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Xiahou Dun posted:Is that the "same" population, or were they effectively doing atrocities to one population to scare the other. Wouldn't that be more analogous to how the Blitz affected idk Crete rather than the UK? The dynamics are probably different when every city is a fortification. The defenders are inside the walls and they know they will be butchered if the walls are preached, unless they play nicely with the attackers. What could the people of Bucha have done differently? The soldiers that gave Russians a hard time had probably retreated out of the region a while ago already. Mariupol was maybe more similar to traditional siege, but there too the larger city had already been conquered during the siege of the metal works. And everyone had forgotten how a proper siege works. The traditional way would probably have been to start executing the citizens of Mariupol in front of the defenders.
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Nov 26, 2023 08:09
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Armacham posted:I'll stick to historically accurate films like the Patriot, thank you very much https://nitter.net/KKriegeBlog/status/1728292482121941213#m
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Nov 26, 2023 08:25
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gohuskies posted:An ahistorical Napoleon film is fine - Gladiator is certainly ahistorical, and I love it - but if Scott is going to go around giving interviews about how If having too high of an opinion about yourself and having tantrums when people don't praise you is thinking like Napoleon then uh, yeah sure Ridley
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Nov 26, 2023 13:00
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Armacham posted:I'll stick to historically accurate films like the Patriot, thank you very much Can we make this somehow the new thread title?
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Nov 26, 2023 14:35
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Ah modern cinematography, taking the famously vibrant colors of Napoleonic uniforms and washing them out and dimming them down until everyone's nearly all in black in a grey haze before they even get shooting and covered in clouds of gunpowder.
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Nov 26, 2023 15:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:Ah modern cinematography, taking the famously vibrant colors of Napoleonic uniforms and washing them out and dimming them down until everyone's nearly all in black in a grey haze before they even get shooting and covered in clouds of gunpowder. haven't seen the film, but usually in films the pretty 18th and 19th c uniforms are shown to be way more pristine than they would have been irl after campaigning around for a few months
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Nov 26, 2023 15:24
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Fangz posted:If two groups of pikemen are engaging with each other, they really, really don't want to run at each other. How would two pike squares engage? (Carefully! Do ho ho!) I sort of know how they're deployed and what they're there to do (protect the people with the guns), and I've seen Holben's drawing of the end result, but I have no idea how they went from one to the other.  TooMuchAbstraction posted:My understanding is that a charge isn't generally actually running. It's a brisk walk. You want to stay in formation, and you don't want everyone to be tired by the time they make contact. Interesting! Could you point me at a source?
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Nov 26, 2023 17:34
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Been relistening to the Revolutions podcast, and I'm looking to round out my knowledge on some of the subjects. Can I get some recommendations for books on the reunification of Italy and general Mexican history?
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Nov 26, 2023 17:53
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Siivola posted:Interesting! Could you point me at a source? Unfortunately no, this is one of those things that I dimly remember reading at some point somewhere. It is, I suppose, possible that I made it up, though I suspect it's more likely that I read it here or on the ACOUP blog. To expand on those dim memories, the basic problem you have with charging into melee is that that takes you closer to the enemy, and they want to kill you. Your average soldier, quite reasonably, wants to avoid that. In an "everyone runs at the enemy" charge, there'll be plenty of chaos and opportunities for individual soldiers to run away, go slowly (and let braver soldiers go first), or trip (intentionally or otherwise). You might try to hype everyone up with some pre-charge speeches or chants, but that's not terribly reliable. A secondary issue is that when your force runs, it'll arrive at the enemy irregularly, as individual soldiers reach the enemy formation. That means that one soldier may be fighting against 2 or 3 at a time. You're basically offering yourself up for defeat in detail. A more orderly charge, where everyone stays in formation, means that much more of your force will reach the enemy, and when they do, they'll be able to support each other in the actual fighting.
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Nov 26, 2023 18:05
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Nessus posted:Yeah that's why I put it as "war gasses" - stuff like Agent Orange, even if it wasn't directly intended to kill the VC, is certainly a chemical weapon. In that sense, gunpowder is a chemical weapon. In the sense of the CWC, a chemical weapon is "[a]ny chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals." Indirect stuff like "lets you see the enemy better so you can shoot him" doesn't count.
