HardThrasher
Published 5 Apr 2025The background to the Dams raid; how it came into being and how it fitted into the assault on Nazi Germany. In which we discuss Banes Wallis, Arthur Harris and a man called Winterbotham.
THESE LINKS ARE ONLY FOR THE SERIOUSLY SEXY
Merch! – https://hardthrasher-shop.fourthwall.com
Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/LordHardThrasherBibliography
James Holland – Dambusters: the Races to Smash the Dams 1943
Max Hastings – Chastise – The Dambusters Story
Alan Cooper – The Battle of the Ruhr
Adam Tooze – The Wages of Destruction
Martin Millbrook and Chris Everett – The Bomber Command War Diaries
Edward Westerman – Flak German Anti Aircraft Defences [sic] 1914-1945
Tami Davis Biddle – Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare
Donald A Miller – Masters of the Air
April 7, 2025
Dambusters Part 1 – The Battle of the Ruhr
March 28, 2025
The First Sturmgewehr: The MKb42(H)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Nov 2024The first iteration of the iconic German Sturmgewehr was developed by Haenel starting in 1938. It was a select-fire rifle chambered for the short 8x33mm cartridge, developed by the Polte company. It used a long-stroke gas piston and a tilting bolt patterned after the Czech ZB-26 light machine gun. What makes the MKb42(H) stand out from the later Sturmgewehr models is that it was an open-bolt design. The original design spec was concerned about preventing cook-offs, and so it required firing from an open bolt. This means a very simple fire control system, but it also made the rifle difficult to shoot accurately in semiautomatic.
The first MKb42(H) prototype was finished in 1941, with 50 sample guns produced by late March 1942. A major trial was held in April 1942, in which Hitler rejected the design (mostly, he disliked the smaller cartridge). Development was continued anyway, with a move to a closed-bolt system that would become the MP43/1 which was ready for its first testing in November 1942. The open-bolt 42(H) was put into production anyway, as a stopgap measure to provide some much-needed individual firepower to troops on the Eastern front. Serial production began in January 1943, and continued until September 1943. In total, 11,813 of the rifles were manufactured. They saw use in Russia until replaced by newer MP43 models, and represent the first combat use of the assault rifle concept.
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March 24, 2025
The Concorde of the English Channel – Hoverspeed
Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 23 Nov 2024Hello all!
In something a little different from cars, trains and planes, we take a look at what has often been considered the Concorde moment for cross-channel ferry operations, the introduction of routine hovercraft services between Britain and France by the Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed companies, and later the Hoverspeed firm following their merger.
Hoverspeed was a truly exceptional mixture of speed and technological prowess, skirting across the surface of the English Channel and reducing journey times to but a fraction of what they were aboard regular ferry boats, but due to increasing costs, a fragile business case, and the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, Hoverspeed, much like Concorde, is now but a fading memory of a bygone era for international travel.
Chapters:
0:00 – Preamble
0:44 – Rise of the Hovercraft
3:04 – Tapping an Untapped Market
7:15 – Into Service
10:33 – Heyday of the Hovercraft
13:05 – Fragile Foundations
17:21 – Coming to the End
21:55 – Conclusion
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March 19, 2025
Moore Teatfire Revolver
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Jun 2015The Moore patent “teatfire” revolver was one of the more (no pun intended) successful workarounds to the Rollin White patent. Designed by Daniel Moore and David Williamson, the gun was a six-shot .32 caliber pocket revolver which used a proprietary type of cartridge. It was loaded from the front, and the rear of the case had a nipple in its center full of priming compound. This allowed the rear of the cylinder to only have a small hole through which the hammer could reach to hit the nipple and fire the round, as opposed to a rimfire design in which the whole rear of the cartridge had to be exposed at the back of the cylinder. Some examples, including this one, included a unique type of extractor for pushing out spent cases.
March 15, 2025
Canada’s Unique WW2 Rocket Artillery: The Land Mattress
OTD Military History
Published 12 Nov 2022The Land Mattress, officially known as Projector, Rocket 3-inch, No 8 Mk 1, was the Canadian rocket launcher used during World War 2. The last surviving example is on display at the @CanWarMus.
