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hmmm (thelemmy.club)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by to c/hmmm@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 7 months ago (7 children)

Germany during WWII did something kind of like this. They modified some of their cars to run on wood gas and they would tow a wood stove on a trailer that generated the gas, with an attached hose that would feed it into the engine. A sensible plan when your only source of oil is Romania and all of your horses have been requisitioned by the army for its "blitzkrieg".

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

    You don't need a trailer for that. It just attaches to the car. Doesn't weigh so much as to need a vehicle of it's own.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator

    Here's a Dodge V10 with one.

    And here's one from WWII so ppl don't think they were much bigger back then

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (3 children)

    They're an interesting thing to say the least. Finland had a lot of wood gas generators in use during WWII as what limited petrol we had went towards the war effort. Other substitute fuels were used a lot as well, e.g. pine turpentine which we had a lot of as it's a side product of refining wood into pulp.

    It's a relatively efficient system, and burns quite cleanly in the engine (as soot and other contaminants are filtered out by the generator). Though they're quite dangerous, since wood gas is mainly pure carbon monoxide. The amounts they produce are so high that leaks or topping up the generator can cause carbon monoxide poisoning even when outside. In Finnish we actually call the generator häkäpönttö, which in English would be a carbon monoxide can (häkä colloquial Finnish for carbon monoxide, pönttö a colloquial Finnish word meaning a can, container, carton or someone dumb in a usually non-derogatory way – closest equivalent in English would be dummy).

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah that's actually how I googled it. Couldn't for the life of me get "wood stove generator" into my head but "häkäpönttö" is easy.

    And I'd agree that, like many Finnish words, it doesn't properly translate. A pönttö would be closer to a barrel, I'd say, than a can. A can sort of implies a smaller one. Although yes, "garbage can" would be a can as well and nearly on a similar scale as a häkäpönttö.

    It's sometimes crazy hard explaining all the implications of a given word. You know them but listing them would be hard.

    But yeah especially with how much forests and forestry we have, it was a very good solution in WWII. We needed the proper petrol for all those tanks we stole from the Ruskis. We started the war with genuinely a few old Pösö tanks from WWI and stole most of what we had by the end of the war. (That's Peugeot for non-Finns haha)

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Good point with the barrel, truth is probably somewhere between the barrel and a can. After all, there's also pönttö, both vessan- and linnun-, which again are on the smaller side. I kinda love how much nuance and double meanings there are in especially the spoken language.

    True meaning can only be grasped with enough exposure.

    Didn't we also have some Vickers six-tonners at the start? Next to useless by then but probably could penetrate at least a BT-5.

    Edit: now that I think of it, a canister probably fits quite well between the sizes of can and barrel. But to me it would then be a closed container, which a pönttö doesn't necessarily have to be.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Ture, "bird cans" aren't especially large. But they're not like beer cans. You could never really say "annappa se kaljapönttö" unless you were talking about a barrel or a small bucket of beer.

    Didn't we also have some Vickers six-tonners at the start?

    If you say so, alls I remembers is one of the tanks we stole from Russia is still being prominently displayed in the Häme Regiment base in Lahti... checks on his facts Fuck, I'm too old for this shit. The Häme Regiment (HämR) was a regiment that was shut down in 2014. I mean, it was about time. But I'm still curious as to what happened to the tank I was talking about... Well, say what you want about LLM's (and they do sort of threaten a lot of society but) but it was pretty good in searching for info like this. I explained to Gemini where I did my service and asked about the tank.

    ​Where is it now? After the Häme Regiment was disbanded in 2014, most of the heavy historical equipment was moved. That T-34 was relocated to the Parola Armour Museum (Panssarimuseo) to ensure it was preserved and maintained, as the Hennala site transitioned into a residential and civilian area.

    So yeah. Anyway, my point was that I just remember reading the sign saying how many we took from the Soviets. And also our lieutenants and whatnot military fanatics giving us some history on them. Then I couldn't remember the number years after so I googled it and saw we only had some puny WWI tanks before. Honestly, I don't even know what a Vickers six-ton is, but I'm guessing British..? (Because I do know what a Vickers gun is) Checking.

    Yah. Thanks for the info.

    Finland – used 33 tanks since 1938 (including an evaluation tank). They were bought unarmed, without optics and radios. Some were armed with short-barreled 37 mm Puteaux guns and later equipped with 37 mm Bofors anti-tank guns as their main gun with a coaxial turret MG and a "tank SMG" in bow plate. They were used in the Winter War with the USSR. After this war, the Finns rearmed Mark E tanks with captured Soviet long 45 mm guns and DT MGs as used in the T-26. The Finns designated the rebuilt Vickers tanks logically as: T-26Es. They were used in combat from 1941 to 1944 and remained in service as training tanks until 1959.

    Oh yeah.

    So about half and half apparently:

    Before the Winter War (Nov 1939), Finland’s tank forces were minimal, consisting mainly of 32-34 obsolete Renault FT-17 light tanks (acquired 1919) and about 30-32 recently purchased Vickers 6-ton light tanks, which were still being fitted with armament. They had no medium or heavy tanks

    So we had like 60 light tanks. By the end of the war we had captured and destroyed, quite a few.

    Oh yeah and about the languages, yeah, if you speak both Finnish and English fluently, it's awesome what weird shit you can combine because of the different natures of the languages. My friends used to think me a bit pretentious for inserting English phrases or words into Finnish, but that was like 10+ years ago. Nowadays most speak Finglish pretty fluently and it doesn't matter if you add a bit of London while completely speaking Finnish, as long as you're not doing it just to be pretentious, but because the word/phrase suits better (or you've just forgotten the Finnish word, which happens to me quite a bit nowadays.)

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