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ArchangeI posted:How well would that do against infantry, say, in foxholes? Because it seems to me that KE projectiles are pretty bad at killing infantry in cover unless they hit directly. In which case, granted, you only bury the guy symbolically. I recall plans for a projectile that would break apart near its target, saturating an area with "smaller" (probably still 20+mm) metal spikes. Sort of like a rail-shotgun.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:51
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Arquinsiel posted:What other effects would you like from a gun? Area effets (submunitions and the like), electronic warfare stuff (HPM and the like), low-yield precision stuff (ie, putting a lightweight antipersonnel shell through the window of a building instead of blowing up the building), illumination, smoke, and so on.
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Apr 22, 2014 20:58
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bewbies posted:Area effets (submunitions and the like), electronic warfare stuff (HPM and the like), low-yield precision stuff (ie, putting a lightweight antipersonnel shell through the window of a building instead of blowing up the building), illumination, smoke, and so on.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:04
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All of those are used in places where "$THING is blown the gently caress up" is not a desired outcome.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:34
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bewbies posted:electronic warfare stuff (HPM and the like) It seems like you'd want CHAMP to be slow (or at least capable of a longer, waypointed, flight). But I guess if we're making a wish list....
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Apr 22, 2014 21:38
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Arquinsiel posted:This seems like an awful lot of effort when you're talking about enough kinetic energy to just melt stuff. Liquefying everything is sometimes fine, but increasingly we're finding that we want/need to do a variety of other things.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:40
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bewbies posted:Liquefying everything is sometimes fine, but increasingly we're finding that we want/need to do a variety of other things. Then it's time to change your attitude, young man.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:42
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bewbies posted:Liquefying everything is sometimes fine, but increasingly we're finding that we want/need to do a variety of other things. Yes, but why do you want to use a railgun to do those things? It seems like other delivery methods would be more suited for non-explodey objectives, whereas the railgun is strictly for delivering large amounts of kinetic energy from long distances.
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Apr 22, 2014 21:55
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blackmongoose posted:Yes, but why do you want to use a railgun to do those things? It seems like other delivery methods would be more suited for non-explodey objectives, whereas the railgun is strictly for delivering large amounts of kinetic energy from long distances. I was just noting that a lack of scalability is a limitation of railguns. As it stands right now at least. edit - that is to say, we want all platforms to be as scalable as possible, generally speaking bewbies fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 22:02
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e: /\ Dude I don't know if you know this but there happen to be acceptable situations where brute force is all which is required. I understand your notation of and even preference for non-destructive goals like e-war, but concrete is concrete and you can see a tomahawk coming. Something traveling at eight times the speed of sound is not getting shot down unless it hits a bird on the way to the target and even then it's probably going to transform said bird into a peculiarly unbirdlike cloud of plasma without significant deviation in course or speed. I like these guys who are acting like the acceleration forces on a railgun projectile won't obliterate any payload conceivably available. But that's OK since the kinetic energy carried by the rail projectile as initially developed is 32 Megajoules, equivalent to a 32-ton truck slamming into the target at 100 miles per hour. FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Apr 22, 2014 |
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Apr 22, 2014 22:34
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You're not going to use a rail gun to shoot a dude in a foxhole between the orphanage and the puppy orphanage. You shoot the S-300 protecting that guy with the rail gun, then the fighter/bomber/drone goes in with the small-diameter bomb or something for that guy and all his friends.
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Apr 22, 2014 22:59
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FAUXTON posted:Something traveling at eight times the speed of sound is not getting shot down unless it hits a bird on the way to the target This actually isn't a really good assumption. Patriot (and, they claim, the S-300/400/500) can engage ballistic targets travelling twice that speed.