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February 24, 2025
QotD: Great Men when it’s time to do x
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en
This is obvious, but: Elon breaks libs’ brains because he is the living vindication of the Great Man theory of history. Literally nothing he built would have existed without him, and without him clearly exhibiting superior intelligence and indomitable will.Not so fast.
I’m here to tell you, because I lived it, that the experience of being the “Great Man” who changed history can feel very different from the inside.
I’m not going to try to speak for Elon. Maybe he feels like a colossus out of Thomas Carlyle. I’ll just say that I didn’t feel like that when I was doing my thing, and I’m doubtful that he does more than a small part of the time.
Somebody was going to take the concept of “open source” to the mainstream fairly soon after general access to the Internet started to happen in the mid-1990s. But it didn’t have to be me; you get steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time, and it was time. Dennard scaling and cheap wide-area networking were the underlying drivers. Conditions like that generate ESR-equivalents.
Now it’s time for rockets to Mars. The drivers include extremely cheap and powerful computing, 3-D printing, and advances in both metallurgy and combustion chemistry. Conditions like this generate Elon-equivalents.
It is more than possible to look like the Great Man from the outside but to feel like — to know — that you are almost at the mercy of currents of change much larger than yourself. Yes, you have some ability to shape outcomes. And you can fail, leaving the role to the next person to notice the possibilities.
If Elon is like me, he sometimes plays the autonomous Great Man in order to get the mission done, because he knows that the most effective way to sell ideas is to be a charismatic prophet of them. But if he’s like me, he also feels like the mission created him to make itself happen, and if he fails or breaks the mission will raise up another prophet by and by.
I’m not claiming the Great Man theory is entirely wrong — it takes some exceptional qualities to be an Elon, or even a lesser prophet like me — but it’s incomplete. Great Men don’t entirely create themselves, they are thrust upwards and energized by missions that are ready to happen.
ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-31.
February 16, 2025
QotD: Why we’re stagnating
I won’t attempt to recap here the many arguments that have been made recently about whether and how our society is stagnating. You could read this book or this book or this book. Or you could look at how economic productivity has stalled since 1971. Or you could puzzle over what else happened in 1971. Or you could read Patrick Collison’s list of how fast things used to happen, or ponder how practically every new movie these days is a sequel, or stare in shock at declines in scientific productivity. This new book by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber starts with a survey of the most damning indicators of stagnation, moves on to suggest some underlying causes, and then suggests an unexpected way out.
Their explanation for our doldrums is simple: we’re more risk averse, and we don’t care as much about the future. Risk aversion means stagnation, because any attempt to make things better involves risk: it could also make things worse, or it could fail and turn out to be a waste of time and money. Trying to invent a crazy new technology is risky, going into consulting or finance is safe. Investing in unproven startups or speculative bets is risky, investing in index funds is safe. Trying to overturn the scientific consensus is risky, keeping your head down and publishing papers that don’t say anything is safe. Producing challenging new art is risky, spewing an endless stream of Marvel superhero capeshit is safe. Even if, in every case, the safe option is the “rational” choice for an individual actor in maximin expected value terms, the sum total of these individually rational choices is a catastrophe for society.
So far this is a lame, almost tautological, explanation. Even if it’s all true, we still haven’t explained why people are so much more fearful of failure than they used to be. In fact, we would naively assume the opposite — society is much richer now, social safety nets much more robust, and in the industrialized world even the very poor needn’t fear starvation. In a very real sense, it’s never been safer to take risks. Failing as a startup founder or academic means you experience slightly lower lifetime earnings,1 while, in the great speculative excursions of the past, failure (and sometimes even success) meant death, scurvy, amputations, destitution, children sold into slavery or raised in poorhouses — basically unbounded personal catastrophe. And yet we do it less and less. Why?
Well, for starters, we aren’t the same people. Biologically, that is. We’re old, and old people tend to be more risk-averse in every way. Old people have more to lose. Old people also have less testosterone in their bloodstream. The population structure of our society has shifted drastically older because we aren’t having any children. This not only increases the relative number (and hence relative power) of older people, it also has direct effects on risk-aversion and future-orientation. People with fewer children have all their eggs in fewer baskets. They counsel those kids to go into safe professions and train them from birth to be organization kids. People with no children at all are disconnected from the far future, reinforcing the natural tendency of the elderly to favor consumption in the here and now over investment in a future they may never get to enjoy.
