Morgane

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific Historical Inspirations, Silent Service

Pacific’s Shipgirl Comment on Pin-up Girls: A Commentary

by Morgane 2017年8月26日

Hello everyone. It’s me again. I’m having tons of fun with the title!

I know Morgane’s already said that the updates aren’t daily but I still feel bad about missing them. Sadly, sometimes technology gets in the way.

Anyways, today’s topic is sort of a mail call question, but it was more of an extended conversation between friends that I thought I’d organize. In short, the conversation got onto the topic of fanservice – specifically, that of pin-up girls.

There’s a few things I’d like to talk about. Since, well, I’m going to guess that a lot of our readers love looking at pretty girls in various states of dress (or undress). That’s fine! But, since you’re here and all, I’d really like you to understand the purpose of the pin-up, how it came about, and what role it played specifically during the Pacific war.

Believe it or not, the pin-up was implicitly encouraged by the military. The very popular pseudo-official military magazine, Yank, had pin-up girls for every issue. The overarching idea?

Um. Uh… If you have pictures of a pretty girl to look at, maybe you won’t go look for prostitutes and go cause trouble.

I’m serious.

Here’s why. During WW1, we found that military men will be military men. They will get drunk. They will chase after and sleep with girls or prostitutes. They will get into fights. Of these, STDs were of a particular concern. Our military forces suffered significantly from it, and the Army was determined to not to have it repeat again.

But how? One way, of course, was through education. The military generally maintained the viewpoint that sex was something that should be reserved only for your best girl at home – that is to say, within marriage. See below for a quote coming straight out of an army publication.

If you wait until you marry, you’re safe and keep your self-respect. You also play fair with the “girl back home” whom you expect to play fair with you. There’s no substitute for morals!

Sounds like something I’d agree with, heh. But, that’s not all. The military also tried to foster a healthy culture by providing significant resources towards education, particularly that of venereal diseases.

They also created posters like these.

Ah. See? Now that’s where we’re getting into the subject matter. As I said above, pin-up girls were created to be representative of something more than just a nice pair of legs for the guys to look at. You’ll notice that some of the most popular pin-up girls aren’t necessarily the prettiest. Rather, they look kind of average. They were neither particularly tan nor particularly pale, neither particularly plain or particularly glamorous, neither particularly bosomy or flat, neither svelte nor supple…

You get the idea. Pretty average. Something like the girl next door. Something like girls you might know.

Indeed! Now you get the idea. The appeal of the pin-up girl is far more than sexual. It appeals to something much more fundamental to each individual soldier on the battlefield. In a nutshell, they were American ideals, personified. They’re icons in which the boys out in the frontline would fight to defend. Something literally meant to be “pinned up” inside a vehicle or a plane or a ship to look up to.

Don’t believe me? There’s some pretty good statistics out there showing that while sexually suggestive or even explicit pin-ups were very popular with the men, the most popular pin-up photos like Betty Garble were pretty ordinary.

Yeah. It’s that one. Pretty simple, isn’t it? But it’s the simplicity that appealed to the soldiers out front. In fact, Garble herself told the wives and girlfriends at home: want to cheer your man up? Then send pictures of yourself as a pin-up girl! Take those pictures in heels and bathing suits and looking coy! The guys’ll love it!

And they totally did. Remember, the boys were boys – many of the soldiers in WW2 signed up at 17, 18, 19. There’s a sort of homeliness to the overall image of the GI that makes it easy to see why they were the direct counterpart to the “plain” pin-up girls. They were supposed to be the average decent innocent farm-boy next-door, coming out here to fight to defend the American way of life. Doesn’t mean they don’t think about girls! If you’re at that age, heck, I’d say girls are probably on your mind a whole lot of the time!

So, to that end, the pin-up was an important contributor to morale. It’s not really something you can put a statistics to it, but from the many, many, many instances it showed up? I’d say it’s definitely an important part. It was just as important – in its own way – as the USO ladies, the broadcasts from base, the letters from home, and the care packages delivered.

Pretty neat, huh?

Now, I’m going to turn to us shipgirls in Pacific. I want to talk a little bit about the design process in which Morgane and K9 and everyone else went about designing Silent Service’s subgirls.

Heck, actually, you know, it sort of goes for Pacific’s shipgirls as a whole. I can’t speak much for the non-Americans in Pacific, but you’ll notice that outside of a few oddities, by and large the American shipgirls have very plain looking appearances. As a whole the hairstyles are simplistic. Virtually nobody wears make-up. Colorful exotic hair colors are the exception and not the norm. You won’t find any sort of tattoos, nose-rings, and others of the sort either.

Well, plain, for an anime-styled character, anyways.

Now, after seeing the above, do you see why? Do you see what might have inspired us to follow our particular design paradigm?

Hey, I’m not saying that our girls can’t be sexy or alluring or hot. We’ve got plenty of that, too! After all, you can’t be the best if you don’t look the best, and against the Abyssals we’re going to need to be the best.

But at the end of the day? Each one of us shipgirls have a different idea about how much skin we want to show. That’s more or less inherent in the “default” costumes in which we appear in, and we are almost without exception comfortable with how much or how little skin we want to show.

Our appearances are designed to be attractive. The artists like drawing cute girls and sexy girls and pretty girls. We are, after all, meant to represent a particular vision and a particular set of ideals. Each one of us does that in our own way.

Me? My position? Uh…

W-what’s that got to do with anything? I mean, I already told you how I felt about this kind of stuff! It’s in the box quote up there?

…W-w-w-wait wait wait. No. That’s not – That’s not what I mean! I’m not some cat lady or man-hater either. I just have my own ideas about what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Okay?

…

I’M TOO BUSY FOR DATING, OKAY?

…

Alright alright alright. I’m done. Sorry! I knew it was a bad idea to try to comment on this. Here’s a pin-up shot I did. Now go out there and be a good family man!

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific Silent Service

Silent Service: Early US Submarine Designs (6) – the Dolphin

by Morgane 2017年8月24日

WHAT. WERE YOU EXPECTING TAUTOG TO COVER MY NAMESAKE? HAHAHAHAHAHA! DREAM ON! IF THERE’S ONE SUB CORNER I SHOULD TAKE, IT’LL BE THIS ONE!

Sarge! That’s V-7. Your namesake was V-7. V5 and V6 are Narwhal and Nautilus…

I-IS THAT SO?

*Ahem* Afraid so.

Well, cripes. SO DO I DO THIS SUB CORNER OR NOT?

Since you’re here and all, why not…

Alright! So. Listen up. Where we last left off, we were just talking about the Argonaut’s teething troubles. Big submarines are tough to make! They’re also expensive and really, really, really unwieldy.

Without getting too much into the Narwhal and Nautilus, I’m just gonna say, those boats weren’t very good. As shipgirls they’re excellent! As actual submarines? Well, let’s just say the downsides turned out to be HUGE blessings in disguise. But! But but but! For now? They weren’t popular.

The year is now 1928. Mickey Mouse just appeared on the big screen, Charles Lindbergh got his Medal of Honor, and the Japs just started up chaos up in Manchuria. In Congress? We’re busy yelling at each other.

See, one of the previous sub corners, Tautog’s talked about the V-program, right? Well, it’s now eight years later! Time to deliver results. What actually happened was that the General Board wanted to stick to the plan, and the submariners said no. If the Board would have had its way, we would have built two more Argonauts and a sub cruiser, giving us three big minelayers, three cruiser submarines, and three faster fleet submarines.

The submariners said, well, that’s well and good, but these boats take forever to build! The big submarines weren’t easy to operate either. Why don’t we make something smaller? Something that we can make faster and something that’ll be easy to make?

That something was called the U-135. Now, depending on who you read and how much they slobber over GERMAN SCIENCE, you’re gonna get people arguing different things. The general gist of a popular argument is that the US really liked what they saw in the U-135. So, this new design should be small. About 1250 tons, going 16 knots on the surface and 8 submerged. It’ll be armed modestly with a single deck gun and six torpedo tubes (for twelve torpedoes total). The guy pushing for it even hunted down old U-boat commanders trying to sell the idea that we need to be more like the Germans.

Yeah, yeah. Back in the 20s some people, particularly the submariners, had this idea that the general quality of US machinery was inferior to that of Europe. They’re always pushing for buying of _______ (like engines and parts) from the (INSERT EUROPEAN POWER HERE).

We said no. We’re gonna buy American and make things American. That basically put an end to that conversation, and we put the pencil-pushers to work. They ended up spending a good three or four months figuring out the design.

Now, here’s the thing. The submariners had the right idea. Smaller, more agile submarines indeed worked out pretty good in the Pacific War, but that’s only because we managed to patch up all the troubles with something like the U-135. For starters, small subs means less space. If we’re gonna make a powerful engine, where the hell’s that supposed to fit?

