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Old 08-24-19, 07:54 AM   #1876
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This arrived yesterday morning.

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Old 10-19-19, 12:49 PM   #1877
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Default Neither Sharks Nor Wolves: The Men of Nazi Germany's U-Boat Arm, 1939-1945


https://www.amazon.com/Neither-Shark.../dp/1591145465
It seemed to be a little boring at the beginning, but then I found out lots of interesting information, statistics data, deep analysis of the U-boat crews service.
Recommend for those who are interested in german U-boat crews history.
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Old 12-18-19, 10:02 AM   #1878
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Half way though a non military book..true.

BEDLAM London and Its Mad by Catherine Arnold

Little jumpy in places but not too bad for average book.
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Old 12-18-19, 08:20 PM   #1879
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Hunter Killers: The Dramatic Untold Story of the Royal Navy's Most Secret Service Paperback by Iain Ballantyne.

Reminds me that open warfare is not commonplace in the present time.
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Old 01-24-20, 03:12 PM   #1880
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I recently received my copy of the new "Anatomy of the Ship" series book on the battleship Iowa. Frankly, I'm disappointed. The external views are gorgeous, and depict the ship at several points between commissioning and 1990. The interiors are unfortunately incredibly stingy. No detailed views of the machinery and hull structure, lots of unlabeled illustrations, and only basic General Arrangement plans of each deck. Certainly a step down from the classic "Anatomies" published in the 80s and 90s.


You can read my review here: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1TGGG...p_perm?ie=UTF8
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Old 02-23-20, 11:29 PM   #1881
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Mortar Gunner on the Eastern Front

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Old 02-24-20, 06:28 AM   #1882
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Old 02-29-20, 10:04 AM   #1883
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Been alternating between Norman Friedman's "US aircraft carriers" and "US Submarines through 1945." I'm enjoying the former more, though the latter has a lot of fascinating details I haven't seen elsewhere.
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Old 03-24-20, 09:49 AM   #1884
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Just started reading a book about anti-gravity. Its impossible to put down.
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Old 03-24-20, 03:20 PM   #1885
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Just started reading a book about anti-gravity. Its impossible to put down.
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Old 03-27-20, 11:24 AM   #1886
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I've recently finished reading "British Town Class Cruisers: Design, Development, & Performance" and "Going Deep: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine." You can read my reviews here:



Going Deep
British Town Class Cruisers


I've also just started reading the revised edition of "Scooter! The Douglas A-4 Skyhawk Story." Lots of pretty pictures, but I haven't had much of an opportunity to dig in too deeply.
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Old 04-02-20, 07:21 PM   #1887
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Amazon isn't publishing my review of Haynes' Leopard 1 tank manual for some reason, so I'll post it here.

Quote:
I'm not entirely certain why Haynes no longer publishes their tank "manuals" in association with the Tank Museum, but there's been a noticeable dip in their quality over the last couple of years. Thankfully, this is a pretty solid reference which does a fine job exploring the complex history of the Leopard 1 in its many incarnations.

The author, Michael Shackleton, published a three-volume history of the Leopard 1 in 2003; good luck finding a set for under $200. Although I can't compare it with this book, I imagine all but the most hardcore armor buffs should be content with this book. Starting with a brief look at the Bundeswehr's requirement for a new MBT in the mid-50s and the production and testing of prototypes, we come to the "anatomy" chapter, which describes the tank's main systems, transmission, suspension, armament, etc. Chapter 3 describes all of the main variants and major upgrades of the battle tank variants and some of the engineering attachments they used. Chapter 4 looks at each of the specialized variants of the basic Leopard, including engineering and recovery vehicles, the Biber bridge layer, and the Gepard anti-aircraft vehicle. Chapter 5, the book's largest, covers the tank's service in 16 of the foreign armies that used it, focusing on local modifications and new vehicles derived from the basic Leopard chassis. The final chapter focuses on operating and maintaining the tank, and the appendix includes specification sheets for each main variant.

Although Haynes has a tendency to pad out their books with personal accounts, fluffy asides, and flashy full-page color photos, this is an extremely lean affair. There's not much in the way of operational and development history here, just a straight-up technical study that traces the evolution of the design. Thankfully, we get two color "family tree" graphs to avoid any confusion. For the serious tech heads, there's quite a bit of detail on the functioning of some of the major systems, excellent photographs of the "guts" of the tank, and instructions for starting the tank, preparations for fording rivers, and checklists for First and Last Parades. If you're a modeler, you'll probably be endlessly inspired by all of the foreign modifications. There's even a lengthy schedule for monthly, biannual, and annual servicing. Don't forget to check the oil level in the traverse gearbox once a month!