Old age isn’t the only thing that reduces testosterone levels. So does just living in the 21st century. The declines are broad-based, severe, and mysterious. Very plausibly they are downstream of microplastics and other endocrine-disrupting chemicals. The same chemicals may have feminizing effects beyond declines in serum testosterone. They could also be affecting the birth rate, one of many ways that these explanations all swirl around and flow into one another. Or maybe we don’t even need to invoke old age and microplastics to explain the decline in average testosterone of decisionmakers in our society. Many more of those decisionmakers are women, and women are vastly more risk-averse on average.2
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Boom, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-11-11.
1. And given the logarithmic hedonic utility of additional money and fame, that hurts even less than it sounds like it would.
2. If you’re too lazy to read Jane’s review of Bronze Age Mindset but just want the evidence that women are more cautious and consensus-seeking than men on average, try this and this and this for starters.
February 1, 2025
China produced DeepSeek, Britain is mired in deep suck
In the Sean Gabb Newsletter, Sebastian Wang discusses the contrast between China’s recent release of the DeepSeek AI platform that appears to be eating the collective lunches of the existing LLM products by US firms and the devotion of the British Labour government to plunge ever deeper into their Net Zero dystopian vision:
Net Zero image from Jo Nova
For those few readers who may be unaware, DeepSeek is an advanced open-source artificial intelligence platform developed in China. Released in late 2024, it has set a new standard in AI, outperforming American counterparts in adaptability and capability. It excels in natural language processing, machine learning, and data analysis, and — critically — it is open source. Unlike the proprietary models that dominate the American tech landscape, DeepSeek allows anyone to adapt, improve, and use it as he sees fit. It’s not just a technological triumph for China; it’s a serious challenge to American domination of information technology and an opportunity for those who want to break free from the stranglehold of Silicon Valley.
As a Chinese person, I take pride in this achievement. It’s a testament to what my people can achieve with focus and ambition. But my concern is less about taking pride in what China has done and more about lamenting how little Britain has contributed to this revolution. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, seems to have no place in this new world of AI-driven progress. The question is why?
The answer is simple: The people who rule Britain have chosen decline. Crushing taxes on income and capital gains, and inheritance taxes, punish those who want to create wealth. Endless regulations stifle ambition, making it easier to conform than to innovate. Worst of all, there are the net zero policies, which have made energy costs the highest in the world, making electricity unaffordable and unreliable. Industries that depend on energy have been priced out of existence, and the dreamers and doers who might have built the next DeepSeek are being ground down by a system designed to reward mediocrity.
Net zero is not a noble goal born of misconception; it’s a disaster by design. It’s a wealth transfer scheme that takes from ordinary working people and hands billions to a small clique of green profiteers. The winners are the wind farm builders, the financiers running opaque carbon trading schemes, and the activists cashing in on government handouts. The losers are everyone else — families struggling to pay energy bills, businesses forced to close, and an entire country left unable to compete.
Compare this to China. DeepSeek wasn’t luck — it was the product of a system that rewards innovation. Electricity in China is cheap and reliable. Regulations focus on enabling progress, not blocking it. Ambition is celebrated, not treated as a threat. The ruling class there, for all its many and terrible faults, understands the value of creating wealth and technological self-reliance. Britain’s ruling class, by contrast, has abandoned the idea of building anything. They’d rather sit in the City of London, counting money made elsewhere, than see industry and innovation flourish in the country at large. They have chosen decline — not for them, but for us.
