
Hitler’s Flak Towers Were Anti-Aircraft Castles - vinnyglennon
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/hitlers-flak-towers-were-anti-aircraft-castles-4da8c423b725
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rdl
And I lived on/ran a datacenter from one of Churchill's anti-aircraft castles.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand)

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yareally
Guessing you have some interesting stories about Sealand. I know it's asking a
lot and I understand if you don't have the free time, but did you have any you
don't mind sharing with us?

~~~
rdl
1) Having a dog on a platform like that (basically a 5000 square foot trailer
park with no "park") is pretty crappy for both the dog and the humans
unfortunate enough to be stuck with it (not the owners of the dog).

2) 30 year old canned meat products are in fact still nominally edible.

3) Spending all day on the Internet from a random building in the middle of
nowhere is actually not THAT different from my daily life today; less traffic,
higher latency Internet.

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rb2k_
I can't seem to find it anywhere, so I thought I'd add this here for the non-
German speakers:

Flak stands for "Flugabwehrkanone" or "Fliegerabwehrkanone" which consists of
the 3 words:

\- Flug / Flieger (Flight / Airplane)

\- Abwehr (Defense)

\- Kanone (Cannon)

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jrbancel
Bordeaux faced a similar problem with a submarine base. It is much bigger
though: 450,000 sq ft. It is now a cultural center. According to my dad, who
was involved in the conversion, working with 22 feet thick walls was very
challenging.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETASOM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETASOM)

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batou
There's a bunker in the UK [1] that I went to. Before they could allow
visitors they had to add a fire escape. Apparently it took a couple of days to
cut a hole in the wall for this due to how strong it is and that was state of
the art diamond cutting equipment.

Good day out though.

[1] [http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/](http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/)

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Shivetya
PBS has an old special you can find on Netflix entitled Nazi Mega Weapons.
Included in there is a story on Fortress Berlin which covers towers like this.
The other more impressive construction project would be the submarine bases
along the coast. Even the hidden manufacturing plants for ME-262 are
impressive, not only for the scale but ingenuity in construction

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vermontdevil
Wikipedia has a great section on this including lots of photos:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower)

~~~
icc97
Very interesting, one of the images [1] gives some good blue prints for the
geek's version of a sand castle.

[1]:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Fl...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Flakturm-
Bauarten.png/300px-Flakturm-Bauarten.png)

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jand
Waste of space on the internet.

The authors constructs questions out of thin air.

"The question is—what the Hell are you supposed to do with them? They’re
certainly not going anywhere."

What could be done with them... well, exactly what they are currently doing?
Music [1], living space [2], social space & clubs [3]/[4], office spaces...

The author cites the concept of the "pyramid garden" on top of the Hamburg
Bunker which was not rejected because the people were unwilling to change
something - it was simply rejected because a corporation tried to get its
hands on the real estate under the cover of a urban gardening project [5].

But gladly the author clarifies that the bunkers are hard to crack - i was
clearly suprised that war tech designed to withstand multi-ton bombs is tough.

[1] [http://www.musikbunker-hamburg.de/](http://www.musikbunker-hamburg.de/)
[2] [http://bunker-hamburg.de/](http://bunker-hamburg.de/) [3]
[http://www.uebelundgefaehrlich.com/](http://www.uebelundgefaehrlich.com/) [4]
[http://www.terracehill.de/](http://www.terracehill.de/) [5]
[http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/dachgarten-in-st-
pauli-d...](http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/dachgarten-in-st-pauli-da-
koennte-ja-jeder-gaertnern-1.2217699)

~~~
vacri
> _Destroying them is pretty much impossible owing to their proximity to urban
> spaces—and the sheer amount of explosives required._

This bit also annoyed me. It's not the amount of explosives required, it's
that it's too expensive. Destroying large lumps of concrete can be done with
technology we've had since the start of written history - a quarry isn't all
that different. It's just that it's really labour-intensive, and hence,
expensive.

It's interesting also that the pictured 'renovation' idea does very little to
mask the shape of the tower. If you want to stop it looking like a lumpen
fascist monument, add some new lines to it, make it look visibly different,
rather than overgrown.

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iaw
I find it interesting that artifacts like these towers can see so many
lifetimes and incarnations. It's almost as if one incarnation stands until
opposition to change is overwhelmed and a new incarnation can be created.

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stigi
I wonder what happened to the canon rounds that missed their target (that must
have been most of them). There must be an entire region that must have gotten
used to raining 128-millimeter bullets.

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douche
Anti-aircraft shells were usually fused to explode at a given altitude. The
proximity fuse was developed by the allies during the war, and was regarded as
a top-secret piece of technology.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Indeed, the VT fuze. It worked by using a tiny radio transmitter and receiver
to detect proximity to the target. This was hugely effective both for anti-
aircraft use and when attacking ground targets. WWII AA techniques had a hard
time hitting aircraft. If you use bullets you can spray a lot of them near the
aircraft but they have fairly limited range, and you use up a ton of ammo.
With something like an artillery shell you can get the range to hit a distant
aircraft but a solid shell would be useless as it would likely miss the
aircraft, so you need to explode into a bunch of fragments. But even if you
have good aim if the shell explodes only a little bit too early or too late
then you won't hit anything, since the fragments have a short range. With the
VT fuze you guarantee that the shell will explode near the aircraft if it's
headed in the right direction. With ground targets there's the opposite
problem. You can hit very close to a target, but if the shell explodes on the
ground then most of the blast will be directed upward, and the only way you'd
be able to hit the target is if it was sitting out in the open. If it's dug
into even a shallow fox hole or depression then you'd have to get a direct
hit. But if you can ensure the shell explodes at a specific height over the
target then the fragmentation can fly downward, which can hit targets in a
bigger radius than just near a surface blast.

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nether
war is boring

