Top Gun: Maverick

Tom Roper said:
VHS-HiFi - Check! I still have it. Had the 6.5 foot Kloss Novabeam 100 front projection too, Carver amp and JBL classics. Times were not bad...
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Kloss Advent. Ah, memories. Front projections were the shiznit until 1987-88 or so. Then in 1989, Mitsubishi came out with their new 45" and 50" models (4501/5001 in wood and 4502/5002 in fake thin black plastic trims ... the thin trim sold out almost instantly) with 700 lines of resolution (previous was 560, i.e., the signal was even more electronically enhanced). 45" was $2,700 and 50" $3,000. That was the beginning of the RPTV decade.

BTW, I meant the "12 O'clock High" film (1949) with Gregory Peckory, which the series was based on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_O'Clock_High
 
The Novabeam 100 in 1988 was 700 line resolution, and HD ready for the forthcoming analog version of HD that never happened thanks to Microsoft. Laserdisc was 325 lines, VHS about 250 lines. The Novabeam 100 was probably the zenith of front projection, a bit brighter, its RGB tubes based on a relective mirror and Yves Faroudja processing. They were however pretty famous for burning out the green tube although I never had that problem with mine, color maintained true until I moved in 2002 and left it behind. Had many great times with it, none better than rewatching the original Top Gun and its famous sountrack.

I thought the 12 O'Clock High TV series was better than the movie but maybe that's because my father was a WWII B-24 bomber pilot in Italy. This was our favorite show and we watched it together, and he would tell me stories about flying if I prodded him enough. Like the other young fighters of that greatest generation, they were humble, not fighting for ideals of democracy or freedom, but rather just to live and survive and be around to go home to their wives and raise families. He would explain the intracacies of flying the B-24 like the 17, you didn'ty just slam the throttles open, it was a delicate balance of mixture, rpm, oil temperature, super-charger bypass, prop-pitch, carburetor de-icing, switchable air filter (in the wings). The B-24 was two handfuls to fly, and thanks to Henry Ford II there were more of them than pilots to fly them.
 
Yup, the Ypsilanti Willow Run plant at 800,000M2 was the largest single roof plant in the US during WWII. The previous largest was 330,000 M2 Willys Overland's main assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio that ended up making Jeeps. And the largest in the whole world was the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) in KdF Stadt, currently known as Volkswagen in Wolfsburg with 1,000,000 M2. The VW plant is still operating too, making about 700,000 automobiles in the final pre-Covid year. Willow Run has long been shut down, as was the WO, where it's now the Toledo School for the Arts.

PS. And the main cause for the German defeat in WWII was its horrible tool and plant utilization. KdF was contracted to make 1,000 Käfer cars per month.
 
DLD said:
Actually, I thought the Final Countdown's air combat scenes were far too cheesy - most pilots would have to think about firing at a Zero from a "modern" jet's gun. Chances are they'd use a Sidewinder because the difference in speed was too great (something that the Germans realized with Me-262's and the Allied bombers).

PS. The best air combat scenes were from "12 O'clock High" - because they were documentary, aka real camera footage taken from the USAAC and the Luftwaffe planes.
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The F14s are struggling to stay airborne during the dogfight in the Final Countdown since they had to fly so slow. I never saw 12 O'clock High but that sounds interesting
 
How did people feel about the dogfight scenes in Dunkirk? It was great cinema but I couldn't judge the veracity of the depiction
 
If that's the scene you're talking about, then it's far too slow because it can't be filmed - well, maybe it can - at real speed.


The dog fight accounts of the German pilots memoirs is that it involves multiple planes going at 350-400 miles an hour at different directions and a human brain simply needs a long time to get used to processing all that movement. Which is why pilot training didn't happen overnight. A movie viewer would have a similar response at a real speed action - he'd feel nauseated and incapable of comprehending what exactly was going on.

