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Author Topic:   Coffee House Musing
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 222 of 380 (891944)
02-18-2022 3:31 AM
Reply to: Message 210 by ringo
02-07-2022 12:22 PM


Submarines
I like submarine movies.
If you ever make it to Germany, go to München (Munich to English speakers -- I have a bad habit of pronouncing names as they should be), visit the Deutsches Museum which is a museum of technology. It's located on an island in the river Isar just east of the Altstadt (durch das Isartor und dann 'n bissl südlich). Absolutely fascinating for any tech nerd. I saw a WWII Schwimwagen which looked like a VW chassis in a boat hull. And a Tropfenwagen, an aerodynamically designed car (the designer started as an automobile engineer, then designed aircraft during WWI, then had to return to designing cars because of Treaty of Versailles restrictions for German aircraft) whose basic shape was like a canoe with the driver at the narrow front (go to the Italian Wikipedia page for an interior view of that).
I didn't see it when I was there in 1973, but one of the current displays is of the interior of a German submarine, the U-1, of which there are a number of YouTube videos; eg:
Share and enjoy!
 
ABE:
When you visit the Deutsches Museum, arrive early and be prepared to spend all day. Or maybe even plan to spend two days. There is so much to see there.
Another good museum if you're interested in science history is the Museo Galileo in Florence (Firenze). It's on the river Arno a few blocks upstream of the Ponte Vecchio and right next to the Uffizi. In Florence it's a good idea to buy a museum pass; a lot of major cities offer the same deal. The best part of the deal was that we had front-of-line privileges so we didn't have to wait in the long lines.
Edited by dwise1, : changed subtitle

Edited by dwise1, : ABE


This message is a reply to:
 Message 210 by ringo, posted 02-07-2022 12:22 PM ringo has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 226 of 380 (891973)
02-18-2022 6:02 PM
Reply to: Message 224 by kjsimons
02-18-2022 4:38 PM


Re: Submarines
I was surprised at the amount of wood work there was inside the sub.
Well, wood is a very versatile material that can be turned into any shape. We mainly use plastics for that now, but plastics technology was not as advanced then. Plus many plastics are of petrochemical origin and oil was a valuable and scarce commodity in WWII Germany.
In a computer version of Larry Bond's modern naval wargame, Harpoon, Tom Clancy wrote a short essay about a tour he had taken of a Soviet warship. Please note that Clancy had met and worked with Bond when writing his breakthrough novel, "The Hunt for Red October", using Bond's wargame to testplay the novel's action scenes as well as tapping Bond's familiarity with Jane's Books (which were in turn created starting around 1906 to support Fred T. Jane's own naval wargame). In his piece, Clancy noted the wood paneling in the captain's stateroom (where he would receive visitors) and all he could think of was all that wood turning into "secondary missiles" during combat inflicting grave physical harm to any occupants of that room.
 
In WWII, my father was a SeaBee (Naval Construction Batallion -> CB -> Sea Bee). They trained at Camp Peary which was located in a government reservation in Virginia which, rumor has, is where the CIA's training facility, "The Farm", is located.
That same reservation also housed a very special POW camp. ADM Dönitz was a WWI veteran, from which he learned the vital importance of cryptography and the need to keep your communications absolutely secure. Army and Luftwaffe use of Enigma was often slack which made breaking their comms easier. But Dönitz ran a much tighter ship! Not only did Kriegsmarine comms run much tighter protocols, but even the Navy Enigma machines were more complex. And hence far more highly prized for the Allies.
The mortality rate of U-Booten (dative plural) was high enough already (as cited in the beginning of the movie, Das Boot), though greatly worsened by the accomplishments of the Western Approaches Tactical Unit (WATU), a unit manned primarily by rather young women (WRENs) which analyzed wolf pack attacks against our convoys and wargamed highly effective countermeasures which led the CO of U-Boot operations to mount a photo of the WATU CO on the wall and identify him as their primary enemy (post-war, he saw that himself).
Every one of those sunken U-Booten (dat.pl.) carried a Navy Enigma device and code books. If that U-Boot actually sank, then that classified material was lost, no security problem. But if the U-Boot had been captured, then that classified could have been captured as well. In the classified bizz, that's called a compromise (I'm drawing here on 35 years of training in military service plus some civilian experience). The Kriegsmarine's response would have been the same as our own response to a compromise: issue new codes and other stuff (if even I were to learn of them they'd have to kill me).
So, when we were able to capture a German U-Boot and its Enigma and codebooks, we had a vested interest to not advertise that fact. There was a scene in The Imitation Game where the British having cracked Enigma traffic revealed a wolf pack attack on a convoy where a character's brother was serving. They couldn't warn that convoy since that would tell the enemy that we had cracked their codes, so they couldn't do anything to warn the convoy of the attack. There was supposed to have been a similar situation with the British knowing of a bombing attack on Coventry that they couldn't do anything about without informing the enemy that they had inside information about the attack.
As I understand the Geneva Conventions (I could be mistaken), when you take a prisoner of war you are supposed to report it. But if you were to report having captured a member of a U-Boot crew, then you are also reporting the potential of having also captured that U-Boot and all its classified. So those captured U-Boot crews were not reported at the time, but rather were taken to highly secure POW camps, their survival kept a close secret until the end of the war.
One of those POW camps was supposed to have been in that government reservation housing Camp Peary and The Farm (albeit in different time periods).
 