January 28, 2025
AI, the iPhone, and other tech whizzery are not the most important inventions ever
Freddie deBoer reacts to so, so many technically illiterate hot takes about this or that latest bit of techno-woo bling being given accolades as “the most important invention”:
Years ago, I think in 2010, Business Insider invested a great deal of hype and hoopla into a list they developed of the one hundred most important inventions of all time. I have tried and tried to find a link, including via the Internet Archive, but no dice; I’ll chalk it up to linkrot, the endless deterioration of the web over time, Business Insider‘s paywall, and their convoluted publishing history. You’ll have to take my word for it that, in a list that was released with great fanfare, they rated the iPhone as the most important invention of all time. Not antibiotics, the plow, or alternating current, not anesthesia or the lightbulb, but the iPhone, which took a bunch of things that already existed (cellular telephone service, email on the go, a touchscreen) and put them in one remarkably profitable package. The Business Insider list isn’t alone in putting the iPhone so high on ranked lists of human achievement. There’s plenty you can find, including a British survey that put the iPhone at number eight, ahead of the internal combustion engine, or this New York Times podcast which puts the iPhone at number three, although the list seems to be partially tongue in cheek. There’s a lot you could ask about such a choice, including epistemological questions inherent to putting a cellphone above the electricity-generating technologies that power it. But my visceral response to this kind of thinking — and even aside from ordinal lists of importance, the smartphone-supremacy attitude is very common — is to say, wow, these people must really enjoy shitting in the yard.
Plumbing — bringing fresh water from one place to another and disposing of human waste via engineering — goes back to antiquity, and you occasionally find claims of affordances like flush toilets in ancient times. Today, modern people in most developed parts of the world have constant access to free-running clean water and toilets that can remove physical waste to a secure processing facility or holding unit, with heated water on demand a very nice extra. That’s largely a 20th-century and forward phenomenon. There were pretty sophisticated sewer systems in Victorian London, the White House got running water in the Jackson administration, and as usual major metropolitan areas in rich countries were ahead of the game generally. But it wasn’t until the 1920s or so that indoor plumbing became a true mass phenomenon, again only in wealthy countries, and it was perfectly common for a soldier coming home from World War II in 1945 to be coming home to a house with a well and an outhouse. It wasn’t until the 1960s that a majority of American homes had indoor plumbing, which means that the beginning of the Space Age overlapped with a period where most Americans couldn’t wash their hands whenever they wanted to. And, as cool as NASA and launching satellites and orbiting the Earth and traveling to the Moon are, their practical impacts on human life pale in comparison to modern plumbing.
So when I read people putting the iPhone as the pinnacle of human ingenuity, I have to imagine that they’re big fans of shitting in their yard. Because if faced with a choice, they’ve indicated that they’d choose their smartphone over their toilet! And that’s quite a choice. It might be worth doing a little reality check in that regard by spending a month without one and then a month without the other. So you see how life feels without your smart phone for 30 days, and then you see what it’s like to not be able to access indoor plumbing for 30 days. You have to piss and shit outside. You have to walk to a well, if you can find one, to get (hopefully clean) water, and then you have to heat it up on your stove if you want it hot. You can’t shower, and taking a bath would be a remarkably laborious process that still left you with tepid water. And this isn’t just a question of comfort but a question of essential hygiene, by which I mean medically-relevant hygine — cholera, typhoid, gastrointestinal worms, scarlet fever, hepatitis, and many more diseases were massively harder to avoid before mass indoor plumbing. I don’t know you, personally, but I feel considerable confidence in suggesting that your desire to avoid those diseases is greater than your attachment to Instagram.
That’s the shitting in the yard test, or the indoor plumbing test, for those who prefer to avoid vulgarity. The test requires you to compare the hype about a particular tech product up against the actual brick-and-mortar changes wrought in the great period of human advancement that began sometime in the late 19th century and ended sometime in the late 20th; the modern flush toilet is just a particularly relevant example. Is Zoom really a bigger part of your life than food refrigeration, a technology that has saved untold millions of lives over the decades by dramatically reducing deaths from foodborne illness? Is cloud storage really a bigger deal than infant vaccines, which save six lives a minute? Does Android Auto really rate when compared to the airbag? You can call these questions obtuse, and some do, but they are natural and necessary things to think about in an era of obsession with artificial intelligence. (By which people mean LLM/neural net-based artificial intelligence, which is a whole other thing.) When you say that AI is the most important invention in human history, you’re making some really, really powerful claims. And yes, you have to then justify saying that AI is more important than, for example, the transistor, self-negating claims that deny the importance of technologies that make large language models possible. But you also have to justify saying that AI is more important than, like, the bowl. By which I mean, bowls. To put food in. To eat out of. Try and spend the rest of your life without ever using another food container and get back to me about whether ChatGPT is more important. Food containers are inventions!
