There are moments in life that an adult has to deal with, whether they want to do so or not.  These moments are called "obligations," and not following through with them is a very bad thing.  At work, in one's personal life, and even in something as floofy as a blog, one's word is your currency throughout your life.  That is why I had to give FedEx hell when their delivery man decided that dropping my package at the leasing office for Pond Central's complex was fine, as opposed to even trying to deliver it to my door.  Sure, there was nothing preventing me from going the four blocks to the office to pick it up... except for the principle of the thing.  I apparently got the delivery guy in serious trouble, but c'mon.  Do Your Job.  Follow through on your obligations. 

Which is why I am here right now writing about the newest episode of Kantai Collection when I'd rather be doing nearly anything else.  I thought last episode was fluff, and lord was I was right.  It did have the advantage of being wonderfully Mutsu-centric, and that right there made it fun for me, so it had that going for it.  Which was nice.  This one, though... from everything I had suspected was going to occur, this one was making my stomach churn.  As it turned out, what I suspected was going to be bad wasn't... but then the show took an unexpected turn.  So why am I still muttering here instead of actually doing the writeup?  I dunno.  Just because I follow through on my obligations doesn't mean I enjoy it all the time.  Well, so it goes... being an adult sucks sometimes.  And with that thought ringing through your mind, let's get on with the show!

We open with the command ships gathered together, discussing the results of the latest simulations now that the entire fleet is gathered at Truk.  Much like Mutsu said last week, the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor if they push Operation MO now.  Nagato, no dummy herself, agrees and will speak to the Admiral about it right away.  Things are wrapping up when another shipgirl rushes in... there's a problem with one of the destroyers!

Someone has moved Pippin's lightness slider waaaaay far to the right.  She's all glowy and washed out.  The other girls are somewhat taken aback by this, of course... small errors aside, Kantai Collection has been a well-animated show, something like this just shouldn't happen.  The usual reasons for her glowing are trotted out...it's true love, it's aliens, it's bad fuel so she might explode.  Her humors are out of balance, we'll need to apply the leeches.

Fortunately for everybody, including us (leeches, ugh!), Nagato and Mutsu arrive and while visibly surprised, clearly recognize what's going on.  They tell Pippin to go to the factory right away... all the destroyers look concerned.  Remember that game mechanic I talked about some episodes ago, where you can use unneeded ships for spare parts and improvements to other vessels?  Is P-for-Poi about to be sent to the breakers???  Does Akagi need repairs, and if so, do we get to see shipgirl-on-shipgirl cannibalism?

What's wrong with me?

more...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:17 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 1993 words, total size 15 kb.

-Aria The Origination, Ep13

So... squishy...

Fresh steaming piles of content are headed your way soon.  Until then, this will have to do.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 04:29 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 28 words, total size 1 kb.

...she will not hesitate to make your world a nightmare.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:37 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

Running late this week, but fortunately this episode is somewhat fluffy in content so it shouldn't be a problem to write up, right?  Weeeeellllllll... maybe not so much.  See, there's a lot of Mutsu this week, and it's hard to write coherently when you're dreamily staring at the screen with a dreamy smile on your face and a vast lack of attention to your surroundings.  She's dreamy is what I'm saying, and she has the ability to cause mass distraction, at least in your humble scribe.  Did I mention that this is a beach and/or swimsuit episode?  Boogity boogity boogity, let's go KanColle-ing!

We pick up shortly after the end of last episode, with Foobie Force escorting a badly damaged Shokaku to a mysterious location that only Kongo knows about.  And who better but a British-built battleship to know the location of the new Japanese fleet base called Camelot!

Which is a much nicer sounding name than what we usually remember it as, Truk Lagoon.  "The Gibraltar of the Pacific."  "Japan's Pearl Harbor."  Easily the most important IJN base outside of the Home Islands themselves, in real life Truk could do everything but build new ships or do major repairs.  After spending a good half-hour to an hour examining terrain maps and satellite photos, I'm forced to conclude that Foobie Force is approaching Uman Island, which is an odd choice of place for the Production Staff to use.  To be sure, there was a Japanese presence on the island, a small base on the outcropping on the left of the picture.  But the Administrative Center for the IJN was one island to the North, Tonoas.  A much larger facility, that, and one that'll match up better with what we'll be seeing soon.  Perhaps they decided not to use an actual place where so many soldiers and sailors really died.  If so, good call, I'm okay with that.

More importantly, Mutsu told Kongo that there's a new, special ship based there, and that by the time Foobie Force arrives, the rest of the Naval District will have relocated.  The two carriers resolve to head directly to the repair bays, while everybody else is... um... everybody else.

Mutsu! 

more...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 01:29 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment
Post contains 1735 words, total size 13 kb.

1 A couple nights ago, while browsing through many a site unmentionable and better that way, I encountered an artifact most curious. A volume, penned and drawn by a couple of notable porn artists, who on this occasion had settled for some light cheesecake as a side to something rather more substantial. It appears to be a guide to naval combat for people who got into the game but don't actually know how any of this stuff works. Shell types and sizes, arced fire, the gun loading process, the inner workings of a torpedo, diagrams of mini-submarines, scout planes and search patterns, the use of the arresting wire... I mean, I can't read a word of it other than some of the numerals, but it's kind of fascinating anyway.

