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Every time the LCS comes up I can’t help but wonder how the Absalon/ Holland would have turned out with that amount of money poured into it. The Holland’s are supposed to be$150M or so a pop for light weapons, basic radars and a helo. Another $50m per unit of sensors and $50m of extra mission...

The “ignore” option works really well nowadays. Just saying.

That’s absolutely amazing, I had no idea. So that’s 195 million bucks worth of Hawker aircraft paid for by the US taxpayer for use by RAF, RN, and the Belgians/Dutch. I wonder if the additional $117M of Hawks for those countries were decided before or after the US aid buy?

Romania also had a population of nearly 20 million people before WW2, just how big is Ruralia? Romania built artillery, aircraft, submarines, ships, and other relatively complex stuff. Not a whole lot, or leading edge, but certainly more than I would expect from a small rural backwater country...

It’s a relatively small, dense, urbanised country which was physically untouched by WW1. I’m guessing the leading engineers had already done a lot of back of the envelope “if-only” sketches. Then once the enabling legislation was nodded through parliament it’s a matter of connecting up a whole...

Wasn’t the 406 even smaller than the 109? I agree that it should have been significantly upgraded by 1940 but im not sure if there was very much stretch in the design.

To be fair, it’s intended role wasn’t just artillery spotting but also photo-recon and a bit of light bombing. Sort of like a Fw189 but done really badly and when the RAF had far more important needs it should have been addressing. Edit: actually after having had a closer look at the specs I...

Yes, at that point the thinking was literally Sub-Machine Gun, ie a smaller version of a Machine Gun. And Machine Guns in that era were still things like the vz26, Mg34, M1919, etc - small pieces of industrial equipment built to last a lifetime of heavy use. Nobody had really started stamping...

This is pretty much the litmus test for ASB. The Axis couldn’t hope to overcome 35km of the English Channel, they’re not crossing 3000km of Atlantic.

No, it’s a half-witted photoshop based on the Kalinin K-7

Well make your mind up. Is it a great feat which Czar Nicholas/Czar Stalin are incapable of, or a trivial bit of primitive engineering which they are easily capable of? You seem to want to have it both ways and be simultaneously a bagatelle for dictator Nicholas and impossible for that...

Also problems with the whole operational concept being different, as I understand it. German railroads were built on the idea of few heavy trains running at speed over good solid railbeds, whereas the Russian railroads instead had to use lots and lots of slow light trains over very crappy...

And yet, amazingly enough, the original Trans-Sib was built out of nothing twenty years earlier by a far less industrialised Russia. So how is building a railway next to an existing railway with far better equipment and far more resources somehow more difficult than hacking one out of the virgin...

It’s maybe worth remembering that the Trans-Siberian isn’t a natural feature, and it’s throughout isn’t listed alongside the Planck constant or the speed of light. The thought of upgrading the logistics to the Far East is enough to make any engineer burst into tears. However given the choice...

This whole discussion about whether the 1945 offensive is a matter of the Soviets striking an overwhelming blow or the Japanese eagerly surrendering at the earliest prod is interesting but I am not sure it is that relevant to the specific question posed in the OP. Six years earlier than that...

Hmmmm. If you want to do a bit of scouting and the enemy has solid air defences, then what would be really useful is something like a high-speed high-altitude scout drone or a low-orbit satellite. If only there was some suitable launch method available to get one to the desired...

I’m probably missing something significant but this railguns=battleships thing confuses me. OTL - no practical amount of armour can protect a ship from being sunk/mission killed at a range of hundreds of km with missiles/bombs. The battleship is eliminated as a useful warship class. ATL - no...

We were in charge with a huge majority before Hitler became president, and nodded through German rearmament! We kept a massive majority and used it to allow the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and sell Manchuria, Abyssinia and Spain to the Fascists! We couldn’t give you a chance to vote in...

More like ‘for a very loose definition of “serving officer”’. Arbitrarily deciding which deployment you want solely on the basis of whether it sounds interesting and then playing the “my granddaddy was a duke, don’t you know” card continually until eventually you get sent (probably displacing...

If this was such a dramatic change of course then it should be easy to document when it happened. When exactly did the Soviets finally declare the AKM and ammunition obsolete and ‘dump it totally’? You win an internet cookie if you can come up with a specific date. As far as I am aware when...