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Apr 22, 2014 23:52
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It'd be different shooting down powered flight at that speed and shooting down a lump of metal that just has a lot of momentum.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:00
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bewbies posted:This actually isn't a really good assumption. Patriot (and, they claim, the S-300/400/500) can engage ballistic targets travelling twice that speed. True, but the targets Patriot and similar modern SAMs/ABM systems are engaging have a much larger radar signature (and IR signature to that matter) than a single railgun projectile. Plus you have a degree of early warning with missiles (assuming you can catch it during launch/boost) that you don't get from a railgun that's shooting hypersonic rounds right out of the tube.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:02
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Bacarruda posted:True, but the targets Patriot and similar modern SAMs/ABM systems are engaging have a much larger radar signature (and IR signature to that matter) than a single railgun projectile. Not really; Patriot, for example, has no issue detecting and engaging BMs that use separating payloads, which aren't going to have a significantly larger signature than an 18 inch long metal slug. quote:Plus you have a degree of early warning with missiles (assuming you can catch it during launch/boost) that you don't get from a railgun that's shooting hypersonic rounds right out of the tube. This is true, but the slug is moving significantly slower than an MRBM warhead is on re-entry. Provided it is within the radar's FOV there's plenty of time to act on it. Patriot might even be able to do this with its current software depending on how it processes the target (I don't remember the speed parameters for anti-radiation missiles but it'd be something like that). The big issue in my opinion is an interceptor is roughtly a jillion times more expensive than a big metal slug.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:11
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Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal.
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Apr 23, 2014 00:29
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xthetenth posted:Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:31
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xthetenth posted:Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal. Doesn't take much to knock it off course.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:43
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xthetenth posted:Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal. Both PAC-3 and THAAD are hit to kill; i.e., they destroy the target through sheer kinetic energy, not by blowing it up. I think y'all are overestimating just how much energy a railgun slug has and/or underestimating how solidly built a ballistic missile's re-entry vehicle is going to be. We're talking about something that is capable of carrying a nuke warhead while traveling at Mach 14...it's going to be pretty solidly built and like I said, both PAC-3 and THAAD are capable of destroying RVs through kinetic energy alone. Also it's worth mentioning that ballistic missile warheads aren't really "powered flight" in the terminal phase (when most ABM systems are going to engage them) and are really quite a bit closer in function to a railgun slug than y'all think. Really the issue isn't a technical one, it's the fact that bewbies pointed out that any ABM missile is going to cost significantly more than a railgun slug. That said I feel like the topic is a little outside the scope of this thread...but it's well within the scope of this one! To try and get things back on track, ArchangeI was pretty spot on in detailing the problems with Keegan's "interpretation" of Clausewitz. I'll just footstomp that while On War does indeed have large sections devoted to the nuts and bolts of waging a Napoleonic war (logistics, terrain, etc) which might not be as applicable to modern day warfare (although there are still nuggets to be gleaned if you conduct a close reading), the heart of On War is on the nature of war itself...at its most basic level, timeless and immutable. If you aren't focusing on that and debating it on its own merits (in short, that war is a policy driven violent clash of wills, subject to fog, friction, and chance), you're missing the point and being rather intellectually lazy.
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Apr 23, 2014 01:45
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Is Keegan more one of those scholars who had one big hit (Face of Battle) and then coasted along for the rest of the career on it, writing slightly crazy things?
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Apr 23, 2014 01:48
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iyaayas01 posted:That said I feel like the topic is a little outside the scope of this thread...but it's well within the scope of this one! I semi-routinely forget that I'm not in that thread when I'm in this thread. And yeah, lost perspective on how energetic that missile is because the comparison is carrying so much energy.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:15
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DerLeo posted:Is Keegan more one of those scholars who had one big hit (Face of Battle) and then coasted along for the rest of the career on it, writing slightly crazy things? I don't think that's quite fair. It's more that he had one mega-hit (Face of Battle) that got the attention of a lot of people in the history mainstream and did a LOT to tear down a bunch of artificial distinctions that had been drawn between milhist and "real" history, followed by a bunch of more narrowly applicable but still pretty good works, and then one where he just kind of went a little crazy and fell on his rear end in a huge way. Unfortunately the one where he fell on his rear end was his big, grand, synthetic work where he tried to weave some of the biggest threads of history into one giant tapestry. This actually isn't that uncommon with more senior scholars. You see a lot of these kinds of big, sweeping works from late career historians as they try to pull off something that kind of sums up the connections and conclusions that they've made across however many years of reading and researching in a lot of varied fields. Doubly unfortunately these also tend to be the works that, due to their highly synthetic nature and attempts to answer Really Big Questions are the most accessible to the lay reader, so they get the most exposure to the general public. Even today you can find A History of Warfare in gently caress near every Barnes & Noble in the country, while Six Armies in Normandy is more something that you order on Amazon. The net result is that even though he did a bunch of decent scholarship, and had a couple of instances of brilliant scholarship, most people who invoke his name do so to push his most groan-inducing flub of a thesis.
