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Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

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Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#61

Post by werftgh »

silentbicycle wrote: post #36
werftgh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't remember the name but an experiment by a prof from UCL showed that cars approached him more closely when he was wearing a helmet - but they gave him more space when he was wearing a long blonde wig. So the safest solution is a transvestite without a helmet.

Oddly, I can't remember the name either, but I'm almost certain I've read the same study. Let me know if you find it first. ;) Edit: Secondary source, still working on the primary - http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/653/blonde-wigs-safer-hel... Edit': Got it - http://drianwalker.com/overtaking/ American drivers' attitudes may differ from UK/Austrailian drivers', especially regionally (i.e. rural Texas vs. New York C…

Places I have lived where more people cycle the drivers have a better attitude. Cambridge, Amsterdam and Vancouver are great to cycle in, London reasonable, smaller industrial cities where cycling is rare = terrible

I used to commute on a motorbike and the cars to be very careful of were: SUV with mom in the front and a kid in the back, BMW with guy wearing suit, hot hatchback with 4 teenagers in - you just gave any of those a wide berth!

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#62

Post by werftgh »

bhickey wrote: post #55
silentbicycle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suppose that we want to study the underlying genetics of a disease. To do this, we want to look at some people with the disease (cases) and some people without (controls). The trouble is that if the disease makes people more likely to die, they won't be enrolled in your study. This is of particular concern for fast moving diseases like pancreatic cancer. In general this effect manifests as a bias against people with…

Similar to the famous Boston cemetery study. It shows the age at death of people in a cemetery drops linear as you approach the current date. whereas people 100years ago all died in their 60-80s

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#63

Post by werftgh »

pg wrote: post #44
werftgh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WW II fighters shot down a large number of aircraft. Erich Hartmann alone claimed 352. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_air_aces

Mostly against primitive fighters particularly on the Russian front. Assuming similar exaggeration of successes by each sides publicity offices you can probably divide the figures by 2 or 4.

Even if all these had been against night heavy bombers it's a tiny part of the losses

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#64

Post by pg »

cperciva wrote: post #54
pg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WW II fighter pilots were very rational about what they aimed at. (I happen to have read a lot about this.)

How many WW2 fighter pilots were actually good enough shots that they could aim at part of a plane? I always figured that the difference between a good gunner and a bad gunner was whether they hit the plane at all.

In every instance I've read about they aimed at specific parts. Presumably the difference between the good ones and the bad ones was whether they were able to hit what they were aiming at, but they all appear to have at least tried.

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#65

Post by Bootvis »

werftgh wrote: post #33
silentbicycle wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any citations for that? I'm not doubting you, but genuinely curious (and ambivalent about helmets). There seems to be a pervasive attitude in the US that if you're a cyclist hit by a car when you're not wearing a helmet, you're automatically at fault, because you're not being responsible. Which is weird, because the risk isn't coming from the bikes...and there's a good chance that it makes cycling seem mo…

Can't remember the name but an experiment by a prof from UCL showed that cars approached him more closely when he was wearing a helmet - but they gave him more space when he was wearing a long blonde wig. So the safest solution is a transvestite without a helmet.

Even better is concealing your helmet under a long blonde wig.

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#66

Post by jayliew »

firebones wrote: post #15
jayliew wrote: post #10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

The only black swan connection I see is Taleb's point about "the graveyard of silent evidence". Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We didn't see all the planes returning that had catastrophic failures in the known bullet-holed areas and never returned.

Isn't that what the article is saying? "Don't forget the planes that didn't return", which is silent evidence because there's no evidence of its absence

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#67

Post by JshWright »

werftgh wrote: post #34
anonymous236 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The RAF didn't fly in formation during night bombing attacks, rather they flew in "streams" often hundreds of miles long. So there wouldn't have been hundreds of turrets to bring to bear on a single fighter.

I think you're also overestimating how easy it would be to spot a blacked out fighter at night. A popular german night fighter tactic was often to sneak up beneath a bomber and then pitch the nose of the fighter up sharply while firing, racking the bomber's belly with cannon fire.

Many fighters were equipped with guns mounted in a vertical configuration called Schräge Musik. The guns would fire automatically when a magnetometer detected an enemy bomber was overhead.

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#68

Post by Someone »

TGJ wrote: post #35

I guess an interesting point to think about, of those 1000 or so shots on the wing, what about the one that finally hit the wire that disconnected the aileron from the yoke? You might have plenty that hit around the wing, but one that takes out that wire and it could be over. The sweeping logic being used doesn't cover those areas.

You aren't taking the circumstances into account. The question these guys got wasn't to optimize plane safety, it was more something like "we will be building 1000 more of these planes next week. What should we different about them to make them better?" There simply wasn't time for nuance.

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#69

Post by teilo »

joe_the_user wrote: post #32
werftgh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing with bicycle helmets and seatbelts in cars.

This conversion isn't automatic at all, though. Helmets turn fatalities into head injuries but also head injuries into non-head injuries. You need the real statistics for each case before making a judgment. Also, a metal helmet has the obvious problem that there's no damping for an impact. A Styrofoam helmet absorbs shock.

Styrofoam helmets. That made me laugh.

I'm not talking theory but facts. Metal helmets increased head injuries substantially, and reduced bullet and shrapnel to-the-head fatalities substantially.

Also, you've evidently never seen a real metal helmet, which has plenty of damping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1_Helmet

The M1's predecessor, the Brodie also had a padded lining: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0036C0MXY/ref=dp_ot...

Re: Put armor where there aren't bullet holes

#70

Post by Luc »

VMG wrote: post #56
Luc wrote: post #52

It's a nice story, but the distribution of the bullet holes in the illustration ( http://motherjones.com/files/images/blog_raf_bullet_holes.jp... ) looks a bit too neat to me. I wouldn't expect the bullet holes to be placed exactly so that a cursory glance makes it mind-blowingly obvious where the weak spots are, in a neatly symmetrical way. I'd expect a bit of frowning and thinking and calculating to be needed to fi…

Maybe this is the sum of multiple planes illustrated on one

That's what it's purporting to be, but maybe it's just made up.

Look here: http://404uxd.com/2007/08/03/thinking-and-leaping

In reference to the illustration in question, it says "the result was a graphic that looked something like the image below", in other words it's made up.

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