Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Operation Chastise animation

Operation Chastise animation

Voting period is over. Please don't add any new votes. Voting period ends on 22 Dec 2011 at 23:58:03 (UTC)

**Original** – Operation Chastise was the dam-busting mission to flood Germany's Ruhr valley industrial center. Using two spotlights to adjust altitude, the modified Lancaster dropped a backspun drum which skipped over torpedo nets protecting the dams.

Reason: Its unusual to find a gif this big in an article, but despite the size of the gif it does do a good job of illustrating the attack against Germany's dams carried out on 16–17 May 1943 by Royal Air Force No. 617 Squadron using a specially developed "bouncing bomb" invented and developed by Barnes Wallis. The Möhne and Edersee Dams were breached, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley and of villages in the Eder valley, while the Sorpe dam sustained only minor damage.
Articles in which this image appears: Operation Chastise
FP category for this image: Wikipedia:Featured pictures/History/World War II
Creator: Commons User:Anynobody

Support as nominator --TomStar81 (Talk) 23:58, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Support I like the EV with this, maybe if the animation could be a little smoother and the barrels a little more visible Hariya1234 (talk) 09:04, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Weak Oppose. First of all, I love the idea of this, as it is a needed illustration. But how it's done just seems excessive:
- What we don't need: Stars in the sky. The ghost image of the plane as it flies by. Explosions and flak. Gun fire. Detailed dam explosions.
- What we may not need: Are those gun placements actually real, or just there for show? Unless they were placed there based on actual weapon placement, they shouldn't be there.
- What we do need: A smoother animation. And a shorter one - a good third of the time is just the plane approaching doing nothing.
- What I would like to see - The plane come in for a few frames (no more than 10% of the total) to show it and the spotlights, drop the bomb which smoothly hops (Not talking 60 fps here but motion instead of one frame per second would be nice), then falls to the bottom and explodes. We don't need the AA fire, we don't really need the dam breaking, as the main purpose of this is to show what was so fancy about them dropping the bomb. --Golbez (talk) 17:14, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  - Agreed. Actually this animation illustrates the article much better. O.J. (talk) 23:36, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    - Yes it does, though that one is not featured quality either. It'd be nice to get a single featured animation out of all of this. (Also, to clarify or reword an above comment: I don't expect the torpedo nets to be historically accurate, as we're mainly demonstrating the mechanism by which the bomb hit the dam. However, since the gun emplacements seemed purely extraneous to the subject, that's why I only wanted them there if they were historically accurate. Otherwise they're just graphical fluff, which isn't necessary.) --Golbez (talk) 14:27, 15 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
      - Yeah, its not exactly the world's greatest animation; its choppy, and the bomb's trajectory is a little funny in the illustration. That said, you never know until you try, right, so that's why its here. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:45, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not Promoted --Makeemlighter (talk) 01:19, 23 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]