Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[DDE]

Allow me to pop that topic.

So, the Mi-24.

The Soviets almost immediately gave up on trying to use it as a troop transport, and instead added a door gunner. And yet they were still unsatisfied compared to a Mi-8 ramp gunner.

Some people know the story about an experimental Mi-24 with a tail gun, connected by a tunnel (through the fuel tank) that was so narrow some corpulent general got stuck in there.

Thing is, they haven't seen how actually bad it all turned out. That general wasn't particularly fat. And this sack-like extension contains the gunner's legs.

[magnemoe]

34 minutes ago, DDE said:

Allow me to pop that topic.

So, the Mi-24.

The Soviets almost immediately gave up on trying to use it as a troop transport, and instead added a door gunner. And yet they were still unsatisfied compared to a Mi-8 ramp gunner.

Some people know the story about an experimental Mi-24 with a tail gun, connected by a tunnel (through the fuel tank) that was so narrow some corpulent general got stuck in there.

Thing is, they haven't seen how actually bad it all turned out. That general wasn't particularly fat. And this sack-like extension contains the gunner's legs.

Lol, I thought it was for spent brass or something, also why don't simply has an external door for the tail gunner?  You are not using that tunnel to evacuate anyway, or remote operate it. 
Did not know they stopped using it for troop transport. Well its a bit overarmed for an primary transport helicopter. You should expect it to be an US design. 
But the paint job is epic. 

[kerbiloid]

31 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

why don't simply has an external door for the tail gunner? 

Derived from

Spoiler

 

Now for bicycopter.

[Ben J. Kerman]

"Otrok" means child in Slovenian, but slave in Czech. Basically the same thing though right?

 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

"Otrok" means child in Slovenian, but slave in Czech. Basically the same thing though right?

"Otrok" = "teenager", "young man", no other meanings in Russian.
Also, it's an obsolete word never used irl.

P.S.
Let's omit the etymology of the Ukrainian common treatment "khlopets" and not compare it to the Polish  word "chłop".

Edited February 9, 2023 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Nuclear fuel channels in a VVER look... like something you wouldn't expect.

https://t.me/syndromA3/1583

[steve9728]

Source

I am ashamed to say that distinguishing between the branches and development models of the AR, AK and Sukhoi has always been something I hardly to learn.

[Beamer]

From the Friday-afternoon-research-department: turns out Bruce Lee's 1-inch punch wasn't magic at all, it's just physics! https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-to-bruce-lees-superhuman-one-inch-punch/

 

Context: Joe Lewis was the Heavyweight Full Contact Karate Champion of the time and the first ever Kickboxing champion, nicknamed the Muhammad Ali of Karate, standing 1.83 meter/6 feet tall and weighing 88 kg/195 lbs. Bruce Lee was 1.71 meter/5'7" tall and about 64 kg/140 lbs. This was their first meeting, they would go on to become good friends and Lewis studied Jeet Kune Do with Lee for several years after. Lewis was originally supposed to be Lee's opponent in Enter the Dragon, but due to either a scheduling conflict or a falling out (accounts differ) was eventually replaced with Chuck Norris.

 

[steve9728]

1 hour ago, Beamer said:

rom the Friday-afternoon-research-department: turns out Bruce Lee's 1-inch punch wasn't magic at all, it's just physics

“I think we can all agree that physics gets the credit here, not magic. And so does training and skill: Bruce Lee could deliver a punch with quite a significant wallop. In the end, it doesn't matter if this punch is superhuman or not—I don't want to be on the receiving end of it.”

 

Emmmmmmm… yep

However, I have always had the idea that the traditional Chinese martial arts we see today - the unarmed part - is similar to the gymnastics part of the daily training of armies around the world today. It certainly has some combat ability, but I think it is mainly a preparation for armed men before formal training. In turn, these empty-hand fighting techniques were modified in different ways for different needs as they spread from the military to the civilian population. The end result is what we see today as traditional Chinese martial arts: frankly it has become a sort of art performance ......

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Maybe we can watch that completely not bonkers demonstration of useful combat techniques by the NK army - such as bending steel with your neck and breaking concrete with your face? 

Truth is... Just watch the John Wick series over and over again if you want to know Gun-Fu 

[Beamer]

3 hours ago, steve9728 said:

However, I have always had the idea that the traditional Chinese martial arts we see today - the unarmed part - is similar to the gymnastics part of the daily training of armies around the world today. It certainly has some combat ability, but I think it is mainly a preparation for armed men before formal training. In turn, these empty-hand fighting techniques were modified in different ways for different needs as they spread from the military to the civilian population. The end result is what we see today as traditional Chinese martial arts: frankly it has become a sort of art performance ......

Jeet Kune Do is most certainly not traditional, it didn't exist before Lee and he didn't live long enough to formalize it, so in a sense you could say it's still in development (and might very well forever remain that way). It's by all means a very modern form.

