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Nenonen posted:In 2016 the Taiwanese accidently fired one of their anti shipping missiles, and it homed on a fishing boat 75 km away. It ripped right through the boat's superstructure, killing the captain and injuring three crew but luckily didn't explode, I assume because the warhead didn't hit anything solid enough to trigger it. It's also lucky that it found a target before continuing to Chinese territorial waters. My uncle served two tours on PBRs in Vietnam, and I interviewed him for a high school essay on the subject. I asked if it sucked being on a fiberglass hull boat in combat and he said that it was great because an RPG might just pass right through without exploding as long as it missed any metal mechanical bits.
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Dec 7, 2020 12:57
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Napoleonic muskets weren't rifled tbf it's only mid-late 19th century we start seeing rifled muskets. To clarify, rifles were used in the Napoleonic era, but they weren't the predominant arm. A goon even has an original specimen!
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Dec 8, 2020 15:08
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HannibalBarca posted:Accidents can happen. They're especially common for presidents in the first few hours after winning elections.
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Apr 20, 2021 13:41
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PittTheElder posted:Although didn't I just read something about the US (NATO?) adopting a new standard small arms round in a new calibre? I don't know how close we are to a replacement for 5.56 for the average soldier. I've heard there's a new 6.8x51 for the supposed m249 replacement, and .300 and .338 norma magnums for SOCOM stuff. I don't know if those are 100% in the pipeline or in trials stuff; I'm definitely not an expert on US military future things.
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Jul 12, 2021 17:23
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CommonShore posted:To what extent is there actually room for improvement in military small arms anyway? They already seem (from my not-extremely educated perspective) to be accurate, reliable, and more than sufficiently lethal, or at least extremely in the realm of diminishing returns there. Like, you could concievably increase the projectile's muzzle velocity, for example, but is that going to meaningfully improve the weapon's contribution to achieving tactical and operational objectives? They also seem to take minimal training to achieve meaningful efficacy. Wouldn't future improvements be instead on the manufacturing and logistics side? I believe most of the current concerns revolve around issues of optimizing effective range, and with defeating body armor as it becomes ubiquitous.
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Jul 12, 2021 18:04
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Ugly In The Morning posted:I figured it was something like that. 6.5mm was like magic when I was shooting it but I was also doing it from a bolt action that I completely baby, not a semi auto that had been dragged through muck. The 6.8 that is being developed for the NGSW saw replacement and rifle is supposedly actually aiming to be much more powerful than the 6.5 creedmoor and nothing like the 6.8SPC. Sig claims it's approximate to the .270 WSM round in ballistic performance, so like 3000+fps for a 140ish grain bullet. That sounds kinda wacky to me given that it might cook barrels and have substantial recoil, but that's what I've read.
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Jul 12, 2021 20:08
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aphid_licker posted:Realistically obviously there's nothing that could've been done with the state of psychological / psychiatric science at the time, or today, but it seems like a psychopathy indicator and that it should be correlated with violent criminal behavior? I get what you're saying and I can imagine that there may be a higher than normal distribution of abnormal psychology among guys who are especially "good at war", but I suspect most of those guys -particularly in a war where a whole society is mobilized- are just adapting to the circumstances and won't have an unusual life once they return to more normal circumstances. In any case, it might have been hard to discern post hoc what was pre-existing and what was caused by the widespread trauma inflicted by the experience of war, which I suspect have had a larger effect post-war.
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Nov 3, 2021 12:34
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Phobophilia posted:Isn't that mostly going to be a thing for modern conscript armies? Older professional armies full of hardened veterans are going to skew a tad older. Your typical longbowman or landsknecht or man-at-arms could have been campaigning for a decade. You still have a ton of very young enlisted. Across all branches of the US military 51.7% of the active duty enlisted were under 25 in 2017.
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Nov 5, 2021 13:24
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Randarkman posted:I could actually imagine a conscript army in (total) war time might average older than a professional army like the US's, because in addition to the recently trained soldiers it's going to be calling up alot of the older reserves also to augment its numbers, that's kind of how most or all conscription-based armies work you get called up, serve for 1 or 2 years in active service and then remain in the reserves for like 10+ years after that, perhaps occasionally called up for training or mobilized for emergencies. I haven't thought about this much, but based on some quick googling it looks like the average age doesn't shift a whole lot. Unvetted sources other than 2017, but it looks like the average age in the union army in the civil war was about 25.8, in WW2 was about 26, and today is about 27. US society was probably notably proportionally younger in those older eras, too.
