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Category Archives: Military History
A Problem Solved in Excel and Mathcad
I use both Excel and Mathcad in my daily work. Most people would consider me very proficient in both. I frequently get asked, "Which tool is better?" Like all other interesting questions in Engineering, the answer is "it depends".
As an example, I decided to work a simple problem in both Excel and Mathcad. A number of the advantages and disadvantages of both tools can be seen in this example. The key problem with Excel is its cell-oriented approach. While the cell-oriented approach works for small problems, it has major issue with large problem Continue reading
Fire Control Formulas from World War 1
Quote of the Day When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag carrying the Cross. — Sinclair Lewis Introduction I am reading the book "Dreadnought Gunnery and the Battle of Jutland: The Question of Fire Control". … Continue reading
WW2 Sub Skippers Were Very Young
Hollywood movies usually show WW2 sub skippers as men in their late 40s or 50s (e.g. Operation Pacific or Run Silent Run Deep). I found a list of the top scoring US submarine skippers of WW2 and was able to figure out their birthdays. Given their birthdays, I determined that they had an average age of 32 years on December 7th, 1941. The following table summarizes their ages and their post-war "ships sunk" scoring. When you think about the responsibility they had, these men were very young. Continue reading
World War 2 Industrial Casualties
I like to watch authors discuss their history books on BookTV. I listen to BookTV while I work around the house. One weekend, I heard two historians (I did not write down their names) discussing World War 2 and each mentioned a statistic that sounded something like this (my wording). Continue reading
Aiming Torpedoes from a PT Boat
I read quite a bit of World War 1 (WW1) and World War 2 (WW2) naval history. Recently, I have tried to specialize my readings on torpedo launch platforms. One area where I have never seen much information is on how torpedoes were used from PT boats during WW2. I am particularly interested in how torpedoes were aimed and launched. While doing some history-related searches on Youtube, I discovered this video that does an excellent job of showing how torpedoes were launched from PT boats. Continue reading
Battleship Guns and Danger Space
I have been reading a couple of excellent books about battleships ("Naval Firepower" and "Guns at Sea"). During my reading, I have encountered the term "Danger Space" that appears with nearly every table describing the large naval guns. Of course, I had no idea what danger space was when I began investigating it. It turns out that danger space describes an important metric for battleship guns and it is worthwhile documenting what I have learned about it here. Continue reading