It's definitely true the various arts were developed to serve different needs. Jeet Kune Do as Lee practiced it (taking a lot from Wing Chun and Jiu Jitsu) is a fighting style optimized for self defense and quickly taking out your opponents. Most of its attacks are aimed at the 'soft parts' along the center line of the body - groin, belly, throat, eyes. Even the defensive moves are often aimed at damaging the attacking limb rather than blocking it. Basically everything that would be considered illegal or at the very least dishonourable in the more formalized traditional duel styles. This also makes it not very suitable for tournaments, probably one of the reasons Lee was reluctant to take part in them in his US years. He would have had to ditch 90% of his tool set against people who were trained their whole life in tournament rules karate.

It does however make it a particularly good style to look at the physics involved. It's so heavily centered around efficiency that it becomes interesting to look at the solutions they came up with. In the end it's all still action and reaction, so how do you optimize your action such that it creates the biggest reaction? None of the developers of martial arts took out their slide rules to figure out how to do that, but through trial and error and evolution they still managed to come up with some pretty clever solutions to maximize friction, utilize angular momentum, etc.

Of course people still want to measure themselves without having to pick real fights with American marines twice their weight (as Lee was reported to do in his Hong Kong years) so along the way tournament rules develop, and that will change a fighting style without prior formal dueling framework considerably. I suspect that's the case for a lot of the Chinese styles, unlike fighting styles like Karate and wrestling and their many variations which were mostly formalized a long time ago and often centered around 'fair and honourable' dueling rather than actual combat or self defense use.

 

[DDE]

11 hours ago, steve9728 said:

“I think we can all agree that physics gets the credit here, not magic. And so does training and skill: Bruce Lee could deliver a punch with quite a significant wallop. In the end, it doesn't matter if this punch is superhuman or not—I don't want to be on the receiving end of it.”

 

Emmmmmmm… yep

However, I have always had the idea that the traditional Chinese martial arts we see today - the unarmed part - is similar to the gymnastics part of the daily training of armies around the world today. It certainly has some combat ability, but I think it is mainly a preparation for armed men before formal training. In turn, these empty-hand fighting techniques were modified in different ways for different needs as they spread from the military to the civilian population. The end result is what we see today as traditional Chinese martial arts: frankly it has become a sort of art performance ......

I think the problem is that "Oriental" martial arts have suffered from mission creep and began to incorporate not just general fitness training, but a religious/spiritual aspect that began to come at the expense of actual hitting power. "Occidental" martial arts never tried to rise above their station, but the lack of flashiness and exoticisim made all the various types of wrestling and boxing lose the public attention.

Spoiler

...Now the rivals two, silent, moved apart,
Thout another sound did the fight commence.

Kiribeyevich was the first to strike;
His gloved hand he waved and a crushing blow
Struck the merchant brave on his mighty chest.
And Stepan Paramonovich staggered and reeled;
On his breast there dangled a copper cross
With a relic from holy Kiev-town,
And this cross bit deep into his firm flesh,
And like dew the blood from beneath it dripped.
And he said to himself, said the merchant brave:
"What is fated to be is bound to be;
For the truth will I stand to the very end!"
And he steadied himself as he made to strike,
And he gathered his strength and with all his force
Fetched his hated rival a round-arm blow,
Hit him full he did on the side of the head.

And the young oprichnik he softly moaned,
And he swayed and dropped to the icy ground,
To the icy ground like a pine he fell,
Like a slender pine in a wintry grove
By an axe cut down at the very roots....
To the ground he fell, and he lay there, dead.
 At this fearful sight was the Christian Tsar
Overcome by a blinding rage and fierce,
And he knit his brows, and he stamped his foot,
And he bade his men seize the merchant bold,
And to bring the knave 'fore his face at once...

 

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Historically first use of Kalashnikov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_the_Merchant_Kalashnikov

[steve9728]

3 hours ago, DDE said:

all the various types of wrestling and boxing lose the public attention

Meanwhile, our fellow Mongolians: Welcome to the Naadam!

[Ben J. Kerman]

Not that interesting but I just found out the name of Bhutan's anthem is "The Thunder Dragon Kingdom". Honestly it's not my favorite as far as the music goes (Just my opinion), but they definitely picked a cool name.

Technically apparently Vietnam is one of the 10 countries in the world that has never been in a war (Because North and South Vietnam were separate entities from the current Socialist Republic of Vietnam, I think) and they haven't had a war since Vietnam reunified, I guess,

 

 

 

Edited February 19, 2023 by Ben J. Kerman
I don't know where the person that made a list of countries that have never been in wars got his infomation, but yeah, I forgot the Sino-Vietnamese war

[kerbiloid]

3 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

Technically Vietnam is one of the 10 countries in the world that has never been in a war (Because North and South Vietnam were separate entities from the current Socialist Republic of Vietnam, I think) and they haven't had a war since Vietnam reunified.

They had a short conflict in 1979.

[steve9728]

6 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

they haven't had a war since Vietnam reunified.

PLA:

[Codraroll]

20 hours ago, Ben J. Kerman said:

I don't know where the person that made a list of countries that have never been in wars got his infomation, but yeah, I forgot the Sino-Vietnamese war

According to some, that wasn't a war. China tried to invade, got bogged down, realized after three weeks they had no good way of winning, pulled out, declared victory, and then pretended it never happened.

