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

[steve9728]

In the subtropical and tropical regions of East Asia, there is a kind of bird called the Asian Koel, and "噪鹃" in Chinese. Translate directly means "Noisy Cuckoo". And that's for reason: they would be "singing" at 5am~7am, (sometime maybe little earlier) 10am~12pm, 3pm~6pm and 8pm~10pm, EVERY ** DAY.

Why I'm posting this is because whether it's my parents' house, my rented flat, where I work, or even when I was in transit in Singapore a few months ago, all can hear this annoying sound. Although it's sinful to even think about it, I did think about getting a slingshot to shut it up.

Correction: It's "singing" at random times throughout the day. Because now it's 2:54 CST, yeah, it's *** singing right now

Edited March 21, 2023 by steve9728
Added "correction" because I was just woken up by this

[DDE]

Surfed the wiki from the Asian Koel to the Systema Naturae. The first edition of Carl Linnaeus's seminal taxonomy of life covered 3000 plant species on 11 - albeit very large - pages.

Then people started mailing him.

And mailing him.

And mailing him.

He broke out the index cards, but was still overwhelmed by every self-respecting biologist everywhere striving to get their discivery recognized by him.

By 12th edition, Systema Naturae had grown to 2400 pages.

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, DDE said:

every self-respecting biologist everywhere striving to get their discivery recognized by him.

Spoiler

 

[DDE]

So, fun fact: hypervelocity tungsten penetrators have two penetration peaks by velocity, one at somewhat lower and one at a velocity barely achievable even by the latest tank guns. Whereas depleted uranium penetrators have a single peak somewhere in between.

What this means is that, starting with the 2000s, there have been noticeable performance gains from using tungsten vs uranium, and so the reliance on that material has been comparatively decreasing.

Sauce: https://t.me/vatfor/8482

[steve9728]

36 minutes ago, DDE said:

So, fun fact: hypervelocity tungsten penetrators have two penetration peaks by velocity, one at somewhat lower and one at a velocity barely achievable even by the latest tank guns. Whereas depleted uranium penetrators have a single peak somewhere in between.

What this means is that, starting with the 2000s, there have been noticeable performance gains from using tungsten vs uranium, and so the reliance on that material has been comparatively decreasing.

Sauce: https://t.me/vatfor/8482

Then I googled “main tungsten producing countries”…

[DDE]

35 minutes ago, steve9728 said:

Then I googled “main tungsten producing countries”…

Yes, this was a considerable problem for 1940s Germany. It quickly found itself short on tungsten tooling, let alone shells; they were suffering similar issues with steel alloy additives and electrodes, so by late war, German tanks were rather shoddily made - either the plates would shatter from impacts, or the seams would burst, and some production runs would feature a "camo scheme" that would leave some of the rust-like dark-red RAL8012 primer exposed and not covered with the "sandy" Dunkelgelb (RAL7028) used as the baseline pain for tanks post-1943.

Spoiler

Also, many panzers would similarly economize on interior paint, and so you'd have a ratherly dimly lit environment with a dark-red floor interrupted by matte black torsion bars and engine drive shaft. Good luck finding anything you've dropped.

Edited March 21, 2023 by DDE

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

... Good luck finding anything you've dropped

I believe that you just described the interior of every tank. 

[kerbiloid]

23 hours ago, DDE said:

tungsten vs uranium

Sometimes you need this one.

Spoiler

To be put into a shell, as everyone saw.

[DDE]

Sorry for the barrage of tank facts, but anyway...

In WWII, the Western Allies developed a wet ammo rack. It encased shells in a tank of ethylene glycol that would, when ruptured by enemy fire, douse the shells in liquid and thus stave off ammunition cook-off. The Soviets, some time later...

Spoiler

The Soviets in the 1960s had a rather clear vision of the future war that they were gearing towards. They wanted to, for purely defensive reasons of course, drive NATO off into the Atlantic Ocean before American "cavalry" could arrive in numbers. This implied maintaining a mind-numbing 100 km/day advance, underpinned by the assumption of sparse combat - concentration of forces by either side was expected to be impossible owing to gratuitous use of tactical nuclear weapons, both for direct destruction missions and for radioactive area denial. The need to navigate a nuclear wasteland is why you see the Soviets, who went through the entire WWII building precisely zero APCs and almost no indirect-fire self-propelled guns, aggressively equip their infantry and artillery with enclosed, fallout-protected fighting vehicles. Truck-based logistics, however, would certainly end up falling behind as they would need to wait for a path to be charted through areas of less intense fallout.

As a result, Soviet fighting vehicle design put pretty extreme emphasis on endurance, which meant stuffing the interior with as much fuel and ammo as possible, often to the detriment of crew convinience and safety, as well as those big external fuel drums. The additional rounds outside a tank's autoloader are usually the cauase behind the infamous tendency towards catastrophic detonations and "turret tossing".

Enter the Soviet version of the wet ammo rack, бак-стеллаж, which instead of flame retardant containes diesel fuel. This is where most of those "loose" rounds are stored; the schematic below is of a T-72's fuel system. T-90M traded the forward wet racks for a big box bolted to the back of the turret, with no internal access, but the rack behind the carousel (item 16 in image 2) has stayed.

