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Yes, we're off topic ... An A6M5 pilot would also need about an hour to attempt to intercept a B-29 because a Zero needs about 30min just to reach a B-29's cruising altitude.

Um ... An A6M5's top speed was only 351mph. EDIT: B-29 pilots could basically do what SR-71 pilots did on the rare occasions when they were intercepted: open the throttle and run.

B-29s had a 357mph top speed. The F4F Wildcats and A6M2 Zeros which fought at Midway would not have been able to keep up with a B-29.

They were also part of the backup plan for the B-29 project ... which was actually more expensive than the Atomic Bomb.

I think you just made my point for me. BTW: B-29s weren't capable of carrying 22,000lb Earthquake bombs.

News reports tend to vastly underreport the damage because it's all propaganda.

Bomb, Medium Capacity, 22,000lbs was not a joke. EDIT: I juat looked it up to confirm. A B-29 couldn't get a Grand Slam off the ground and deliver it "to whom it may concern". An Avro Lancaster could and you would need to remove the bomb bay doors just to get a Grand Slam or an Atomic Bomb into...

The RAF once left a Grand Slam on display as a gate guard kids could play on for fifteen years before anyone noticed that it was live and would flatten both RAF Scrampton and the city of Lincoln if it went "BOOM!":

There's all sorts of dangerous stuff left over from WWI and WWII buried and lurking in Europe: https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/14/europe/poland-tallboy-bomb-explodes-scli-intl/index.html That one was about half the size of a British Grand Slam or American atomic bomb. It just sat at the bottom of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge It's estimated that it'll take several hundred more years to completely clean up what was done during WWI.

Typo. That's been corrected and Yamato is also an Ancient way of saying "Japan".

Explosives also do not like to be wet because most don't work when they're wet. The easiest way to prevent a magazine fire from turning into a magazine explosion with a mushroom cloud: flood the magazine ASAP with all the water you've got. EDIT: When Yamato was sinking her forward magazines...

If that's true they've learned absolutely nothing about how to be out and about when it's below freezing and there's ice on the ground despite centuries of having to deal with it. Either that or the Russian leadership simply doesn't give a shit about the Russian people - which is pretty much...

There's a reason why 40mm Bofors AA guns were water-cooled instead of air-cooled. This made them heavier but meant the crews didn't need to do barrel replacements while enforcing a "no fly zone". IIRC the the WWI example I suggested was British machine gun crews getting off 2 million rounds...

A bit. Full-auto is suppressive fire. You aren't expected to hit anything. You're just supposed to prevent return fire.

An MG3 needs a barrel replacement after about 15 seconds of continuous fire. EDIT: An MG3 ain't gonna do what a crew-served water-cooled WWI-era machine gun was gonna do: "sit there and fire all day".

You do not get to choose your army. You work with what you've got. The Zulus, for example, managed to make things very difficult for the British Army. The Brits had breech-loading rifles. The Zulus used stone spears.

I just jooked the number of type IX U-boats Germany built: a little less than 200. Roughly one quarter of the German U-boats with enough range to be a nuisance off of the American East Coast had to deal with American civilians exercising their 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.

LA to NYC is roughly 1,000 miles longer than London to Moscow. EDIT: The treaty cruisers the US built during the 1930s could sail half way around the world without refueling because they were going to need that much range if the Panama Canal wasn't available and all of Latin America was hostile.

Yes, they were finished. They were also not completely and unequivocally defeated in the way the Japanese were.