As a side mention - the Bf-109's didn't fight like Hurricanes or Spitfires. Because the Daimler Benz 601 engines had fuel injection and the plane itself was a phenomenal diver/climber, that was the MO of the Luftwaffe pilots. They'd dive down from the sun and, if unsuccessful, force the RAF fighters to dive down with them. They they would come out of the dive - often experiencing a near blackout 4G territory for the pilots - while the RAF planes Rolls Royce engines with their carburetor would have fuel supply cut off and the plane would simply crash into the ground/water. On the other hand, Spitfire, with its larger wings, was a superior turner and the German pilots carefully avoided these sorts of engagements.

And a historical note, Hans Pabst von Ohain had the first jet engine working in 1937 but the first jet plane with those engines only flew a few days before the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Helmut Schelp was the head of the German jet engine development and, being educated in the US, spoke perfect English. In 1946, he was "requested" in England but, with nothing to do, was wandering around London until he wandered into an Imperial War Museum. There, much to his amazement, a tour guide showed a Frank Whittle designed jet plane, calling it the first jet plane in the world. Schelp interjected, "This is simply not true". The tour guide asked why not and Schelp replied that the first flight took place much earlier. The tour guide asked how he would know this and Schelp calmly explained that he was the head of the entire German program. After that the museum management dragged him their offices and, after a long conversation, changed their presentation.

Von Ohain was taken into the US under Operation Paperclip (the same program that brought von Braun, Walther, Lippisch, Kramer also). He first went to work for the Air Force, then was hired by a private company. Sometimes in the 1950's, he became very good friends with Frank Whittle, who was having hard times in the UK and tried getting Whittle several well paying jobs in the USA. Von Ohain died in Melbourne, Florida in 1998.
 
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No I didn't see the original - I couldn't make it thru 2 hours of that kind of onslaught of the senses. The only reason I waved my handkerchief on the other other side of the fence saying I wouldn't see it is because I always think it funny when one asshole says 'not for me!' It's just jingoistic blather to me. Hey, I get it, peeps like all kinds of movies. I forget who said when a gun is shown on screen he turns it off. I'm half way there...
 
For historical reference - the Germans studied their gun camera film and came to the conclusion that only 2% of the shells/bullets actually hit the target. And that a 20mm shell required 4 hits to bring down a single engine fighter, about 10 hits for a twin engine bomber and 20-23 hits for a 4-engined B-17. The total hit requirement, obviously, went down with the larger caliber cannon - the 30mm MK108 needed one hit for a fighter and 3-5 for a 4-engine bomber. MK108 was tested by the US Air Force after the war and it was discovered that its Minengeschoß shell with 85 grams of High Explosive made a hole in a wing of 12 square meters, thereby eliminating the wing's ability to keep the aircraft in the air.
 
When dad flew bombing missions in the later stages of the war in 1944, the Nazis were unable to put up much fighter resistance. They had planes but had lost most of the skilled pilots and the fuel to fly them. He flew 35 missions from the base at Stornara in southern Italy near Cerignola. They flew north across the Adriatic Sea to targets in Romania, Austria, Germany, mostly oil depots and refineries, railroad marshalling yards, aircraft and ball bearing factories. He never encountered fighter resistance however on a raid in December of 1944 on the marshalling yards of Vienna, his B-24 was struck by the German eighty eight "Flak" guns as they were known. The ammunition was programmed to explode at an altitude filling the sky with piercing shrapnel. As two of the engines on the right side lost oil pressure and caught fire, the plane lost altitude over Yugoslavia and the crew escaped through the open bomb bay doors. As my mother was trying to celebrate with my older brother on Christmas Eve, she received a telegram from the war department that her husband was missing in action, which had to be awful. A few weeks later in January, she received another that he had returned to base. He and most of the others had been under the care of Tito's Partizan fighters. In the course of WWII, 50,000 airmen were lost over the skies of Europe about half or more British aviators. The picture below depicts heros less fortunate, as escaping an inverted B-24 was nearly impossible.


