laugh so hard the normal folk must have thought I was crazy. However, I am not sure if I can explain why it is so funny to someone who did not go to Catholic schools.
I swiped it from ’90 Mile Mystery Box’ (ahem) and posted to Discord which is how I presume it showed up here, and I was never in a Catholic school. Though, granted, I likely did have quite as an… acute… reaction.
The picture of Mid-1700s men walking down the street is accurate but mis-leading. They did dress like that (lace and all) and did wear makeup and did wear high-heeled shoes frequently red. What is left out is that they usually wore swords or carried sword canes and were willing to duel at the drop of a lace handkerchief. Maybe if we brought back dueling we could also go back to fancy dress for men.
Americans like guns too much. Knives and swords are nice and all, but I’d much rather shoot you from a different zip code. Nothing says F You like a fifty cal, Howitzer, or MLRS, Mirv, Trident, etc….
A nuke is really F You and everyone around you and your whole damn city.
NUCLEAR WEAPON: “What part of CUT THAT OUT! DO YOU NOT COMPREHEND?!”
Kilotons of explanation.
Thought experiment: While Teller couldn’t get the “Super” (H-bomb) during the Manhattan Project, ponder if tritium boosting had been added to Little Boy and/or Fat Man.
Interesting thought, but time did not allow it. As Paul Johnson put it, the Manhattan Project, towards the end, turned into a ghoulish race to develop the atomic bomb while there was still a war to use it in. Once they got to ‘earth-shattering kaboom’, there was no time left for tweaking the design, so out the door she went.
The whole project was a lot more makeshift and skin-of-one’s-teeth than historians of any stripe like to admit (for too many historians are in love with Historical Forces, denigrate the role of chance, and despise the individual, as if they were Second Foundationers in charge of the Seldon Plan). Here’s Johnson again:
‘…The Americans had a nuclear monopoly. But it was a theoretical rather than an actual one. On 3 April 1947 Truman had been told, to his horror, that though materials for twelve A-bombs existed, none at all was available in an assembled state.’
During the Berlin crisis in 1948, the U.S. flew sixty B-29 ‘Atomic Bombers’ to Britain in what Johnson refers to as ‘a blaze of publicity’. But they did not have sixty atomic bombs to put aboard them. Some of the planes (I don’t know how many) were empty.
It wasn’t until, I should say, the end of 1952 that there were enough A-bombs in actual existence to make the ‘nuclear deterrent’ a real factor in international affairs. The turning point came when Eisenhower was elected President, and forced Communist China to wind up their campaign in Korea. He had his diplomats in neutral countries quietly tell the Chinese that if they kept stalling the peace talks at Panmunjom, he would use A-bombs on Peking. This threat was evidently credible, for the war wrapped up within six months.
On top of that the MKIII bombs (lightly modified Fat Man) that were the standard took a team of 1/2 a dozen skilled engineers ~30 hrs to assemble and ready. in 1948 there were 6 teams to do that assembly, plans were to ship 5 of them to the UK and the other to alaska to assemble weapons if war looked imminent.
As for boosting a weapon at the end of WWII, not a paper dogs chance in hell. We had material for 1 little boy and 3 fat man (one was tested at Trinity, one was used on Nagasaki, Third was being prepped in the US for shipping to Tinian when the war ended). That takes some serious testing to get right and better understanding of fusion that we didn’t have until after the Ivy Mike Test. Even them there are a LOT of fizzels in the testing of early boosted designs, its hard,,,
Sorry I have a stupid lot (publicly available) of this junk filed in my brain. This has held an attraction like a snake allegedy holds for a bird all my life. Dark Sun is a book that has some history on this (as well as of the atomic spies and the USSRs program).
Part of the problem was that a neutron could make an atom of plutonium, or of tritium, but not both.
There was much argument over what to make. Plutonium was needed to make a bomb, but tritium was needed to boost ot make a “super”.
Logistics, we needed more bombs, so for a while we focused on plutonium production, with tritium essentially an accidental byproduct. Once we had a sufficient pile of plutonium, we changed focus and the more advanced designs increased rapidly.
Tritium also has a relatively short half life, and decays to helium 3, a strong neutron absorber, so any tritium-using weapon was higher maintenance.
Once we had enough reactors running, we could pile up whatever we wanted.
The reason the Soviets built the Chernobl design, is its utility to make uch plutonium and/or tritium. Of course, it also had the downside of a positive void coefficient, thus a built-in tendency for rapid runaway.
Only Ivy Mike used the Deuterium/tritium reaction (called a wet bomb). Ivy mike was an 84 ton building (Soviet scientists referred to it derisively as a fusion installation ). There was a design for a deliverable refrigerated bomb (MK 16) but when Casle Bravo worked that design was never built. Most fusion weapons we have use lithium 6 deuteride (like Castle Bravo). Not sure what boosted weapons use although Tritium is rumored to be at least part of it. This is the kind of stuff that is REAL hard (basically impossible) to get engineering details on as it considered Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information (CNWDI) and neither major power really wanted this stuff selling on the street corner. UK, France and China have all detonated/tested Fusion Weapons and boosted weapons. Rumors are one of India’s shots in the 90’s was boosted data is scanty at best. Odds on Pakistan doesn’t have it none of their tests was anything above 30 Kt and most much smaller though they claim to have boosted weapons. North Korea bought much of their technology from Pakistan swapping some ballistic missile skills so likely no. Israel isn’t saying nominally they have no atomic or fusion weapons. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you… Rumor is they have the parts that could be assembled in a matter of hours, but if asked “Do you have nuclear weapons?” they can say no as all they have is parts :-) .
Israel is not a signer of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and while they are publicly ambiguous about their possession of nuclear weapons, there is little doubt that they have them assembled and in the case of at least one submarine, deployed. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan however…
I suspect there [more than] a few (even some we might NOT know about) who have NO “assembled” nuclear weapons…. who might very well change that in a few minutes IF NEED BE,.
I can buy that I knew they had refused to sign the NNPT. I don’t think they’ve acknowledged it yet, although if they have sub launched weapons those would almost certainly want to be ready to roll, what good is a retaliatory weapon that can’t retaliate?
“As Paul Johnson put it, the Manhattan Project, towards the end, turned into a ghoulish race to develop the atomic bomb while there was still a war to use it in.”
Which sounds like Mr Johnson had bought into the “we only dropped the bomb because we were bloodthirsty” myth, not that we were trying to avoid the absolute bloodbath that an actual invasion would turn into.
It was an interesting moral choice between killing roughly 100K of the enemy versus killing a million or more in an invasion and, maybe, dragging out the war for another two years. That doesn’t include the cost in American lives. Besides, Americans were sick and tired of war.
On a personal note, my father was scheduled to be sent to Okinawa for reasons unsaid at the time but most likely as part of an invasion of Japan. So, if the bombs had not ended the war. I might not be here to bore you all with my useless opinions and bits of trivia.
All told I think it worked out well for humanity that the US ended World War II with a nuclear punctuation mark. We became an economic powerhouse and expanded the frontiers of science, medicine and technology. Not perfect by any rational measure — we still have politicians — but pretty darned good. If there are any future historians, they will have to ponder the madness of of the American people who allowed the Left to squander such a legacy for the sake of cross-dressers and pedophiles.
“It was an interesting moral choice between killing roughly 100K of the enemy versus killing a million or more in an invasion and, maybe, dragging out the war for another two years. ”
“Least awful option” was baked into atomic weapons from the very beginning.
I’ve heard the stories about how in the summer of 1945, Japanese school girls as young as 11 were being formed into platoons and trained to fight the U.S. Marines with bamboo spears. We had already seen the fanatical defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. An invasion would have been far more horrific than two nuked cities.
Besides, we were already firebombing cities. There were more civilian casualties in July than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is also the idea that surrender was less dishonorable when facing such terrible weapons. Nobody knew we only had 2; from their perspective it looked like we would go on nuking a city every few days for as long as it took.
While it’s true that the Enigma crack (started in Poland, continued in Britain, mechanized out the wazoo by America) made a big difference in the Atlantic submarine war, the real answer that would’ve worked regardless was, “we can build ’em faster than you can sink ’em, no, really we can.”
Or as Captain America has been known to say, “I can keep this up all day…”
‘While it’s true that the Enigma crack (started in Poland, continued in Britain, mechanized out the wazoo by America) made a big difference in the Atlantic submarine war, the real answer that would’ve worked regardless was, “we can build ’em faster than you can sink ’em, no, really we can.”’
That’s true enough, but in the meantime cargoes had to get through to England and Russia, and the U-boats could sink ships fast enough to play hell with that. The Eastern Front was a nearly run thing, and there were times when Russian resistance would probably have collapsed if their supplies from the Allies had been cut off. Winning the war then would have been a long and daunting task.
There are Marines who talked about when they were attacked by a Japanese school-girl with a bamboo sticks.
The ones that told it were lucky enough to have been able to catch the girl, who was terrified out of her mind when they didn’t kill her- and they were extra angry when they found out what she was facing if she hadn’t charged them.
The standard thing was to threaten people’s families, as well as an individual’s chastity and freedom.
The whole thing with high school girls being made Okinawa military nurses, and their high school homeroom teacher sent with them… and how she murdered them when the Americans were winning, because obviously the Americans would treat them to a fate worse than death…
Well, I’m pretty sure the teacher was also scared for her family, freedom, chastity, et al. Still doesn’t make it right, but I’m pretty sure that’s what pushed her in that direction.
