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Musings on Random Musings


Kara Zor-El

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Also, the British "Splendid Cats" battlecruisers, of which Beatty said "There is something wrong with our bloody ships today" at Jutland, shared many design features with the Kongo-class (of which Kirishima was one), coming from a British naval architect's design at more or less the same time. The later refit and reclassification as fast battleships could not make up for the shortcomings of the whole battlecruiser concept.

Beatty and Jellicoe sat on the report which showed what had gone wrong at Jutland for the ships. They had powder out to enable the guns to be quickly fired. This meant that when a shell hit and ignited the powder boom no ship.

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Well, battlecruisers never fared well in action when facing opposition with guns of the same class as the battlecruiser itself. When they were the only big guns present, as at the Falklands (1914), they could be great (though Hiei suffered crippling damage against only cruiser and destroyer opposition at Guadalcanal). But against each other or against fully protected but slower battleships, the design decisions made to get speed at the cost of protection and hull strength showed badly ... the additional boilers and engines needed to attain the speed consumed lots of internal space in big indivisible chunks, pushing the big guns further out along the length, making for rather higher stresses in the hull ... with what should have been predictably catastrophic results, as at Jutland, and the fate of HMS Hood, and Kirishima at Guadalcanal.

 

Unfortunately, because their speed led them to be rather useful for projecting force at extreme distance from base, battlecruisers were put into combat situations disproportionately more often than their fully-protected counterparts, who more or less never steamed without at least a mate of the same class. But because BC's had the 14-inch armament with both its range and hitting power, when they ended up being the only big guns in a battle, inevitably they were commanded to fight like battleships. Thirty knots of speed versus 22 is great for naval strategy and being able to threaten, but once in gun range that speed doesn't make up for several thousand tons less steel in the hull and armor.

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More or less disturbing than listening to You Only Live Twice in Finnish?

 

I'd say less.

 

 

Not being a speaker of Finnish, I can't say how accurate the translation was. However, the music was John Barry's composition; his name appears in the credits. It was the ending theme in this episode, where an assassin had a poker chip with him at all times. The ending theme had a Bond-like sequence, except with gambling chips instead of ladies with guns.

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Now there is Ebola in Dallas.  Not that I needed another reason to avoid the place, but you know.

Dallas is a goofy place. No recognition of good ideas. When they were getting an MLS franchise going, I sent in the suggestion of calling the team the Book Repository Snipers. Those lamers took a different suggestion.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sooooo

 

We hired a new IT specialist. Good guy. Gonna help me a lot. 

He started last week

We had a big problem and we figured it out by Friday. Still have some problems potentially but now have breathing room.

 

Today? Someone in our Vancouver office got fired. And someone Quit. And they're all freaked out over there. 

 

We live in interesting times.

 

Your company got cursed by an old Chinese woman?

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