B-24 hit by Flak - Anti-aircraft warfare - Wikipedia
 
kevin baggott said:
No I didn't see the original - I couldn't make it thru 2 hours of that kind of onslaught of the senses. The only reason I waved my handkerchief on the other other side of the fence saying I wouldn't see it is because I always think it funny when one ******* says 'not for me!' It's just jingoistic blather to me. Hey, I get it, peeps like all kinds of movies. I forget who said when a gun is shown on screen he turns it off. I'm half way there...
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Sure, jingoistic blather. As far as pace and spectacle though, I remember it being quite measured. Nothing like the whirligig of visual skull-****ing in a pirates of the Caribbean sequel, for example
 
The German flak (yes, it's abbreviation from Flugabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft artillery) batteries were made up of four (usually 88mm, but they also had 105 and 128mm) units that fired as a box - high-low-in front-behind - at their target. The goal was to fill the space with fragmentation, as those traveled about 200 meters in all directions. The British then responded by designing a "flak jacket" - a vest with pockets/inserts for thin aluminum plates - that lowered the casualty rate by about two thirds. As the RAF bombers were quite cramped, the vests were deemed bulky and the Luftwaffe night interceptors flew underneath the RAF bombers with their "Schräge Musik" (literally, "jazz music") vertical installations, the need for body armor lessened and they were offered to the Americans. The USA AC found them to be more than useful, as the casualty rate was also drastically lowered. They helped against fragmentation and the smaller caliber bullets but not against the armor piercing 20mm rounds. But, since most German 20-30mm shells were high explosives and went off on contact with the fuselage anyway, the jackets did the job they were designed to do.

PS. I assert that the Germans royally effed up by not copying the Japanese "beehive" rounds, which would have allowed them to fire underneath the aircraft and greatly increase the concentration of fragments. For the last 60 years or so, the "beehive" shell has been used by the US ground based artillery against the exposed enemy infantry.
 
I don't know but just flying into the fragmentation at 200 knots, never mind a direct hit, was enough to cause mayhem. The wings and rudders of the B-24 and B-17 were covered with a sort of rubberized fabric easily shredded.
 
The early Flak gunners success rate was one bomber per 8,000 rounds. That's when the US bombers flew at 20,000 feet. The US crews then began to fly at 30,000 feet and the Flak success rate went down to 16,000 rounds. The problem was the reduced accuracy of the US own aiming, something like .5% of all bombs falling within 1,000 feet of its target. That required more sorties per given target and the de facto carpet bombing with small 500 lb (220 kg) bombs just to cover the assigned area. Smaller bombs, naturally, have far less destructive power and the Germans found it fairly easy to retool.

This was one huge error on the part of the US planners. The bombers should have flown at night as lower altitudes with larger bombs and twin engine fighter escorts. Which is what Luftwaffe did in Russia (when they did it all), except for the escorts. In June, 1943 Red Sormovo raids, they wiped out 52 buildings off ~ 680 twin engine sorties or about 25 tons per plant.
 
Bombing is about frying other peoples kids and ripping thier arms legs and heads off. This happened to some of my relatives in ww2.

So im in a quandy about this basic purpose not, I guess, getting mulled over in TG

I thought the first TG was too straight for me the alternative teenager.

But its gotta be said some cool rigs angles and nice rock music do move the inside - this kind of questions the whole human phsyce and ability to ignore what they cannot see.

I remember some 1950s ww2 film with a burnng pilot even though I watched when i was 8, dont know the movie though.. but it had an effect that TG prbably wont.
 
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It's no more than a cool movie, an escape from reality I would agree but let it be said, alternative teens don't own the moralistic high ground, didn't struggle under tyranny and are not lacking in any ability to ignore what they did not see.
 
One of the most prominent survivors of a fiery aircraft explosion was Johannes "Macky" Steinhoff, a colonel in the WWII Luftwaffe and a high level military official with NATO in 1970's. He's famous for being in a PR reconciliation appearance during Reagan's visit to Germany in 1983.
 
There were other proud Nazis, like Gunther Rall, one of the prolific murderous BF-109 Luftwaffe aviators. After his high level appointment by Hitler, he claimed ignorance after the war of the atrocities of the Holocaust and became a consultant for USAF for ME-262.
 
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