We never did convince the Japanese to surrender. We convinced the Emperor to surrender. They almost overthrew “the Son of Heaven” rather than surrender.
An invasion would have killed 10 million japanese, or more.
There is a reason the Army in 1945 ordered five hundred thousand Purple Heart medals for the invasion. Note, that was just for the beachhead mission, not the campaign.
We are still issuing from that batch, 78 years later.
In fairness, it was a tiny minority of fanatical officers who tried to overthrow the Emperor.
The chief weakness of Imperial Japan was that the laws and the culture conspired to give unlimited veto power to the most obstreperous members of the armed forces. No government could be formed without the explicit consent of the Army and Navy, since the service ministers had to be, respectively, a general and admiral on the active list. And within each service, anyone who urged caution, or suggested that Japanese victory was not guaranteed in all circumstances, was liable to be executed by a gang with submachine guns, Chicago-style. The country was governed by its own worst psychopaths.
You get the most HORRIFIC arguments for why “SCARY bomb place that had conscripted entire population and would kill them, horrifically, if they did not do what they were ordered” was bad and we should have done… something else.
Pretty much anything that lets them say “those people were wrong,” really.
In Tom Kratman’s Nova Terra/Legion del Cid series, he had a sort of “alternative history” of WW2 where the Japan counter-part was nuked and after some SOBs nuked the USA counter-part for using nukes, the Japan counter-part didn’t surrender thus US counter-part didn’t invade but starved the alt-Japan until it surrendered.
And if you read some of the histories of the sub campaign, by 1944 after the torpedo issues were fixed and we got forward bases closer to Japan, we came pretty close to actually doing that. Much closer than the U-boats ever came.
Japan before the end of World War 2 was a lot like the U.S. today — ruled by a tiny minority of elitists that didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, or the country, only about their own comfort and privileges.
‘Japan before the end of World War 2 was a lot like the U.S. today — ruled by a tiny minority of elitists that didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, or the country, only about their own comfort and privileges.’
The most obvious difference is that the Japanese were raised in a culture that insisted they obey that tiny minority without question, even at the cost of their own lives. Americans, God bless them, tend to be ornery that way.
Years ago, I stayed overnight at Mad Mike’s (and lived, yes…) and read or at least skimmed one book in his Library (he has MORE books than firearms, or at least that was the case in 2007…) and one text Stood Out. It was a collection of WWII Alternate Histories. I thin I read (or least skimmed) the entire tome..) and the intro was what stood out. Summed up, “As crazy as these stories might seem – ponder that our own history is perhaps the most insane, least likely, of all. A HUGE gamble paid off… the SuperWeapon worked… and ended the war… …and has never been used again in warfare.” Freaking MAGIC might be more sensible…. and yet… here we STILL are. We’ve had INSANE close calls.. note *plural… and yet HERE. WE. ARE. At LEAST once something simply didn’t ‘feel’ right. A sub-$1 chip failed… and someone caught it. A new RADAR screamed of an echo…. and someone noticed it was MOONBOUNCE. A system said “incoming” and someone asked “Where’s Khrushchev?” And he was in NYC, so… no. And.. that’s just the crap we KNOW about!
DAMN, but HUMANITY is REALLY F[rea]KING lucky! Why, a fellow could suspect Divine Meddling in things, one could.
The Allies noted at the time that Japan was continually dragged onward by the armed forces staging false flag attacks. Much less consent to the warmongers than there was in Germany
I have explained it to some younger folks that Truman had a few choices.. and they ALL ‘sucked’. Using the Bomb(s) sucked the least – which indicates just how miserable things were.
I recall seeing the claim that if deaths due to war were plotted against time, the line would climb relentlessly – sometimes faster, sometimes slower, a precious few slight drops after local peaks… and WWII had ti climb quite a bit… and then in early/mid August 1945 or maybe September it did something new: It dropped quite low, and then STAYED THERE.
This would mean that not only did The Bomb save million(s) of American/Allied lives, and million(s) of Japanese lives, it ALSO saved an untold number of lives that might well have NO other relation to WWII.
One thing that some don’t realize is that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the largest single casualty event. That would be the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 9th into the 10th of 1945 at over 100,000 dead. And yes Operation Downfall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall) was expected to get really ugly. So ugly that the number of Purple hearts created in anticipation lasted well into the early 1990’s. and its affect on the Japanese people would have been 10x as bad, charging troops armed with M-1 rifles, M-3 sub machine guns and M2 flamethrowers (and similar) with sharpened bamboo spears is not conducive to a long life. On top of that the first part of Downfall was planned for October several (3-4) atomic bombs would have been available and would have been used to clear the area ahead of the landings. As has been noted the best of many really awful outcomes…
Indeed they left them alone as a few “scouting” B-29s were not a threat and at 30K ft they were at the limits of Japanese fighters. On top of that fighters and pilots were getting scarce by August of 1945 between factories being bombed and most of the experienced Japanese pilots having died.
No, Johnson was quite clear that Truman was choosing the least of a number of appalling evils. (He goes into the projected casualty figures for Downfall in some detail.) But the engineers working on the bomb knew nothing about any of this. They only knew that Germany had surrendered and Japan might go down at any time, and they had better hurry up if they wanted their great contribution to the war effort to mean anything.
They needn’t have worried. The other blockbuster research project of the time (which you hear a lot less about, stupidly) bore no fruit at all before VJ-Day, but it continued to its conclusion, with the successful construction of ENIAC. That was originally built to calculate firing tables for new artillery types, which were being developed faster than anyone could compute the tables manually. But it immediately found other uses once it was switched on in 1946; as, indeed, did the A-bomb.
Invading Japan would not be a fast process. Remember they only got the stock of Purple Hearts, ordered for the invasion, down to levels calling for re-order, after 75 years.
For one thing, it’s hard to see where one could’ve put the boosting gas (always gas not solid, for compression preheating or something not open-lit.) in either design. Little Boy was gun-assembly, so everything gets (asymmetrically) squashed; Fat Man had a mostly solid plutonium core (‘pit’ in bomb-speak), with just enough room inside its two matching almost hemispheres for the “Urchin” initiator / neutron source. And of course, as noted, there was a big wartime rush on and also huge motivation not to ‘waste’ the uranium, which was literally irreplaceable for years to come.
Now I have heard that South Africa (IIRC) did explore, but not fabricate, a boosting option for their gun-assembly bomb / bombs (which they evidently later did admit to having). And later, late 40s / very early 50s implosion bombs went to a hollow core, or even a “levitated pit” featuring a solid inner core inside a hollow double-hemisphere outer core. The space inside or between is ideal for D-T boosting gas, since the initiator is now a neutron-source tube well outside the core (out of reach of the chemical explosions for Just Long Enough).
But all this is way, way after the ‘gotta get it to the front’ urgency of a hot war you want to be able to take nuclear, which we did. (The first atomic war was World War ii, for nicely obvious reasons already enumerated, exactly two of them, our entire nuclear arsenal right then. Though current / past historians seem to be quite reluctant to state that obvious fact out loud…)
(The point of boosting is for the fusion fuel inside the fission core to heat up and make ‘just a few’ neutrons, which then hit the really supercritical fission core and make lots of fresh neutrons; they will, because supercritical. This ‘cures’ both pre-detonation, fizzles from bad luck in when the run-away fission chain reaction kicks off, and apparently also most of the ‘fratricide’ problem, of a previous bomb burst causing nearby bombs to fail. So it’s apparently common in all, let’s say about, post-early 50s designs. except say neutron bombs and a few other special cases… so, why not boost, would be the question.)
I’d recommend the Nuclear Weapons Archive (www dot nuclearweaponarchive dot org), and especially their amazing Frequently Asked Questions pages, which amount to an expanded and detailed update to the old “Los Alamos Primer”. When you have both an interest and a main / narrator character who’s overhauling (and then flying) an old Ulam Drive (a.k.a. for us Project Orion type) ship, you need to be able get all this stuff right…
I am not worried in the slightest about Leftists getting their hands on neutron sources.
These, after all, are the people who think math is racist. They don’t know how any of their stuff works and leave icky jobs like maintenance and repair to peons.
Don’t miss the part of the Web site where they have a listing of (IIRC) literally every single American nuclear-explosives test ever done, even the ‘supposed to be a fizzle’ ones for safety certifications (‘single point initiation’). Along with lots, lots, lots of pictures…
Light element enhancement increases yield in an implosion device by 50% or better. If Fat Man had lithium or tritium added its yield would have been over 30 kt instead of the approximately 20 kt it actually generated. I can safely say, with the clarity of hindsight, that there was no such enhancement.
Alright, unworkable for multiple reasons in this/our timeline/universe.
Alternate timeline/universe.. tritium boosting is comprehended in time to be of potential use. Would it be used? Would it be seen as excessive(ly excessive)? Could the delivery aircraft even get away from the dang thing in a survivable manner if it was used?