It turned out there were two volumes of it. Cute stuff for what it is. Very much too bad there's no translated version, but let me know if you want to take a look at the Japanese version.

Posted by: Avatar at March 03, 2015 03:44 AM (a38fD)

2 Yeah, I could tell that was the Yamato by her big... guns....

Posted by: Mauser at March 03, 2015 05:13 AM (TJ7ih)

3 Mutsu baiting Nagato was pretty much the one really good thing about this episode...

Posted by: GreyDuck at March 03, 2015 08:23 AM (AQ0bN)

4
The 18.1" Shan Shiki shell seems thoroughly scary but rather poor doin's, thanks to Japanese lack of proximity fuses.  

It can take a substantial chunk out of a  formation of aircraft if you guess right as to where they'll be when it gets there, but the sky is big and if they know of the threat they'll be maneuvering.     Supposedly the militarily useful burst is a markedly forward-directed cone-like shape of 20 degree solid angle  and the better part of a km length.
 
With a proximity fuze rather than pre-set detonation, things get more interesting -- but I'm guessing you could actually put  a much higher rate of proximity-fuzed antiaircraft fire into many more places, still with plenty of range and altitude capability,  by using the ship's secondary battery.    (The VT fuse scaled down to the 5" guns that  most USN ships had at least a few of.)      That way you can preserve or otherwise employ the big guns and still have good air defense.

Thankfully the real IJN never got those fuses...

Thoughts?

Posted by: Ad absurdum per aspera at March 03, 2015 06:17 PM (cQAlw)

5 Uncle Ad, if the IJN had had prox fuzes, they wouldn't have needed the Type 3 shell in the first place.  The idea of a 18.1" diameter shotgun barrel is awfully fun, though...

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 03, 2015 07:34 PM (jGQR+)

6 It's hard enough to build a proximity fuse using vacuum tubes that can continue to operate after having been fired from a 5" DP gun (which is what the Americans did). I can't imagine how you'd make one that could survive being fired from Yamato's 18 inchers. (360 Kg of cordite, baby, in the propellant charge!)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 03, 2015 08:00 PM (+rSRq)

7 MORE BUBBLE WRAP!!!

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 03, 2015 11:38 PM (jGQR+)

8 The game has the type 3 shells as especially effective against "installation type" bosses, based on RL airfields. Did the IJN use them against those targets?
The wreck of Yamato's sister ship, the Musashi, has apparently been discovered by Paul Allen. Unlike the Yamato, it was mostly intact. I wonder if she'll show up later?

Posted by: muon at March 04, 2015 06:41 AM (XIprt)

9 Muon, yeah, I wrote about the Musashi being found a couple hours before I posted the writeup for Ep08.  It's literally the post below this one.  I'm sure she won't show up in the show.

No, the Type3 shell was strictly an anti-aircraft round; that was the only point to it. 

Posted by: Wonderduck at March 04, 2015 08:17 AM (jGQR+)

10 Yay! Great writeup!

The old-school anime injoke was the bit where Yamato was standing looking out at the sea sadly at night, and all of a sudden they started in with the wailing female vocalization music, a la Space Battleship Yamato.

To be fair, some swimsuits work that way, but only if you apply a lot of stickum and double-sided tape. And you can't swim or move much.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at March 06, 2015 08:52 PM (ZJVQ5)

11 Well, probably it's really "a la that Imperial Japanese Navy song about the Yamato Spirit that the Space Battleship Yamato theme song is reminiscent of," but it made me laugh.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at March 06, 2015 09:10 PM (ZJVQ5)

12 There isn't really a good anti-runway shell, is there? I mean, by the standards of WW2 aviation, for a fighter base, you really just needed a level field free of obstacles. I know the Germans spent a lot of bombs on British runways that just got filled in after (and Churchill reminding everyone to make it look like they were still cratered up, heh!)

Posted by: Avatar at March 06, 2015 09:56 PM (zJsIy)

13

Henderson field was shelled by the Japanese, including battleships, and they used fragmentation shells.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 06, 2015 10:07 PM (+rSRq)

14

Airfields in that area weren't just cleared ground, because of tropical rain storms. If the field turns to mud, you can't use it. The Americans had big mats made of steel that the CB's put down and welded together, to cover the entire length of the field.

If one of those got damaged, they'd cut it off and replace it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 06, 2015 10:10 PM (+rSRq)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

The wreck of the Japanese battleship Musashi, probably the largest battleship ever to go sea, was located today by Billionaire Paul Allen.

That's the first view tweeted out earlier today, of the great ship's bow Imperial Chrysanthemum (which appears to have either fallen off or been covered by sea gunk) as seen from a ROV piloted from Allen's yacht Octopus.  Amazingly, the Octopus, at over 400 feet, is about half the length of the Musashi. 

At last report, they are still trying to prove conclusively that the ship is the Musashi, but it's very hard to confuse her with anything other than her sister ship Yamato which has been precisely located for years.  We have no real idea about the orientation of the above picture... she could be upside-down on the sea floor for all we know.

We'll find out soon enough... exciting times ahead!!!

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:35 PM | Comments (19) | Add Comment
Post contains 148 words, total size 1 kb.