The Cannons on the B-29 Bomber

All the devices shown suffer power losses between input and output, some of them severe. A torque amplifier has two shafts that are 1:1 geared for speed but the output shaft has extra power taken from a third supply shaft, like the supply to a logic gate that lets it drive more output power than it draws from its inputs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_amplifier

Analog computers were basically voodoo to me before this. Looking forward to watching the rest!

1: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/star-wa...

Or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If that didn't work for the 109s, they'd do a head on attack. A head on attack made it very hard for the B17s to hit them, and the closing speed was so fast it would carry the 109s out of range quickly after the attack.

My father said that unlike the buffoonish German pilots portrayed in WW2 movies, the real ones were careful, professional, and deadly. You never wanted to let your guard down around them.

Never really meant? Some citations there would be nice.

US day bombers that were not protected by fighters often suffered heavy losses against the Luftwaffe. Which is why unescorted daylight bombing was suspended following the 25% casualty raid on Schweinfurt.

>They switched to shooting mostly tracer rounds. ..right. What I've read is that many units stopped using tracers altogether on pure fighters because their different ballistics at long range meant that they were not useful. The gas created when the base of the tracer burned diminished drag. (this has later been adopted for howitzer ammo, base bleed increases range by up to 30%)

One of the most interesting cold war AFVs was an M113 chassis with a cherry picker and 15 TOW missiles on it. Armor is nice, but a hill is even nicer.

The problem is that the US army is still equipping itself superbly to fight the Eastern Bloc in 1985.

I have a relative who was in the mechanized infantry back in the early 1990s. From what he was able to share with me, the Bradley was an interesting vehicle with a lot of cool stuff but if my life was on the line, I'd prefer to be in an M1 Abrams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%A4ge_Musik

I've read a couple memoirs of WWII pilots, interesting stuff. I'm pretty sure they're all dead now, whats documented out there is all we'll ever have.

As for effectiveness, well, bomber aircraft losses were tremendous until the end of the war, yet they lost the war anyway. So its hard to say. If you can down 10% of the B-17 per bombing run against ball bearing factories, but still lose the war, was it effective or not? Or looking at the staggering economic and logistics costs of the air war, skipping the air war and focusing on shipping over tanks that don't suck might have ended the war in '44 or earlier, so maybe it was ineffective. Imagine if the winter battle of the bulge never happened because the war was already over by winter rather than lasting till spring. Or maybe no bombing would have meant more hardware would have meant the D-day invasion getting pushed back into the sea Dunkirk II style. Its an evenly balanced enough argument that academics will never lack for discussion topics.

I teach light infantry tactics to new lieutenants for the US Army. There's a couple reasons to use old-school methods over relying on your GPS:

* Using a compass and a map gives you a much better feel for terrain. One of the common problems with lieutenants is a disregard for advantages and disadvantages of specific terrain. I feel that this is by far the most important point. Understanding and visualizing terrain from a map is a hugely valuable skill that impacts most points of an operation, specifically route planning, where to place your machine guns, and where to attack the objective from.

* GPS can be jammed. This point was driven home hard by the novel Ghost Fleet. Ghost Fleet is a white paper turned into a novel (because no one would read a whitepaper) on what a future war with China would look like. I'm pretty sure Ghost Fleet is also the impetus for the Naval Academy re-adding celestial navigation to their classwork.

* GPS doesn't always work, or takes a while to get enough satellites to get a fix. You know what really sucks: taking fire and not knowing where you are.

* Batteries are heavy. Yes, tech is improving and you typically only need AA batteries. But soldier weight for light infantry is and continues to be a challenge.

My only military experience is from my compulsory service in the Finnish Defence Forces, where everyone does have to learn how to read maps and use a compass (we never used gps/other equivalent). I was in signals myself, so I didn't have any training for rangefinding.

The "79 fighter planes" claim doesn't pass the sniff test to me either. Remember that two months after this, the Japanese didn't even bother sending fighters to even try to intercept the planes that bombed Hiroshima (for example).

I'm not saying that the claim is definitely false, but I wouldn't take anything written in the press during the actual war at face value.

There's a recorded instance of a B29 shooting down 14 fighters over Tokyo (it was also rammed by two fighters and still made it home). There are also instances of B29s downing MiGs over Korea.

The late model B17s were pretty effective too. An old Strategy & Tactics magazine quoted stats for two different air forces (recall it was the "US Army Air Corps" and "Air Forces" were simply an organizational unit) operating out of Britain over a two year period in WWII, one was bombers and the other fighters. Both shot down roughtly the same number of planes -- but the bombers used 100x as much ammunition. (Sorry, this is a 1970s print publication, no link, just my memory.)

Also recall that the Japanese lost almost all their trained pilots early in the war, so the B29 was using a far superior weapon system against very inexperienced pilots.