I think escape is possible. The B-50 (basically an uprated B-29) delivered several large test shots in the pacific test range top speed ~394 Mph. The Russian Tsar bomb (~50 Megaton yield) was dropped from a Tu-95v which had a top speed of ~575 MPH. Although the crew of the tu-95 v got the heck shaken out of them…
The most amazing delivery method was the “lob” for small fighters (e.g. F-100) to deliver tactical nukes. Basically you approach the target, pull up into a upwards half loop. Just before you start to head away from the target you release the weapon, pull to 180 off the original course, nose down, afterburners on (if you have them) and run like hell and offer a prayer to the deity of your choice :-) . Chuck Yeager talked about practicing this one, the pilots were NOT certain they’d make it…
As for laydowns the Hiroshima/ Nagasaki weapons were dropped from high altitude (30K feet?) with a radar altimeter to trigger them at about 2000′. I think Tsar Bomba was parachute retarded and airburst (or they’d have contaminated large portions of the Eastern Pacific USSR .
Almost all the aircraft dropped weapons were designed for parachute drop. It had become clear high altitude runs were a losing proposition mid to Late 50’s given SAMs. Its part of what killed the XB-70 and the B-58 Hustler, high and fast couldn’t out run a SAM. Thus you needed time to get out of the blast zone and the use of a parachute.
In alternate, but not too alternate, history… maybe that could’ve worked.
The ‘Little Boy’ design was very simple, very ‘technologically reliable’ — unlike the ‘Fat Man’ implosion design, it didn’t need to be tested (see: Trinity device) and worked well first time. But it was also pretty notably inefficient; and adding either more uranium (not available), or boosting (see above) might have considerably enhanced its yield even per-pound of U-235.
Think, say, 2-3 times its actual yield at least. But…
Adding any more uranium is dicey, though, since it was already near-critical enough that, IIRC, it was assembled in flight and if the bomber had then hit the water… the extra reflection and moderation would likely have made the device go critical and ‘cook’ somewhat.
And hard to see where to put the boosting gas, but maybe… if they’d guessed right and it was designed to ‘will work, but may work better’… with luck and enough changes from our timeline to theirs, maybe so.
One of the early stories from salvaging the Atocha was finding all these little bottles with stoppers that looked like solid eyedroppers. It apparently took them quite a while to figure out that they were perfume bottles for the young gentlemen to anoint their mustaches so they avoided smelling each other……
Well, there’s a lot of sticks overhanging croco-gator territories, and even some underwater sticks and rocks. And they have burrows, so maybe they scratch themselves in their underwater burrows.
Re: dressed up guys in the old days, of course that directly led to Beau Brummel’s plain black suits and white neckcloths, and to people like the Quakers and Mennonites and Pilgrims who tended to dress plainly. (Although a lot of those guys were fashion-influenced by Dutch merchants and their wives, who wore black and white because the dyes were expensive and the linen was flawlessly white.)
Btw, more funny/interesting stuff I learned: colonial Quaker couples notoriously wrote their own vows. So that’s where that came from.
Also, early and colonial Quakers, including Penn himself, constantly fought against being mistaken for secret Catholics. Partly this was because they also didn’t go to the established Anglican or Puritan churches. But partly it was because they tended to innocently reinvent Catholic styles of talking about Biblical stuff, probably because they were all too young to remember Catholic stuff or came from areas that were super-Protestant.
It gets even funnier when you read online stuff about how edgy the early Quakers were, from people who are also unaware of Catholics/Orthodox/etc. having said these same things all along. (Being nourished by the “breasts of God” stuff, for example. I mean, that’s ancient imagery.)
My father’s Dutch Calvinist ancestors wore “plain black and white.” Black satin, black brocade, white lace, white linen … To show their modesty and simplicity. shakes head and smiles a little
Dad actually found a portrait in the Rijksmuseum. The gents were, ahem, well fed. The ladies were almost as zaftig.
Other interesting facts: Quakers were supposed to marry other Quakers (there were exceptions), and they were supposed to do it after getting the consent of their parents, the women’s Meeting, and the men’s Meeting. (I’m not sure what happened if the parents had thrown a kid out for becoming a Quaker.)
Anyway, the historical mystery/romance hilarity is that the women’s meetings would make extensive investigations into the past and character of an out of town Quaker man, mostly by mailing other Quaker women’s meetings in other towns. Presumably the men also did something along these lines.
Also, it was reasonably common for young single Quaker women to decide they had been called to preach and prophesy and go on evangelization journeys, either on their own hook or because their mothers had had a similar calling; or because they were friends with somebody else who was going. So if their Meeting agreed, these young ladies were tooling around the Colonies, the early US, the UK, etc., staying at random Quakers’ houses (arranged for by women’s Meetings and by ladies who liked arranging things, who were honorarily called things like “nurses” or “mothers.”)
And since they were exotic new people in town whose Meetings back home obviously thought they had good character, they had a tendency to meet young male Quakers and marry at some other town.
Sadly, Quakers got a lot less edgy as the Victorian period went on. (But as I’m sure some people here know better than me, getting the consent of parents and both sides of the Meetinghouse is apparently a Thing even now, and gets deployed if a guy is obviously scummy.)
So again, we have an example of things that don’t make sense for standard Anglican ladies of quality during the Regency, but which could easily work for a young middle-class Quaker girl in the 1700’s. Like traveling around without a lot of family and maids, and writing your own vows.
Seriously, this stuff cracks me up. If you want something improbable for US historical romance, I guess you can just invent your own minor American religious group. (Although there will be Consequences for the rest of your heroine’s life.)
My grandfather was a paratrooper in WWII, and continued with that LGOP attitude when he came home. But, that might have just been his default state. This is the guy that shot the tassel off a kid’s tuque while the kid was wearing it.
According To Hoyt 
Awesome stuff, and glad to see some of the best from Discord on there! I especially like the Faceplant reactions and the last one about Nerd Club!
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English. So wonderful, such an amazing range of vocabulary, and soooo lethally ambiguous.
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Heh.
Heh heh heh heh …
Ahem. Yes, indeed.
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Maybe yes, maybe no. Meanwhile I’m looking for a sale on sails while thinking that you can’t lead a lead pipe to water while you can splatter a leader, or a can with lead & rum’s not what I drink.
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“Let’s eat Grandma!”
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Thank God for punctuation!
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Especially since Grandma will bite back. :twisted:
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So someone must REALLY like morning rum since I swear I saw it like 3 or 4 times in the list.
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Don’t tell me you know no one who drinks 4-6 cups of coffee in the morning.
Just so happens there’s an alcoholic version of that is all.
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4-6 cups of Irish Coffee in the morning….
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That’s the effect of morning rum.
Ask me how I know.
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Posted twice? GAH WP.
BUT it’s that sort of morning, even though I don’t drink (And never in hte morning.)
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Sigh. Turns out there’s a “duplicate” button next to the “delete” in the back panel. I thought I’d deleted one and moved one…. yeah.
Now fixed.
And no. Don’t drink in the morning (Or much the rest of the time) but it was the sort of morning I think lovingly of drinking, so….
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Since I have an aunt to drink Jameson almost to exclusion (though WHICH Jameson sub-version does vary…) that is one I am saving to (eventually) relay. Though the idea of having it hot or warm seems… a bit strange. Cold, or even ‘room temperature’ seems the more likely. I suppose there is Winter and a version/variation of the Hot Toddy.
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…an aunt who drinks Jameson…
(oy vey..)
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I say to you Irish Coffee… Thus warm Jameson (although with Coffee and whipped cream)
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Explains why the rum is always gone….
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is now inflicting memes on family
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That’s what they’re for!
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The memes or the family?
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yes.
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“Lead me not into temptation — I can find it on my own!” :-D
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When I was a wee lad of 40% angsty teen, 40% book nerd, and 20% can’t-wait-to-get-growd-up, there used to be a trend, let’s say, of girls playing at being rather stoopid to attract guys. The colon thing reminds me of that.
I don’t miss that particular little fad. At all.
The guys, on the other hand, at least I know they came by it honestly. Guy hormones make your brain go on vacation along with your common sense when it comes to attractive women. It is especially bad during puberty.
It might say something about me that it took a rather depressing amount of time to link ‘colon’ and ‘cologne,’ though. I mean, that kink exists, somewhere out there, I’m sure…
And I’m quite pleased with my own ignorance on this fact. So much so that I plan to enjoy it for the rest of my life if possible.
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I was informed by a dear, well-meaning lady that the reason I never found a husband is because I’m too openly smart and scared away all the guys. SIGH She was very serious, and trying to be helpful. Facepaw
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Well, to be fair to the woman in question, she’s not wrong- if you’re after hunting a rather particular sort of man, that is.
One with a bit of insecurity, perhaps. Or a lack of self confidence. Or perhaps just plain to blinkered enamored of his own intellect to the point he cannot stand any challenge to it.
My own question would be what’s that man to do if he ever gets sick? Or old? Injured? Or just plain needs a bit of help now and then? We all do, as none of us is perfect.
Competence and true, raw intelligence are very much lacking in this world. A wise man knows he oughta snatch up a smart wife. Better still if she’s smart in are he’s weak in. Shore up each others’ weak spots, make better decisions overall.
Of course that’s coming from a man that’s actively avoiding marriage like a bad smell, so take that with a pinch of salt. Find someone you can stand to be around, with your values more or less, and a good head on his shoulders.
And make babies. That’s what the older generation tells us, usually around family reunion time, if I’m not mistaken. The world needs more good people, and they only come about one way I know of.
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Hear, hear!! That’s what I did. :)
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Three or more for Freedom!
Babies, not wives.
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Couldn’t find one to match up to you? One gal actually told me that I was so smart I was intimidating. I rather wish she had hadn’t been scared off; she was nice. Then there was the one that had a mind like a steel trap…or was it her personality?