[StrandedonEarth]

 

[steve9728]

One more fun fact about the Asian Koel I just found in this morning: If you can make a similar sound like it, such as by yourself and play it by your Bluetooth speaker, then shout to this bird, it would argue with you!

Why I found that is because my gf and I found the one "singing" in the tree when we went downstairs to buy breakfast this morning. And, yep, believe or not, we the two weirdos just argued with an annoying bird. Good news is the weather we have here today is non-stop thunderstorms after the noon. It shouldn't "singing" tonight until the rain stops.... probably

Edited March 25, 2023 by steve9728

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 3/23/2023 at 5:44 AM, DDE said:

the assumption of sparse combat - concentration of forces by either side was expected to be impossible owing to gratuitous use of tactical nuclear weapons

That is interesting - there is always a reason for design considerations. 

If you don't think anyone is going to be left to shoot at you... Pack more fuel for the drive. 

 

Thanks! 

[Codraroll]

3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

That is interesting - there is always a reason for design considerations. 

If you don't think anyone is going to be left to shoot at you... Pack more fuel for the drive. 

Kind of a weird design consideration for conventional warfare, however, where there are plenty of enemies there to shoot at you. Having all enemy resistance bombed out by nuclear bombs beforehand seems like an edge case as far as warfare goes. In lower-intensity conflicts, such an arrangement just appears to make the tank poorer - as demonstrated with gusto during recent events. It's not much of a good tank if the turret pops like a champagne bottle when being hit by enemy projectiles.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Kind of a weird design consideration for conventional warfare, however, where there are plenty of enemies there to shoot at you. Having all enemy resistance bombed out by nuclear bombs beforehand seems like an edge case as far as warfare goes. In lower-intensity conflicts, such an arrangement just appears to make the tank poorer - as demonstrated with gusto during recent events. It's not much of a good tank if the turret pops like a champagne bottle when being hit by enemy projectiles.

Conventional warfare was not on the list of likely considerations at the time.

Then Afghanistan happened. The Soviets sorta started moving towards a more versatile force, but they didn't have the time before the country imploded from under them. It took until the early 2010s for Russia to 'brigadize', privatize much of vehicle maintenance et cetera and start building a leaner force with an eye towards counterinsurgency and bush wars while relying on a nuclear deterrent to avoid any 'real' wars.

As has been recently seen, that assumption hasn't been accurate either.

Edited March 27, 2023 by DDE

[Vanamonde]

Once again, let's please take the discussion away from war and politics and back toward fun facts which don't involve blowing up things and people. 

[steve9728]

In an emergency, some aircraft can ignore a "bit of water" on the runway.

Then I found this:

They paid ton of respect to the workers who build these runways. Although I doubt there is no runway in the first one

Edited March 28, 2023 by steve9728

[Codraroll]

20 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

Once again, let's please take the discussion away from war and politics and back toward fun facts which don't involve blowing up things and people. 

Okay, let's go aaaalll the way over to less danger and more fun:

A single strand of spaghetti is called a spaghetto.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

6 hours ago, Codraroll said:

spaghetto

:0

 

17 hours ago, steve9728 said:

Then I found this:

At first i was like "oh theres just some water over the top, the pilot must be feeling like a boss taking off"

then i saw the true nature

oh my gosh that pilot must have gone through several lifetimes of hearts during that take off

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

 

[TheSaint]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

 

[StrandedonEarth]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

 

A turtular eclipse? 

[SunlitZelkova]

Did you know that Japan took Tesla’s ray gun concepts and put them into production during WWII?

https://sensha-manual.blogspot.com/2017/04/high-voltage-dynamo-tank.html?m=1

This article tells the lost story of the Type 100 Ka-Ha medium tank.

[DDE]

Chinese knockoffs (not).

There were two primary routes for Chinese tea imports into Europe - oversea ("cantonese tea") and overland ("Kyakhty tea"). This even had a reflection in local etymology, with "chai" being the combination of a north-Chinese name for tea with a Persian suffix, whereas "tea" comes from Min Chinese or even the Malay.

Anyway, in the mid-XVIIIth century a house serf who'd spent some time in the Russian embassy to China had a brilliant if not particularly ethical idea of making fake tea from fermented willowherb/fireweed (Chamaenerion) mixed with hot dark soil to make it black enough. The herb harvesting business boomed, originally centered on the old fortress of Koporie, lending this type of tea its colloquial designation "koporka"; soon the industry was big enough that entire villages near Kalyazin were specializing in making faux-Chinese wooden boxes. The plant, hitherto basically known as cyprian (kiprei), is now known mainly as Ivan-chai.

Naturally, in the early XXIst century some clowns have been trying to promote it as "traditional" and "healthier" tea alternative.

[kerbiloid]

+ Borshchevik and Ambrosia.

[Maria Sirona]

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

+ Borshchevik and Ambrosia.

Okay, but "borshchevik" sounds so epic in the most slavic way possible