History, Politics And Current Affairs

I’m rather curious too. I don’t get the reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underarm_bowling_incident_of_1981 In 1981 in the Australia/New Zealand one-day match, the thing came down to the last ball bowled. New Zealand required a score of six on that ball to tie, which means that it must leave ...

Is that in a Test, there's a break for both lunch and Tea, there are endless debates about LBW, one side doesn't take the field until the game is half over, and underarm is a scandalous affair. In reality, routine jobs are commonplace, lunch is foreshortened, much less Tea, everyone tries to play a...

A little coda/expansion on aircraft: - The '(Must) Replace Canberra Again' is a wry reference to a nickname jocularly given to the early stage of the MRCA programme - Here in Dark Earth, there isn't a need for Britain to replace the Canberra again, as it did it right the first time with the TSR-2 - ...

Chaps, the Canberra here is a very late WW2 light jet bomber that was excellent for the 1940s, fine for the early 1950s, starting to show its age in the late 1950s and replaced in the early 1960s. Primarily a Korean War era bomber, with a useful coda in the 1956 War, but two generations ago as of 19...

A sneaky sneak preview of March 1976: March 1: A Strategic Air Command RC-135 and its RB-74 Condor and F-108 escorts on regular patrol over the South China Sea south of Taiwan encounter a hitherto unknown Chinese jet bomber, seemingly on a test flight. Several very long range pictures of the elusive...

Thank you Jonathan. This isn't going to be a Falklands War scenario, but rather a series of little vignettes (not necessarily connected) looking at the far reaches of the Empire in ~ 1975, painting a picture that will later have some level of significance. There will be Israel, Burma, the Congolese ...

A little bit of a coda on military production that will become clear in March 1976 and subsequently: - The USN is starting to give some consideration to the DE equivalent of the CVV/Aircraft Carrier Medium, which wouldn’t be particularly medium by our standards! Here, a ‘medium’ aircraft carrier wou...

The explosives and propellant factories are all GOCOs, so that at least one of the above is run by Hercules, based on a lovely little U.S. Army monograph which I used for my research. I can link to it tomorrow night, for illustrative purposes, as it is on my PC, but short version is Hercules, DuPont...

Falklands Garrison: Land Forces 3rd Battalion, The Black Watch 1st Battalion, Falklands Islands Regiment B Company, 72nd Royal Marine Battalion C Company, 41st Gurkha Independent Battalion, Parachute Regiment D Company, 4 Royal Navy Commando No. 236 Squadron RAF Regiment 1 Mounted Cavalry Troop (1 x...

No, that isn’t the case at all here, just an ironic final line in the light of our world. "The presence of Prydain as an independent Commonwealth state on the South American mainland, encompassing the @ Argy provinces of Chubut and Santa Cruz and the entirety of Tierra del Fuego effectively mak...

Borderlands Part 1: The Falklands It was good to be back. Major Mike Norman stepped off the stair of the RAF Belfast. The breeze was bracing, yet warmer than he had become accustomed to in his last deployment to the islands, even considering that spring was still a month away. That wasn't the only ...

US Armaments Production Infrastructure 1975/76 Artillery, Tank and Armoured Fighting Vehicle Shells Shell Manufacturing Plants Scranton AAP: 375,000 x 155mm shells per month Milan TN AAP: 375,000 x 155mm shells per month Mississippi AAP: 250,000 x 155mm shells per month Iowa AAP: 250,000 x 155mm sh...

Looking ahead to March 1976: - French wine riots (zut alors!) and their own nuclear power plans - Nadia Comaneci achieves something pretty big in a U.S. competition - Refurbishment of the Maunsell Forts in the Thames Estuary - The British budget comes out in an election year, with some different spe...

February 1976 Notes - Not only is there no swine flu issue, but the universal influenza vaccine is a gamechanger for winters to come - The French Somaliland bus hijacking has an even swifter end, what with British Somaliland lying next door vs Somalia, and non lethal means of resolving hostage situ...

January 1976 Notes - The Italian Scallion/The Kentucky Fried Idiot triumphs in his first fight against Apollo Creed, partly to avoid stretching out the event chain too far, and partly due to the view that Rocky and Rocky II are in many ways the same big picture, just split into two. Naturally, Cree...

February 1976 February 1: The CDC indicates that the period of concern over the so-called ‘swine flu’ had passed, with the current and projected rates of administration of the the universal influenza vaccine across the USA leading to effective herd immunity by next winter. Subsequent health records...

A little preview of February: February 7: Rutland Water, the largest artificial lake in Britain, is officially declared open, completing a five year process of construction and flooding. It serves as a reservoir for both domestic consumption and industrial purposes for the booming East Midlands, and...

Thank you! It is also a hobby horse of mine as well. For a relatively small part of the overall cost of a new ship, allowing for future growth does make for a very reasonable expense. The newest German DDG designs of the mid 1970s have grown incrementally in that sense to ~ 8600t, and they are being...

BBGN, to be precise. ;) The 1960/61 Deutsches Marine had CV: Kaiser Wilhelm IV, Friedrich der Grosse BB: Deutschland, Preussen, Bayern, Sachsen CA: Berlin, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Koln, Leipzig, Munich, Hamburg, Nurnburg, Dusseldorf DDG: Seydlitz, Moltke, Blucher, Yorck DD: Werner von Urslingen, Herma...

All of the Colt 25mm and the GD Mk 25 50mm are unmanned mounts, but there is a continued emphasis on defensive firepower, even as the main defensive weapons of said ships are their missiles.

Precision works well for the strategic and tactical exigencies of our world, but there are others, such as DE.