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Well, you might scare away the wrong guys. Which is all to the good. A filtering mechanism.
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My momw as sure I never would marry. I read too much.
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$BigBoss was shocked that I don’t watch TV to speak of (nor stream much if at all) and do this crazy thing: read. But that’s where the most, most enduring information is! And a picture is NOT worth a thousand words at 24/30/60 frames/second. I get that sometimes one needs to SEE, so sometime video makes sense. “Podcasts” are annoying as they waste my time. I don’t listen to them while doing “housework” as they get in the way. And my ‘commute’ is.. under 10 minutes, so… let me skim the transcript already!
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Hear, hear!
Also, transcripts are trivially easy to search for key phrases. Audio recordings are basically impossible.
I’ll start listening to podcasts when I can tell the player, ‘Skip on to the bit where they start discussing X.’
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Yeah, I can just ‘hear’ Pa using one of his pet lines on those that drone about nothing before getting to the content: “Shut up and talk!”
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One site had an advert for something that might have been useful, so I did the clicky thing. It lead to a video (filled with red flags, so nope) that wouldn’t let me skip around, and the flogger of this particular stuff was going to take forever to get to the point. Yes, I know the problems associated with trying to fix this problem is, but why don’t you get to the sales pitch for yours. Arggh.
Eventually, I looked at the URL, went to the website and got the details. Definitely nope.
I have the bandwidth to download podcasts. I do not have the patience to listen to them.
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Written word also limits the data to what is relevant– I mean, sure, I can listen to Alan Rickman read the phonebook. However that doesn’t make the numbers right.
What Sarah calls the “fan dance” is possible in text, but it’s HARDER than in audio, and audio plus visual is even easier. (which is why it’s great that I loath listening to politicians speak, almost uniformly, don’t really know why)
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^This^ So much this. Not even in the background.
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They all sound like bad salesmen who have never used their product. Might not even know what their product is, they just memorized the brochure.
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That, actually, is a pretty fair working definition of ‘socialist’. Their policies generally go something like this: ‘X has never been tried, but it would obviously work perfectly because Trust Me. Therefore I want to make it compulsory for the whole of society.’
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The only time the Reader listens to podcasts is at the gym. Useful there.
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I love a good podcast, because I can have it in the background as I do other stuff– like how some folks use music radio.
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Yes, I think of podcasts as talk radio.
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Speaking of, new Jimmy Akin episode!
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(for those not familiar, you need to finish the episode. Or go listen to the bunyip/dropbear episode)
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Thanks, Foxfier. That was interesting, and unexpected.
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I spent the first half of the episode yelling things at the computer. :D
Discussions here about various psych frauds have taught me PATTERN RECOGNITION!
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I am wired such that smart women are -hot-.
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These days there is a kind of smart that means HR Karen. Think ginger Goebbels or Rachel Maddow.
“Smart” especially as an adjective for a female, is a degraded word.
Any sane man would run for the hills
(With apologies to TXred because this is tangential to her case)
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Hm. For me that came from one of the guys, who I had been matched with on a dating site.
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Yes. It took a couple of minutes to figure out WTF the girls were writing about. (Gets brain bleach to destroy the memory of one of Anthony Bourdain’s meals in deepest Africa. He got better after a round of antibiotics…)
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The person I hate most would never notice the pocket change or luck.
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Yay, one of the ones I yoinked showed up! Here’s to many more.
I have loads and loads of D&D memes, actually. Given how many readers here are of the nerd/geek variety, surely a few wouldn’t go amiss…
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It’s… disturbing?.. how many DnD/gaming things I ‘get’ despite having never played, nor cared to. Alright, at one gathering I did participate in a game of ‘Nuclear War’. The fellow who brought it was aghast at how fast we managed to not only get things started, but ENTIRELY FINISH OFF the world. “I’ve seen this game go SO FULLY DESTRUCTIVE SO FAST!” Yeah, we’re SCARY I think we ALL adopted the ‘Samson’ Option: I might be doomed, but now SO ARE YOU!
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That the one from Flying Buffalo Games where you play three rounds face down in advance, and have a spinner for yield?
I picked that one up from some nuke sub crew guys, who played it endlessly. Scary folk – a little too quick to mention that if their crew mutineed, they’d be the world’s number 3 nuclear power.
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I doubt there was/is another.
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“… there is another…”
Nuclear Escalation
Same publisher. Can be stand alone, or combine with Nuclear War. Dice instead of spinner.
More mayhem.
There was also a computer game version of Nuclear War. The intro was a bomber with the manufacturer’s logo. It drops a bomb with a cowboy, facing backwards, saying “yahoo!”. Build the 100MT warhead and a crowd says “oooooooooo”. Decent gameplay for late eighties Amiga.
Too funny.
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There was also one in the late 80s called “Global Thermonuclear War”. It was noteworthy for three things:
1. It was the first multiplayer game (more than two people) I ever saw.
2. Which probably had something to do with the fact that it was released on Novell Netware, only. Novell Netware was basically networked MS-DOS.
3. The geopolitical; biases of the developer were obvious for the time.
a. The Soviets always won.
b. You lasted longer if you let the Soviets win at their pace.
c. The author was obviously worried about “the China card”, because $20 million in military aid to China would trigger an instant first strike.
It didn’t last long.
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And a third, Nuclear proliferation. Once again, can stand alone or add in with the other two.
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I own the first two. Didn’t realize there was a third. But this is the very first group I’ve been associated with who is even familiar with the original! Lots of good company here.
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. Scary folk – a little too quick to mention that if their crew mutineed, they’d be the world’s number 3 nuclear power
:snickers in Navy:
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“I’ve NEVER seen….”
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Well, even if medieval high fantasy isn’t your style, you’ve certainly got the mindset down.
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Ahh Nuclear War, what is known by grognards as a beer and pretzels game (i.e Not taking the focus of say Squad Leader or Star Fleet Battles, played at the end of the evening when everyone is tired). It was a favorite at my college apartment. Ah the joy of getting the Saturn Missile and the 100 Megaton bomb :-). In a similar spirit are the modern Munchikins and Exploding Kittens.
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Diadem of Demented Dexterity + 3 Handed Sword = WIN.
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Pretty sure Stan Rogers is a better singer…..
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As I said to a friend of mine just yesterday:
‘Oh, the year was 1976.
How I wish I was in silence now!
Old Stan Waters went on too long,
And put 53 verses in his song—
God damn them all!’
(I like the song, actually, but it is kind of asking for that particular snark.)
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““Matty Groves” is a great old traditional song, and lots of people ask for it. The big problem with “Matty Groves” is, it’s big. About four hundred and seventy verses. Fortunately, with a little creative editing, it can still be chopped down to a reasonable size…say, talking blues?”
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Then there’s the alternative version “Garnet’s home made beer”. We left one of his concerts singing it on the way out the door and he shouted “Wait!” and chased us down and told us the story about the party it commemorated. Sounded like quite the time!
“Garnet was smashed with a gut full of dregs, and his breath set fire to both me legs…
God damn them all,
I was told this brew was worth it’s weight in gold”
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Son of a Radium Dial watch, I’ve HEARD that sucker!
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C4M
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I believe the LGOP is the best description I’ve seen of the difference between US Military culture and the rest of the world’s militaries.
For instance why the Movie Kelly’s Heroes would never work with any other country’s soldiers as the characters. (Unrealistic, yes, but at it’s core, every member of the US military has felt, or knows teammates, that you could say “Yeah, I could see him doing that”)
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See also Down Periscope. The tech was laughable, but anyone who’s ever been underway underwater can point to the characters (especially on the Stingray) and go “knew him… knew him… had a friend who sailed with him… had that asshole as my Dept head…”.
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Consistently shows up on the list of most realistic military movies when polling submarine sailors. ‘Cause it sorta is.
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One they didn’t show was the Smitty, every ship had a Smitty. One time in Japan our Smitty left the ship in a US naval uniform, he came back in a Japanese Naval Uniform. we never did get the story out of him about that little adventure.
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To be fair, that was probably a case of being one of those characters that you can not include in a story because no one will actually believe the reality.
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Unless it’s a D&D story, in which case, have at it! Those who know will tell you their own DM-Needs-A-Drink moments.
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Ahem
I was such a character. “Boggle the gamemaster” seemed to be my schtik.
Heh.
“Boggle the senior NCO” was even more fun.
…
(Having refused an unlawful order) ” do you know why I don’t want to share a cell with you, First Sergeant?”
“No, -PFC-! Why don’t you tell me!”
“First Sergeant, you’re married. You’ll get lonely first.”
(Boggle!)
It ended well. I got promoted not too long after. But it’s a long story.
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Were, by chance, rubber ducks involved?
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And yet, those are the ones that HAVE to be real, because WHO THE [PHOTON] would/could make that up?
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Saw it before I hit the Navy.
Kept noting “wait, that’s my uncle…..”
Didn’t change after I joined. ^.^
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It actually kind of works with Canadians, too, because that’s pretty much our military’s SOP: ‘We’re sending you into battle with three blank cartridges, two MREs, and half a roll of duct tape. Figure something out.’
Look up the history of Leo Major, if you’re so minded.
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You guys invented blitzkrieg because you were bored with slow fighting and had bicycles.
I don’t know that I want to leave you unsupervised… but I’m pretty sure that Trudeau doesn’t count as adult supervision.