Are you a Marvel fan? Do you really want to know what Hydra was up to during WWII? It's an absolutely true story! No duff!* (as the Canadians say)
Camp X
Hydra
X Company, a Canadian/Hungarian spy thriller television series depicting a team of agents out of Camp X operating in France and communicating through Hydra. I had watched it on Amazon Prime, but it's apparently no longer available.
 

* FOOTNOTE:
One of my friend's favorite TV shows was Air Disasters, which is a USA rebranding of a Canadian show, Mayday. That show cured her of her fear of flying, because each investigation into what had gone wrong led to corrective actions to keep that from ever happening again.
One show depicted a crash in the far north of Canada. Basically in such cases, any survivors of a crash would eventually die from exposure. Not so here.
At the time of the crash, Canadian defense forces were conducting an emergency exercise for such an incident. When the actual crash occurred in the middle of the exercise, the radioman reported the crash as "No duff! This is no duff!" Those two words are now burned into my memory.
 
The warming of the planet has raised a few questions.
As the "Northern Passage" across North America opens up due to warming, what's to keep cruise liners from booking such passages?
And when those cruise ships encounter emergencies, who's there to bail them out?
Case in point. On a cruise along the south coast of Spain, we heard on the 1MC the call to the crew to clear the forward deck/helipad for the evacuation of a passenger for a medical emergency.
In the Northern Passage, what emergency facilities even exist?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 224 by kjsimons, posted 02-18-2022 4:38 PM kjsimons has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 227 by AZPaul3, posted 02-18-2022 6:36 PM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 229 of 380 (892006)
02-20-2022 2:57 AM
Reply to: Message 228 by Tanypteryx
02-19-2022 11:28 PM


Re: I hate science
OK, I'd get high around 1970. Then my future wife wasn't into any of that, followed by my 35 years of military service and the constant spectre of "Golden Flow"(routine urinalysis testing for drugs).
It's just not the same anymore. We'd get high and it was really cool to listen to music, but it's just not the same anymore.
What happened? Did I just get old? The only way to get a really great high is to include tequila for some drug synergy. Whiskey-Tango-Foxtrot-Oscar!?!?!?!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 228 by Tanypteryx, posted 02-19-2022 11:28 PM Tanypteryx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 230 by Tanypteryx, posted 02-20-2022 11:35 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 338 of 380 (908620)
03-17-2023 12:01 PM
Reply to: Message 337 by Theodoric
03-17-2023 10:59 AM


Re: YEC's will be scrambling
And who was it who counted out and labeled every single meter tick mark on that 40 million meter tape measure? Not to mention marking off all the centimeter tick marks in each and every one of those 40 million meters. Plus labelling some, if not all, of those centimeters.
Somebody had to have done that!
But Sludge's problem is that he cannot imagine anybody being able to count big numbers since that is far beyond his own personal abilities, which are not much better than a Kindergartner just starting to learn to count: "One ... two ... {very strained look on Sludge's face due to severe mental constipation} ... ... many!"

This message is a reply to:
 Message 337 by Theodoric, posted 03-17-2023 10:59 AM Theodoric has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 346 by Dredge, posted 03-18-2023 11:55 AM dwise1 has not replied

  
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