Hubris.

WW2 japan had fighters that flew faster, climbed quicker, had bigger guns, and turned quicker (a6m vs f4f). And we had intel reports that told us, but we ignored them because "we have the best stuff and nobody else can compete".

You see the same stuff today with China. China makes all of our microchips, all of our microelectronics, most of which are designed over there anyways (companies here just ask for a widget that does X and Y, and Chinese companies design+make it), yet we act like as if they are some technologically retarded place that only knows how to steal ip.

Russia has been at the forefront of rocketry since ww2. Nobody has systems that compare to their consistency and reliability. Not even the U.S.. The idea that Russia can't make a hyper sonic missile before the U.S., because it's Russia, is a non sequitur.

Also, Russia broke up as a country because guaranteed government jobs for all citizens, where you can't be fired and performance is not important, is going to destroy any economy. No one will produce, shelves will be empty, and money will be no more than paper. Combine that with making private business illegal (preventing people from economically helping themselves), and you have a recipe for economic disaster and social discontent.

This missile exists to swat down carrier groups on the cheap.
We're gonna need some powerful lasers, or our own hyper sonic interceptors, or else proliferation would instantly leave us isolated in the Americas (vis-a-vis power projection via conventional weaponry). Our only option for projecting power would be reduced to nuclear or nothing.

-scheherazade

Can be misleading, or can be apt. In this case, this is just one of many times Israel intentionally attacked Americans, so it's not misleading.
Also, there was only one combatant here. *facepalm

This is about how someone we call allies have acted undeniably criminally by committing multiple war crimes against us that we conspired to hide for decades, not how we treated actively aggressive enemies that attacked us and our allies first. Also, we're talking about crimes delineated in the 1949 revision and ratification of the Geneva Convention, so WW2 isn't covered. Duh.

Facts, like multiple undeniable war crimes against America, crimes that directly led to American murders, you mean?
If I find you on my street and cover you with a tarp before I beat you to death to footloose at 120 db so you can't protest, "I thought it was a known terrorist....i didn't see or hear anything to indicate it wasn't besides my friends who told me it wasn't." isn't going to work as an excuse. That's basically what we have here.

Your"illustration" is not a bit on topic, and seems like floundering excuses for the indefensible war crimes of Israel.

Movies didn't influence divorce rates. There were a series of events that led to them skyrocketing.

1. Birth Control pills. Women and Men were no longer forced to remain in marriages because of children.

2. Due to economic change and because of WW2, women became more acceptable in the workforce. This increased year after year due to varying factors and after a while, many women became less dependent on their spouses to support them. With this economic independence, women who were in unhappy marriages no longer HAD to stay in them. This also led to....

3. The rise of Feminism. With economic independence, women could start fighting for their rights. Rights that had been withheld from them for many years.

4. The Baby Boom after WW2. Most countries experienced it at some level and with a much high population, more people are going to divorce.

5. The importing and mainstreaming of new ideas in regards to relationships, spirituality, and sex. This didn't come from Hollywood, but from the East. The Kama Sutra, Mysticism, and more worldly takes on relationships.

6. Changes to existing laws, possibly one of the biggest reasons. Prior to the time period listed, divorce was a PAIN IN THE ASS to accomplish. Fault was usually required - one of the spouses must have committed a crime or 'sin' that justified the divorce. A long separation before the divorce used to be mandatory. Around the 50's, states began relaxing many of these laws, swapping to a no-fault style divorce and decreasing the separation period. By 1970, almost all states had laws allowing no-fault divorces. These laws had a great effect on the divorce rate. From 1940 to 1965, the divorce rate remained near 10 divorces for every 1,000 married women. By 1979, the rate had doubled.

7. Divorce also became more acceptable. The guilt and fault of the old divorce laws were gone. As more couples separated, divorce gradually became a normal part of life.

8. Children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced. As the number of divorced parents increases, so will the number of their children that get divorced.

These are the root factors, not movies. If you believe movies lead to divorce, you probably also think video games lead children to violent acts. We all know how wrong that is.

Your video, Amazing Places: Testing Britain's WW2 Sound Mirrors, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

One part of my mind is like "Hell YEAH!" and another is like "Wait, there were no integrated paratrooper battalions in WW2..."

To be fair, he also said this while criticising a bunch of people who actually do a job he's too much of a coward to do.

You never know until you're tested, fine, but it's not hard to look at the kind of person you are and extrapolate. When has Trump ever done anything like that in his life? Hell, I'd believe Nixon (scumbag that he was) would run into that school before Trump. At least he was in WW2.

Now, I don't hold lack of military service against someone, but Trump doesn't even look likes he's ever EXERCISED in his life, let alone taking on a gunman.