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Not sure ‘Shiny Pony’ (which is a disservice to quadrupeds for show…) can count as adult anything.
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…. maybe he’s a Valdamar fanboi?
Mindcontrol ponies, mindcontrol ponies, oooooooooh
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Blitzkrieg was Canadian?
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Nah. We never had that kind of firepower.
Instead we had dogged persistence, immunity to what Europeans imagined was ‘bad weather’, and an unlimited willingness to scrounge useful kit instead of the duff equipment our Army pawned off on us.
We went into the Great War with Ross rifles, which were good sniper weapons but jammed if you so much as said the word ‘mud’ near one, then threw them away and traded our souls, our grandmothers, or (if available) our virginity to get Lee-Enfields instead. The British government had refused to sell Lee-Enfields to the colonies and wouldn’t license the design, either, so we got stuck with a homebrew design that had never been properly tested before the war.
This set the standard for Canadian military procurement over the following century.
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That was the straight-pull, right? I’ve read that the Ross, while accurate and fast to operate, had the unfortunate tendency to blow the bolt back through the head of the firer if not reassembled correctly. And apparently it was very easy to reassemble INcorrectly…
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That may be; I’m no expert. But it wasn’t what caused Canadian infantrymen to throw their Rosses away by the thousands. It was the simple fact that they jammed at the least exposure to mud, and guess what the whole Western Front was made of?
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The Eastern Front was, too.
IOW, the same issue that made the 1911 far superior to the P08 Luger in combat.
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Laughed way too loud at the New York City skyline one. That’s getting posted on my blog. ~:D
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c4c
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It’s hilarious how wokeists think they can racebend actual historical figures like they do fictional people, and that they won’t be called out for it.
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Witness the catastrophic SPLAT of the recent ‘Cleopatra’ miniseries. They portrayed her as a sub-Saharan African, a phenotype not found in Egypt at that date, never mind in the Macedonian ruling class. The critics yawned, viewers stayed away in droves, and the Egyptian government formally complained about the racist portrayal of their history.
The producers: ‘Bu-bu-but they’re African! Everybody in Africa looks just like American blacks! Why don’t they love our show?’
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The Egyptian government didn’t just formally complain. They also filed a lawsuit.
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Someone who was criticizing the miniseries said that Sub-Saharans were in Egypt at the time, but they were a distinct minority and certainly weren’t marrying into the foreign ruling class of the time.
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How black were the Nubians? The word is typically used to refer to dark-skinned Africans in general these days, even though Nubia itself was a specific region. Historically, Nubia, or Kush, shared a border with southern Egypt, and there were conquests in both directions over the centuries. I would expect that there was a Nubian minority in Egypt at the time.
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From contemporary accounts there were quite a few; they were frequently in the military. But the Ptolemies definitely were NOT Nubians; they were Macedonian Greeks.
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Yes, the Ptolemies had a very bad habit of relying on foreign mercenaries. Some were Nubian. The bulk of them, as I have read, were Jews. Closer at hand, easier to recruit, and many of them spoke Koine Greek and could therefore understand their paymasters’ orders. Plus, centuries of persecution and subjugation had made them tough. The general opinion seems to have been that only the Romans were tougher.
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It seems to be the same today; FAFO with Israeli troops is * not* recommended.
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The Nubians, to this day, are considerably lighter-skinned than the West African peoples from whom nearly all American blacks are descended – though much darker than the Egyptians. But there was actually very little traffic between Egypt and Nubia at ordinary times: the cataracts of the Nile were a formidable barrier. (That’s why the conquests didn’t last, in either direction, and Egypt and Nubia always reverted to being separate countries and societies.)
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Nubians were notoriously good archers, and thus the relevant Andre Norton historical novel, Shadow Hawk.
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Mostly they aren’t. Because people are stupid. They now have a bunch of people convinced Queen Charlotte was black because she MAYBE had a black ancestress…. does math 600? 700? years before.
They are insane.
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They apply the ‘one drop rule’ when they want to.
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A rule so utterly insane the freaking NAZI’s went, “Hang on, that’s crazily excessive.”
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Heck, the Nazis let “one great-grandparent” pass, unlike the notoriously white in appearance octoroons of the somewhat more reasonable Deep South.
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Yeah, but let’s face it, by that rule almost all of us are black.
I have an ancestor way closer than that. BUT besides all that, the Moorish ancestress, if the rumor was true was probably Mediterranean looking and (Because Moors preferring Germanic concubines) likely redheaded or blond.
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IIRC the original meaning of “Moors” didn’t refer to Black Africans and the actual people that were called “Moors” were Mediterranean in appearance.
Off topic, but that’s why I’m seriously annoyed at the Black Christ meme. As a Middle-Eastern Jew, he’d be Mediterranean in appearance, not a Black African.
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About my color, in fact.
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A few years ago, I met a woman who called herself “Mexican-American” but nobody would have realized it if she didn’t “shout it to the rooftops”. :lol:
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Was it AOC? :-P
Dat beotch be pasty white, mon.
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LOL :lol:
This was long before AOC crawled out from under that rock. :wink:
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Many years ago, a very pale, very freckled redheaded woman claiming to be a Native American applied for a tenure-track faculty position in the English dept. The grad students advising the hiring committe rhapsodized about this wonderful “woman of color”…until one guy spoke up and said, “What color?”
Seeing the gears grinding and smoke coming out of their ears was a wonderful thing. (She was offered, but didn’t take it. A “woman of color” with a decent CV has far better opportunities than podunk State U.)
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LOL :lol:
But of course, if you know anything about Mexican society, you’d know that a large percentage of Mexicans are “White”.
Their ancestors were completely European lacking American Indian ancestry or Black African ancestry.
So yes, this Mexican-American woman had mainly European Ancestry. :grin:
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In fairness (or completeness), I had one black-haired roommate who was as pasty white as me, but Native American (in a not Federally recognized tribe), but his sisters were the typically copperish tone one associates with Native Americans.
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Yes, to be fair, she could have been an actual tribe member, probably was. Fakery wasn’t rampant then (that I know of), and she was very specific about which one (not that I remember it).
And somehow it conferred on this freckled redhead a magical quality of “color” that all other redheads lacked and only the “progressives” could see. I found it quite educational.
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I have cousins that were red head Indians.
(short version: Scottish great grandfather had a brother who married an Indian lady.)
…the only surviving member looks Paiute. The rest died of “alcohol and Bad Live Choices.”
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I’ve mentioned before we know a “kid” (in 30’s now) who is a year younger than son. He and his parents have documented proof of native genes (marriage and birth certificates), from recognized tribes, making him at least 1/4. Red hair and whiter than I am. Neither parent look native either. He wasn’t, but both parents were raised on the reservation. Their problem is “multiple tribes”. None of the specific tribes will recognize either him or his parents. (Dilutes the casino money, don’t ya know?)
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I always thought Queen Charlotte was pigmented like my aunt, who is German-Russian, but is darker than everyone else in the family.
(For those that don’t know, German-Russian is the term for the German populace who moved to Russia by invitation then fled Russia, mostly before the revolution, when the Tsar started breaking promises. They never intermarried with the local populations and remained fully German until they got to the new world)
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A number were Mennonite, and ended up in the US, Mexico, or Canada. Others were just German, like the “Saxons” of Transylvania [Siebenbergen] who went back to the 1200s-1400s.
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Actually except for one aberrant portrait, the woman was a pale blond. It’s bizarre what they have attached to her.
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The video game “Kingdom Come”, which is set in Medieval Hungary, and includes real life historical figures, was criticized for not having black characters. A couple of years ago, I read a serious article in one of the British newspapers that “explained” why there really were black Vikings.
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Darker than blonde? Oh yes. African-Scandinavian? Ah, nope.
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Maybe they settled in the Valley of the Keldara… :-)
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Like the Black Irish are actually black?
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Of course not. They’re descended from Clarence, the last Neanderthal. :-D
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Speaking of “Taking the piss”, “Chinese culture” wins. This is yeally only in a small area of one eastern province:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu5mXFWzCsI
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“yeally” >>> “really”
And the win is that 99.44% of even Communist China doesn’t have that…
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Maybe not, but they have lots of other exotic cuisine to offer.
Like the street vendor who was arrested during the Beijing Olympics for selling ‘pork dumplings’ that were actually filled with cardboard soaked in lye. The scary thing is, he probably would have got away with it if the Chicoms hadn’t been so obsessed with saving face and making the city look squeaky clean.
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The one about “Lead me not into temptation…” made me laugh so hard the normal folk must have thought I was crazy. However, I am not sure if I can explain why it is so funny to someone who did not go to Catholic schools.
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I swiped it from ’90 Mile Mystery Box’ (ahem) and posted to Discord which is how I presume it showed up here, and I was never in a Catholic school. Though, granted, I likely did have quite as an… acute… reaction.
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The picture of Mid-1700s men walking down the street is accurate but mis-leading. They did dress like that (lace and all) and did wear makeup and did wear high-heeled shoes frequently red. What is left out is that they usually wore swords or carried sword canes and were willing to duel at the drop of a lace handkerchief. Maybe if we brought back dueling we could also go back to fancy dress for men.
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Worse, they were dressing as High Status Men of their time but they weren’t dressed as High Status Women of their time.
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Americans like guns too much. Knives and swords are nice and all, but I’d much rather shoot you from a different zip code. Nothing says F You like a fifty cal, Howitzer, or MLRS, Mirv, Trident, etc….
