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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-05-17, 11:04 PM (EST)
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"Two Amusing Coincidences"
 
   A couple of amusing coincidences of naming have come to light during my recent researches.

The first: The modern Japanese Navy Maritime Self-Defense Force has an auxiliary called the Chihaya. It is a submarine rescue vessel. Mind you, in this context that means it's for rescuing people from submarines, not rescuing actual submarines, but...

... You know what, this one might not actually be a coincidence. I think I see what you did there, Ark Performance.

The second: The wartime IJN had a class of what they called torpedo boats, but which in the classic IJN tradition were really small destroyers, called the Chidori class. They were absurdly heavily armed for the size of their hulls, packing half the firepower of a Fubuki-class destroyer—already a heavily-armed ship for its size—into less than one-third the standard tonnage.

This made them notably—one might even say famously—unstable.

I have nothing to add.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Berk Jan-06-17 1
     RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Gryphonadmin Jan-06-17 2
         RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Berk Jan-06-17 3
             RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Gryphonadmin Jan-06-17 4
                 RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Berk Jan-06-17 6
                     RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Gryphonadmin Jan-06-17 7
                         RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Berk Jan-06-17 8
                             RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Gryphonadmin Jan-06-17 9
                                 RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Berk Jan-06-17 10
                         RE: Two Amusing Coincidences jhosmer1 Jan-09-17 12
             RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Pasha Jan-06-17 5
                 RE: Two Amusing Coincidences Offsides Jan-09-17 11

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Berk
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Jan-06-17, 01:34 PM (EST)
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1. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #0
 
   There were several interesting ideas being played around with during that era. Such as Kitakami's tour of duty packing 40 torpedo tubes.

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-06-17, 02:25 PM (EST)
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2. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #1
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-06-17 AT 02:26 PM (EST)
 
>There were several interesting ideas being played around with during
>that era. Such as Kitakami's tour of duty packing 40 torpedo tubes.

"More is more" was a pretty standard design philosophy among Japanese naval architects of the time. It was a way of compensating for the fact that the Japanese industrial base was never going to be up to making as many ships as that of the United States (which even in the '20s was the IJN's principal "hypothetical adversary"). The theory was that Japan's ships would be so much better, it would make up for the fact that they were always going to be outnumbered.

This didn't always work—in the end, thanks to the unexpectedly rapid advancement of naval airpower, it didn't work at all—but that was the idea for nigh on 25 years, and it gave rise to both the ridiculous (Super Kitakami-sama) and the sublime (the Yamato class, which, for all that they were built to win a kind of war that was never going to be fought in the first place, were still straight-up astonishing feats of engineering).

As an aside, it's a real shame neither of the Yamatos survived the war, and not just for sentimental reasons. Because they only existed during wartime, when everyone in Japan had other priorities, there are virtually no good photographs of either one, and I've never found any showing anything inside. Without that, or having one preserved as a museum, it's difficult to get an intuitive feel for just how huge they were. You have to put the numbers next to each other and think about it for a second instead.

For instance: the American South Dakota class was roughly contemporary with the Yamatos—indeed, slightly newer, since they started building in 1939 and Yamato was laid down in 1937. They were modern, heavily armed (nine 16" rifles and the usual slew of secondaries), fast by the standards of the day, and altogether imposing ships. I choose this as my basis for comparison because I've been aboard one, USS Massachusetts (now a museum ship at Battleship Cove in Fall River), and she is not what you would call a little boat. She's 680 feet long and 108 feet abeam, with a standard displacement (that is, nominal displacement calculated with all weapons, ammunition, and stores aboard, but for some reason no fuel) of 35,000 tons.

Yamato was a bit more than 127 feet abeam, and 863 feet long. If you moored her next to Big Mamie, you could park an oligarch's superyacht in the space in front of the American ship's bow and not be able to see it from the other side of Yamato. Her standard displacement was sixty-five thousand tons. You could pile a whole Fusō-class on Massachusetts and still get some change back from that.

They weren't perfect by any means—no weapon system ever is; their citadel armor wasn't as well-designed as its architects thought, nor as well-constructed as it should've been, and too much attention was paid to the wrong threats when designing their defenses, though that last was only evident in hindsight. But man alive, they must've been something to see.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Berk
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Jan-06-17, 02:39 PM (EST)
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3. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #2
 
   It's a crying shame. Purely from the ascetic perspective she must have been a sight.