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Nov 26, 2023 18:30
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Siivola posted:How would two pike squares engage? (Carefully! Do ho ho!) I sort of know how they're deployed and what they're there to do (protect the people with the guns), and I've seen Holben's drawing of the end result, but I have no idea how they went from one to the other. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-AHk19aU24
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Nov 26, 2023 18:40
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Phanatic posted:In that sense, gunpowder is a chemical weapon. In the sense of the CWC, a chemical weapon is "[a]ny chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals." Indirect stuff like "lets you see the enemy better so you can shoot him" doesn't count. Yeah reading about it, this was the argument US lawyers used in UN when there were talks about banning the use of those chemical agents in Vietnam using Geneva Protocol. Also came as a surprise to me that American herbicide warfare was almost as much about destroying food production in Vietnamese countryside as it was about defoliating the jungle. American military just made conscious effort to only talk about the removal of concealment aspect of it for obvious reasons, and looks like they were pretty successful in controlling the discourse because even today you don't hear as much about it. Really puts the whole campaign in even more disgusting light.
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Nov 26, 2023 19:03
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Vietnam was a disgusting, immoral war. Probably illegal, though I'm not sure that matters -- Iraq 2 was illegal, and we're still there. We haven't really been in a righteous one for a while. The only good thing that war did was destroy the conscript army, which was in practical revolt by the end of it.
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Nov 26, 2023 19:16
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Phanatic posted:In that sense, gunpowder is a chemical weapon. In the sense of the CWC, a chemical weapon is "[a]ny chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals." Indirect stuff like "lets you see the enemy better so you can shoot him" doesn't count. Agent Orange wasn't intended as a tactical chemical weapon to kill enemy soldiers the same way that deployed chemical weapons are usually supposed to, but it did poison people long-term, people who had the stuff dumped on them. Nothing really indirect about it, even if wasn't the specific intended effect. Similar chemicals were also used locally in the US as herbicides, but they weren't dumped en masse because even if people didn't fully know the dangers, there are obvious reasons to not want to ingest or be covered in poison. If you do the courtesy of assuming no malice to civilians, it's at best massively irresponsible to just dump the stuff everywhere. I believe non-lethal tear gas is also banned as a chemical weapon even if it's popular as a domestic tool for crowd control.
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Nov 26, 2023 19:29
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People critiquing like, the uniforms or weaponry in Napoleon are the exact sort of people who also tend to be completely wrong-headed when it comes to the fundamental narratives of the Napoleonic Wars and French Revolution anyway. It's all just History Channel/Barnes and Noble level white dad analysis like "the Jacobins just went too far!!! What's a 'White Terror'??", the type of people who read the memoirs of people like Cicero about the "Mob" or take the memoirs of Nazi generals on the Eastern front at (essentially) face value. All bleeding back to the general clichéd revisionist idea of "revolutions" as risky hot-headed endeavors that devour their own, whose historical violence is analyzed in a far different way than the status quo violence they're seeking to abolish. That's the kind of poo poo that bothers me most and is most widespread, the sort of reactionary status quo Simon Schama perception of the French Revolution (which Mark Twain spoke against so eloquently and famously), not like, whether a rifle with a scope is accurate.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:I believe non-lethal tear gas is also banned as a chemical weapon even if it's popular as a domestic tool for crowd control. Only sort of. It's true that you are not allowed to use it as a weapon in war, such as in order to drive troops from their trenches so that you can shoot them. But you're still allowed to use it for things like riot control in POW camps.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:22
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Punkin Spunkin posted:People critiquing like, the uniforms or weaponry in Napoleon are the exact sort of people who also tend to be completely wrong-headed when it comes to the fundamental narratives of the Napoleonic Wars and French Revolution anyway. It's all just History Channel/Barnes and Noble level white dad analysis like "the Jacobins just went too far!!! What's a 'White Terror'??", the type of people who read the memoirs of people like Cicero about the "Mob" or take the memoirs of Nazi generals on the Eastern front at (essentially) face value. All bleeding back to the general clichéd revisionist idea of "revolutions" as risky hot-headed endeavors that devour their own, whose historical violence is analyzed in a far different way than the status quo violence they're seeking to abolish. Enh. I agree with some of this point. At least the thrust. There are a bunch of people who only like surface-level dad milhist who are going to be insufferable (as they always are). But also, at a very fundamental level, no you’re wrong. It’s entirely possible to think both kinds of inaccuracies are bad and have a realistic appreciation for what kinds of misrepresentations are most societally harmful. This thread is in fact full of them. And most of them want to crack some jokes and move on. It’s less that I disagree with you and more that I can see this turning into a giant debate about grognard taxonomy and I’d rather jump in quick to end it before it can begin.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:22