A nuke is really F You and everyone around you and your whole damn city.
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NUCLEAR WEAPON: “What part of CUT THAT OUT! DO YOU NOT COMPREHEND?!”
Kilotons of explanation.
Thought experiment: While Teller couldn’t get the “Super” (H-bomb) during the Manhattan Project, ponder if tritium boosting had been added to Little Boy and/or Fat Man.
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Interesting thought, but time did not allow it. As Paul Johnson put it, the Manhattan Project, towards the end, turned into a ghoulish race to develop the atomic bomb while there was still a war to use it in. Once they got to ‘earth-shattering kaboom’, there was no time left for tweaking the design, so out the door she went.
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I rather suspected that, but was not sure.
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The whole project was a lot more makeshift and skin-of-one’s-teeth than historians of any stripe like to admit (for too many historians are in love with Historical Forces, denigrate the role of chance, and despise the individual, as if they were Second Foundationers in charge of the Seldon Plan). Here’s Johnson again:
‘…The Americans had a nuclear monopoly. But it was a theoretical rather than an actual one. On 3 April 1947 Truman had been told, to his horror, that though materials for twelve A-bombs existed, none at all was available in an assembled state.’
During the Berlin crisis in 1948, the U.S. flew sixty B-29 ‘Atomic Bombers’ to Britain in what Johnson refers to as ‘a blaze of publicity’. But they did not have sixty atomic bombs to put aboard them. Some of the planes (I don’t know how many) were empty.
It wasn’t until, I should say, the end of 1952 that there were enough A-bombs in actual existence to make the ‘nuclear deterrent’ a real factor in international affairs. The turning point came when Eisenhower was elected President, and forced Communist China to wind up their campaign in Korea. He had his diplomats in neutral countries quietly tell the Chinese that if they kept stalling the peace talks at Panmunjom, he would use A-bombs on Peking. This threat was evidently credible, for the war wrapped up within six months.
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On top of that the MKIII bombs (lightly modified Fat Man) that were the standard took a team of 1/2 a dozen skilled engineers ~30 hrs to assemble and ready. in 1948 there were 6 teams to do that assembly, plans were to ship 5 of them to the UK and the other to alaska to assemble weapons if war looked imminent.
As for boosting a weapon at the end of WWII, not a paper dogs chance in hell. We had material for 1 little boy and 3 fat man (one was tested at Trinity, one was used on Nagasaki, Third was being prepped in the US for shipping to Tinian when the war ended). That takes some serious testing to get right and better understanding of fusion that we didn’t have until after the Ivy Mike Test. Even them there are a LOT of fizzels in the testing of early boosted designs, its hard,,,
Sorry I have a stupid lot (publicly available) of this junk filed in my brain. This has held an attraction like a snake allegedy holds for a bird all my life. Dark Sun is a book that has some history on this (as well as of the atomic spies and the USSRs program).
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Part of the problem was that a neutron could make an atom of plutonium, or of tritium, but not both.
There was much argument over what to make. Plutonium was needed to make a bomb, but tritium was needed to boost ot make a “super”.
Logistics, we needed more bombs, so for a while we focused on plutonium production, with tritium essentially an accidental byproduct. Once we had a sufficient pile of plutonium, we changed focus and the more advanced designs increased rapidly.
Tritium also has a relatively short half life, and decays to helium 3, a strong neutron absorber, so any tritium-using weapon was higher maintenance.
Once we had enough reactors running, we could pile up whatever we wanted.
The reason the Soviets built the Chernobl design, is its utility to make uch plutonium and/or tritium. Of course, it also had the downside of a positive void coefficient, thus a built-in tendency for rapid runaway.
Oops. I guess Blowups Happen.
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Only Ivy Mike used the Deuterium/tritium reaction (called a wet bomb). Ivy mike was an 84 ton building (Soviet scientists referred to it derisively as a fusion installation ). There was a design for a deliverable refrigerated bomb (MK 16) but when Casle Bravo worked that design was never built. Most fusion weapons we have use lithium 6 deuteride (like Castle Bravo). Not sure what boosted weapons use although Tritium is rumored to be at least part of it. This is the kind of stuff that is REAL hard (basically impossible) to get engineering details on as it considered Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information (CNWDI) and neither major power really wanted this stuff selling on the street corner. UK, France and China have all detonated/tested Fusion Weapons and boosted weapons. Rumors are one of India’s shots in the 90’s was boosted data is scanty at best. Odds on Pakistan doesn’t have it none of their tests was anything above 30 Kt and most much smaller though they claim to have boosted weapons. North Korea bought much of their technology from Pakistan swapping some ballistic missile skills so likely no. Israel isn’t saying nominally they have no atomic or fusion weapons. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you… Rumor is they have the parts that could be assembled in a matter of hours, but if asked “Do you have nuclear weapons?” they can say no as all they have is parts :-) .
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Israel is not a signer of the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and while they are publicly ambiguous about their possession of nuclear weapons, there is little doubt that they have them assembled and in the case of at least one submarine, deployed. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan however…
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I suspect there [more than] a few (even some we might NOT know about) who have NO “assembled” nuclear weapons…. who might very well change that in a few minutes IF NEED BE,.
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I can buy that I knew they had refused to sign the NNPT. I don’t think they’ve acknowledged it yet, although if they have sub launched weapons those would almost certainly want to be ready to roll, what good is a retaliatory weapon that can’t retaliate?
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Apropos of all of this I give you:
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At the way things are going nowadays, I trust ALABAMA with ‘The Bomb’ more than the dolts in D.C.!
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“As Paul Johnson put it, the Manhattan Project, towards the end, turned into a ghoulish race to develop the atomic bomb while there was still a war to use it in.”
Which sounds like Mr Johnson had bought into the “we only dropped the bomb because we were bloodthirsty” myth, not that we were trying to avoid the absolute bloodbath that an actual invasion would turn into.
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It was an interesting moral choice between killing roughly 100K of the enemy versus killing a million or more in an invasion and, maybe, dragging out the war for another two years. That doesn’t include the cost in American lives. Besides, Americans were sick and tired of war.
On a personal note, my father was scheduled to be sent to Okinawa for reasons unsaid at the time but most likely as part of an invasion of Japan. So, if the bombs had not ended the war. I might not be here to bore you all with my useless opinions and bits of trivia.
All told I think it worked out well for humanity that the US ended World War II with a nuclear punctuation mark. We became an economic powerhouse and expanded the frontiers of science, medicine and technology. Not perfect by any rational measure — we still have politicians — but pretty darned good. If there are any future historians, they will have to ponder the madness of of the American people who allowed the Left to squander such a legacy for the sake of cross-dressers and pedophiles.
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“It was an interesting moral choice between killing roughly 100K of the enemy versus killing a million or more in an invasion and, maybe, dragging out the war for another two years. ”
“Least awful option” was baked into atomic weapons from the very beginning.
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I’ve heard the stories about how in the summer of 1945, Japanese school girls as young as 11 were being formed into platoons and trained to fight the U.S. Marines with bamboo spears. We had already seen the fanatical defense of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. An invasion would have been far more horrific than two nuked cities.
Besides, we were already firebombing cities. There were more civilian casualties in July than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is also the idea that surrender was less dishonorable when facing such terrible weapons. Nobody knew we only had 2; from their perspective it looked like we would go on nuking a city every few days for as long as it took.
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It was useful to have the reputation of
“America’s Answer:
PRODUCTION!”
And two different types, that could be fairly readily realized by analysis? “Crap, they have AT LEAST TWO production lines!?”
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For an example of that, see: Liberty ships.
While it’s true that the Enigma crack (started in Poland, continued in Britain, mechanized out the wazoo by America) made a big difference in the Atlantic submarine war, the real answer that would’ve worked regardless was, “we can build ’em faster than you can sink ’em, no, really we can.”
Or as Captain America has been known to say, “I can keep this up all day…”
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‘While it’s true that the Enigma crack (started in Poland, continued in Britain, mechanized out the wazoo by America) made a big difference in the Atlantic submarine war, the real answer that would’ve worked regardless was, “we can build ’em faster than you can sink ’em, no, really we can.”’
That’s true enough, but in the meantime cargoes had to get through to England and Russia, and the U-boats could sink ships fast enough to play hell with that. The Eastern Front was a nearly run thing, and there were times when Russian resistance would probably have collapsed if their supplies from the Allies had been cut off. Winning the war then would have been a long and daunting task.
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“Rosie has a boyfriend, Charlie.
Charlie, he’s a marine.
Rosie is protecting Charlie…
Working overtime on the riveting machine.”
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And a group of Japanese Army Men still attempted to stop the Emperor from issuing the Order To Surrender. :sad:
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There are Marines who talked about when they were attacked by a Japanese school-girl with a bamboo sticks.
The ones that told it were lucky enough to have been able to catch the girl, who was terrified out of her mind when they didn’t kill her- and they were extra angry when they found out what she was facing if she hadn’t charged them.
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I am both curious… and knowing better than to ask. For I might care to sleep in peace, at least some of the time, this century
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Pretty much.
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The standard thing was to threaten people’s families, as well as an individual’s chastity and freedom.
The whole thing with high school girls being made Okinawa military nurses, and their high school homeroom teacher sent with them… and how she murdered them when the Americans were winning, because obviously the Americans would treat them to a fate worse than death…
Well, I’m pretty sure the teacher was also scared for her family, freedom, chastity, et al. Still doesn’t make it right, but I’m pretty sure that’s what pushed her in that direction.
