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You're [History], Like A Beat Up Car
Bogart
Streetwise HerculesRegistered User, Moderator mod
Streetwise HerculesRegistered User, Moderator mod
This is a thread for posting cool things from history.
Such as the story of a French ship wrecked during the Napoleonic wars off the coast of Hartlepool with all hands lost. A monkey survived, apparently dressed in a French uniform, and was put on trial by the local townsfolk, either as sport or because they believed the monkey (never having seen one before) to be a Frenchman. The monkey was duly hanged and the tale passed into local legend, both as a source of amusement for people outside Hartlepool, who derisively called its inhabitants "monkey hangers", and for Hartlepool itself, which took the monkey on as a mascot for many local sports teams.
Anyone posting things that turn out not to be true will be given detention. When we reach page 100 there will be a test.
Such as the story of a French ship wrecked during the Napoleonic wars off the coast of Hartlepool with all hands lost. A monkey survived, apparently dressed in a French uniform, and was put on trial by the local townsfolk, either as sport or because they believed the monkey (never having seen one before) to be a Frenchman. The monkey was duly hanged and the tale passed into local legend, both as a source of amusement for people outside Hartlepool, who derisively called its inhabitants "monkey hangers", and for Hartlepool itself, which took the monkey on as a mascot for many local sports teams.
Anyone posting things that turn out not to be true will be given detention. When we reach page 100 there will be a test.
+14
Posts
The Vietnam War is going very poorly.
Ba Van Nguyen, a Major in the South Vietnamese Air Force, realizes that the war is lost and the chain of command has completely broken down.
He takes a Chinook helicopter (big dual-rotor helicopter) and lands it in front of his family’s home in Saigon, loading his entire family on board. He heads out to sea, hoping to escape heavy fighting in the city. He hears English radio chatter and realizes there may be a nearby US vessel that can aid the people aboard his Chinook.
That ship is the USS Kirk, which has been taking in desperate refugees like Nguyen and his family all day. However, the Chinook is far too big to land on the deck.
So Major Nguyen hovers above the deck and people start jumping. Once everyone but himself is safely aboard, he now has a problem. He can’t simply jump out without crashing the Chinook and killing everyone on the Kirk.
So he flies off to starboard and hovers above the sea. He removes his flight suit while somehow still holding the Chinook steady. And then, he rolls it into the sea, jumping out so as not to be caught in the giant metal death trap
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Usually they were given a name that reflected their character or was meant to imspire. From this comes names like Ståhl (Steel), Svärdh (sword), Rask (quick), Fager (fair/beautiful). Also names from nature like Löv (leaf), Falk (Falcon), Ek (Oak) or Duva (Dove) was common.
Some soldiers were less fortunate.
The rolls tell us of a soldier who for the first two years of his service was known as "Försupen" (Drunkard), until at some point (at the insistence of the regimental priest) he was given the name Förbättrad (Improved).
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I got engaged in a nearly 40 minute series of counterfactuals with the gentleman singing this song starting from the question "What if Charles XII was healthy at Poltava and could've lead on the field, instead of on an overlook with crappy communications?"
~ Buckaroo Banzai
The oldest continuous operating publically traded company is actually a paper and forestry company now based in Finland but chartered in Sweden. I give you:
Stora Enso
This piece of wonder was originally established as a water driven copper mine complex along with water based lumber and paper mills (one of the first in Northern Europe and Scandinavia) during a 13th century surge in hooking waterwheels up to anything needing rotating motive power and Europeans were learning about cam shafts and gears again, along with rudimentary transmissions. It was chartered and shares put up for sale in 1288, making it 830 years young and still going strong.
Yes the ownership has shifted nations, but there are still active values descended from those first 1288 shares on the books.
Seems paper mills were the in thing to make in the 13rh and 14th centuries. A now defunct one was done in Cordoba, Spain in the 1290's and Moulin Richard de Bas in France still runs and churns out high grade paper and vellum for artists and draftsmen.
~ Buckaroo Banzai
Also nine American torpedoes and more than 400 5 inch shells in an attempt to scuttle the ship, and then two more enemy torpedoes.
This is a picture of an International Harvester plane tug on the USS Hornet, taken January 23rd, 2019, 17,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific ocean, having been found 76 years after it sank.
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/02/12/sunken-aircraft-carrier-hornet-best-known-for-doolittle-raid-located-miles-below-the-waves/
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
if they don't use this whole thing in advertising they're fools.
full page spread in... american farmer magazine. which is probably a thing.
Tour it all around IH agricultural equipment dealerships around the world.
although, it doesn't look all that bad, all things considered.
Any coral growth would probably be the worst part, and I'm thinking you could strip that somehow without damaging the tractor (scrubbing with a lightly acidic solution maybe, and then washing it off right away? That would dissolve the calcium carbonate of the coral growth eventually). Those tires look like they're in amazingly good shape, so the cold temps may have allowed the seals to keep from rotting; wouldn't keep the water out at those depths, but the seals might have managed to keep anything from growing in the engine.
Honestly, I'd bet you'd need a hell of a less work to get that tractor running than, say, something that has been left sitting out in a yard for the same amount of time, rusting away.
The salt water is a vastly worse environment than just sitting in some yard. Everything on it has open vent holes that will allow water in. The internals are going to be rusted into a solid lump. If it had sat in your yard for 50 years, if rain hadn't gotten inside, it's possible a new battery and new gas could have it running again.
We can still clearly read the logo off that tractor, and the steel cables securing it to the deck are intact despite 70 years of being kept under tension. There's sure to be some corrosion, but no way is it going to be like something left on a shoreline or in shallow water.