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Phanatic posted:Only sort of. It's true that you are not allowed to use it as a weapon in war, such as in order to drive troops from their trenches so that you can shoot them. But you're still allowed to use it for things like riot control in POW camps. Or for gassing your own conscripts as part of  training.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:27
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SeanBeansShako posted:Can we make this somehow the new thread title? It didn't quite fit so I had to trim it. Saukkis posted:The dynamics are probably different when every city is a fortification. The defenders are inside the walls and they know they will be butchered if the walls are preached, unless they play nicely with the attackers. Please stick to history in the Military History thread. There are ever so many other threads for current events.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:37
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gohuskies posted:An ahistorical Napoleon film is fine - Gladiator is certainly ahistorical, and I love it - but if Scott is going to go around giving interviews about how Maybe he was thinking like Napoleon. You can't prove Napoleon didn't imagine himself doing sick horse charges and kicking enemies in half using kung-fu all the while dodging enemy sniper shots like Neo
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Nov 26, 2023 21:41
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Are people even critiquing the uniforms or equipment in Napoleon? The costuming is like the one thing they got fairly right.
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Nov 26, 2023 21:45
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What's the origin/etymology of "Life" units, like the Life Guards or Leib-Husaren? Seems to spring up in multiple nations in the 18th century
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Nov 26, 2023 21:47
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Grumio posted:What's the origin/etymology of "Life" units, like the Life Guards or Leib-Husaren? Seems to spring up in multiple nations in the 18th century they guard the ruler's life
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Nov 26, 2023 21:49
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Fangz posted:Are people even critiquing the uniforms or equipment in Napoleon? The costuming is like the one thing they got fairly right. that guy is doing the goon thing where he imagines people he doesn't like and then he gets mad at them
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Nov 26, 2023 21:51
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Fangz posted:Are people even critiquing the uniforms or equipment in Napoleon? The costuming is like the one thing they got fairly right. It also goes for the Napoleon=kinda Hitler, which...that's a hell of a move. Xiahou Dun posted:It’s less that I disagree with you and more that I can see this turning into a giant debate about grognard taxonomy and I’d rather jump in quick to end it before it can begin. Punkin Spunkin fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Nov 26, 2023 |
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Nov 26, 2023 21:59
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Punkin Spunkin posted:People critiquing like, the uniforms or weaponry in Napoleon are the exact sort of people who also tend to be completely wrong-headed when it comes to the fundamental narratives of the Napoleonic Wars and French Revolution anyway. It's all just History Channel/Barnes and Noble level white dad analysis like "the Jacobins just went too far!!! What's a 'White Terror'??", the type of people who read the memoirs of people like Cicero about the "Mob" or take the memoirs of Nazi generals on the Eastern front at (essentially) face value. All bleeding back to the general clichéd revisionist idea of "revolutions" as risky hot-headed endeavors that devour their own, whose historical violence is analyzed in a far different way than the status quo violence they're seeking to abolish. Punkin Spunkin posted:Inasmuch as people are critiquing historical accuracy, yes it's generally stuff like that or just the strict reality or sequences of events, my point is that there's a core actually problematic ahistorical way the entire narrative is told that is rarely addressed. It wasn't necessarily purely about this thread's content, and it's certainly not imagined. Oh gently caress off, you can be disappointed with technical accuracy and accuracy to the historical narrative at the same time. Much of the critique that's been posted and discussed in this thread has come from historians of the time period, and if you're upset about them, post about that instead of making up people to be mad about.