Some photographs remain, where you can see things like troops who are mustered on her decks for a speech, and it looks like they're on a FOOTBALL FIELD with guns sticking out. Or a shot of her while she was under construction, where the crew had built a temporary HOUSE on the deck as shelter for tools and whatnot.

It's hard to wrap your brain around how big she was, as if there's some kind of photographic trickery afoot.

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-06-17, 06:53 PM (EST)
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4. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #3
 
   >It's hard to wrap your brain around how big she was, as if there's
>some kind of photographic trickery afoot.

The lengths the Japanese went to in order to prevent the West from finding out about two such colossal projects are pretty funny to read about in retrospect. Musashi, for instance, was built in Nagasaki, a town that is almost entirely built on hills overlooking the harbor, which makes it... challenging... to conceal anything you might be building waterside, but particularly an 863-foot battleship. Oh yes, and there was a United States consulate on one of those hills. So what did the shipyard do?

Curtains made of rope.

Lots and lots and lots of curtains.

(And they built a Not-Strictly-Needed Warehouse to block the American consulate's line of sight.)

Meanwhile—and this is the reason I thought of this here—over at Kure, once Yamato's hull was launched and had to be fitted out dockside, they knew they couldn't keep the existence of the ship a secret any more; so what they did was surround her with smaller ships, not in (as is sometimes supposed) a futile sort of "Foghorn Leghorn hiding behind a sapling" attempt to hide her, but to make it impossible for an observer to see all of her at once, the theory being that this would disrupt the viewer's sense of scale and make it hard to estimate how big the ship was. This is why, for instance, in one of the few good photos of her that I know about, she's parked next to Hōshō, which was tiny by comparison.

And here's the funny part: all that comic-opera stuff worked. US Naval Intelligence had no idea they had a pair of battleships that goddamn big, to the point where when Yamato was first sighted by US submarines and aircraft in '42, ONI assumed the reports must be wildly exaggerated. Even after the war, the occupying naval personnel had trouble believed they had been as big as the Japanese were telling them.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Berk
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Jan-06-17, 09:55 PM (EST)
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6. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #4
 
   And there's the house/shed/whatever.

Yamato is probably one of my favorite characters who has been animated in Kancolle at this point, perhaps for the sheer incongruity of a soft spoken, demure woman who stands at seven feet in bare feet and will RAIN HELL FROM ABOVE if the situation requires it.

Captain America.. I mean Bismarck.. MAY eventually usurp this position. If they add her to the cast.

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-06-17, 10:11 PM (EST)
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7. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #6
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-06-17 AT 10:12 PM (EST)
 
>Yamato is probably one of my favorite characters who has been animated
>in Kancolle at this point, perhaps for the sheer incongruity of a soft
>spoken, demure woman who stands at seven feet in bare feet and will
>RAIN HELL FROM ABOVE if the situation requires it.

Mm. Well, I've always been fond of the "sweetheart who will fucking cut you if she has to" archetype, anyway. It's why I like Belldandy, and depictions of Inazuma that are aggressive but stop short of flanderized "Plasma-chan" territory. :)

(Man. I just made myself imagine Bell and Yamato managing an Occasion. That would get the shit managed out of it, whatever it was. :)

>Captain America.. I mean Bismarck

... Eh? Do you mean Iowa? Why would Bismarck get called Captain America? I may have missed a memo.

>MAY eventually usurp this
>position. If they add her to the cast.

If Bisko does appear in a later run of the anime, I would almost bet that they'll portray her in Big Akatsuki Mode, the same way that they ran with the super-exaggerated "gachi-les Ooibot" persona. They might show her at least trying to maintain, like Nagamon spends most of the first series keeping the lid on, but it's too tempting a riff for those writers to stay away from.

(Same reason why I almost hope Tenryuu doesn't appear, because you know they'd just make her a total chuuni.)

