Stalins Organ

Quite an old game now and the developer no longer exists.... Sadly I also just started playing War Thunder, which has proved to be utterly addictive and I no longer have a life!

Was thinking of reinstalling this as a good time waster, but I see there's no simple summary of what needs to be done these days to connect - any chance of an update??

Avional as mentioned in the 2nd picture is a high strength aluminium alloy - there's not a lot on the web about it. but translating the info on the 2nd photo - I found reference to "Mines fire cartridge 93 with base fuse Mi Br Pat 93 BoZ " - a translation of this page (link is to google translate) under "Munitions" There's a PDF about modern 30 & 35mm ammo here that is a good read, although I cant' tell if the ammo identified above is part of it - it's still pretty cool.....as long as you're not on the receiving end!!

I wouldn't think of it as armour so much as successive skins - the aircraft outer skin, perhaps some light armour around the cockpit area, and/or some internal structural members, the engine structure, etc.

The T34 was not a modern tank tho - it had a 2 man turret and was unreliable and as awkward as all heck to operate. The engine/transmission layout was appalling so when the T34/85 was introduced it was grossly overbalanced - something that could only be rectified by massively increasing the strength of the front springs - which did nothing to improve the ride. Ammunition stowage was pathetic - 9 rounds ready in the '76!! the T34 did have good armour, a good gun and good mobility for 1941 - but it was not as fantastic as many people would like to believe. As for operational "agility" - the US introduced the 76mm Sherman in July 1944, the Russians got the T34/85 operational in May - so there's not a lot of difference in eth timeline there. The Pershing was as good as anything anyone else produced - so again, not sure what your point is. A "political" decision was made to not produce it in numbers in favour of Shermans.......but that's certainly nothing to do with US design agility.

It wasn't the depression - that affected everybody. And everybody went for the same mix of tanks - "Infantry" and "cruiser" to use the British parlance - in Germany they were the Pz 4 and Pz 3, in Russia they were the BT (cruiser) and the T26 & T28, in France they were the H35 and R35 and Char as infantry, and Souma as Cruiser - cavalry tanks as they French termed them (although the French then fielded the R35 as a cavalry tank.....go figure!) WW2 was a time of massive change - the Germans had tanks that were better suited to upgrading rapidly - 3 man turrets were a major advantage to them and were developed due to their better thinking about command and control during the depression. The Russians got it about 2/3rds right with the T34, and 90% right with het KV-1 in 1939-40 so had the "raw material" for effective tanks before they went to war. The British Cavalier was also specified in 1940, but was a bit of a turkey and eventually became eth Cromwell after a couple of years of development. The Americans had nothing at all effective in 1939 - but like the Soviets had 1940-41 to absorb some of the lessons of the early war and got the formulae right with the Sherman (in the sense of a "modern" concept) so IMO the Brits suffered because they were early into the war with a faulty doctrine & designs that they lacked the industrial clout to alter quickly at exactly the time they needed to.

M-41 Walker Bulldog

At he start of the war the British had pretty much the same types of tanks as everyone else - light machine-gun armed recce vehicles, only marginally better armoured "cruisers", and "infantry" tanks - but British doctrine had some differences with others that aren't really important - tank guns only for killing tanks (so no HE), more armour for het Infantry tanks... so...anyway - then WW2 comes along and the Brits tanks are just as good/bad as everyone else's, with a couple of standouts - the Matilda's have heavy armour & get a good rep. But as with everyone except the Germans their doctrine and command and control are rubbish and the get beat. Here's where the problem starts - people start designing new tanks to learn the early war lessons, or they modify existing tanks.....but British tanks have some shortcomings - the main one is that the turrets are small - and the turret ring is too small to take bigger guns. So they are stuck with pre-ear concepts of tanks at the same time everyone else is moving on - the T34, Sherman and Pz-IV F2 onwards are all good medium tanks that the Brits can't match - they have no such tank in the development pipeline, nor can they make significant changes to existing designs. They did up gun the Valentine and Crusader with 6 pounders (57mm) - but these arrived quite late - only 100 Crusader III's with the 6 pdr were available at el Alamain in October 1942, and the 6 pdr Valentines only became available at the end of the African campaign. Both modification also came at a cost - the Crusader lost a crew member so eth commander became het gunner, and the Valentine lost it's machinegun!! so through 1942 the Brits are mostly still fighting with a lot of their cruiser designs that are great examples of the pre-war concept.......but out gunned/armoured and commanded. So they have to design a "decent" tank from scratch - they make the Cromwell.....which would have been great in 1942 but isn't any more in 1944. The Churchill is in the pipeline as an old-style "Infantry tank" - slow with heavy armour - it is tough enough to be useful........but it's not great. By the late war the Brits have figured it out and the Comet and then Centurion show that they weren't idiots by any stretch of the imagination.