@noims -- My grandfather had about 10 war stories that he rotated through telling, pretty much exclusively after one of my uncles "broke the dam" by asking him to recall things as they were at the Oshkosh air show standing next to a P-47 airplane like he had worked on.

By the time that happened, my grandfather was in his 80's and in very good physical and mental shape (cattle rancher that did daily work manhandling heavy feed bags around, etc.) but had a quirky personality because he was 90%+ deaf. I don't think that was a result of the war, hearing problems seem to run in the family.

Anyway, he frequently used those hearing problems as an excuse for not having to interact with people. He had hearing aids, but he'd turn them off most of the time and just ignore people. I think some of that was being an introvert, and some was probably lingering "shell shock" / PTSD effects. But overall he really adjusted back to civilian life just fine. Got a degree in education on the GI Bill and taught and coached basketball to High School students, then worked as a small-town Postmaster, and eventually retired to work the ranch. I don't think any of us in his family, including his wife and children, thought of him as being "impaired" by the mental effects of the war. But it was clear that some of what he experienced had a very deep, lifelong effect on his outlook.


I wrote out the 3 stories of his above because they seemed to be the ones that had the most emotional impact on him. To me, it was interesting that a lot of stuff outside of combat hit him the hardest. He also had more traditional "war stories" stuff about victories and bravery, like when his unit captured / accepted the surrender of a young German pilot in a Bf-109 who deserted to avoid near certain death from flying too many missions after the handwriting was on the wall that the allies were going to win. But by far, he got more choked up about the other stuff like having to knock that French girl off her bike and seeing starving civilians and being unable to help them much.

Like you said, more banal stuff side-by-side with or against a backdrop of horror. I think it's pretty much impossible to imagine what those sorts of experiences in war are really like and what being in those situations would do to us mentally. And then WW2 in particular just had a massive impact on the entire generation. Basically everybody back home knew multiple people that went away and never came back. Then when some did come back, they were clearly different and yet reluctant to talk about what happened. Pretty messed up time to live through, I guess.

Standard load for the US military is 7 thirty round mags. You can carry more or less, but that is the general amount.

My biggest complaint would be that if we are assuming these to be WW2 Marines, there is no way a force of 300 would all be carrying Thompsons. In general, they would be using BARs or M1 Garands. If they were Korean era, M14s. These would have used a much more deadly projectile that easily could penetrate multiple targets packed close together.


Could a force armed correctly for the time period indicated actually kill that many targets? Numbers would suggest they would run out of ammo with some Romans still alive. However, we then run into some intangibles.

One must factor the sheer shock value of a force literally laying your fellow soldiers out in windrows. I would suspect that even highly disciplined Roman soldiers would begin to break and flee at some point.

Assuming they did not break ranks, the soldiers would still have bayonets, grenades, and personal sidearms. The Romans would still also be attacking an elevated position. As the Korean war showed us, it could go either way, but the likelihood is that the elevated position would eventually triumph in hand to hand combat. Not to mention that the Romans would be dealing with typically healthier, larger, and better trained soldiers.

Now if this was 300 current era Marines, it would be a slaughter. They would be using highly accurate 5.56 weapons with around 63000 rounds of ammo.

And compared to building $35 trillion worth of schools, hospitals and libraries since ww2 how much has it helped the world - or the still angry american people and their collapsing infrastructure, food banks?

California essentially banned them in grocery stores (oddly they still have free produce plastic bags) and charges $.10 for paper bags. It seems to be working.....
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/05/18/are-plastic-bag-bans-good-for-the-environment/

Trump's a buffoon randomly dancing around from one tire fire to set off another. This is no defence of him or any 'thought', motive or goal behind anything he does.

I'm just pointing out that the world's reaction of horror and outrage to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is naive and hypocritical. It is naive in that clearly the peace process has been dead since WW2.

I'm going to list points that seem to clearly indicate the peace process didn't exist and tell me anything you disagree with cause I suspect we are working from different 'facts'.

Israel clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
Hamas clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
Fatah clearly doesn't want a two state solution.
The Muslim world clearly doesn't want to share Jerusalem with an Israeli state.
The Israeli state clearly doesn't want to share Jerusalem with a Palestinian state.

With the above, and Israeli's militarily dominant position over the Palestinians the only 'peace' process is going to be whatever Israel decides it wants that to be. Morality, wishes, blundering American 'presidents' and anything else we want to pull out doesn't really matter in the face of that. Israel has the might and the ability and so they will do what they want. My hope is to influence the Israeli state towards equitable, fair and compassionate treatment of Palestinians. If Israel decides to create a one state solution, but abides by that fine. Two states with borders unilaterally laid out by Israel, fine. So long as popular opinion in Israel can be won in favour of fair, equitable and compassionate treatment of Palestinians then that's the most I hope or wish for. I think it's a realistic goal that can be realized.