January 23, 2025
Guycot 40-shot Chain Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Dec 2016The Guycot chain pistol was the development of two Frenchmen, Henri Guenot and Paulin Gay in 1879. It is chambered for a unique 6.5mm caseless rocket ball type cartridge in which the base of the projectile is hollowed out and contains the propellant powder and a primer. Upon firing, the entirely of the projectile exits, leaving nothing to be extracted or ejected from the chamber. Unfortunately for the Guycot’s military aspirations, this cartridge was far too small and underpowered to attract and serious interest and only a few hundred at most were made. These were divided between several models, including a 25-shot pistol, a 40-shot pistol like this one, and an 80-shot carbine.
January 19, 2025
QotD: Role-playing games
So why were such games seemingly only invented in the 1970s? Humans have been telling stories presumably since we evolved to speak. We’ve been using dice, or something quite like them, since at least 3,000 BCE. Why did it take us so long to combine them? Certainly, some elements were already present in the mid-1820s in Kriegsspiel, a Prussian battle simulation game, in which regiments had hitpoints that needed to be depleted to remove them from the field, as well as an umpire — much like the later Dungeon Masters — to roll the dice and decide if players’ orders succeeded. Even the 1820s, however, seems rather late.
One of the responses I saw on Twitter was that such games required a bureaucratic mindset — that it’s an essentially modern thing to reduce attributes like health or skills or the strength of an attack to numerical values. Children (and adults) have always played at roles, of course. In ancient Egypt children had miniature wooden swords; in thirteenth-century England, even kings played at being Arthurian knights. But tabletop role-playing games require systematising and formalising that play. It’s not just saying “I pull out a sword and hack the goblin’s head off”. Instead, first roll this die to see if you succeed. But is this really so modern? Obsessive counting of things, at least in the English-speaking world, seems to date at least from the seventeenth century — perhaps it wasn’t that widespread, but lists like actuarial tables and demographic statistics were already being compiled. The craze in seventeenth-century English policy circles was for “political arithmetic”. All in all, if the lack of such an attitude even was a constraint, it seems a soft one. If the predominantly agrarian society of 1820s Prussia could come up with Kriegsspiel, why not earlier still?
Another response I got was that such games needed literacy or numeracy, or had something to do with printing. But the whole thing can be done, and indeed invented, with just pen and paper. It could even be done with chalk on slate, or with sticks in the sand. As for the counting elements of such games, they essentially involve just agreeing a number — your health in the story, for example, or your ability to attack — and then comparing it with another number, such as an opponent’s armour or their ability to attack. It barely requires numeracy, let alone literacy. Tallying would cover most of it. And, of course, games might still be popular among a smaller group of literate people, even if much of the overall population was illiterate. Again, it seems too soft a constraint.
Finally, there was the response that the invention of such games required higher population densities. But that would be an argument against the invention of all games. We’ve had chess for millennia, however, and card games for centuries. If anything, we’ve been storytelling for even longer. An interesting variant of the argument, suggested by Matt Clancy, is that in fact tabletop role-playing games have been invented and re-invented many times, all over the world, but because of the lack of printing and low population densities, they have become lost and forgotten. Perhaps. Though I find it hard to believe that an activity so fun would never have been mentioned.
Anton Howes, “Where Be Dragons?”, Age of Invention, 2020-02-13.
January 15, 2025
QotD: Innovations hiding in plain sight
Today, another half-century later, a coast-to-coast flight still takes you as long as it took your father in the 1970s. And with the major exception of computers, nothing in your luggage is likely to be much more useful or valuable than dad’s equivalent.
It may well be the case that aeroplanes fly at the same speeds that they did in the 1970s. I don’t know for sure, but my understanding is that supersonic speeds were banned due to noise factors. No doubt someone in the thread will clear that up. Let’s also concede the point about “major exception of computers” – like wow, let’s ignore the single greatest area of human innovation in the past 20 years.
