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Fun fact: The Germans didn't even use most of the King Tigers that they had at the Bulge. IIRC, they were so unreliable that the Germans actually preferred to leave them in the rear instead of risk having a single tank break down and block the road for the rest of the armored column behind it. Ensign Expendable posted:Please tell me those two tank columns are charging into each other in some kind of knightly joust. In Armored Thunderbolt it's mentioned that the first US Armored units to be deployed in North Africa were under the impression that charging gallantly forward into battle like cavalry of old was how tank-on-tank combat was to be conducted. It... didn't end well.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:35
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Chillyrabbit posted:If I remember the movie correctly they "dance" around the other tanks and force them to use up all their fuel so the american smarts beat the dastardly Germans. I'm glad to know that World of Tanks reflects armoured combat accurately.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:36
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Ensign Expendable posted:I'm glad to know that World of Tanks reflects armoured combat accurately. All infantry combat revolves around circle strafing and bunny hopping. Also dolphin diving.
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Jun 2, 2014 05:00
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Does that mean that Ace Combat is a correct and accurate description of aerial warfare? 
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Jun 2, 2014 05:18
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game) Was the most accurate aerial combat simulator ever made. Because there was lots of nothing involved in some of those missions.
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Jun 2, 2014 05:29
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Davin Valkri posted:Does that mean that Ace Combat is a correct and accurate description of aerial warfare? Yes, in real life fighter planes can carry well over 100 missiles for a single sortie. No other way to bring down the flying battleships.
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Jun 2, 2014 05:29
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Frostwerks posted:All infantry combat revolves around circle strafing and bunny hopping. Also dolphin diving. Ok I'll bite, what is dolphin diving? Crouching then jumping or something? The last time I played a shoot-em-up was around the quake 3 era.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:22
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Slavvy posted:Ok I'll bite, what is dolphin diving? Crouching then jumping or something? The last time I played a shoot-em-up was around the quake 3 era. Apparently it's jumping for mobility, then going prone in midair for accuracy. Don't ask me how that's supposed to work. (Says the guy who just mentioned Ace Combat  )
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Jun 2, 2014 06:31
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It's 'cause it makes you a smaller target so you're harder to shoot. geez and you guys say you know military history.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:I'm glad to know that World of Tanks reflects armoured combat accurately. I haven't played in a while but doesn't it? Two teams hiding out behind cover sniping at each other until enough tanks concentrate at one point of the map and roll over the over team? Sure there's no infantry, pillboxes, minefields or anti tank gun emplacements/ambushes to contend with but some fights probably end up decently close no?
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Jun 2, 2014 06:39
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^And you can see armor behind buildings from the other side I really can't fault too many of the old movies for using stand ins, it's not like there's a ton of Shermans, Tigers and King Tigers laying around to be used for major tank battles, and modifying so many beyond a paint coating would likely take the movie well beyond budget. Now days though with our fancy shmancy CGI and poo poo, there's really no excuse to be loving these things up so much. I mean the only movie that really got lots of it right without blowing off more money than a drunken sailor on whores was Kelly's Heroes SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 06:45
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 Also Battlefield 2 was buggy as gently caress and the second you hit prone the hitbox would immediately shrink to the prone size and you'd get the accuracy bonus of being prone while keeping the mobility of jumping which made it a bitch and a half to shoot someone who was properly dolphin diving while he was headshotting people from the other side of the map. It probably still works in the later Battlefield games, I don't know. Serious MilHist question, how would a First Crusade-era army be organized? Did they just accept every vaguely devout Christian who volunteered to fight for the Holy Land, or was there some kind of levy where the lords would grab peasants and bring them to his fight for the Holy Land? The Total War series tells me it's more of the former, but the same series tells me that Oda Nobunaga united Japan with his massive army of psychos wielding 5 foot swords, so it's not exactly what I call historically accurate.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:Not to question your archeologist friend too much (since, you know, she has a degree in all this) but how did she determine that these were all musket wounds? Grand Prize Winner posted:I'd imagine that the wounds themselves would be different. A blade might scrape bone but might not be too likely to fracture it; even a pike would punch a relatively neat, small hole. A musket/pistol round, especially at point blank, would really tear poo poo up. And heads of state, mercenary entrepreneurs, and quartermasters may be fretting about powder, but among the soldiers it's normal to do things like shoot your pistols out the window of your room after supper. I doubt they particularly give a poo poo that it's difficult to obtain.
