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Submersible Photographs WW2 Japanese Sub's Long-Lost Airplane Hangar
Zothecula writes: Until the 1960s, Japan's three I-400-class subs were the largest submarines ever built. They were so large, in fact, that they could each carry and launch three Aichi M6A Seiran amphibious aircraft. The idea was that the submarines could stealthily bring the planes to within striking distance of US coastal cities, where they could then take off and conduct bombing runs. Now, for the first time since it was scuttled at the end of World War II, one of the sunken subs' aircraft hangars has been photographed. The M6A on display at the Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center is worth seeing, if you get a chance.
the link to gizmag pulls up a giant best buy ad whose (x) to close button doesn't work.
The Japanese strategy of using their subs as highly ineffective aircraft carriers is one of the reasons they lost the war. While they were wasting their efforts on that, the American's were using their subs as commerce raiders, devastating the Japanese economy ... and the Japanese failed to stop that because they never developed effective anti-sub warfare. They should have consulted with their German allies, who could have told them a lot about the effective anti-sub tactics used against them in the Atlantic.
We sank the only submersible aircraft carriers around just to keep the Russians from having a look? I guess no Jack Ryan was there to have a better idea.
That headline has gotta be one of the hardest to parse ever. Probably would have been easier if the words had been put in alphabetical order.
If you do any significant amount of reading regard the Japanese in WW2, you notice that there was often an over reliance on trickery, subterfuge, and a focus on the means rather than the end goal. Part of it was desperation borne out of being completely outmatched technologically, but part of it was also a deeply entrenched belief that the fighting spirit of the Japanese soldier would allow him to overcome any hardship, any adversary. Examples such as Guadalcanal, where they landed the 900-man Ichiki Detachment with orders to destroy the 10,000-strong Marine landing force; the countless instances of forsaking strong, pre-prepared defensive positions for banzai charges that killed hundreds or thousands of Japanese at the cost of a handful of Americans; to untrained high school boys with just enough flight training to be able to take off and fly level piloting aircraft with nothing more than an airspeed indicator and a compass trying to sink aircraft carriers. Necessity really is the mother of inventions, but when it is combined with desperation it can spawn some of the craziest ideas, which more often as not result in disaster.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
. . . for scale.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Almost as cool as the USS Akron, ZRS-4. One of two flying aircraft carriers.
The US and UK looked at aircraft carrier submarines in the between WWI and WWII and eventually gave up on the idea because of the technical and operational problems.
- Seaplanes have some pretty sharp inherent performance limits. (Speed, range, and payload.) Miniaturizing the aircraft to fit on a reasonable submarine just made things worse.
- Getting around these limits by enlarging the submarine was no picnic... they were much harder to maneuver than more conventionally sized submarines, and were far more vulnerable on the surface because they were much slower to dive.
- Because of the submarine's vulnerability, if the target had any substantive ASW defenses it was forced to operate at the limits of the aircraft's range... making rendezvous and recovery (which was already very challenging) even more dicey because of the aforementioned performance limits.
- The best time for launch and recovery was daylight... which was also the worst time for the submarine to be on the surface.
- The hangar had a number of negative impacts, and placed a lot of unusual constraints, on the submarine's design.
And that's setting aside the issue of the small size of the attack force that could be mustered.
As a bit of triva - Maxime Faget, designer of the Mercury capsule, was a submarine officer and a member of the American crew that sailed I-401 to Hawaii after the war.
That's why we need AdBlock and other advertising blocking software because of really shitting web design.
When some website puts up a message saying that I need to turn off my advertising blocking or script blocking software because I "need" it for my experience or they need ads to feed their chipmunks or something, I ignore it because those sites are usually the ones that cause Firefox and every other browser to hang.
So, ad blockers and script blockers are an absolute for web viewing because web designers are idiots.
Reminds me that the Japanese Navy and the Japanese Army functioned as wholly separate forces who were jealous of each other's influence and successes. To the point that the Japanese Army had their own submarine fleet rather than ask the Navy for assistance.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I always thought the most practical combination of aircraft and submarine was the FA 330, a rotary-wing kite used by Nazi submariners to get their lookout higher to see farther. It was tethered and unpowered, but it was quick to set up, simple to use, and provided a great benefit to the sub in the last few days before radar.
Even without her loss, M2 was one-of-a-kind and there were no plans to repeat her. Nobody else, save the Japanese and the French, even completed one (and Surcouf was, like M2, a one-of-a-kind).
The carrier submarine (and it's close sibling the cruiser submarine) were simply impractical with the technology of the time. While the modern SSN closely approaches the cruiser submarine in concept, no carrier submarine has ever progressed past the drawing boards since WWII. (In a large part because cruise missles, SSG's, and SSGN's, have rendered them as superfluous as horse cavalry.)
WHICH Air and Space museum? The one in San Diego? Wright-Patterson AFB? Any of the other hundred scattered about?
Why would I have to click on the link just to figure out wtf you're talking about?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Russian nuclear subs are larger than this submarine
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact