Yama

Yak-38 was primarily meant for strike & recon with secondary role in air defence, including chasing off or shooting down enemy AWACS aircraft (!). Think of it like equivalent of the original Etendard but with vertical takeoff. Its warload was light but it could carry AS-7 missiles. As RETAC21 said, the thought process which resulted to these ships was long and tortuous (not completely unlike one behind RN 'through deck cruisers'). Basically, Moskvas were designed as pure ASW cruisers: then Yak-36 was presented and some within the Navy began to see it as an opening for aircraft carrier

This is the Turkish interpretation. However there is also another school of thought based on legalistic principle "If something is not explicitly forbidden, it is allowed". Nowhere does Convention explicitly forbid carriers passing through, either. Since it has never gone to court, it is impossible to say which view would prevail. Any way, Moskvas and Kievs were very much just huge cruisers with some aircraft capability tacked on. So from POV of Longon 1936 and Convention, they were really 'capital ships'. With Kuznetsov and Ulyanovsk, they're clearly getting more into 'bona fide aircraft

Well, much of it is. Lockheed Martin is a major 'consultant' in the design.

It's a bit more complicated than that. The Convention permits Black Sea powers to transit capital ships and light warships through the Straits, but makes no mention of aircraft carriers, which are explicitly defined as 'not capital ships'. Non-Black Sea powers are limited by strict tonnage limits which for practical purposes excludes sending aircraft carriers through (in theory however a small carrier could be sent in accordance of the Convention). None of the Black Sea powers had any kind of aircraft carriers at the time of Convention, nor were planning to build them, so this was probabl

Erdogan is wrong, the Convention specifically says that 'the Straits' includes Dardanelles and Sea of Marmara.

I very much doubt Alamein was impregnable, neither British nor the Axis thought so at the time though in retrospect we now know that Rommel had very remote chance of breaking through. But in this timeline, much will change. Even though I agree that the Germans could not have just deployed an overwhelming force in Africa and rolled through to easy autowin, we are still looking at the scenario where Axis do a little bit better in every turn and in the end cumulative effect probably is that campaign will look quite different and it is hard to see how British could win, or even delay defeat until

Well, unlucky people only get torpedoed once.

I knew it!

MiG-19 was apparently quite a pain to maintain. Hydraulics were unreliable and engine hard to operate. Often it would not even start. 'Unofficial' startup method was apparently devised for RD-9 engine: fuel pumps were started first and kept on until enough of fuel had pooled up inside the engine. Then the starter engine was fired up to provide airflow, while a mechanic would throw a burning rag inside the exhaust and quicky run away. 'Usually this would start the engine, except for those cases when it didn't'. Still, MiG-19 surely had certain hot rod quality in it: it's closest competitor

Is it us? But no, seriously, without again going to tiresome, repetive arguments about the subject of women in military, I think it amusing to say that 'Chinese military is becoming more masculine' when they have always had women in combat duties. I don't know if they have women in infantry units, but they do have female fighter and chopper pilots, tank drivers etc.

Shockingly, Yemeni Shia don't want to be ruled by a stable, friendly, head-chopping and oppressive Sunni regime. What bastards. Without Iran and Hezbollah 'meddling' with Syrian civil war, Syria would now be under religious Wahhabist dictatorship, with massive suppression and genocide of non-Sunni. But I am sure they would be friendly with Israeli.

Both Iraq and Syria conflicts began as Sunni insurgencies. Yemen civil war was result of long-term ethnic and political rift and to portrait it as some Iranian machination is complete fantasy. Humanitarian disaster in Yemen is mostly result of military intervention by Sunni countries. What "military occupation of Yemen"? They LIVE there. Sunni terrorist cells have not killed 'hundreds at best', they have killed tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people. I agree that Israel has every right to feel threatened about Iran supported terrorist organizations in Lebanon and Syria. However

I don't agree with that all. I think such argument is completely ludicrous in face of the facts. Also, there are only few Shia majority countries, of which Iraq is the only one which might be seen as potential risk of falling into Iran camp. Even there, ethnic disparity between Iran and Iraq would likely prevent any large scale alliance. In addition, whole Shia mindset is much more insular than apocalyptic, millenaristic Wahhabist visions.

I struggle to remember any terrorist attacks in Europe or US undertaken by Iran-supported Shias. Almost all Islamist terrorism is a product by sects originating from Saudi-funded religious schools. I don't see much potential targets where they could import their revolution either. It's not like there are tons of Shia dominated countries about to 'tip over'.

I understand Germans never captured Mk I or II in workable state (Mk III did not see combat). They weren't that common and usually British were advancing and ended up masters of the terrain in the end, and even though Germans occassionally got to study one as result of counterattacks etc, recovering huge immobile lumps of metal was not exactly simple thing in circumstances of WW1. In addition, some examples were badly jumbled up by explosions and Germans were also confused by wildly disparate eyewitness accounts and were long unsure if there were just one tank type or several. I read an a