I'm a diesel technician by trade. Gimme that tractor, my tools, and enough money for gaskets and seals, and I'll get it running again. There's folks out there in the steam enthusiast community resurrecting engines that have been buried for over a century and which have corroded into a solid lump, that tractor looks damn near as good as new from my perspective.
It depends on the composition of the ship - Titanic's wreck is going to collapse in the next few decades, for example - but yeah, it can be pretty stunning the kinds of things people can get off the seabed pretty much intact.
Unless its freezing it's not the temperature that puts things on hold, it's the lack of oxygen, so the oxygen content is extremely important when it comes to preserve wrecks. Vasa had an additional advantage in that the baltic isn't salty enough to support shipworms and that the water was heavily polluted at the time, and remained heavily polluted for the following 350 years (making it extremely rich in sulfur, which made the environment hostile to microorganisms. In fact, even now Vasa contains so much sulfur that it generates 100kg of sulfuric acid every year and has enough sulfur in it to generate 7 tons of sulfuric acid).
If Vasa had sunk anywhere else in the world it would not have been as well preserved. But the low-salinity, sheltered, oxygen-poor and heavily polluted water in the Stockholm bay was ideal. In fact, if the ship hadn't been discovered and salvaged when it was it would probably have been gone in the next century. People had become gradually more and more concerned about the quality of the water surrounding Stockholm, and efforts were taken to reduce the pollution, to the point where the sulfur-rich environment that once protected Vasa doesn't exist anymore.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2018/10/black-sea-shipwreck-archaeology-map/
Like 133-year-old beer!
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
So this has been a really neat youtube channel that I was wish was available as a podcast but ah well.
Can anybody recommend a good WW1 based podcast? Or episodes of a podcast that focus on WW1? I recently slogged through Blueprint for Armageddon, by Dan Carlin, which was alright but very, very lengthy.
It’s detailed and there’s probably hundreds of episodes at this point. Can’t really speak to its factual-ness since I’m not well read enough. It does feel very home made, I don’t know if that changes later on since I haven’t really gotten far enough to tell yet.
Edit: Actually, if you want a tighter summary type of thing this is probably the opposite of what you asked for.
I did try giving History of the Great War a listen, but the first episode felt very ... I'm not sure how to explain it. It felt like the person was definitely reading a script, but also that they weren't very practiced at reading a script. Kind of like how some folks can make prompter speeches and make them feel natural, while others can't hide that they're reading? It felt very much like the latter, and I couldn't get through the first episode for it.
Yup, I know exactly what you mean. Style is usually pretty important to me but I stuck with it for a while remembering Mike Duncan’s early stuff felt pretty shaky as well. But then other stuff caught my ears so I fell off it before I could tell if it was improving.
The Black Sea is kind of crazy because below a certain point it's anoxic so there's just like, no decomposition at all. The wreck they found was almost perfectly preserved. And it used to be an extremely heavily trafficked area of ancient shipping, who knows how many wrecks are down there!
Measuring longitude was a bugger of a problem for centuries, and in 1714 the British government offered a prize to anyone who could work out a way of accurately calculating it. One method was proposed by Humphry Ditton and William Whiston.
The authors' Wikipedia pages just mention the fact that their proposal was rejected, but (in part thanks to the web comic SMBC, I bothered to read the original.
Their proposal is online here: A new method for discovering the longitude both at sea and land: humbly proposed to the consideration of the publick.
There's a lot of talk of geometry and speed of sound and weather conditions, but the proposal boils down to "let's install a load of massive fuck-off guns along sea routes and fire them every midnight".
That seems like considerable overkill, since longitude determination can be done anywhere with a sextant and a good clock, and quartz clocks are portable, long-lasting, easy to make, and reliable (even the cheap ones only lose a handful of seconds a month).
15 seconds a month is enough to miss your position considerably, by 15-20km. And that's assuming a modern implementation with frequency tuning and relative temperature stability
The highest precision quartz clocks would be more than enough, but require specialized manufacturing and a much larger power supply to keep the crystal at a precise temperature
Which is why before GPS sailors adopted latitude sailing, ie that before your longitude error margin you reach the correct latitude and then sail east/west until you reach your target.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Yeah but even a (relatively) cheap Bulova Precisionist wristwatch keeps time to five seconds a month. If you spend more you can get a quartz wristwatch that keeps time better than 10 seconds per YEAR (a Longines VHP starts at about a thousand bucks brand new). That's the whole thing with quartz watches, they're way more accurate than clockwork watches.
There are probably better reasons than just lattitude to do a radio pulse system though, if you had 2 or 3 such positions nearby and an accurate map you could figure out your position fairly reliably without even worrying about external methods of calculating longitude and lattitude.
And it really isn’t a huge technical challenge to build an AM transmitter that can be heard for hundreds of miles. A proto-post apocalyptic civilization could set up a primative land and coastal based gps system fairly easily.
I know. But the quality of quartz watch you'd get in a rebuild civilization scenario is going to be much closer to a common watch than the precision versions
It's kind of...not that easy. The level of technology needed is quite basic, but the industrial challenge is high. Basicly LF transmitters that use ground propagation are very dependent on size. Bigger is absolutely better.
For example the transatlantic transmitters were usually multi-tower cables that were over 2km long, while submarines (since LF waves can penetrate up to 200m of water) usually had cables stretching from bow to stern during WWI and today usually have the ability to deploy a trailing cable that's several hundred meters long.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The craziest thing about the French Revolution podcast is when you realise the damn thing took over a year. Like, there is just so goddamn much going on and he's still skipping a bunch of stuff.