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gohuskies posted:Battle of Sedan, 1870: grover fucked around with this message at 04:17 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 04:13
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the JJ posted:The DnD American History thread just had a great derail on why the question of human agency shouldn't be studied in history man. Because that's like blaming the victim. Oh god I can only imagine how awful that thread is. I know that the US has done some really awful things (and continues to do so at an accelerating pace) but jeez.
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Feb 16, 2014 04:14
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gohuskies posted:Battle of Sedan, 1870: This is a pretty nutso photo. Here's a question I've been mulling over: What were your chances of surviving a complete war on the frontline? I was reading through some of the casualty reports of American infantry divisions in WWII, and I found that a lot of them exceeded the 14,000 men that were supposed to make up a division. That's some of the ones that only entered the war after Overlord too!
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Feb 16, 2014 04:29
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grover posted:Despite the caption, it's pretty obvious that photo is staged, as there's no motion blur, and no smoke. Are there any photos like this taken during the actual battles? Around that time period smokeless powder was coming into being maybe they had it then? Plus I see a little smoke coming out of those skirmishers firing or it just might be photo aging.
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Feb 16, 2014 04:57
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Chillyrabbit posted:Around that time period smokeless powder was coming into being maybe they had it then? Plus I see a little smoke coming out of those skirmishers firing or it just might be photo aging. e: lol, 1870 not 1970 grover fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 05:00
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grover posted:Even the best photographic equipment in 1970 needed several seconds of exposure; even the smallest movement results in massive blur. That photo is staged as hell- there is no movement anywhere like there would be if they were actually under fire. Hell, look at the guy in the front line on the right hamming it up like a scarecrow. Jesus grover modern technology hasn't moved forward that far!
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Feb 16, 2014 05:47
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grover posted:Even the best photographic equipment in 1970 needed several seconds of exposure; even the smallest movement results in massive blur. That photo is staged as hell- there is no movement anywhere like there would be if they were actually under fire. Hell, look at the guy in the front line on the right hamming it up like a scarecrow. Harold Edgerton would like to have a word with you. Also, the LEICA IIIf, introduced in 1950 had shutter speeds up to 1/1000 of a second available. You'd use flash or a bright sunny day, but "Even the best photographic equipment in 1970 needed several seconds of exposure"? What are you reading that has you so far off base?
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Feb 16, 2014 06:19
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I think he means 1870.
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Feb 16, 2014 06:22
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Oh god I can only imagine how awful that thread is. I know that the US has done some really awful things (and continues to do so at an accelerating pace) but jeez. It has literally been. thread start -> pg1 derail on USSR -> random factoids and small clips of history for pages -> above mentioned agency argument -> a parallel mesoamerican discussion. D&D is not the hell scape the bad posters with bad opinions who got mocked out of it portray it to be.* e: also no one in this thread is one of the aformentioned bad posters except maybe Vincent van goatse. *Offer not valid in the auspol thread. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 07:05 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 06:57
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I love how everyone thinks I got shouted out of D&D when I never posted there much in the first place. Anyway, here's some neat photos of Royal Navy aerial experimentation in 1908. That boxy thing is a manned kite. Click for big.  
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 08:06
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I love how everyone thinks I got shouted out of D&D when I never posted there much in the first place. The Japanese had a much better solution for looking over the horizon. 
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Feb 16, 2014 08:10
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Speaking of looking over the horizon, how exactly does WWII and WWI ships fight each other at long range? I read it takes a minute or more for shells to arrive for longer range. How are you suppose to hit something that's actively dodging with this kind of delay?
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Feb 16, 2014 08:44
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Large ships have a ton (well, many tons) of momentum, they can't dodge super well. e: and actually, come to think of it, I wouldn't be super surprised to learn that individual ships wouldn't be zig-zagging much at all if they were fighting as part of a battle line, lest they cross the path of a friendly vessel. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 08:47
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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pedro0930 posted:Speaking of looking over the horizon, how exactly does WWII and WWI ships fight each other at long range? I read it takes a minute or more for shells to arrive for longer range. How are you suppose to hit something that's actively dodging with this kind of delay? I'm no naval expert but the answer is math. Once you have the shell velocity, your speed and heading, estimated path of the target, estimated target speed and distance you can throw that into some equations and get a firing solution. I'd assume gunners would have tables of numbers to consult so as to get the calculations done quickly before the invention of the fire control computer.
