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WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)
Any primary documents you recommend? (Curious history nerd.)
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WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)
Was this because of their incredibly short ammunition reserves? I heard something recently about spitfires having only having about 20s worth of machine gun fire.
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What about anti-aircraft ground fire?
For bombers thats the main cause of aircraft losses, fighters of WWII were pretty ineffective, especially at night. It's difficult to believe a WWII era fighter diving into a stream of bombers, at night, while the multiple gun turrets on 100s of bombers were returning fire - were making precise tactical decision about which part of the airframe to target. The nice thing (statistically) about AA fire is that it's rath…
Survivorship bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Would you mind fleshing that out? Just posting two words and linking to wikipedia doesn't add much to the conversation, and people who care about maintaining the level of discourse on HN might heavily downvote you.
You must be careful when applying this sort of logic because it assumes that what happens to a plane after its shot is entirely deterministic, ie. if it gets shot in the tail fin it crashes, if it gets shot in the wing it doesn't. That may or may be accurate for planes (I really don't know) but may not for other things. Suppose anywhere the plane was shot led to a 1/5 chance of the plane crashing, meaning that all pl…
Steve Blank's presentation is great on this topic and radar: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/computer-history-museum-112...
Also note that between 5 and 20% of the planes didn't come back from each mission. How many more were damaged every run? Most? 15,000 flak cannons protected Europe, many of them radar guided/aimed. Strategic bombing was an incredibly crappy job: you died more often than a Marine in the Pacific.
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According to John Forester, being struck by an overtaking car is among the least likely bicycle accidents, even though it is the rationale used to justify mandatory bike lane usage. http://www.johnforester.com/ His book, Effective Cycling is a great way to improve bicycle safety.
Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's character whose strategy for bike safety at night was to assume he was wearing reflective clothing and that everybody in a car would be paid a million dollars to kill him.
A friend of mine does this, he has a whole closet full of orange and silver sweatshirts that he wears every day. Last time he got hit by a car was years ago, but when the cops showed up they took one look at him and arrested the driver before he'd uttered a word.
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Would you mind fleshing that out? Just posting two words and linking to wikipedia doesn't add much to the conversation, and people who care about maintaining the level of discourse on HN might heavily downvote you.
this bias tends to come up frequently on HN (often as a reminder that this community shares more articles about businesses that succeed than those that fail), so many may recognize it (and upvote it) --- it's sort of like saying tl;dr and summarizing the article it it's own way.
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Reminds me of Neal Stephenson's character whose strategy for bike safety at night was to assume he was wearing reflective clothing and that everybody in a car would be paid a million dollars to kill him.
What Neal Stephenson book was that? Zodiac?