Recent content by hx87

IIRC one of the reasons YF-22 was chosen over YF-23 was easier navalization. Stealthiness might have been affected by maritime conditions, but that could be balanced out by the Navy having a more Soviet-style fighter doctrine emphasizing maneuverability, missiles, and active electronics over...

Any B- or D-body would be fully capable of taking it. A diesel Cadillac 500 wouldn't be as fuel efficiency as, sasy, a Mercedes OM603, but it would still be a vast improvement over the engines that actually went into B- and D-bodies of that period. Anyways, it was primitive smog controls and...

Doing away with the awful practice of boiling vegetables to death would do wonders for the acceptance of more vegetables in the American diet.

Turbo lag doesn't happen if you set up the wastegate or variable vane system properly, and the ones in factory turbodiesels are always set up properly. They aren't comparable to the shade-tree hack jobs and 1980s Porsche 911s that gave them such bad names in North America.

The Owen is pretty much the perfect frontline SMG. Reliable, decently accurate, good ergonomics, easy to make and mass produce (with none of the 'file to fit' nonsense that plagued too many austere SMGs like the Sten and PPSh-41). A PPS-43 with completely interchangeable parts, i.e. no 'file to...

The natural political base for fascists, the petit bourgeoisie, were in the US extremely skeptical of centralized political power. Fascism, as opposed to plain old reaction or conservatism, also require a degree of military fetishism and soldier-worship that was absent in the US during that era.

Too heavy (not just the gun itself--the mounts would have been monstrous) , too much recoil, ROF too low to have a decent chance of hitting enemy fighters, too labor intensive to load and train. 30mm is plenty enough to one shot fighters. 40mm is overkill.

Japan has almost always been more populous than Germany, a country that has never had a (non-political) problem maintaining a peacetime army of a million.

If India were a loyal, decently industrialized dominion, maybe.

But as I pointed out, their knowledge would be not just 20 years out of date, but rusty. It's not realistic to call up a cohort of middle-aged and elderly men, give them the same jobs, rank, and assignments as they had 20 years ago and expect them to work at the same efficiency on day one. You...

The human factor is the biggest issue--there haven't been junior officers going through the naval engineering pipeline designing and constructing battleships for the past 20 years, and it takes at least a couple of years if not a decade to rebuild that institutional knowledge. Sure, you could...

Beretta Model 12, anyone? + Stamped steel construction + Positive, easy to use safety + Open, telescoping bolt + Double stack, double feed magazine + Vertical front grip + 9x19mm, easy convertible to 7.62x25mm if desired

Bell P-39 Airacobra with the originally intended turbocharged Allison V-1710 engine, and maybe the 1450 rpm .50 cal machine guns instead of the regular 600 rpm slowpokes. High altitude performance goes from awful to fantastic, and the 37mm cannon has no equal in 1940 for bomber-smashing...

This being continental Europe, I suspect that the "simple interior wall" is solid masonry, not 2x4 with drywall. Unless the 12 gauge is a slug, it's going to be less effective than 9mm. .357 might do better if it's a solid, but police in general don't carry those.

Have gun crime stay low through the 1960s, 70s and 80s. The main reason US police officers kept the revolver for so long was that revolvers required less maintenance than semiautomatic pistols--you could keep a loaded revolver in a safe for 30 years and it is almost guaranteed to fire, whereas...