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Feb 16, 2014 08:51
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I'm no naval expert but the answer is math. Once you have the shell velocity, your speed and heading, estimated path of the target, estimated target speed and distance you can throw that into some equations and get a firing solution. I'd assume gunners would have tables of numbers to consult so as to get the calculations done quickly before the invention of the fire control computer. Actually they mostly didn't need huge tables of numbers (though such things existed) because by the time fighting ranges became that long there were mechanical computers available to the gunnery officers. There was a huge amount of mathematics involved in training gunnery officers, however. Something on the order of the prerequisites for astronomy or physics majors in college.
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Feb 16, 2014 09:00
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Actually they mostly didn't need huge tables of numbers (though such things existed) because by the time fighting ranges became that long there were mechanical computers available to the gunnery officers. If you've got an hour to kill and want to learn about mechanical computers, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 It's more focused on anti-aircraft targeting, but the general principles are the same. Also, one of the parameters of all that gunnery math was which direction the ship was traveling, which spawned the crazy WWI ship camo. The idea is that the zebra stripes make it difficult to tell which end is the front and therefore which way it's going.
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Feb 16, 2014 10:03
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PittTheElder posted:Large ships have a ton (well, many tons) of momentum, they can't dodge super well. Also it was late WWII before someone made a fire control computer that could handle significant changes in the shooting ship's course. Absent such computers, trying to zig-zag would throw off your own range-rate calculations and you'd be unable to shoot accurately.
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Feb 16, 2014 11:09
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Actually they mostly didn't need huge tables of numbers (though such things existed) because by the time fighting ranges became that long there were mechanical computers available to the gunnery officers. grover fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 16:53
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Both fleets at Jutland hit 2-3% excluding battlecruisers.
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Feb 16, 2014 16:57
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They tended to lob a LOT of shells back then.
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Feb 16, 2014 17:29
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grover posted:What was the hit % in WWI at long ranges anyhow, wasn't it something abysmally low, like well less than 1%? The hit %s I've seen that include engagements at more moderate ranges are still all in the low single-digits. Keep this in mind and imagine how bad their shooting would've been without the fire control equipment.
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Feb 16, 2014 18:29
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I was reading through some of the casualty reports of American infantry divisions in WWII, and I found that a lot of them exceeded the 14,000 men that were supposed to make up a division. That's some of the ones that only entered the war after Overlord too! Also funny is how much the Overlord casualties are talked up when looking at Omaha beach. Three thousand casualties sounds like a huge number, until you remember the other 40 or so thousand that DIDN'T get hurt. Overall it's somewhere in the region of 12,000 Allied Casualties, spread through nine Divisions and a handful of assorted, Brigades, Commandos, Troops, Battalions and RCTs (along with some Navy, RAF and USAAF too), spread over five beaches, three airborne dropzones, one bridge and one teeny headland. That said, Wave 1 on Omaha got well and truly screwed, and that's what makes for good movies (except for The Longest Day, which is awesome for all the weird little details of the filming and because it might be impossible to adapt a Cornelius Ryan WWII history book to movie form and NOT make it awesome).
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Feb 16, 2014 18:43
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I've always thought it was pretty astonishing that about, oh, 40 years before Jutland navies were limited to shots that were completely manually aimed, went maybe a mile or two at the absolute most and weren't all that different from the guns used for the previous three centuries. A lot of the guys who hand-loaded the 36 pounders that armed the fully rigged ships in Crimea and the ACW were still alive to see Revenge and Konig chuck 2,000 lbs shells at one another at distances of tens of miles.
