Recent content by Jeeves

Very true - I only have to point out that the modern usage of 'diocese' to mean a bishopric (and the establishment of titular bishops next to the diocesan bishops) differs from the late- and post-Roman concept. The civil diocese as the organizational layer between the provinces and the...

They seem to have made quite an impression on Ian Fleming - the descriptions of foodstuffs, especially milk products that Bond encounters whenever he is in the US, are quite effusive. Might just have been the contrast to wartime and postwar rationing in the UK, though...

I don't have any info for WWI subs either, but German WW2 subs used St 42 or St 52, where manganese is the major alloying element. You're off by an order of magnitude, though - your US example would come out to 3, 4 and 2.5 tonnes respectively per boat. ;)

I hate to be the one to strike up the familiar song of "Yes, but what DON'T you build instead?", but there's no way around it. If you look at postwar pictures of the unfinished capital ships of the HSF, you'll note they all lack belt & barbette armour, not to mention their main artillery...

Don't mix up ammonia and nitrate production - what was running in 1914 was the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. It requires another step utilising the Ostwald process to create nitric acid. The Salpeterversprechen of September 1914 was the promise by Carl Bosch that he'd be able to...

Recognizing the viability of the Haber-Bosch process in principle and getting it running on an industrial scale are two very different things, though. What the KRA can definitely be blamed for is dithering for a year after the reactors at Oppau started production in early 1915. Construction of...

Just don't trust Wikipedia. ;) The MG 08 weighed in at 18 kg / 40 pounds dry. Heavier than the Vickers, but not massively so. I assume the 26.5 kg figure was actually either the MG 01 or 03 - which still had a few bronze parts of the original Maxim left in them. C&Rsenal had an example in...

Yes, and it just requires such a tiny POD... If the torpedo boat V 155 hadn't lost touch with SMS Hamburg, V 158 and V 160 (northern wing of the German van), the British destroyers would've probably have wandered across in front of the central group of SMS Roon (+5 more torpedo boats) and behind...

True - the speed of any advance was limited by the logistical train having to catch up. During the Great Retreat, the Austro-German advance faltered in late 1915 not because of stiffening Russian resistance but because their logistics ran out of steam (sometimes quite literally :D ). Mackensen...

There were actually 872 heavy field howitzers in service in 1914. Of those, 32 (2 battalions) were the V.H. 99 - experimental model, 824 were the sFH 02 and only a single battalion was fielding the new sFH 13. The active heavy FA battalions were equipped with 416 howitzers, which is the number...

I think the most important decision they could have made after the start of the war was for the expansion of synthetic ammonia and thus nitrate production. The first industrial-scale production went online at BASF Oppau between February and May 1915. Despite that it took almost a year of...

Source: Lueger, Otto: Lexikon der gesamten Technik und ihrer Hilfswissenschaften, Bd. 1 Stuttgart, Leipzig 1920., S. 607-609 Krupp-Daimler Kleiner Sturmwagen 4,8m length - 1,93m width - 2,3m height, weight of 8t, max. speed 14km/h, max. incline 50-60° Armament: 4,7cm gun firing 1,2kg shells...

Very true - with the 15,000 men allowed by the ToV, they were already struggling to keep just 3-4 of the pre-dreadnoughts in service. This goes some way to explaining the unreliability of the later high-pressure steam systems: given their experience with a severe lack of personnel, the KM tried...

Ok - I'll have to backtrack. Looking at the plans of Hannover and Wolf at the Dreadnought project for available/necessary volumes, it should be possible to squeeze in a dozen single-ended boilers of the TB-type. That would get you to ~66,000 shp, with three newly-designed turbines (need to...

You're never going to fit 70,000 shp into the engine spaces. Even if you could, it wouldn't help you that much - the hull form and length just aren't made for more than 20 kts. And I don't think lengthening, and thus enlarging the pre-dreads would fly (they're already over 10,000ts). edit: In...