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Yeah.
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We never did convince the Japanese to surrender. We convinced the Emperor to surrender. They almost overthrew “the Son of Heaven” rather than surrender.
An invasion would have killed 10 million japanese, or more.
There is a reason the Army in 1945 ordered five hundred thousand Purple Heart medals for the invasion. Note, that was just for the beachhead mission, not the campaign.
We are still issuing from that batch, 78 years later.
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In fairness, it was a tiny minority of fanatical officers who tried to overthrow the Emperor.
The chief weakness of Imperial Japan was that the laws and the culture conspired to give unlimited veto power to the most obstreperous members of the armed forces. No government could be formed without the explicit consent of the Army and Navy, since the service ministers had to be, respectively, a general and admiral on the active list. And within each service, anyone who urged caution, or suggested that Japanese victory was not guaranteed in all circumstances, was liable to be executed by a gang with submachine guns, Chicago-style. The country was governed by its own worst psychopaths.
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” And within each service, anyone who urged caution, or suggested that Japanese victory was not guaranteed in all circumstances, ”
In which case, I’m surprised Yamamoto lasted as long as he did.
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I have read that Yamamoto was given a command at sea specifically to put him out of reach of the assassins.
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And you have to wonder if his final trip was actually set up to get rid of him.
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That is a very interesting thought.
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You want horror, go look at the folks who are “nice” and think we should have tried to starve Japan instead.
The American Catholic (a blog I contribute to… occasionally… https://the-american-catholic.com/ ) calls this the Bomb Follies.
You get the most HORRIFIC arguments for why “SCARY bomb place that had conscripted entire population and would kill them, horrifically, if they did not do what they were ordered” was bad and we should have done… something else.
Pretty much anything that lets them say “those people were wrong,” really.
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In Tom Kratman’s Nova Terra/Legion del Cid series, he had a sort of “alternative history” of WW2 where the Japan counter-part was nuked and after some SOBs nuked the USA counter-part for using nukes, the Japan counter-part didn’t surrender thus US counter-part didn’t invade but starved the alt-Japan until it surrendered.
Not nice results.
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Heck, it took the guy who took over taking care of Japan threatening to quit if he didn’t get mad amounts of food, NOW, to keep Japan from starving.
I like Japan.
I want it to exist!
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” we should have tried to starve Japan instead.”
And if you read some of the histories of the sub campaign, by 1944 after the torpedo issues were fixed and we got forward bases closer to Japan, we came pretty close to actually doing that. Much closer than the U-boats ever came.
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I’ve read at least one claim that had things dragged to 1946, Anthrax (in th ecountryside… aimed at the food animals) was being at least considered.
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Japan before the end of World War 2 was a lot like the U.S. today — ruled by a tiny minority of elitists that didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, or the country, only about their own comfort and privileges.
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‘Japan before the end of World War 2 was a lot like the U.S. today — ruled by a tiny minority of elitists that didn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, or the country, only about their own comfort and privileges.’
The most obvious difference is that the Japanese were raised in a culture that insisted they obey that tiny minority without question, even at the cost of their own lives. Americans, God bless them, tend to be ornery that way.
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Years ago, I stayed overnight at Mad Mike’s (and lived, yes…) and read or at least skimmed one book in his Library (he has MORE books than firearms, or at least that was the case in 2007…) and one text Stood Out. It was a collection of WWII Alternate Histories. I thin I read (or least skimmed) the entire tome..) and the intro was what stood out. Summed up, “As crazy as these stories might seem – ponder that our own history is perhaps the most insane, least likely, of all. A HUGE gamble paid off… the SuperWeapon worked… and ended the war… …and has never been used again in warfare.” Freaking MAGIC might be more sensible…. and yet… here we STILL are. We’ve had INSANE close calls.. note *plural… and yet HERE. WE. ARE. At LEAST once something simply didn’t ‘feel’ right. A sub-$1 chip failed… and someone caught it. A new RADAR screamed of an echo…. and someone noticed it was MOONBOUNCE. A system said “incoming” and someone asked “Where’s Khrushchev?” And he was in NYC, so… no. And.. that’s just the crap we KNOW about!
DAMN, but HUMANITY is REALLY F[rea]KING lucky! Why, a fellow could suspect Divine Meddling in things, one could.
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The Allies noted at the time that Japan was continually dragged onward by the armed forces staging false flag attacks. Much less consent to the warmongers than there was in Germany
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Virtually every civilian on Saipan had died, often by suicide.
Excellent way to convince us that the conventional attack would be costly.
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I have explained it to some younger folks that Truman had a few choices.. and they ALL ‘sucked’. Using the Bomb(s) sucked the least – which indicates just how miserable things were.
I recall seeing the claim that if deaths due to war were plotted against time, the line would climb relentlessly – sometimes faster, sometimes slower, a precious few slight drops after local peaks… and WWII had ti climb quite a bit… and then in early/mid August 1945 or maybe September it did something new: It dropped quite low, and then STAYED THERE.
This would mean that not only did The Bomb save million(s) of American/Allied lives, and million(s) of Japanese lives, it ALSO saved an untold number of lives that might well have NO other relation to WWII.
Thank God for the Atom Bomb
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One thing that some don’t realize is that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were the largest single casualty event. That would be the fire bombing of Tokyo on March 9th into the 10th of 1945 at over 100,000 dead. And yes Operation Downfall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall) was expected to get really ugly. So ugly that the number of Purple hearts created in anticipation lasted well into the early 1990’s. and its affect on the Japanese people would have been 10x as bad, charging troops armed with M-1 rifles, M-3 sub machine guns and M2 flamethrowers (and similar) with sharpened bamboo spears is not conducive to a long life. On top of that the first part of Downfall was planned for October several (3-4) atomic bombs would have been available and would have been used to clear the area ahead of the landings. As has been noted the best of many really awful outcomes…
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Aye. “One bomb, from one plane.” SUDDEN. That was the Big Change.
Lone planes were no longer “It’s ‘just recon’, don’t worry too much.”
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Indeed they left them alone as a few “scouting” B-29s were not a threat and at 30K ft they were at the limits of Japanese fighters. On top of that fighters and pilots were getting scarce by August of 1945 between factories being bombed and most of the experienced Japanese pilots having died.
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No, Johnson was quite clear that Truman was choosing the least of a number of appalling evils. (He goes into the projected casualty figures for Downfall in some detail.) But the engineers working on the bomb knew nothing about any of this. They only knew that Germany had surrendered and Japan might go down at any time, and they had better hurry up if they wanted their great contribution to the war effort to mean anything.
They needn’t have worried. The other blockbuster research project of the time (which you hear a lot less about, stupidly) bore no fruit at all before VJ-Day, but it continued to its conclusion, with the successful construction of ENIAC. That was originally built to calculate firing tables for new artillery types, which were being developed faster than anyone could compute the tables manually. But it immediately found other uses once it was switched on in 1946; as, indeed, did the A-bomb.
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Invading Japan would not be a fast process. Remember they only got the stock of Purple Hearts, ordered for the invasion, down to levels calling for re-order, after 75 years.
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Right, not boosted.
For one thing, it’s hard to see where one could’ve put the boosting gas (always gas not solid, for compression preheating or something not open-lit.) in either design. Little Boy was gun-assembly, so everything gets (asymmetrically) squashed; Fat Man had a mostly solid plutonium core (‘pit’ in bomb-speak), with just enough room inside its two matching almost hemispheres for the “Urchin” initiator / neutron source. And of course, as noted, there was a big wartime rush on and also huge motivation not to ‘waste’ the uranium, which was literally irreplaceable for years to come.
Now I have heard that South Africa (IIRC) did explore, but not fabricate, a boosting option for their gun-assembly bomb / bombs (which they evidently later did admit to having). And later, late 40s / very early 50s implosion bombs went to a hollow core, or even a “levitated pit” featuring a solid inner core inside a hollow double-hemisphere outer core. The space inside or between is ideal for D-T boosting gas, since the initiator is now a neutron-source tube well outside the core (out of reach of the chemical explosions for Just Long Enough).
But all this is way, way after the ‘gotta get it to the front’ urgency of a hot war you want to be able to take nuclear, which we did. (The first atomic war was World War ii, for nicely obvious reasons already enumerated, exactly two of them, our entire nuclear arsenal right then. Though current / past historians seem to be quite reluctant to state that obvious fact out loud…)
(The point of boosting is for the fusion fuel inside the fission core to heat up and make ‘just a few’ neutrons, which then hit the really supercritical fission core and make lots of fresh neutrons; they will, because supercritical. This ‘cures’ both pre-detonation, fizzles from bad luck in when the run-away fission chain reaction kicks off, and apparently also most of the ‘fratricide’ problem, of a previous bomb burst causing nearby bombs to fail. So it’s apparently common in all, let’s say about, post-early 50s designs. except say neutron bombs and a few other special cases… so, why not boost, would be the question.)
I’d recommend the Nuclear Weapons Archive (www dot nuclearweaponarchive dot org), and especially their amazing Frequently Asked Questions pages, which amount to an expanded and detailed update to the old “Los Alamos Primer”. When you have both an interest and a main / narrator character who’s overhauling (and then flying) an old Ulam Drive (a.k.a. for us Project Orion type) ship, you need to be able get all this stuff right…
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You want to throw up in your mouth from fear? Tesla car Batteries.