Gosh, there's a lot of fandom jargon in this post. I think I hate myself a little now.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Berk
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653 posts
Jan-06-17, 10:15 PM (EST)
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8. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #7
 
   What little we have of Bismarck for characterization at this point is: She's basically perfect, except for that tendency to not wear any pants. And her image song is a lament about how you can never, ever go home again. She pings that same 'Distilled embodiment of an ideal you can't really ever reach.' that Cap does in the back of my head.

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-06-17, 10:27 PM (EST)
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9. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #8
 
   >What little we have of Bismarck for characterization at this point is:
>She's basically perfect, except for that tendency to not wear any
>pants.

... OK, you just gave me an image of Bisko re-enacting the bit in The Iron Age #1 with Priss intimidating the maître d'. "What of it? I have a jacket. I have a tie."

--G.
"Ich habe eine Jacke. Ich habe eine Krawatte."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Berk
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Jan-06-17, 10:38 PM (EST)
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10. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #9
 
   'Aren't you cold?'

'I have a scarf.'

- Berk Watkins
Student of Quantum Bogodynamics


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jhosmer1
Member since Jan-11-07
107 posts
Jan-09-17, 09:53 AM (EST)
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12. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #7
 
   LAST EDITED ON Jan-09-17 AT 09:55 AM (EST)
 
>(Man. I just made myself imagine Bell and Yamato managing an
>Occasion. That would get the shit managed out of it, whatever
>it was. :)

In Diqui, this raises all sorts of possibilities:

"OK, so how did this start?"

"We think that it started in Sakuragoka. <cue slideshow> This is Kotobuki Tsumugi, heiress to the Kotobuki Conglomerate. The last social media we intercepted before the Event was a mass invite to a tea party of all things. Her security forces (all very circumspect) reported that the Avatar showed up with these two in tow <pictures of Belldandy and Yamato at long-range>. After that, things... escalated."

"And now we have a Tea Party that has encompassed the old Fire Nation colonies, the United Republic, and 50% of the old Earth Kingdom? How does this even happen? And what do we do about it?"

"We could enact the Bei-Fong protocol. It's the only way to be sure."

"Now, now, now, now, now, now, now...."

"It's too late...."

(I think this is also how the phrase "WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?" entered the Dalek Lexicon.)


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Pasha
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Jan-06-17, 07:48 PM (EST)
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5. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #3
 
  
>It's hard to wrap your brain around how big she was, as if there's
>some kind of photographic trickery afoot.

About once a week, I drive past the largest building in the world<1>, and there's a similar inability to understand the sense of scale.

It looks like any other warehouse structure, with some big sliding doors, and some little sliding doors next to it. You know, for the people to walk in an out of. It wasn't until I noticed that there were semi trucks pulling in and out of the little doors that I started to grok just how big that fucking building was.

Also, it's really weird to drive for perceptible time at freeway speeds. Like, it starts and then there's a freeway exit ramp and you pass some people and it's still there and then there's another exit ramp and it's still there and you think "wait, I'm going like 80..what the fuck?"

--
-Pasha (1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings)
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."


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Offsides
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Jan-09-17, 08:45 AM (EST)
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11. "RE: Two Amusing Coincidences"
In response to message #5
 
   >
>>It's hard to wrap your brain around how big she was, as if there's
>>some kind of photographic trickery afoot.
>
>About once a week, I drive past the largest building in the world<1>,
>and there's a similar inability to understand the sense of scale.
>
>It looks like any other warehouse structure, with some big sliding
>doors, and some little sliding doors next to it. You know, for the
>people to walk in an out of. It wasn't until I noticed that there
>were semi trucks pulling in and out of the little doors that I started
>to grok just how big that fucking building was.

I assume you've taken the tour - if not, do it! I've been at least once, and I think twice, back when my grandfather was still alive (he taught a middle management class for Boeing that became Standard Training for many years - it may well still be! - and IIRC we got a little something extra tour-wise one time but I was young enough the details escape me). Of all the things I saw, the one that stuck with me the most is the steam tunnels underneath the production floor. Assuming my memory isn't exaggerating, they're big enough to drive a truck through (IIRC they use them to move pallets of smaller stuff around to avoid the big airplanes in the way), and they're long enough that they noticeably compress towards the vanishing point. I can't remember the exact length, but I also remember hearing that people would run them because a lap was something like a half mile...

And that was before the expansion to build the 777 was done...

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>


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