Let’s think about actual living conditions, too. The U-135 had no space for stores. You think you gonna like Eintopf every meal? We’re going to need to add things like coolers and storage to match. Here, the “coolers” aren’t just for food. Rather, it’s to make sure that your oil can work in the relatively hot waters of the Pacific. Given the increasing emphasis on damage control and manpower, we’re going to have to have more berthing space. The submarine has to have room within itself in case of attack. It’s going to need more of everything, torpedoes included.

After about six months of back and forth, we hammered out something fairly okay. Here’s what it looked like. These are a couple of sketches I dug out. The bottom is a revision of the top.

Right off the bat, one big difference. The conning tower is tiny. It’s also arranged pretty differently. The engines are in a separate room, and the direct-drive diesel (1750 BHP) are in the big aft space reserved for machinery (it’s the biggest rectangle on the sketch). The crew would be placed immediately abaft the forward torpedo room, the officers would be abaft the control room, and it’d go about as fast as the other big cruisers.

To make this work, they had to remove a lot of gun ammo. This one had only 100 rounds for its smaller gun, and the pressure hull plating was much weaker to compensate for its size. Also, due to its size, it could only stay out for 75 days rather than 90. Still fairly impressive, but all of these would become issues when this finally became V-7, or the Dolphin.

Yes. This one looked great on paper. It was basically the sort of “mass-produced” submarine that the submariners had wanted. It was about 1500 tons, can go out for 12,000 nm (which, if you recall! That’s what Tautog said would be good for a long patrol in the Pacific), carried a big load of torpedoes (18 in total, in six tubes), and went fairly okay at about 14 knots.

Well, the thing they ended up building could only do 10 knots for 11,000 nm, but that’s alright. The experience was what mattered. This particular prototype had incorporated a lot of the concepts found in the larger cruisers such as the deck shape and the composite drive propulsion system. It also freaked the British out, since we’d just proven it to them that the Dolphin could be a functional and powerful submarine design with a comparatively small tonnage use. They did, after all, try to propose submarines be no bigger than 1800 tons, after all!

Anyways. That’s how the Dolphin came to be. How did it do?

Bad.

The design had the right ideas, but the actual performance of the ship was pretty terrible. You-know-who commented that it was a deathtrap of a boat. He’s not wrong. Despite having been built in 1932, its machinery was really bad. Oil leaks and all kinds of leaks everywhere. Parts were unreliable. Stuff just didn’t work. It was quickly tossed over to training, as the Dolphin only actually saw three war patrols during her lifetime in the Pacific War.

Still. In case you haven’t been paying attention, much like the Argonaut or even the ones that showed up earlier, we learned a lot from it. The great submarine designs like the Gato or the Balao or the Tench? All that had all of these curious ones to thank for. In this case, the Dolphin would be the last submarine before the London Naval Treaty in 1930, and it’ll always have a spot in U.S. submarine history as the first working example of the “smaller” submarines that we’d eventually head towards.

前线来信·Mail call

Clean-up progress: day 13

by Morgane 2017年8月23日

Long day at work, so update came late. Honestly at this rate I think the site’s reorganization should be done in about another week or so.

If you look around the site there’s a few new splash pages that’s been put up. We’ve consolidated information. Tags are actually somewhat useful now. Categories are now proper as well. What I’ve learned is that I can’t update worth a damn – as in, I rarely follow my own guidelines. xD

Zero’s made a facebook page (I guess we’re going to automate there too!) – though I’m curious to see if any of the East Asians’ll be able to see it. Censorship, you know. 🙂

The website now actually loads smoother, though we’re probably going to have to look for a new image host. I still use IMGUR out of habit, but the Chinese want to use Sina since, well, censorship.

Zero’s back in China and our books are getting back to the printers now that China’s stopped cracking down on environmental violations.

I even got a translator helping out with all of our content. So… Yay!

Almost done.

Can’t wait to power the machine on.

前线来信·Mail call

I saw the eclipse today! Here are some pictures!

by Morgane 2017年8月22日

Hi! Prisse here. As Pacific’s semi-official mascot, you know there’s a ton of little copies of me running around all over the world.

Today, I got to see the total eclipse! Thanks to our friends from Missouri!

Unfortunately, we’re bad at taking pictures…

This is what it looked like a few minutes before totality. Apparently you could either get it through the uh, filter-glasses thingie or you can take a picture normally. In which then it kind of looked like this.

As you can see the sun is really bright even if partially eclipsed!

However! Totality itself is amazing. The entire world suddenly turned dark, as if it’s completely night. When you look up, you see this beautiful silvery ring around the sun.

If you just take a picture at the sun, though, this is what you see. But you have to look around. At the ground, at the surroundings – see the streetlights even came on!