Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

  1.  @mskellyrlv  Absolutely. Video used to be scorned as nice to have for newbs but sensor data is for professionals, mainly because getting video from space missions required heavy, bulky equipment and lots of bandwidth. Technology has advanced very far just in the last 15 years. The video camera technology in your phone is something NASA would've loved to get their hands on in the 60s.
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  2. Count me in. From New Jersey to Jersey, all for a good pint.
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  3. AS well they should, Chuck Yeager is a real life badass. Chuck Norris wants to be like Chuck Yeager.
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  4. Under VFR water towers are still great aids.
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  5. I think when you look back on it, the Seven Years War (aka French and Indian War in North America) of the 1750s-60s may have been the first world war. Or one of the first, anyway.
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  6.  @CrackerFL  There are spring-loaded brakes on modern elevators; they do not freefall, power outage or not.
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  7.  Ron Lewenberg  That would be a good topic for Drachinifel.
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  8. Well, if it makes them feel better, the rest of the country, and even the rest of NY state, don't care about the difference between the boroughs and think they are all equally insufferable.
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  9. I've heard this story many times and I find the conventional interpretation of it to be a bit dubious. The Arrow was indeed a very advanced aircraft, but it was likely limited due to its pure interceptor design. In its intended role for continental defense it may have done as well as its later American counterpart, the F-106, which stayed in service until the 1990s, but the Arrow would likely lacked the multirole versatility of the F-4 Phantom, which was used for air-to-ground missions extensively as well as air-to-air. Could the Arrow even handle itself in a dogfight against other fighters? The Phantom certainly could, when flown right, and in tests the F-106 even did well. Then there's the question of how fragile the Canadian aerospace industry was. When one big project cancellation results in the shutdown of your nation's entire industry, it doesn't say much for the resiliency of the business to begin with. A lot of big projects in the US were canceled over the years as well, and while occasionally a company would go out of business or merge, the US aerospace industry was never seriously in trouble. The B-70 comes to mind right off the top of my head. Finally, the idea of Canada pulling off an Apollo-Saturn style moon landing project is a bit much to believe. Where to even start with that? Sounds a lot like the lost golden age myth fantasy. Canadians have played a large role in the US space program, but to imagine the Canadian government shouldering the financial burden of a NASA type moon landing program, with all the public scrutiny that comes with it, is just too much for me. Public perceptions about government spending is what led to the guy who canceled the Arrow, after all.
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  10. The guns on battleships are giant rifles, and they can be used as giant sniper rifles. Just ask Admiral Ching Lee or his opponents on Kirishima, who found out the hard way.
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  11.  @MrMontanaNights  Because the bombs got so big and so numerous that survival of the population became impractical. Also, Mutually Assured Destruction became the policy and making plans to protect your population instead of allowing them to be held hostage to the adversary might be considered as an attempt to fight and win a nuclear war, provoking the other side. So the government decided to say the hell with it, it's pointless and costs money and our fearless leaders want us all to be vulnerable anyway.
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  12. There's a pretty good movie called "At Close Range" starring Christopher Walken and Sean Penn, about an organized crime gang in rural Pennsylvania in the 70s. It's loosely based on Bruce Johnson's gang in the 60s and 70s who stole drugs, farm equipment, etc. around the Lancaster County area.
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  13. Not quite the same, but after the Challenger accident, Rockwell assembled a replacement space shuttle out of structural spares which became Space Shuttle Endeavour. At first NASA considered refitting Enterprise for spaceflight, but that would've required disassembling the airframe and rebuilding major parts to bring her up to spec, so the Endeavor option was deemed cheaper.
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  14. Ah, okay, my memory was dim, I read something about it years ago. But still, he was working with the OSS, so again, a missed opportunity on the part of the US.
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  15. Why do carbon units infest Enterprise?
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  16. I had trouble seeing the video because of all the puns in my eye, but I was able to hear all the jokes and found them rather cornea.
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  17. Great story, and great connection at the end!
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  18. Just like Joe and Hunter making bank off the Chinese, promising to smooth things over with them once he's installed.
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  19. Hindsight is 20/20. Without timely help from the US Navy Wake was doomed to fall, despite the fact that the Marines made the enemy pay dearly for it.
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  20. And the one at Lakehurst, NJ too, which was where the Shenandoah was built, and where the Hindenburg was headed when she wrecked. That one is 100 years old now.
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  21. Kudos to the Navy for rewarding Hudner despite his violating standing orders. That's how things work in a real fighting force. You support the man on the spot for making tough decisions and choosing courage over ass-covering, and you show the rest of your troops that being brave is the right thing to do.