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Jun 2, 2014 06:53
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Hell, watch bullet impacts in slow motion, the energy dispersed really fucks up soft tissue. Stab a melon with a knife. Now shoot it with a gun. The former leaves a hole, the latter blows the insides out. Old black powders are even easier to tell if it was point blank. The victim will not only have burn marks, but bits of unburned gunpowder stuck in'em
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Jun 2, 2014 07:07
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Someone was talking about Swiss pikemen earlier and their like of ambush and someone posted a video of how you could use a lanyard to secure the pointy end of a lance and sneak about, though I don't remember if he implied it was used by the swiss, just that it was an option. Then I remember at least one incident in the ACW where the glint of bayonets in a cornfield gave away an encroachment of Union soldiers. Was their any effort made to wet the blades of pikes/lance in black paint or similar to reduce glint/shine?
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Jun 2, 2014 08:45
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Hold the blade over open fire, voila, it's blackened now
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Jun 2, 2014 08:56
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So Hey Gal since you are doing research on the 30 year war, what is your opinion on the work by Peter Englund on that time period? For those that don't know Englund is a famous Swedish history professor that have written multiple books describing Swedens short period of being involved in European politics. He also hands out the Nobel prize in literature.
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Jun 2, 2014 08:59
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Cardiac posted:So Hey Gal since you are doing research on the 30 year war, what is your opinion on the work by Peter Englund on that time period?
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Jun 2, 2014 09:09
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Chillyrabbit posted:If I remember the movie correctly they "dance" around the other tanks and force them to use up all their fuel so the american smarts beat the dastardly Germans.
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Jun 2, 2014 09:27
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quote:The film's opening narration, by William Conrad, does mention both Montgomery and Patton, but is inaccurate, saying:to the north, stood Montgomery's Eighth Army. To the south, Patton's Third.In fact, Montgomery's northern command was actually the 21st Army Group. The Eighth Army, Montgomery's previous command, was actually in Italy at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. This just keeps on giving.
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Jun 2, 2014 10:19
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SocketWrench posted:^And you can see armor behind buildings from the other side Well, with the history channel documentary that started this thread, it's rather less forgivable to use Pattons for T-34s, given that they *had* T-34s and were using them to stand in for Shermans.
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Jun 2, 2014 11:29
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Myself I'm rather fond of But then again I forgive this movie all sorts of dumb poo poo.
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Jun 2, 2014 11:43
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HEY GAL posted:I'm not familiar with his work, sorry about that. Most of his work is only available in Swedish. Good books, I use them for game design research a lot.
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Jun 2, 2014 11:49
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SocketWrench posted:^And you can see armor behind buildings from the other side
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Jun 2, 2014 11:54
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Lichtenstein posted:Myself I'm rather fond of Seems pretty accurate to me. The narrative is set between the First Happy Time (Oct 1940-March 1941) which was before Britain got it's Convoy and ASW doctrines sorted and adjusted to the loss of France. And the Second Happy Time (Jan-June 1942) from before the US realized there was such a thing as ASW doctrine and Convoys. Ferrosol fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 11:57
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Ferrosol posted:seems pretty accurate to me. The narrative is set between the First Happy Time (Oct 1940-March 1941) which was before Britain got it's Convoy and ASW doctrines sorted and adjusted to the loss of France.And the Second Happy Time (Jan-June 1942) from before the US realized there was such a thing as ASW doctrine and Convoys. The Battle of the Atlantic (IMO) did not turn against the Germans until at least Apr-May 1942 at the very earliest. Prior to that there weren't enough escorts to go around, the Greenland-Iceland gap and other key areas were unpatrolled due to a lack of ASW-equipped Catalinas and Liberators, and there weren't enough ships to form hunter-killer groups yet. By 1941 the Brits may have been able to add some escorts and get some convoying going, but it was still pretty dire as doctrinal progress was being countered by wolfpacks.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:03