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So….Mr. Musk is supplying the left (mainly…) with their own personal neutron sources, IF they get a triggering flux?
Oh, don’t those batteries have some cobalt as well? Added (NO) “fun” there!
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I am not worried in the slightest about Leftists getting their hands on neutron sources.
These, after all, are the people who think math is racist. They don’t know how any of their stuff works and leave icky jobs like maintenance and repair to peons.
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Oh, not worried about that in almost all cases. And anything ‘spicy’ enough to activate such will mean that the secondary source won’t really matter.
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Thank you for that web site link. That may come in very handy for a future story arc.
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Don’t miss the part of the Web site where they have a listing of (IIRC) literally every single American nuclear-explosives test ever done, even the ‘supposed to be a fizzle’ ones for safety certifications (‘single point initiation’). Along with lots, lots, lots of pictures…
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Light element enhancement increases yield in an implosion device by 50% or better. If Fat Man had lithium or tritium added its yield would have been over 30 kt instead of the approximately 20 kt it actually generated. I can safely say, with the clarity of hindsight, that there was no such enhancement.
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Alright, unworkable for multiple reasons in this/our timeline/universe.
Alternate timeline/universe.. tritium boosting is comprehended in time to be of potential use. Would it be used? Would it be seen as excessive(ly excessive)? Could the delivery aircraft even get away from the dang thing in a survivable manner if it was used?
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I think escape is possible. The B-50 (basically an uprated B-29) delivered several large test shots in the pacific test range top speed ~394 Mph. The Russian Tsar bomb (~50 Megaton yield) was dropped from a Tu-95v which had a top speed of ~575 MPH. Although the crew of the tu-95 v got the heck shaken out of them…
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I will note I am NOT volunteering to try this out :-).
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Aye! Let us NOT repeat WWII…. except maybe the parts were Drugs That Worked were found and other Clearly Beneficial advances.
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Parachute retarded drop. If it was straight gravity, the plane goes poof.
The chute also allowed a “laydown” shot, where a multi-megaton warhead gets an optimum surface burst, to dig out hardened silos or command bunkers.
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The most amazing delivery method was the “lob” for small fighters (e.g. F-100) to deliver tactical nukes. Basically you approach the target, pull up into a upwards half loop. Just before you start to head away from the target you release the weapon, pull to 180 off the original course, nose down, afterburners on (if you have them) and run like hell and offer a prayer to the deity of your choice :-) . Chuck Yeager talked about practicing this one, the pilots were NOT certain they’d make it…
As for laydowns the Hiroshima/ Nagasaki weapons were dropped from high altitude (30K feet?) with a radar altimeter to trigger them at about 2000′. I think Tsar Bomba was parachute retarded and airburst (or they’d have contaminated large portions of the Eastern Pacific USSR .
Almost all the aircraft dropped weapons were designed for parachute drop. It had become clear high altitude runs were a losing proposition mid to Late 50’s given SAMs. Its part of what killed the XB-70 and the B-58 Hustler, high and fast couldn’t out run a SAM. Thus you needed time to get out of the blast zone and the use of a parachute.
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In alternate, but not too alternate, history… maybe that could’ve worked.
The ‘Little Boy’ design was very simple, very ‘technologically reliable’ — unlike the ‘Fat Man’ implosion design, it didn’t need to be tested (see: Trinity device) and worked well first time. But it was also pretty notably inefficient; and adding either more uranium (not available), or boosting (see above) might have considerably enhanced its yield even per-pound of U-235.
Think, say, 2-3 times its actual yield at least. But…
Adding any more uranium is dicey, though, since it was already near-critical enough that, IIRC, it was assembled in flight and if the bomber had then hit the water… the extra reflection and moderation would likely have made the device go critical and ‘cook’ somewhat.
And hard to see where to put the boosting gas, but maybe… if they’d guessed right and it was designed to ‘will work, but may work better’… with luck and enough changes from our timeline to theirs, maybe so.
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Yes. I DO know that.
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In fairness, so is the “men dont dress like men” thing– and they never think about the smell.
(I love daily showers)
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One of the early stories from salvaging the Atocha was finding all these little bottles with stoppers that looked like solid eyedroppers. It apparently took them quite a while to figure out that they were perfume bottles for the young gentlemen to anoint their mustaches so they avoided smelling each other……
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Re penultimate meme: “Oh WHOM am I kidding?” dammit!
No, I’m not an English teacher, but my mother was. And I am pedantic.
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There are times I suspect the one big (coming? in-progress?) language reform will be drop ‘whom’ to [archaic].
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https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/19/who-whom/
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I’m hearing that in André Lestrang’s voice. Or Meister Gruenewald …
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Or the Great Northern Emperor?
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Pretty much sums things up:
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-YOINK!-
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Dang, Mrs. Hoyt. My yearly subscription is really giving great value. I hope this means you are doing better!
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via Insty open thread:
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Well, there’s a lot of sticks overhanging croco-gator territories, and even some underwater sticks and rocks. And they have burrows, so maybe they scratch themselves in their underwater burrows.
But yeah.
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“The ‘B’ in LGBT means there are only 2 genders.”
“I resemble that remark.”
“Wait, you’d only umm, you know, with males or females?”
“That’s worked for me, both ways. Poseurs need not apply.”
“Don’t you realize that makes you prejudiced? A bigot?”
2nd speaker makes a meme printed on a button.
Kiss me, boys ‘n’ girls, I’m LGBT.
The “B” stands for Bigot, that’s me.
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Re: dressed up guys in the old days, of course that directly led to Beau Brummel’s plain black suits and white neckcloths, and to people like the Quakers and Mennonites and Pilgrims who tended to dress plainly. (Although a lot of those guys were fashion-influenced by Dutch merchants and their wives, who wore black and white because the dyes were expensive and the linen was flawlessly white.)
Btw, more funny/interesting stuff I learned: colonial Quaker couples notoriously wrote their own vows. So that’s where that came from.
Also, early and colonial Quakers, including Penn himself, constantly fought against being mistaken for secret Catholics. Partly this was because they also didn’t go to the established Anglican or Puritan churches. But partly it was because they tended to innocently reinvent Catholic styles of talking about Biblical stuff, probably because they were all too young to remember Catholic stuff or came from areas that were super-Protestant.
It gets even funnier when you read online stuff about how edgy the early Quakers were, from people who are also unaware of Catholics/Orthodox/etc. having said these same things all along. (Being nourished by the “breasts of God” stuff, for example. I mean, that’s ancient imagery.)
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My father’s Dutch Calvinist ancestors wore “plain black and white.” Black satin, black brocade, white lace, white linen … To show their modesty and simplicity. shakes head and smiles a little
Dad actually found a portrait in the Rijksmuseum. The gents were, ahem, well fed. The ladies were almost as zaftig.
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Other interesting facts: Quakers were supposed to marry other Quakers (there were exceptions), and they were supposed to do it after getting the consent of their parents, the women’s Meeting, and the men’s Meeting. (I’m not sure what happened if the parents had thrown a kid out for becoming a Quaker.)
Anyway, the historical mystery/romance hilarity is that the women’s meetings would make extensive investigations into the past and character of an out of town Quaker man, mostly by mailing other Quaker women’s meetings in other towns. Presumably the men also did something along these lines.
Also, it was reasonably common for young single Quaker women to decide they had been called to preach and prophesy and go on evangelization journeys, either on their own hook or because their mothers had had a similar calling; or because they were friends with somebody else who was going. So if their Meeting agreed, these young ladies were tooling around the Colonies, the early US, the UK, etc., staying at random Quakers’ houses (arranged for by women’s Meetings and by ladies who liked arranging things, who were honorarily called things like “nurses” or “mothers.”)
And since they were exotic new people in town whose Meetings back home obviously thought they had good character, they had a tendency to meet young male Quakers and marry at some other town.
Sadly, Quakers got a lot less edgy as the Victorian period went on. (But as I’m sure some people here know better than me, getting the consent of parents and both sides of the Meetinghouse is apparently a Thing even now, and gets deployed if a guy is obviously scummy.)
So again, we have an example of things that don’t make sense for standard Anglican ladies of quality during the Regency, but which could easily work for a young middle-class Quaker girl in the 1700’s. Like traveling around without a lot of family and maids, and writing your own vows.
Seriously, this stuff cracks me up. If you want something improbable for US historical romance, I guess you can just invent your own minor American religious group. (Although there will be Consequences for the rest of your heroine’s life.)
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Well, they did insist on the medieval principle that the words of marriage (and intent) sufficed.
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Of course, this could never happen; a spinning object remaining unmolested in a circle of cats? Naaahhh.
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Good ones, as always! Thanks!
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My grandfather was a paratrooper in WWII, and continued with that LGOP attitude when he came home. But, that might have just been his default state. This is the guy that shot the tassel off a kid’s tuque while the kid was wearing it.
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That kid finally got off his lawn then?
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His dad broke the stock of the rifle over his butt when he found out.
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Nomination time:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/22540485-july-2023
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I thought folks might find this item amusing:
https://babylonbee.com/news/sad-invitations-to-unabombers-funeral-mailed-out-but-no-one-wants-to-open-them
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Speaks for itself:
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I love that song. Barrett’s Privateers is a Stan Rogers classic. Love these memes. Even the ones I didn’t understand.
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