Recent content by joeferrito

4 cylinder 4-8-4s with automatic stokers to absolutely flatten Shap and Beattock with the heaviest trains available? (:

...One Does Not Simply smuggle ICBMs into Hawaii.

IIRC she took an antiship missile and blew up during the first False Peak strike. Been a while since I've read it, though.

Hell, as an admitted fan of ol' Bull I think I still have to agree with you.

Which really seems to me part of the genius of the way American pilot training was organized - pass on the lessons not only to new pilots to get them ready to fight, but to the guys designing the weapons as well. IIRC Grumman did a whole lot of interviewing of Naval Airmen when it came to...

Meant no disrespect to the crews, just that the weapons system as a whole was horribly inadequate.

Plus the Japanese as a whole regarded torpedo aircraft as the far more dangerous of the two types, at least at this point in the war, without having really seen how inept the TBDs were.

Yeah, with Sara's air group in the mix (Hell, even without it) I still don't see the "death ride" ending too well. Or even being carried out - it just doesn't seem prudent to rush a surface force into the face of, even without concrete information, what appears to be a substantial enemy carrier...

Again to play devil's advocate (and because I genuinely don't know) how much ordnance were Spruance's flattops carrying? I'd have to imagine they'd gone through a lot of thousand-pounders over the course of a couple days. I'd assume there are still plenty of torps aboard but not exactly a large...

Just to play devil's advocate as I definitely agree with your major points, how effective are the SBDs going to be against major IJN surface combatants at this point in the war? The record wasn't exactly stellar during the battle for hitting anything other than the carriers (which to be fair...

Say nothing of the Russian TL, THIS is one that somebody ought to do!

The Japanese Campaign in Battlestations: Pacific, while not at all realistic, is a pretty good way to kill some time. Invading Hawaii at the end is cool - specifically the final part of the engagement where Yamato goes toe-to-toe with Iowa. Like I said, not at all realistic, but the game's a lot...

Was just gonna say that. I'd like to see Jimmy as the early head of SAC. Though I doubt he's loony enough to get parodied in Dr Strangelove, so I lose one of my favorite movies. Sigh.

I'd really like to see that. A bit more hauling power and you could create universal branchline machines - prolong the life of the old "Mixed Train Daily."

Diesels, yeah. But steam's a bit different. The closest we ever got to standardization in the states were the USRA Standards, but even then each road that had them built for home use made its own modifications - tenders, feedwater heaters, valve gear and cab outfitting, etc. Mass Production in...