Guy I know visited the set during filming and they got the Tiger out just for him when they found he'd come all the way from NZ - he got to climb all over and in it.......bastard! He pretty much agrees with JJR's assessment!!

who says you have to have any qualification to leave school? Does the USA keep people in school forcibly past the age of majority if they do not get whatever is required to "graduate"? I suspect not. and it is probably no different in Aus. Certainly here in NZ there is constant measurement of how many kids are getting qualifications at each level of high school and efforts made to teach them things that they might be interested in if not the traditional academic subjects - but some still don't get any.

If it is the programme I am thinking of..... these girls have been selected precisely because they are what one might call vacuous bimbo's - they are not a random or representative selection of Australian youth!

Wow - I never realized that pizza covered in various cheap manufactured sauces, cheeses & other stuff was so artificial. (sarcasm alert) Seriously - did anyone ever think it was anything else??

Huh? and again Huh? 'cos I need more letters....

Each country has an average cost of production/break even price, and of course many of them have budgeted for certain prices - eg see here for 6 countries that are "screwed" (Businessinsider's term, not mine!) by dropping prices. Forbes has this analysis of break even and floor prices for oil that is also interesting reading.

No he didn't, not really.

Of course he didn't die at the Alamo - he made 2 more 1 hour TV programmes after that!!

An illustration of the risks taken by merchant ships even half a world away from "the war": - source the cruiser HMNZS Achilles was in Wellington harbor and undertook a search when it could sail 2 1/2 hours after the raider call was received, but found nothing.

Interesting - I'd never heard of this unit - a quick google search turns up a fair bit. Here's a (longish) extract from the first page of a quite long work on the Pacific commando units, explaining the rationale for them being set up:

Guns of August remains by far and away the best grand strategic WW1 game around IMO - it is unashamedly GRAND strategic - none of this namby pamby division level stuff - you get Corps, you get fleet battles (if you want), arbitrary air points for recce, simple but deep resource allocation for everything (infantry equip, tans, artillery, air, gas, naval - the whole shebang), national morale/manpower, starvation, international commerce, political revolution - all brilliantly and simply integrated in one of my all time favourite "counter" style computer games. Unfortunately it has to be said there are some bugs and although the interface is also brilliant it isn't intuitive! But it's also now 7 years od and cheap Hopefully Frank Hunter will do something to improve it for this centenary anniversary. I can't stand Strategic Command WW1 and CEAW WW1 - sorry, but they are kludges, even though I beta tested both of the original games - I don't like them for WW2 either - blech!

I currently have 3 games of TOAW on the go.......all of them essentially strategic rather than operational!! Third Reich - WW2 in Europe 1942 on div level Europe Aflame: WW2 in Europe from June 1939 (so you can change a few things on either side ) - Corps level Fire in the East - Eastern Front Reg level for Axis, div for Soviets

Someone is taking up your calling Jon - 26 June 1918 Wimmera sinks after striking mine laid by Wolf a year before.

My only experience with "cops" in the USA was when I as about 20 in an Casino in Atlantic City and a blonde security officer asked for my ID....I think I was a little slow on the uptake tho

Here's McKeich's page in the Auckland War Memorial archive. There is no record for a Robert McKeigh - more than likely the headstone was incorrectly completed some time after his death from imperfect records.

Which part of NO POLITICS wasn't clear to you?

Still playing The Operational Arty of War on a daily basis