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Nov 26, 2023 22:13
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Thought about buying the 16 Micronaut models necessary to recreate Task Group 58.5 in Feb. 1945, but then I did the math. To accurately depict the cruising formation of that task group at proper scale would require a 12.5’ diameter space. Not the minor decor project I first considered. The only sufficiently clear space I have is my ceilings, but none of my rooms are even big enough. Garden project?
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Nov 27, 2023 02:08
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I was watching a video about how important it was to develop a clock that would accurately keep time while on a ship without losing seconds/minutes for the purposes of determining longitude and it got me thinking: would a contemporary watch be good enough? Could I use my Casio F-91W to do this? If not, are there still clocks/watches made today for this purpose? Are they still mechanical?
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Nov 27, 2023 02:51
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Fangz posted:Also I understand the portrayal of Josephine and Napoleon's relationship in the movie is terrible anyway He apparently doesn't tell her to not wash ONCE
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Nov 27, 2023 02:55
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Do historical battlefield parks struggle with things like erosion and plant growth altering the landscape? Are there different approaches to how preservation should handle these changes?
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Nov 27, 2023 03:26
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was watching a video about how important it was to develop a clock that would accurately keep time while on a ship without losing seconds/minutes for the purposes of determining longitude and it got me thinking: would a contemporary watch be good enough? Could I use my Casio F-91W to do this? If not, are there still clocks/watches made today for this purpose? Are they still mechanical? Some cursory googling suggests the specified loss rate of your watch is 1 second/day, which is approximately as good as Harrison's H4. His later models were better, but it might be a conservative specification as well. In a pinch it'd be good for rough navigation. Nowadays I suspect every air/surface vessel would use GNSS for timing, since even the cheapest civilian device on the market will give you nanosecond accuracy. Presumably they still train on celestial navigation as well but I don't know how common that'd be. As for submarines, my bet would be that they use crystal systems, high end modern systems are on order of ones of seconds per year loss rate. E: actually now that I think about it, given how large, expensive, and heavy submarines are, there's probably no good reason they wouldn't use atomic clocks, particularly for ones being used as strategic weapons platforms. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 03:34
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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FPyat posted:Do historical battlefield parks struggle with things like erosion and plant growth altering the landscape? Are there different approaches to how preservation should handle these changes? Plant growth is likely a serious problem. I have only been to Gettysburg but I suspect it would be the same anywhere. Gettysburg, as famous as it is for being exceptionally well-manicured, looks very different than what it would have looked like in the summer of 1863. The sight lines on Benner's Hill looking towards Culps and Cemetery Hill(s) and vice versa for example are now completely ruined due to tree growth. Large sections of the Rose Woods near the Wheatfield and Houck's Ridge are completely overgrown to the point where you can't actually make out the terrain. McPherson's woods where significant fighting took place on day 1 was described as being able to see through it from end to end thanks to local livestock eating through the undergrowth. Today it is impossible to see more than a couple dozen feet into the underbrush. The famous stand at Little Round Top is similarly nothing like what it was due to undergrowth. It is doubtful you can actually march a body of men through significant parts of the park now. The field where Pickett's charge occured is now overgrown with very tall grass and they cut small paths through it for tourists to walk through. It would have been knee-high wheat during the battle. They have tried costly controlled burns in the past but the undergrowth simply regrows within a couple of years. A ranger I talked to said they tried to secure permission to cut down the trees near Benner's hill to restore the sight lines but then since it borders on private property that is still farmland to this day, the waivers and risks involved meant they dropped the idea. You actually have to visit the park in the wintertime to get a good view of the original sightlines without the mass of vegetation.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:07
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My opinion of the Napoleon movie was that it looked very cool but it didn't seem even remotely historically accurate aside from some of the uniforms. And my extent of knowledge of the Napoleonic wars is based on like three books and all of the Sharpe series so I'm far from an expert.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:11