If only current leaders were as good at recognizing when their failed invasion has gone sufficiently belly-up that quitting would be the best course of action ...

[Vanamonde]

Away from wars and back to fun facts, please.

[Vanamonde]

Once again, away from wars and back to fun facts, please. 

Some comments removed. 

[Codraroll]

22 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Away from wars and back to fun facts, please.

No wars? Okay, crime it is. Or crime fiction, to be precise.

The classic crime story resolution that "the butler did it!" was used for the first time (in a widely read story) in a 1930 mystery novel called "The Door" by Mary Roberts Rinehart. It was an otherwise forgettable book, apart from introducing the idea of the butler as being guilty of the crime to the public imagination.

However, two years earlier than the publication of "The Door", novelist S.S. Van Dine wrote an essay featuring "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", where he chided the idea of the butler being the murderer as a tired cliché. His words struck a chord, because we still poke fun of the idea today. "The butler did it!" is often quoted as an overused and unimaginative resolution to a detective novel.

But prior to Van Dine's essay, only one piece of fiction has been found where the murderer turns out to be the victim's butler, and it was hardly read by anybody at the time. It was a short story titled "The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner" by one Herbert Jenkins, published as part of a detective stories collection in 1921. Until Rinehart's book in 1930, almost nobody had ever read a detective story with the butler as a culprit ... but already in 1928, it was called out for being a poor way to resolve a murder mystery. "The butler did it!" is so cliché that it was considered overused before it was used for the first time.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/09/why-we-think-the-butler-did-it

Edited February 20, 2023 by Codraroll

[Vanamonde]

Wow, guys. Seriously. Fun Facts thread. 

FUN FACTS 

Insulting other people's nationalities and rehashing old wars is not fun. 

More comments removed. 

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, Codraroll said:

The classic crime story resolution that "the butler did it!" was used for the first time (in a widely read story) in a 1930 mystery novel called "The Door" by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

 

Spoiler

Childéric III is looking puzzled and kinda tells: "The butler did it!", but he has no idea, who are those Mary Roberts Rinehart and S.S. Van Dine.

[Codraroll]

Rabbit-holing a little inspired by the most recent XKCD, I found a cool Twitter thread about packing shapes into larger shapes. As anybody with a dishwasher can attest to, it's not a neat business:

 

[DDE]

Ah, the Bear Tank. Such a horrendously cliche name for a Soviet tank! The Soviets would surely never name a tank that...

Well.

Our story takes us back to Germany, November 1938. The Wehrmacht makes two observations: one, they're definitely going to war in the near future; two, everyone around them had the same thought and were busy building up fixed defense lines. So the Wehrmacht issued requests for breakthrough tanks, and did so rather lazily: they took the speficiations for La.S. (Pz.Kpfw.I). La.S.100 (Pz.Kpfw.II) и B.W. (Pz.Kpfw.IV) tanks, and added a requirement for 80 mm frontal armor. The Panzer IV derivative would join the existing undercurrent of 75 mm and 105 mm short gun tanks that would occasionally be marked "Pz.Kpfw.VII" and would end up being the distant antecedents of the Löwe.

The other two, meanwhile, would actually get produced... but they'd be weird. Panzer I was a small tank with two machine guns, and Panzer II was only marginally bigger with a 20 mm autocannon; neither were a meaningful threat to anything fortified. But Ordnung müss sein, so Pz.Kpfw.II Ausf.J. and Pz.Kpfw.I Ausf.F both went through the motions, avoided the 30 t maximum limit on tanks under the French campaign that saw every heavy tank program curtailed, and a couple hundred of them were made - only a dozen of Panzer I's, because they somehow came out heavier than Panzer II's.

As you can see here, the tank Pz.Kpfw.I Ausf.F looks a bit misshapen, because it's a very light tank "template" with armor thickness approaching a heavy tank.

Spoiler

The first attempt to find a use for both of these dubious designs was an assault on Malta as 1st company of Panzer-Abteilung z.b.V. 66, its second company consisting exclusively of captured Soviet tanks; it didn't happen either. Instead, smatterings of those light-heavy tanks were sent to the Eastern Front, where they did not make a good show of themselves except for their ability to navigate mud and their remarkable resistance to mines.

Spoiler

Gradually, they were shifted towards counterinsurgency roles alongside various other old light tanks, both in deputized Heer formations as well as police units of... a certain two-letter political organization of electricians. This is where our protagonist shows up. Some time in June 1944, vehicle 150 329 of the 4th Police Regiment ended up in Soviet hands in Belarus and was carted off as a curiosity, but not really studied until a 1945 survey of torsion bar suspensions.

Spoiler

The previous owners were not so accomodating as to leave behind a manual, so Soviet records, noticing the regimental emblems of the front and back, simply call it 'the Bear Tank'.

Spoiler

The 'ambush camo' is a weird choice, which is hardly unusual given the practices at Kubinka over the years.

Belgrade has the other survivor.

Edited February 23, 2023 by DDE