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Feb 16, 2014 19:11
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On naval gunnery: The term "battleship" is derived from "ship-of-the-(battle)line". That is, you'd have a long column of ships all sailing in the same direction, and then they'd be parallel-ish to the long column of enemy ships. The first ship in your line would shoot the first ship in the enemy's line; your second ship would shoot the second ship in the enemy's line, and so on, barring special circumstances such as crossing the T where your line-of-battle manages to cut perpendicular to the enemy's line-of-battle, allowing you to shoot with all your guns while the enemy can only shoot with whatever fraction is facing correctly. Under this organization of battle, ships are not actively dodging, because weaving in and out is a surefire way of causing a collision along the line. In any event, naval gunnery was inaccurate enough even without evasive maneuvers. In fact, ships were organized to shoot at their opposite number across the battle line because gunnery officers needed to be able to "observe the fall of shot" If you shoot at a target and the splash of water is in front of it, then you need to increase your elevation. If the splash is behind the ship, then you're shooting too high. And so on and so forth if the splash is to the left or to the right. This only works though if you know which splash is yours. Ships then are typically assigned their own one-to-one targets so that you know that the splashes you're seeing around the target are only ever yours. This sort of dynamic was one of the big influences of 20th century ship design: The Japanese Navy at Tsushima demonstrated that accurate long-range fire from only their biggest guns could be devastatingly effective against pre-Dreadnought designs that had a mix of large-caliber, medium-caliber and small-caliber guns. If you could keep the range high, then the smaller 6-inch or 8-inch guns of your enemy never comes into play, and even if they do, trying to sort out the fall of shot between 2-3 different calibers of guns is going to be a nightmare. As a result of this new paradigm, the Dreadnought, and all other big-gun designs that followed, only ever had a main battery of the biggest gun, which back then was 12-inch, and then only much smaller 3-inch guns for dealing with torpedo boats and other such lighter craft. There were at least two major incidents during WWI, I believe it was during the Battle of Dogger Bank and the aftermath of the Scarborough Raid where Royal Navy gunnery accuracy was fouled by five RN battlecruisers facing off against four German battlecruisers: the orders for who would shoot would get misinterpreted and the last German BC would be shot at by two RN BCs, while the penultimate/third-in-line German BC was not being shot at, at all. This meant that the RN accuracy was even worse than it already was since the fall of shot went all willy-nilly against that double-targeted BC, while the untargeted BC was able to make better shots since it wasn't taking return fire. The last bit of trivia I want to share is that the Japanese Navy would load their shells with colored dye, to make differentiation of fall of shot supposedly even easier. There are quite a few accounts of the Battle of Leyte Gulf where the USN destroyers are darting and dashing and charging the Japanese battleships in clouds and torrents of pink, red, orange and green EDIT: One more thing that I almost forgot - I think it was the earlier mil-hist thread that also taught me that the Royal Navy used to do their shot adjustment one volley at a time - the entire gun battery would shoot at a given elevation, then another to adjust, then the third should hit. The Germans did it by alloting a portion of the battery to one elevation, then another portion of the battery to another. IIRC the RN adapted the German method after it was found to be faster. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 19:33
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Likewise some of the Prussian dragoons who participated in von Bredow's Death Ride in 1870 using tactics not too different to those used in Thirty Years' War would have lived to see barbed wire and machineguns and motorized infantry and Panzerwagens and recon airplanes make horse cavalry nigh obsolete. It's easy to see how old cavalry generals were upset when there had been only a few paradigm shifts in the last five hundred years and how the knight on horseback had been an epitome of warrior in European culture for the last 1000 years. It was almost as great a sacrilege as letting vagina-havers into the ranks!
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Feb 16, 2014 19:55
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bewbies posted:I've always thought it was pretty astonishing that about, oh, 40 years before Jutland navies were limited to shots that were completely manually aimed, went maybe a mile or two at the absolute most and weren't all that different from the guns used for the previous three centuries. A lot of the guys who hand-loaded the 36 pounders that armed the fully rigged ships in Crimea and the ACW were still alive to see Revenge and Konig chuck 2,000 lbs shells at one another at distances of tens of miles. If you get the chance, check out The Eighth Sea, by Frank Courtney. He got his pilots license as a civilian in 1914, flew in combat in WWI, was a test pilot and racer in the twenties and thirties, ferried aircraft all through WWII, and flew the 747 before he retired. The man literally was there for it all, when it comes to aviation.
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Feb 16, 2014 20:04
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Nenonen posted:Likewise some of the Prussian dragoons who participated in von Bredow's Death Ride in 1870 using tactics not too different to those used in Thirty Years' War would have lived to see barbed wire and machineguns and motorized infantry and Panzerwagens and recon airplanes make horse cavalry nigh obsolete. It's easy to see how old cavalry generals were upset when there had been only a few paradigm shifts in the last five hundred years and how the knight on horseback had been an epitome of warrior in European culture for the last 1000 years. It was almost as great a sacrilege as letting vagina-havers into the ranks! I've always wondered what these knightly types would think of Sarah Hay and Samantha Catto-Mott:  
ProfessorCurly fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 20:05
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ProfessorCurly posted:I've always wondered what these knightly types would think of Sarah Hay and Samantha Catto-Mott. 
