Quotulatiousness

February 15, 2021

HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) – Majestic-Class Light Aircraft Carrier

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

canmildoc
Published 7 Apr 2013

HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) was a Majestic-class light aircraft carrier that served the Royal Canadian Navy from 1948-1957.

The third ship of the Majestic class, Magnificent was built by Harland and Wolff, laid down 29 July 1943 and launched 16 November 1944. Purchased from the Royal Navy (RN) to replace HMCS Warrior, she served in a variety of roles, operating both fixed and rotary-wing aircraft. She was generally referred to as the Maggie. Her aircraft complement included Fairey Fireflies and Hawker Sea Furies, as well as Seafires and Avengers.

Tags: HMCS Magnificent, CVL 21, Majestic Class Light Aircraft Carrier, Royal Canadian Navy, RCN, CV, Maggie, Fairey Fireflies, Hawker Sea Furies, Seafires, Avengers, Canada, aircraft carrier, Canada

From the comments:

Tibor80
5 years ago
That’s me with the mike in hand, interviewing the staff. It was the last TV work I did in Canada before leaving the industry and settling on Madison Avenue in the fall of 1954. Don Harron had been hosting a series titled ON THE SPOT, produced by NFB for 2-year old CBC-TV. They were running behind and NFB called me to fill in. I had never before done ad lib of this sort. They were supposed to have an advance man to do research and provide points to be covered or some sort of script but that never materialized. There was no crew either, so I doubled on grip work, hauled equipment from setup to setup — couldn’t do the camera and be in front of it, too — though I’m sure NFB would have loved that.

I was just naturally very interested in the ship and asked a lot of questions and it worked out fine. The ship had no air conditioning. We were on maneuvers in the Gulf Stream near Bermuda in August. The heat was a killer. I couldn’t sleep. I shared a cabin with a lieutenant, a really nice fellow. He said, “Hey, Andy, you’re a V.I.P. here, I could get you a cot on a deck.” There was a little deck at the rear below the flight deck. All lights were out on maneuvers. I had never seen so many stars in my life — and the sea was filled with phosphorescence — like millions of fire flies. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

We only had one week on the Maggie making the documentary but I was tempted to sign up for life. The navy had turned me down once before. A buddy and I got terrible marks in high school in the spring ’45 so we ran down to the Navy Recruiting station in Toronto and asked to sign up. A wiseguy behind the desk said, “Leave your names and if Hitler attacks Toronto, we’ll give you a call.” (Hitler shot himself a week later)

A video editor friend up in Belleville found this video and wrote to me saying there was a fellow with my name in this video. I told him that was me 70 pounds ago. Great days.

The Wikipedia entry says:

HMCS Magnificent (CVL 21) was a Majestic-class light aircraft carrier that served the Royal Canadian Navy from 1948–1957. Initially ordered by the Royal Navy during World War II, the Royal Canadian Navy acquired the carrier as a larger replacement for its existing operational carrier. Magnificent was generally referred to as Maggie in Canadian service. Following its return to the United Kingdom in 1956, the ship remained in reserve until being scrapped in 1965.

Description and construction

The 1942 Design Light Fleet carrier was divided into the original ten Colossus-class ships, followed by the five Majestic-class ships, which had some design changes that accommodated larger and heavier aircraft. The changes reduced the weight of petrol and fuel storage by reducing them to 75,000 gallons, to offset the additional weight from strengthening of the deck to operate aircraft as heavy as 20,000 pounds (9,100 kg). Further improvements over the Colossus class included larger aircraft elevators (54 by 34 feet, 16 m × 10 m) and improvements made to internal subdivisions for survivability purposes and accommodations.

The ship was 698 feet (212.8 m) long with a beam of 80 ft (24.4 m) and a draught of 25 ft (7.6 m). The carrier displaced 15,700 long tons (16,000 t). The ship was powered by steam from four Admiralty three-drum boilers. This propelled two Parsons geared steam turbines driving two shafts creating 40,000 shaft horsepower (30,000 kW). Magnificent had a top speed of 24 knots (44 km/h; 28 mph).

The aircraft carrier was armed with 24 2-pounder and 19 Bofors 40 mm guns for anti-aircraft defence. Majestic-class carriers were fitted out with Type 281, Type 293 and two Type 277 radar installations. The ship had a complement of 1,100, including the air group.

The third ship of the Majestic class, Magnificent was ordered 16 October 1942. The order was placed with Harland and Wolff in Belfast who were also constructing the Colossus-class ships Glory and Warrior. Magnificent was laid down on 29 July 1943 with the yard number 1228 and launched on 16 November 1944.

The current (and future) rash of newsroom purges

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Some thoughts from The Line on why people like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil are being given the show trial treatment and why it’s not going to stop quickly:

The New York Times Building in New York City, 1 January, 2008.
Photo by Frieder Blickle via Wikimedia Commons.