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Nov 5, 2021 13:41
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FPyat posted:Has suicide ever been a serious source of casualties for a military? "On March 12, 2015, offices of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) officially announced that rifles used in military service would be fitted with an enhanced trigger guard shell... ...developed to prevent TAF soldiers from committing suicide using their G3 self-loading 7.62×51mm service rifles."
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Dec 29, 2021 01:29
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Xiahou Dun posted:What!?!?!? I was curious, so I found that wikipedia says... quote:The Shanghainese tonal system is also significantly different from other Chinese varieties, sharing more similarities with the Japanese pitch accent, with two level tonal contrasts (high and low), whereas Cantonese and Mandarin are typical of contour tonal languages. ...which may be what whoever was getting at? I know absolutely nothing about any of this and am not asserting that this is necessarily true, just what I found out there.
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May 23, 2022 21:28
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Thomamelas posted:Podcasting doesn't make it impossible to talk about history in a deep way. It can change how you present it but if you do the work the material should be okay. The issue with Duncan isn't so much that he's talking via podcast, but because he tends to rely on sources that are wildly out of date. Or is just in accurate. If he put together the podcast into a book, it would have the same problems. Are the sources for the Russia series so bad? Of all his topics of focus it's the one I know the least about. It seems like it mixes in a reasonable amount of newer sources, and it at least feels more modern than Carlin usually does, but I'm not at all in a position to judge much.
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Jun 14, 2022 19:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:So, I can't really comment on the Russian chunk you're asking about because I just don't know the literature, but taking a glance at his section on 1848 it's not bad, but no great. In particular I'll note how many of the books he's got up there that were written before 1990. There was a LOT of work done on the 1848 Revolutions - especially the ones in the German states - in the 90s and early 00s and just in general after people started looking more at culture. Working class culture in particular and the way it played into revolutionary movements was a big thing in those circles at that time. Thank you. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the sourcing for the earlier foci especially had more missteps.
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Jun 15, 2022 00:09
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Foxtrot_13 posted:One that is verifiable is that a Luftwaffe Field marshal or general was being escorted around one of the camps by a British general to prove the camps existed. When the German said something along the lines of "what's the problem, they are just Jews" the British general hit the German over the head with a baton so hard it broke. Can't for the life of me remember the people's names. The British general went to Monty the following day to resign as he shouldn't have beaten a prisoner but Monty brushed it of with the equivalent of "the fucker had it coming". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Mills-Roberts
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Jul 15, 2022 15:36
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Isn't fighting in civilian clothing without some kind of marker of your status as a fighter one of those things that can get you assigned unlawful combatant status where summary execution is potentially legal? Similar to being a spy or fighting while wearing an enemy uniform? I don't know much about the specific rules of war in this area. I should be clear that I think summary execution is probably basically always the wrong action both morally and tactically, but I'm asking legally speaking.
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Jul 29, 2022 17:11
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Defenestrategy posted:Whats the shelf life on ammo given a climate controlled room? Does this change when you go from talking about bullets to bigger stuff like dumb bombs or hellfire missiles? I can't speak to bigger stuff, but well cared for modern small arms ammunition can last nearly indefinitely if it's not subjected to heat, humidity, or rough handling; though, shooters who get to choose their ammunition are wise to avoid very old surplus because it's hard to be sure it hasn't been through bad conditions at some point in the past. People still shoot late WW2 era ammunition somewhat routinely, but it tends to be less reliable and can present dangerous pressures because of breakdown of the powder granules into smaller bits.
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Sep 27, 2022 14:56
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SlothfulCobra posted:The schooling system is designed to make you remember and believes all the things your teacher tells you, but teachers are sometimes wrong or they end up totally making something up, but it will wind up wedged into your brain. Like I had a teacher in middle school who told us about how in Vietnam they strapped bombs to babies who would go towards the soldiers, forcing the soldiers to shoot them and becoming "baby killers" that way. Which I've never seen anywhere else and sounds very silly thinking about it now. I have very fond memories of my AP European history teacher in high school who liked to add harmless embellishments that even as teens we knew were bullshit. Still, he never broke kayfabe and would insist that it was certainly true that, for example, after the war Gavrilo Princip got out of jail and moved to DC to operate a hot dog cart.
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Dec 22, 2022 16:45
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TheWeedNumber posted:Hey what’s up. I started a thread in GiP, where I generally post, on COIN last fall. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4018420&pagenumber=1#lastpost The first season of the Conflicted podcast gives a very brief overview in the first few episodes.