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Feb 16, 2014 20:08
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That answers that rather neatly 
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Feb 16, 2014 20:14
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MrYenko posted:Tangentially related: You know I was thinking as I re-read that post that this basically applies to my grandpa. He was born (1920) when fabric covered planes flying no faster than a modern sports car shot pairs of machine guns at one another. He learned to fly in the early 30s on a Stearman, the flew the absolute bleeding-edge aircraft in WWII (B-24 and B-29). After the war he flew airliners for 30 years and finished his career in the 747 in 1980. He's still around; he has one grandson flying the F-22, one flying the C-17, and another flying satellites. I'm not sure that any generation/profession in human history saw such a rapid change in one life span. bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 20:14
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ProfessorCurly posted:I've always wondered what these knightly types would think of Sarah Hay and Samantha Catto-Mott: Later, of course, there's my celebrity crush Queen Christina of Sweden. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 20:22
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How do you fly a satellite?
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Feb 16, 2014 20:23
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Is there a general history thread anywhere? The links in the OP are dead, and I was looking for some book reccomendations that aren't necessarily military related about a couple of time periods?
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Feb 16, 2014 20:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:This sort of dynamic was one of the big influences of 20th century ship design: The Japanese Navy at Tsushima demonstrated that accurate long-range fire from only their biggest guns could be devastatingly effective against pre-Dreadnought designs that had a mix of large-caliber, medium-caliber and small-caliber guns. If you could keep the range high, then the smaller 6-inch or 8-inch guns of your enemy never comes into play, and even if they do, trying to sort out the fall of shot between 2-3 different calibers of guns is going to be a nightmare. While Tsushima no doubt played a major role, I am fairly certain that the all-big gun battleship was actually theorized beforehand, and for much the reasons it was built: if you outrange the enemy and have the speed to keep the range open, you are effectively invulnerable. Frankly, the advances in ship propulsion that were part of Dreadnought were probably as important as the guns. Danger - Octopus! posted:Is there a general history thread anywhere? The links in the OP are dead, and I was looking for some book reccomendations that aren't necessarily military related about a couple of time periods? You can try the history book thread in the book barn, or you can just ask here. Almost all history is connected to war in some way.
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Feb 16, 2014 20:47
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Saint Celestine posted:How do you fly a satellite? Launches are the tricky part, after that it's a matter of using fuel occasionally to stop the orbit from decaying.
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Feb 16, 2014 20:49
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Danger - Octopus! posted:Is there a general history thread anywhere? The links in the OP are dead, and I was looking for some book reccomendations that aren't necessarily military related about a couple of time periods? There's not. But I think that there should be one.
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Feb 16, 2014 21:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:The last bit of trivia I want to share is that the Japanese Navy would load their shells with colored dye, to make differentiation of fall of shot supposedly even easier. There are quite a few accounts of the Battle of Leyte Gulf where the USN destroyers are darting and dashing and charging the Japanese battleships in clouds and torrents of pink, red, orange and green That wasn't just a Japanese thing. The French used them (Richelieu was yellow and Jean Bart orange), the US used them (Iowa was orange, New Jersey was blue, Missouri was red and Wisconsin was green), so I have a feeling that navies which didn't use them by that point were the exception. Speaking of battleship gunnery, does anybody have any information on how accurate the Richelieu class' gunnery was? I haven't been able to find a source and someone argued that it was atrocious during WWII in broken enough second language english that I don't really have enough to identify his source.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:26
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There used to be one years ago back in old GBS that was pretty great, though it did suffer from people asking about the latest Cracked list fad every other page. A few people have suggested making a new one, though I don't know how well it'd go over in GBS 2.1
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Feb 16, 2014 22:31
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Acebuckeye13 posted:though I don't know how well it'd go over in GBS 2.1 Poorly
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Feb 16, 2014 22:31
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It wouldn't be worth it now, sadly.
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Feb 16, 2014 22:33
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