Okay – the material your luggage is made out of is very strong and very light weight compared to luggage in the 1970s. Your luggage will have wheels on it now. Luggage with wheels would have been a luxury item in the 1970s. The entertainment on the flight will be much better than what it was in the 1970s. Remember the single movie in the cabin? That was a feature of flying until the late 1990s. I reckon the food the would be better too, today. Hard to believe, but yes.
Then what about the computers? Paper tickets? Movies on demand on your own device? Books loaded on your own device?
So while it may be true that the experience of flying is very similar – hurry up and wait, fly through the air, and arrive at a destination faster than all alternatives. But many, many aspects of the experience are very different and much improved. Cheaper too.
When thinking of innovation, it’s not just gadgets and new-fangled things that we should think about – it’s improved business models and improvements in pre-existing gadgets that we should think about too.
Sinclair Davidson, “Has innovation stalled?”, Catallaxy Files, 2019-12-14.
December 31, 2024
“Britzkrieg” – Did British Tactics Help Create Blitzkrieg?
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Aug 2024Where did Blitzkrieg, the tactics that enabled Germany to conquer most of Europe in the first years of WW II come from?
Throughout the 1920s and into the ’30s, the German Army was forbidden from developing tanks or experimenting with armoured warfare, but in the same period, the British Army was at the forefront of mechanization and the use of armour on the battlefield.
In this film, we will look at how British tacticians like JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart developed a new and revolutionary way of warfighting and how these principles were taken up and used to devastating effect by the German Army in 1939 and 1940.
00:00 | Intro
02:14 | A New Form of Warfare
04:12 | Plan 1919
07:54 | New Technology – Better Tanks
14:01 | Trials and Tribulations
17:10 | Partly There
20:12 | Fuller’s ChildrenThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.
#tankmuseum
December 24, 2024
David Friedman on elegant solutions to problems
Sometimes the solution to a problem is obvious … at least once someone else has pointed it out:
Recently, when writing a check, it occurred to me that requiring the amount to be given separately in both words and number was a simple and ingenious solution to the problem of reducing error. It is possible, if your handwriting is as sloppy as mine, to write a letter or number that can be misread as a different letter or number. If redundancy consisted of writing the amount of the check twice as numbers or twice as words the same error could appear in both versions. It is a great deal less likely to make two errors, one in letters and one in numbers, that happen to produce the same mistaken result. It reduces the risk of fraud as well, for a similar reason.
That is one example of a simple and elegant solution to a problem, so simple that until today it had never occurred to me to wonder why checks were written that way. Another example of the same pattern is a nurse or pharmacist checking both your name and date of birth to confirm your identity.1
That started me thinking about other examples:
The design of rubber spatulas, one bottom corner a right angle, the other a quarter circle. One of the uses of the device is to scrape up the contents of containers, jars and bowls and such. Some containers have curved bottoms, some flat bottoms at a right angle to the wall. The standard design fits both.
Manhole covers are round because it is the one simple shape such that there is no way of turning it that lets it fall through the hole it fits over.
Consider an analog meter with a needle and a scale behind it. If you read it at a slight angle you get the reading a little high or low. Add a section of mirror behind the needle and line up the image behind the needle. Problem solved.
If you try to turn a small screw with a large screwdriver it doesn’t fit into the slot. Turning a large screw with a small screwdriver isn’t always impossible but if the screw is at all tight you are likely to damage the screwdriver doing it. The solution is the Phillips screwdriver. The tip of a large Phillips screwdriver is identical to a smaller one so can be used on a range of screw sizes.2
Ziplock bags have been around since the sixties. Inventing them was not simple but a new application is: packaging that consists of a sealed plastic bag with a Ziplock below the seal. After you cut open the bag you can use the ziplock to keep the contents from spilling or drying. I do not know how recent an innovation it is but I cannot recall an example from more than a decade ago.
1. This one and some of the others were suggested by posters on the web forum Data Secrets Lox.
2. I am told that the solution is not perfect, doesn’t work for very small screws, which require a smaller size of driver.
December 17, 2024
QotD: Capitalism is a combination of laziness, stupidity, and greed
Tim Worstall, “Folks Are Copying SpaceX – That’s How Capitalism Works”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-09-16.