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FPyat posted:Do historical battlefield parks struggle with things like erosion and plant growth altering the landscape? Are there different approaches to how preservation should handle these changes? It depends on the park. If you were to visit Vicksburg, for instance, you'll find that much of the park is covered in trees and other vegetation. This was very much not the case in 1863 - pretty much every tree around the battle was cut down for fortifications and earthworks. This resulted in pretty severe erosion in the years and decades after the battle, and as a result the CCC planted a ton of trees in the 1930s - but this was not a total or permanent solution, and even today erosion is still a pretty significant issue at the park. e: vv yeah that too vv Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 04:24
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The most glaring change in Vicksburg being the dramatic shifts in the Mississippi's course.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:33
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There are a couple of places I’d love to see that are like that today. The plateau Khe Sahn Combat Base was built on is completely overgrown and unrecognizable, as is Peleliu. With Peleliu it took weeks of bombing, naval gunfire, and napalm strikes to burn all the vegetation off those coral hills, and then probably no time at all for nature to reclaim that turf after it was over. I think even volcanic Iwo Jima has quite a bit of scrub grown on it today, at least compared to how it looked in Feb ‘45.
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Nov 27, 2023 04:51
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gradenko_2000 posted:I was watching a video about how important it was to develop a clock that would accurately keep time while on a ship without losing seconds/minutes for the purposes of determining longitude and it got me thinking: would a contemporary watch be good enough? Could I use my Casio F-91W to do this? If not, are there still clocks/watches made today for this purpose? Are they still mechanical? A quartz watch (which is pretty much all modern watches), to my knowledge, is completely unaffected by environmental factors short of extreme heat or running out of battery. So in addition to what PittTheElder said, the mechanism wouldn't be subject to the fluctuations mechanical clocks of the time had to deal with.
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Nov 27, 2023 05:16
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Sad I missed the sports stuff because old/ancient Sumo wrestling has stories of dudes just blueballing their opponent for mins/hours/days by being at the tournament or dohyo and performing most of the ceremony before a bout but never getting into the ready position so you just have two dudes waiting for the other to finallt be 'ready'
Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 06:00
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Urcinius posted:Thought about buying the 16 Micronaut models necessary to recreate Task Group 58.5 in Feb. 1945, but then I did the math. To accurately depict the cruising formation of that task group at proper scale would require a 12.5’ diameter space. Not the minor decor project I first considered. The only sufficiently clear space I have is my ceilings, but none of my rooms are even big enough. Get several models in different scales and arrange them in a forced perspective diorama.
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Nov 27, 2023 06:10
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Quackles posted:A quartz watch (which is pretty much all modern watches), to my knowledge, is completely unaffected by environmental factors short of extreme heat or running out of battery. So in addition to what PittTheElder said, the mechanism wouldn't be subject to the fluctuations mechanical clocks of the time had to deal with. While the average quartz movement is pretty accurate (eg the 1 second per day spec of the Casio F-91W), that still adds up quickly. Being off by a minute every two months or so could have serious consequences in a military context, particularly because the other clocks in your organization might be off by a minute in either direction as well. Efforts have been made over the years to get quartz movements to be more accurate (Seiko managed a 5 second per year wristwatch in 1978, and it's easier to make accurate clocks) and fancy quartz ship clocks are still made, eg https://www.tamaya-technics.com/e_site/qm11_e.html However, since the problem is not so much making your clock tell the time correctly, as much as it is making all your clocks tell the time correctly, the solution isn't one fancy clock in its own box. There needs to be a master clock system that drives all the clocks on the ship and allows them to be adjusted together, eg https://uller.no/products/master-clock-system-by-seiko/ Also, quartz movements are affected by ordinary fluctuations in temperature, so nicer quartz watches have thermocompensation measures in place. For example, some have two quartz crystals which are cut slightly differently so that they have different temperature characteristics, and the resulting rates are then averaged.
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Nov 27, 2023 06:31
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