The first issue, of course, is a steady weaponization of HR processes and unions. Vehicles intended to fix problems like unfair pay structures, workplace misconduct and lack of due process are being re-deployed as tools of ideological conformity — fuelled by healthy doses of personal dislike and professional resentment.

Make no mistake: there are bad people in journalism, as there are in any profession. Abusers should be rooted out, and there should always be clear processes in place to handle toxic personalities fairly, decisively and effectively. (“Fairly” isn’t a buzzword here — the accused must have rights, too.)

But there has also been a steady lowering of the bar as to what evils warrant an HR intervention. Every newsroom should be a safe place from abuse, harassment and violence — but not from ideas that are offensive. We recognize the entirely legitimate concerns of employees who are from marginalized groups about historic injustices, microaggressions and systemic power imbalances. But being in the world sometimes involves working with people who are simply insensitive assholes. Drawing the line between the merely difficult and the truly dysfunctional isn’t always easy.

Further, many of the complaints now being bandied about are strategic. They are being used to pummel terrified HR staffs and weak, ineffectual managers into compliance with ideological agendas. A staff at war with itself and ever-fearful of the axe is easier to silence and control. Owners have long understood this; it’s a grim irony that our peers have now decided to take up the hood and the blade.

These workplace revolts always boil down to an internal struggle for control. The very concept of where power rests is being challenged by those who think the traditional way of running newsrooms is as obsolete as a classifieds page. Uprisings are about who decides institutional values, and who gets to enforce those values. An entire class of leaders needs to wake up to the fact that they’re three campaigns deep into a battle for their own legitimacy. And they’re losing.

That brings us to the third issue: management. We’ve said this before, but managers need to show some spine. The most consistent theme in all these newsroom eruptions is management either lacking the confidence to assert its authority, or hesitating to do so just long enough to make things worse. Too many leaders have been selected for their affability rather than their toughness. We at The Line suspect this is no accident. Powerful editors, necessary for effective management of staff, are inconvenient for owners intent on slashing said newsrooms. The kind of people who’d be most effective at crushing the odd staff rebellion also annoy the suits. So instead, we get nice people — truly nice people — who know the right folks and subscribe to the right politics, and shy away from embarrassment, conflict, and loss of status. They’re marks.

Gewehr 71/84: Germany’s Transitional Repeating Rifle

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Jun 2018

http://www.forgottenweapons.com/geweh…

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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In the ongoing arms race between France and Germany, the Mauser 71/84 was the first German repeating rifle. Paul Mauser began work on it in the late 1870s, patented the design in 1881, and it was adopted formally in 1884. Production began in 1885, with a total of 1,161,148 rifles being delivered by the four major state arsenals (Spandau, Amberg, Erfurt, and Danzig) by 1888 — when it was replaced by the Gewehr 88. With an 8-round tube magazine under the barrel, the 71/84 represented a substantial increase in firepower over the single-shot Mauser 71 and the French 1874 single shot Gras — but it was put into production just in time to be rendered obsolete by the Lebel and its smokeless powder cartridge in 1886.

The 71/84 was perhaps the German rifle with the shortest service life, at barely 5 years. It would come back out as a reserve rifle during World War One, of course, and it also was responsible for a change in German arms that would last all the way to the present day — the pull-through cleaning kit. The tubular magazine made it impossible to leave a cleaning rod under the barrel as on the Gew71, and rather than put it on the side like the French and Portuguese, Germany opted to remove it entirely in favor of the then-new pull-through cleaning kit.

If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow

QotD: Tail-end boomers aren’t really Baby Boomers at all

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was born in late ’62. I never considered myself a boomer. And before you scream that boomers go to ’64, let me explain: I swear to you they didn’t use to. My brother, born in early ’54 was considered one of the youngest boomers. And if you look at the ethos of the generation and what formed it, and how its public image was created and also when they came of age, you’ll understand that makes a ton more sense.

The boomers were the baby boom after WWII. By the time I hit school, the classrooms were half empty, the trailers that they’d added the decade before were being used for craft classes or gym or something that required tons of space.

It would take a long time to come home if you were still being born in ’62. (And I’d been due in ’63.)

This is important simply because I want to make it clear when I came of age it wasn’t with the boomer ethos of “each generation is going to be bigger than the last and we’re going to remake the world in our image.” That expectation is still obvious in books of the fifties and sixties, as well as the attached Malthusian panic.

The boomers, like now the millenials, are a much maligned generation. The public image is almost not at all that of the people in the generation I actually know, with a very few exceptions.

The people the media chose to highlight were the ones they wanted the boomers to be, not who they were.

But something about the boomers is true — ironically the reason that caused them to hate my generation before they decided to aggregate us, because it gave them more power to still be considered young and marketable-to — and that is that they were raised in the expectation they would make the world a better place, and that they could because of sheer numbers, and because they’d been brought up to be better than their parents.

Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.

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