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Apr 23, 2014 02:17
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DerLeo posted:Is Keegan more one of those scholars who had one big hit (Face of Battle) and then coasted along for the rest of the career on it, writing slightly crazy things? Most Keegan books are decent to good. Face of Battle is a classic that anyone who is interested in military history should have read. His books on certain wars are also decent, but usually not very groundbreaking. A History of Warfare just fails because of Keegan's complete misinterpretation of one of the core texts about the way western nations wage war. It is the equivalent of a theologian arguing that the New Testament isn't actually about Jesus.
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Apr 23, 2014 13:50
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xthetenth posted:Would Patriot be able to damage said slug enough to break it up or something? Last I checked, nuclear warheads were a bit more finicky than slugs of metal. A mach 5 interceptor directly colliding with a mach 8 target basically turns everything into plasma. This is one of the big advantages of PAC-3 versus WMD warheads as all of the nuclear/gas/chemical material gets instantly vaporized along with the rest of the target. efb
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Apr 23, 2014 16:15
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Now I envision a future where wars at sea are decided by railgun-ships bombarding the enemy shoreline and the enemy shooting back with missiles to stop the slugs from hitting. The side which runs out of money for missiles first has to frantically capitulate before it's coastlines are reduced to rubble.
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Apr 23, 2014 16:34
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Libluini posted:Now I envision a future where wars at sea are decided by railgun-ships bombarding the enemy shoreline and the enemy shooting back with missiles to stop the slugs from hitting. The side which runs out of money for missiles first has to frantically capitulate before it's coastlines are reduced to rubble. Solution: Robot swarms. Large quantities of small, cheap, difficult to detect self-organizing underwater explosive devices guided by a swarm AI, creeping up on railboats and blowing them up. We should have a  version of the  smiley.
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Apr 23, 2014 17:01
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There's always this:  Edit: bonus 
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Apr 23, 2014 17:34
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Someone made a Sherman "let's burn this poo poo into the ground" in the style of  . Anyone remember that?
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Apr 23, 2014 20:44
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ArchangeI posted:Face of Battle is a classic that anyone who is interested in military history should have read. This may be true from a historiographical perspective but, as far as the Middle Ages goes, a lot of his work is either out of date or surpassed even by his contemporaries.
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Apr 23, 2014 21:37
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DoubleAughtMeowMix posted:
The D. K. Brown book already mentioned is excellent. Be warned you may end up with the complete set of his works which is no bad thing but annoyingly a lot of the early development around Warrior, the Crimean gunboats (with British Standard Whitworth screws in all their engines) and steam batteries is in the preceding Before the Ironclad Steam, Steel & Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905 from Conways history of the ship series is an excellent companion. All the World's fighting ships by Fred T Jane also has a lot of background information back into that period. Make sure you get the 1898 edition.
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Apr 23, 2014 22:01
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:This may be true from a historiographical perspective but, as far as the Middle Ages goes, a lot of his work is either out of date or surpassed even by his contemporaries. His major intervention with that book wasn't to expose any particular thing that we didn't know about a specific era, but to show that there was still a place for milhist in a post-cultural turn field. Honestly the really important part of the book now is the introduction and (maybe - been a while since I looked at his organization) the first chapter, but that's the way a lot of history books age.
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Apr 23, 2014 23:35
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my dad posted:We should have a 
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Apr 24, 2014 01:56
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I am okay with nyanSherman.
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Apr 24, 2014 02:20
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Someone made a Sherman "let's burn this poo poo into the ground" in the style of Gah, I know I saved that one but I absolutely cannot find it 
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Apr 24, 2014 02:51
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 Enjoy.
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Apr 24, 2014 03:01
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edit: post in wrong thread i am dumb edit 2: But thanks!
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Apr 24, 2014 03:23
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Arrath posted:
Someone should buy this because it'll get a lot of use in TFF during Falcons games.
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Apr 24, 2014 08:20
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It's Veterans' Day here in Finland, so here's roughly 160 thousand photographs of the Finnish front during WWII. Earlier today they released roughly 800 colour pictures and news videos to the collection. I'd dump some choice saunas and battle reindeer, but trying to upload these pictures over a mobile connection is apparently utterly impossible.
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Apr 27, 2014 12:07
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Someone should buy this because it'll get a lot of use in TFF during Falcons games.
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Apr 27, 2014 13:10
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It's not like there's a shortage of thread specific smileys at this very moment 
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Apr 27, 2014 13:30
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