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Feb 4, 2023 19:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:
To offer him the tiniest credit, he definitely thinks the holocaust is bad. (I can't believe I just wrote that sentence.) If I'm remembering rightly he was trying to say something along the lines that there's a silver lining to the holocaust, which... christ. But yeah, I've stopped listening to him in part because he desperately needs and editor to clean up his rambling, and maybe someone to bounce ideas off a little more so he can hear how he sounds. I am being incredibly charitable here.
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Apr 22, 2023 01:33
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Cyrano4747 posted:The one that gets me is the ACW battle that started a bunch of forest fires (I want to say either 2nd bull run or one of the ones surrounding that?) where the wounded in the underbrush basically burned to death. Lots of accounts of people finishing themselves off with a musket before the flames got to them, accounts of finding charred corpses hugging trees or with their hands held out in the direction the flames were coming from etc. Battle of the Wilderness. Lt. Col. Horace Porter, Grant's staff[ posted:"Forest fires raged; ammunition trains exploded; the dead were roasted in the conflagration; the wounded, roused by its hot breath, dragged themselves along, with their torn and mangled limbs, in the mad energy of despair, to escape the ravages of the flames; and every bush seemed hung with shreds of blood-stained clothing...."
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Jun 8, 2023 20:25
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Include a couple Wales in with the whales and you might get there.
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Aug 22, 2023 17:24
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FastestGunAlive posted:Milhist thread, I’ve lived in the dmv for three years and haven’t gone to any battlefields. I am sorry. I want to go to one before I move. Antietam and Gettysburg are both equal distance away. Which will be better for nearby amenities? Wife and kid will probably only be good for a couple hours before it’s time to go eat / find something more engaging for kids First Manassas is small and easy to understand/picture in your head on the battlefield, which makes it pretty rewarding. That portion of the battlefield park is dead easy to visit and walk. If you want to understand Second Manassas, which overlaps but is much larger and more complicated, you have to drive around to different areas to get out and walk. It's still very cool. Antietam is a relatively compact area and you can see a lot of the areas of interest by walking a series of trails. Each trail is not too long but they can add up to a chunk of mileage if you do a lot at once. I've only visited one time (on a very sunny and hot July day - I almost got heatstroke) but I'm gonna to go back again sometime for sure. Gettysburg is even bigger/more spread out, but is a fantastic visit. You would spend multiple days if you really want to absorb the whole thing, but a quick visit is still doable because you can drive almost the whole battlefield area and visit particular spots of interest. This one will really reward a little homework ahead of the visit so you can decide what you want to look at if you aren't going to do a huge long tour of the whole thing. You should do all of them if ACW is of interest to you. All these battlefield parks are preserved reasonably well and it will really put you in touch with the history. There are also a zillion minor spots of interest, especially on the Virginia side of things, though most of them aren't worth it on their own for the ACW content unless you're hardcore, but they're cool to catch when you're nearby for something else (Fairfax Courthouse, the Falls Church, Fort Stevens, Brandy Station, etc). One of my recommendations for these more minor spots is Fort Washington. It wasn't really a factor in the ACW, but it's a big-rear end fort on the Potomac that is a cool short visit on a nice summer day. glynnenstein fucked around with this message at 15:24 on Apr 16, 2024 |
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Apr 16, 2024 15:17
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There was a headline in a local paper (iirc) a decade ago or so that ran, "Manasses a Haven for Gays," which touted the growth of LGBT-friendly businesses in the area. Sadly, I can't find it in a search anymore so someone probably didn't appreciate the pun. Carillon posted:Likely a different answer for each site, but how similar is the terrain today compared to when the battles were fought? Is there generally a sense that it is pretty close? I imagine 150 years could really change things. As Cyrano noted, trees are a big alteration. All through Northern Virignia in the mid-19th century the land was cleared for farming, but large chunks have returned to forest. Where there were existing trees they've grow to be much larger. I live near the highest point in Arlington County, which was held by the Union for the whole war as an observation point/reserve camp. Confederate-held Falls Church could be seen at the time from ground level, though they also had a tower and launched tethered balloons, but today where there aren't million-dollar houses there are trees and the view is totally blocked. Sure enough, a bunch of stuff at Gettysburg is obscured by trees that were not there at the time. Also, at all the battlefields the areas that would have been working farms at the time are (mostly) at best just a grassy field. Development, as also noted, is the most obvious problem. Manassas (and Centreville, Haymarket, everything nearby) was massively built-up from the late 80s/early 90s on, though it mostly encroaches just on one side of the Battlefield Park and you can feel still kinda rural like the whole area used to be as recently as 50 years ago. Antietam still feels pretty far from development, but Gettysburg has chain businesses practically right on the edge of the Park. glynnenstein fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Apr 18, 2024 |
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Apr 18, 2024 17:01
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