Counter-rotating propellers sparked my curiosity when I first saw them on a British Seafire Mk46 at a flight show in the early nineties.

So my amateur's answer would be that it's about the problem of turning the engine's power into thrust. With increasing power, you can either increase the propeller's RPM or its area. So you either a) spin it faster, b) increase its diameter, c) use a more favourable blade geometry, d) add more blades.

a) and b) both lead to blade tips moving faster, and once they approach the speed of sound, wave drag sets in and ruins your day. b) also runs into issues in terms of ground clearance. Thus the Kim Jong-un blades on planes like the An-70: short and fat.

c) is rather difficult to do in terms of manufacture -- that's why more pronounced blade shapes are a relatively recent development.

d) on a single propeller decreases the efficiency of each blade as it passes through the previous blade's vortex. That's why, for instance, German planes in WW2 almost exclusively relied on 3-bladed propellers with increasing blade size, whereas Supermarine went to four and even 5 blades rather quickly. You can work the issue to a certain degree by modifying the blade geometry, thus the 8 blade props on a modern A400M.

Adding more blades by adding another propeller gets around d), although the aft prop still loses efficiency compared to the front prop. On the other hand, counter-rotating props massively reduces problems with torque, which can be rather horrendous for single engine prop planes. The Bf 109, for instance, is (in)famous for being difficult during take-off as it pulls to the side quite violently.

Way to ignore point one...the illegal hacking of what he hoped contained top secret information by a hostile power at Trump's public direction.

The fact that you would even try to contend that the relationship between the U.S. and Russia is not adversarial makes anything else you say moot, because you have already proven to either be a liar or insanely naive. It is, and since ww2 has been adversarial. Your contention that responding to an illegal-by-treaty Russian military build up and invasion on it's borders with a long term international defence program stoked the Russian invasions of Crimea and the Ukraine shows you bought the Putin propaganda, and your follow up that it's an excuse for them installing their candidate in a hostile nation, as if that's proper, shows you aren't being rational at all. What we were required by treaty to do was protect the Ukraine...all of it...with our full military force, securing their borders....we balked and Russia just walked in.

Really, you think collusion with a foreign power to perform illegal acts against private citizens and the government and the interests of the U.S. isn't a crime? Sorry, but it absolutely is here in the U.S., where he did it.

So far, "he" isn't charged with a crime (only because it's likely he's so incompetent that he actually didn't know his entire staff were covert foreign agents....some have admitted as much when confronted with proof)...what his cabinet is charged with varies but all of them perjured themselves to congress about the crimes, who they work for, who paid them, and who they owe millions... so that's felonious.
Just a few crimes (of many) that the campaign is accused of is working with Russian diplomats for the benefit of Russia and against the interests of the U.S., hiring foreign agents, and hiding tens if not hundreds of millions secretly paid to the managers by Russia.
The campaign managers did directly receive money, all of them it seems, tens of millions...and lied about it over and over. What's more, they have admitted (only after recordings were produced) having subverted government policy by making arrangements with Putin before taking office that were diametrically opposed to the current (at the time) policy...again, that's treason.

There's a legal reason for that. In Germany, the law prohibits the distribution or public use of symbols of unconstitutional groups (flags, insignia, uniforms, slogans and forms of greeting) as part of an effort to 'de-nazify' the national culture following the end of WW2. The Wolfenstein games are chock-full of these symbols. You can see the effects of the law on other WW2-themed games as well, like War Thunder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

Although there are (hopefully) no statues to Hitler in Germany, to be honest, there is an ongoing debate about remebrance of the Wehrmacht and its generals by the Bundeswehr.
There are still some Bundeswehr bases named after Wehrmacht generals who fought in WW2. And there was a recent report about Wehrmacht paraphenalia (a small part of them clearly praising the Nazi ideology) in Bundeswehr bases.

But the main point in the debate about confederate memorials is that taking down statues or flags does not automatically state that every last Confederate soldier was personally fighting to uphold slavery. What those statues commemorate is what the confederate army as a whole were fighting for.

I wonder how many of the people who marched in Charlottesville and supposedly protested for a more diversifeid view of the confederacy (you see, I am not talking about the KKK, people here but the "Not all of those people were Neo-Nazis"-People) have the same thoughts about islam?
How many of them say "I think most muslims are not terrorists", how dare you take down statues of their generals and leaders?".