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  22.  @badhat3051  The locations and destinations of naval flotillas are concealed as best as possible. I'm guessing the Venezuelans did not have high tech maritime surveillance in 1958; it's likely that they knew about the carrier and the Marines off shore only when Ike wanted them to know what was coming if they didn't protect the VP. A Marine landing is not considered "stealthy"; it's an old joke: Navy SEALS sneak up and kill you in your sleep, Marines call you on the phone and tell you they're coming to kick your ass in a few hours, and then they proceed to do exactly that. But in reality you never quite know where they're going to land if they can help it.
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  23. I love that the VW Beetle is a unit of mass. I remember when the Iowa class battleships were in service in the 80s and 90s and people would say "each main gun shell is like a VW Beetle being thrown 20 miles."
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  24. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum has the restored Enola Gay B-29 and a model of the Little Boy bomb on display. About 10 or 15 years ago some wackjob protestors threw blood or red paint on the airplane, right after they had spent hundreds of man hours restoring it.
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  25. That part about the shoe shine box reminds me of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
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  26.  @cmdraftbrn  I read the book. It's a good read but it's also grim. HIs time in Japanese POW camps was not pleasant. He also had serious alcohol problem later in life that probably led to an earlier than expected death.
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  27.  @ronfullerton3162  Now we have unsecure wi fi networks instead.
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  28. So Marty, how many times are you going to copy and paste that hogwash and crap all over History Guy's videos?
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  29. Communists are pieces of shit, and Stalin was among the greatest piece of shit in communist history, topped perhaps only by Mao. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would embrace that wretched, foul ideology after the enormous piles of dead bodies it leaves in its wake, and the monsters that always rise to the top. Doesn't surprise me to learn this asshole started off as a violent bank robber; the Communist Party is a natural place for him to wind up.
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  30. It helps that he was a smart general, as opposed to some of the blithering idiots commanding the troops.
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  31. Actually, many parts of that Goldsboro bomb were recovered; the part still buried in the mud is no longer a functional bomb. It may contaminate the water supply or cause some other pollution problem, but it is physically impossible for it to function as an explosive.
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  32. You better stand, there's no turning back!
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  33.  @jerrymiller276  Far easier to indoctrinate children in ideological nonsense than to teach them reading, writing, math, and science.
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  34.  @billbolton  Cigarette smuggling is common in the US, since some states have high taxes on what is a legal product.
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  35. Anytime troops are told "You'll be home by Christmas" it's almost invariably a lie.
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  36. Also that jackass running the pizzeria down the street from me. I don't like his cheesy bread and he doesn't give me enough free napkins. Break him up!
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  37. 11:55 Nelson, "If it makes you feel any better, you've had your ass kicked by the very best who's ever sailed the Seven Seas and you put up a decent fight."
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  38.  @winstonchurchill3597  Honestly I had buddies in college who had to do that to get through school. I was in a technical program, so not so much for me, but there were still a few liberal arts classes where telling the truth was bad for your grade if it didn't match the professor's ideology.
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  39. No internet and no cable TV, nothing else to do.
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  40.  @johnmorris7209  If you've ever pulled buttes at a rifle range you know what it sounds like when rifle rounds pass close overhead. They are loud with a supersonic crack that over time damages your hearing if you don't wear earplugs. Now imagine a much bigger round going just as fast or faster passing even closer. Yikes.
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  41. And Drachinifel.
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  42.  @BeachsideHank  That's a great rant and all, but in this case the Navy was right.
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  43. I was in Japan in the early 90s and the Japanese navy was flying large 4-engine turboprop flying boats out of Iwakuni, a joint US Marine Corps and Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force (ie navy) base. They used them for antisubmarine patrols and search and rescue, and they were very impressive, landing in the water and then taxiing up the seaplane ramp to get the salt water hosed off. They had a bunch of pitot tubes and weathervane-looking instrument probes sticking up from the forward deck area as I remember. Don't know if they still use them today.
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  44.  @TheHistoryGuyChannel  I wonder why he rode it into the ground. It must've been before zero-zero ejection seats, when those old seats couldn't save you if you were too low and too slow.
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  45. Exactly, by making a stand he never got to use all the awful stuff he had in his car on her.
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  46. @Silently Sceptical you are just a troll
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  47.  @TheHistoryGuyChannel  I'm sorry, but I don't think she believes it is YOUR mail. It belongs to her now.
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  48.  @corneliuscrewe677 Yes, but it's a 5 mile walk, in an environment with no air, and your suit must not fail. So it's still pretty edgy.
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  49. The rocket booster in that story refers to the space shuttle solid rocket booster segments, which were built or refurbished and fueled at the factory and shipped by rail to Florida where they were assembled into complete boosters. An alternate plan offered by a competing company was to build a manufacturing plant in Florida near the launch site which would build larger, fatter booster rockets which would be all one long casing. The bigger one-piece boosters would've been more powerful and also would've avoided the engineering problem of the O-ring joints that doomed the Challenger.
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  50. I was there once, many years ago, doing the same thing. Keep the faith, brother, and come home safe.
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