Why I like WWII

So, I brought in a ship model to work on during lunch today, Dragon's 1/350th USS Buchanan DD-484 1942. I haven't had a lot of time to work on it, but I set up the parts that I have assembled on my desk so I've got something fun to look at from time to time, and while staring at the midships superstructure while listening to the news about the stock market (dropped 508 points, like a load of depth charges) I remembered one of the reasons why I spend so much time studying the second world war.

We view it as a simpler time, and it's an escape from the modern day problems to a time when it was an "us & them" fight to the finish. Sure, there were a lot of complications and war-weariness, but the simple matter is that the concept of a simple Allied Versus Axis fight is a nice break from the uncertainty of a fast-paced but troubled global outlook.

Sure, it was a difficult time, and many people died, but it was an essence boiled down; an us-or-them fight. No worries about slow, distant problems; no "your kids may have to live with global warming, no "this generation is putting the next ones into debt," just simple "if we don't win WE WILL DIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!!!"

Camouflage...

Found this last weekend and just got it stitched back together. It's an experimental design of some sort for CVE, but doesn't match any that I know if. It's got some similar elements to some, such as the feathering on Measure 32 4A and some of the shapes on pattern 10A for the Essex class, but also differences. Note that the black shapes "fade" as they move forward... the colors in general start to move towards lighter shades about midships.

In the same folder was a picture of the model... showing the desired affect, although it appears to me they didn't fade out the black towards the bow.



These were part of a letter to the "Engineer Officer" of USS Nassau in July of 1942, and pre-date the Measure 3X series of dazzle schemes... this is not Measure 17, however, and may be an early forerunner or experiment for Measures 31, 32, and 33. The letter said, in part:

As you can see from the enclosed photograph, the model was painted and tried in the theater. It has quite a bit of course distortion as is apparent in the photograph. The model was actually pointed in a south easterly direction, but has the illusion of going due east.

Less evidence of Stupidity

So, I got a missing half-page of text online in the OEG ASW in WWII report... nothing like seeing a half page of text missing in the middle of a document to make you feel competent.....

On a roll.....

Worked on three separate pages today, but I'm only going to mention two for now. The Raleigh Report has all of the text in place and photos added... it just needs proof reading.

I was not in the mood for proof reading tonight though so I got another page and half added to Chapter 3 of "Antisubmarine Warfare in WWII" which is only about the Atlantic theater, because, as you know, the Japanese didn't have submarines. This is a long-term project at close to 200 pages long. I try and gnaw away at it here and there in addition to the shorter pieces so that I don't disappear and not have ANY updates for 4-5 months.

I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it

With nods to Mitch Hedberg.

So, the Boeing Machinists' Union is on strike. Can't help but feel like it's the nail on the coffin for the possibility of the next plane Boeing builds being built here in Seattle. Who knows, maybe they'll hire out the EADS/Northrup Grumman factory that'll probably be doing the tanker.

Oh yeah, one more page on the Raleigh Report done.

A bit about the process....

Hit a model horse show with my wife this weekend. That hobby is more about collecting than building, so when I go to one with her I usually bring stuff to work on; it's great to be trapped in this way as it really forces you to focus on what you brought and not get distracted. There were no tables available for modeling, but there was power out in the lobby, so I was able to work some more on the USS Raleigh CL-7 Pearl Harbor Damage Report. She was one of the first ships torpedoed (Must pull out David Aiken's excellent "Torpedoing Pearl Harbor" to double check; it was Utah first and Raleigh second I think).

This damage report is somewhat of a slog, perhaps due to the fact it was a ship's report and not an official booklet, or perhaps because it was earlier in the war before they had refined these reports a bit. Regardless, the "text to formatting ratio" was highly skewed to the formatting side, which alway slows me down. When it's just 4-5 paragraphs a page with the odd indent here and there I can walk through a page in five minutes, but all the table work for this one has been taking me

Certain elements can be carried from page to page quickly, such as headers, but how about the actual text? This one I had to start each page by looking it over from a formatting view and planning out how I was going to lay out the HTML and tables to get things to line up the way they were on the original document. Page 4, for example, took a half hour just to set up the formatting down to item C.1., at which point I could copy and paste rows in and replace text, but even after that it took another 15 minutes to get the rest of the text into its respective code. (which I did while sitting at The Rock Pizza in Vancouver as I waited for our lunch to cook. We were the envy of the show hall).

Items spanning pages are a concern; do I want to make sure all the numbers, etc. are spaced exactly the same or will it be too much of a PITA (Pain In The Ass)? How do I make it graceful, so there is a minimum amount of code and I don't look like an idiot to any other HTML Wrangler who inspects my code? Some times there is an area that I can see is going to be difficult and I'll code around it and leave it for later... when I come back, the solution turns out to be simple.

Anyway, I managed four pages in about as many hours yesterday. Page 7 still has the table borders up at this time so I can double check layout, spacing, etc.. Once it's all kosher I'll remove them.

OOps Redux

Thanks to everyone who pointed out the bad URL in the ASW screen link; I changed the name a bit after the original post and forgot to come back an update it.

In penance I offer this gunnery log for an unknown destroyer during the invasion of Guam.