The only reason I'm giving this four stars instead of five is that it runs into the same problem that most books on modern weapons run into. Even if it's technically obsolete, the Leopard 1 is still being used by five countries, so details on armor, fire control gear, and electronics are sketchy at best. Although it's more tightly written than many Haynes books, it's also somewhat drier in tone. Putting that aside, I recommend this one for armor buffs. It looks like the only other book on the Leopard 1 that's currently in print is an Osprey title from the mid-90s, so this definitely fills a gap in the currently available literature.
I really need to stop buying books before I'm done reading the last one. I keep a list of what I'm either reading or haven't started yet, and there's about 15 on it right now!
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Old 05-02-20, 01:11 PM   #1888
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Default This being a submarine forum: required reading!

this just out and required reading imho: history's first successful sub attack....and a Confederate one at that!
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How a determined scientist cracked the case of the first successful—and disastrous—submarine attack

On the night of February 17, 1864, the tiny Confederate submarine HL Hunley made its way toward the USS Housatonic just outside Charleston harbor. Within a matter of hours, the Union ship’s stern was blown open in a spray of wood planks. The explosion sank the ship, killing many of its crew. And the submarine, the first ever to be successful in combat, disappeared without a trace.

For 131 years the eight-man crew of the HL Hunley lay in their watery graves, undiscovered. When finally raised, the narrow metal vessel revealed a puzzling sight. There was no indication the blast had breached the hull, and all eight men were still seated at their stations—frozen in time after more than a century. Why did it sink? Why did the men die? Archaeologists and conservationists have been studying the boat and the remains for years, and now one woman has the answers.

In the Waves is much more than just a military perspective or a technical account. It’s also the story of Rachel Lance’s single-minded obsession spanning three years, the story of the extreme highs and lows in her quest to find all the puzzle pieces of the Hunley. Balancing a gripping historical tale and original research with a personal story of professional and private obstacles, In the Waves is an enthralling look at a unique part of the Civil War and the lengths one scientist will go to uncover its secrets.
As a black powder shooter and civil war re-enactor myself and
CSS Hunley poster myself https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showpost.php?p=2284625&postcount=1059:
 

From today's W.S.J.: Most people don’t understand explosions. In action movies, we see heroes, propelled by fireballs, get back up, then brush themselves off before jumping back into the fray. But in the real world, the pressure wave from a nearby explosion can kill you without even knocking you over. “Our action hero, thrown across the room by the winds of an explosion,” writes Rachel Lance in her book “In the Waves,” “is not standing up and dashing off after a mild back injury.” Instead, the blunt trauma to his lungs will kill him “100 percent of the time.”
Ms. Lance would know. She’s a biomedical engineer who studies blast trauma and pulmonary physiology. Her book, which centers on the research at the heart of her Ph.D. dissertation, unravels the mystery surrounding the death of a Civil War submarine crew.
In the Waves

By Rachel Lance
Dutton, 352 pages, $28


In 1864, H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. But the Confederate submersible never returned home. When the 40-by-4-foot tube was recovered in 2000, the remains of all eight crew members were still seated at their stations, showing little sign of struggle or trauma (aside from 100-plus years of decomposition). How did they die?
One popular theory suggests that they asphyxiated from either too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide. CO 2 poisoning would have been the quicker of the two killers, but there still would have been several minutes between the first painful symptoms and the crew’s ultimate demise—yet there were no signs the crew even attempted to open the bilge pumps to surface for fresh air. “Nobody sinks their teeth into their own tongue in agony”—as sufferers of CO 2 poisoning have done—“yet sits still, one hatch door away from freedom, without taking action,” Ms. Lance writes. So asphyxiation is ruled out.

Then there is the lucky-shot theory. A hole in the sub looks to have appeared around the time of the sinking. Perhaps a Union bullet hit and sank the Hunley. But again, the crew made no moves to avoid drowning in the several minutes they would have had before death.
Ms. Lance prefers another theory: that the crew was killed by a blast wave. Central to this idea—first proposed in 1877 but without enough supporting evidence at the time to keep it beyond dispute—is the thin spar, 16 feet long, which was attached to the front of the hand-cranked sub and used to hold a bomb: 135 to 200 pounds of black powder encased in a copper canister the size of a beer keg. Contact between the bomb and the underside of a ship would trigger the device.




On the night of Feb. 17, 1864, the Hunley set out to destroy the USS Housatonic, one of several Union warships enforcing a blockade around Charleston, S.C. When the bomb on the spar hit the ship, it blew a hole in the Housatonic’s hull and sank it in about five minutes, killing five of its hundred-plus crew. But the spar was angled slightly downward from the Hunley, so the pressure wave traveled through the water to the submarine’s underside—mere feet away—causing its wrought-iron belly to flex like a trampoline and transmit the wave to the air inside the sub. There, according to Ms. Lance’s scaled-down re-creation of the event, the pressure wave bounced around like a ripple in a bathtub, amplifying itself where the peaks overlapped and hitting the confined men from all sides. As Ms. Lance writes, “The Hunley was inadvertently designed to kill her own crew.”
“In the Waves” is one part science book, one part historical narrative, one part memoir. The author vividly describes the physics and physiology of explosions, shock waves and asphyxiation, often addressing morbid topics with bemused detachment. Pressure waves destroy lungs and intestines because they travel through fluid faster than air, decelerating and destructively dissipating their energy when they hit air pockets such as lung alveoli. “The phenomenon of this extreme slowdown in the water-air maze is called ‘the hot chocolate effect,’ ” we are told, “after the delightful frothy bubbles of the delicious beverage.”
We learn of the Hunley’s construction and testing by privateers, led by Horace Lawson Hunley, who died in one of the two training accidents that gave the vessel its nickname “the peripatetic coffin.” We learn the history of black powder, submarines, trans-Atlantic cables, the Civil War and characters such as George Washington Rains and Gabriel Rains—“the Bomb Brothers”—who manufactured munitions for the South.
The author paints for us a portrait of herself as a sleep-deprived, motorcycle-riding, cake-baking, scuba-diving pursuer of truth at any cost. We follow her in novelistic detail (“My forkful of eggs froze on its way to my mouth”) as she befriends a Civil War re-enactor willing to shoot at metal plates with his musket to help shatter the lucky-shot theory. She commissions a metalworking artist to build a scale model of the Hunley (dubbed CSS Tiny), meets an ATF agent to fill her trunk with sacks of black powder, uses homemade baked goods to entice a farmer to let her blow stuff up in his pond, and spends hot days in the sun and cold nights in the lab blasting and measuring. We also learn a bit of technical jargon, like SWAG, for “scientific wild-ass guess.”
Some of Ms. Lance’s struggles are common among graduate students. One epigraph quotes another former Ph.D. student: “My adviser had a saying: You have to believe that Sisyphus was happy.” Describing her need to collect clean data on deadline, the author writes: “Perhaps this was a small taste of the desperation that the [Charleston-defending] crew of the Hunley felt. They knew how dangerous their boat was, but they were starving, and they were being bombed nightly.”




Some blockades were unique to her pursuit. On departing the Hunley museum, where its archaeologists denied Ms. Lance basic information about the displayed submarine, “I looked back up at the sign urging me to help ‘solve the mystery.’ ” Apparently they weren’t that curious. Eventually they offered to share their guarded knowledge, on condition that she sign a nondisclosure agreement—a death knell for hopes of scientific publication. She declined, but has the final word with a tight jab in the book’s epilogue: “When I last toured the museum I was unable to find, even in the sections dedicated to general Civil War history, a single mention of slavery.”
In the end, Ms. Lance concludes that, with a 200-pound charge—given its unfortunate placement—each man on the Hunley would have had a 99.9% chance of “serious injury” and a 92% chance of immediate death, plus a 46% chance of traumatic brain injury. Just as harrowing, and inspiring, is the depiction of the scientific process and its bracing danger of death by a thousand cuts.
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Last edited by Aktungbby; 05-02-20 at 01:14 PM. Reason: This being a submarine forum: required reading!
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Old 05-02-20, 06:53 PM   #1889
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Well wait, I was watching a NatGeo show called "Drain the Oceans" and it said that they (The crew of the CSS Hunley) died from Carbon Monoxide Poising?

If it said that in your review you posted, my bad.

This is what I am reading right now:


Yes, I am really reading this.
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Old 05-02-20, 09:05 PM   #1890
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Quote:
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Well wait, I was watching a NatGeo show called "Drain the Oceans" and it said that they (The crew of the CSS Hunley) died from Carbon Monoxide Poising?

If it said that in your review you posted, my bad.
look (click)under the 'spoiler'; the CO2 issue is discussed, and rejected. The crew died instantly, not under the agonistic throes of CO2 asphixiation.
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