Daydream Notes

I made this kit a few years ago now; but only now have taken its picture. It's Tamiya's I-400 kit. The I-400/I-401 are fairly famous (I mean I saw a comprehensive documentary on them out of PBS), so I'll skip the info dump this time.  Just for context, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had some exceptionally large submarines, as the expected combat zone was the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese warmed up to the aircraft-carrying subs for a few reasons. First, some of their submarine classes were large simply because they were built for trans-pacific operations. Second, for those finding things in the Pacific reasons, the idea of scout aircraft was seen as sensible, regardless of what job the submarine was assigned to. The Japanese were also really good at submarines, and really good at aircraft carriers, so making it practical came much easier. Finally, the Japanese were also the people who made floatplane versions of their fighters to operate air cover in ...

Pyotr Velikiy. The collapse of the USSR had a major impact on the Kirov program. By the time the lead ship Kirov was put into commission, it was 1980,  and the enormous military spending of the USSR (50% of GDP) was bringing the rest of the economy to a halt. As a result, I'm breaking up the service records into three eras: the Soviet era, the 1990s shambles, and the 2000 + stabilization of Russia. As a preamble, I thought I'd mention something only occasionally touched on when talking about the Soviet Military: the corrosive nature of their military-industrial complex. Jobs producing military goods were higher status in the Soviet Union, as well as relatively well paying. While there were lots of other things driving Soviet military budgets (especially in the early 1980s, when the Cold War reached a peak of hostility) communist party officials could best bring home the bacon for their constituents by getting more military production in their district. I suspect that some...

Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great.) Battleships were over by the time the Second World War ended. Aside from the US Navy (who being a superpower could afford to be sentimental about massively expensive warships) what battleships remained at the end of World War 2 were decommissioned and scrapped with astonishing rapidity, considering in World War 2 the very same ships were thought of as critical strategic assets. Why battleships fell completely out of favor is a pretty simple story. Battleships were enormously expensive to build and to man, and the march of technology had made them very vulnerable – both to submarines and to aircraft. The development of the first guided munitions in World War 2 was a knock against them, as going forward it would be far easier to design weapons with enough explosive to negate a battleship's armor. Another factor was that aircraft carriers had proven themselves as capable of taking over their role of defeating enemy warships at vastly greater enga...