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Dunno, talk of 'major setbacks' and 'heavy losses' along with everyone in the movie going "that darn Hitler is gonna get us all killed  " feels like saying Brest Fortress was where the tide began to turn on eastern front.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:The Battle of the Atlantic (IMO) did not turn against the Germans until at least Apr-May 1942 at the very earliest. Prior to that there weren't enough escorts to go around, the Greenland-Iceland gap and other key areas were unpatrolled due to a lack of ASW-equipped Catalinas and Liberators, and there weren't enough ships to form hunter-killer groups yet. The U-Boat war is somewhat overrated in terms of the real damage it did to the allied war effort. There were only something like three months of the war when the German Navy managed to destroy more merchant ship tonnage than was being commissioned in allied shipyards. Now individual convoys would be savaged and the losses especially in trained seamen would be severely felt but in a broad sense there was no way for Germany to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Britain was never in serious danger of starving (unlike WWI) and the war effort was never put under severe threat, Churchillian rhetoric aside. That's not to degenerate the brave and clever efforts of many on the allied side who made sure to control and contain the U-Boat threat but the notion that the Kreigsmarine could ever achieve anything but the most temporary victories in the North Atlantic is ludicrous.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:18
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meatbag posted:He certainly enjoyed getting other people drunk, but he himself reportedly preferred weak, almost clear georgian wine. I know this is from 2 pages back, but I can plug a great Stalin biography by Robert Service The book describes one of Stalin's favorite tactics over the years: getting subordinates drunk. He would drink weak or watered-down liquor while getting his dinner guests trashed on vodka. He did this for two reasons: First, in vino veritas, he learned about secrets different people were hiding. Second, and more sinister, he would get people to say stupid poo poo while they were drunk, giving him an excuse to execute them later.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:24
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Ferrosol posted:The U-Boat war is somewhat overrated in terms of the real damage it did to the allied war effort. There were only something like three months of the war when the German Navy managed to destroy more merchant ship tonnage than was being commissioned in allied shipyards. Now individual convoys would be savaged and the losses especially in trained seamen would be severely felt but in a broad sense there was no way for Germany to win the Battle of the Atlantic. Britain was never in serious danger of starving (unlike WWI) and the war effort was never put under severe threat, Churchillian rhetoric aside. For quite a while submarine warfare succeeded in tying down huge amount of military effort. U-boots took down military ships once a while, and I imagine replacing a cruiser takes a lot longer than a big merchant ship with comparable tonnage. I think that even if you count all the military resources and effort taken by German submarines and Allied losses and military resources required for ASW, Germans still would spend their resources wisely.
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Jun 2, 2014 12:46
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Pornographic Memory posted:Yes, in real life fighter planes can carry well over 100 missiles for a single sortie. No other way to bring down the flying battleships. Or unmanned satellites the size of aircraft carriers which manage to survive reentry not only intact but with functioning solar panel rotation motors... ...Which are just rotating all the way around like a space-windmill and have to be blown off the satellite as it mysteriously enters the atmosphere at well below anything near escape velocity and below the afterburner speed of your wizard-plane. Who knows how they did it, either it carried enough fuel up there to bleed off velocity before reentry, or it was made of some kind of unobtanium alloy impervious to the plasma-torch effect of airbraking into the atmosphere at some 14 thousand mph but vulnerable to the airborne AMRAAM factories of the motherfucking Razgriz squadron.  Hey, at least the music made it seem important. Speaking of planes and such, was the concept of "Air Supremacy" mainly a post-WWII thing evolving from "Air Superiority" being only half the game once guided missiles became the mode? Or was it a named component of air war doctrine and simply achieved at the same time as Air Superiority due to the limitations of technology at the time?
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Jun 2, 2014 14:37
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Fangz posted:Well, with the history channel documentary that started this thread, it's rather less forgivable to use Pattons for T-34s, given that they *had* T-34s and were using them to stand in for Shermans. I know, hence why I said old movies have an excuse whereas modern stuff doesn't
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Jun 2, 2014 14:54
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I think you could also look at movie budgets for an explanation. Even adjusted for inflation, modern (post-1990) production budgets dominate the "most expensive chart. The oldest movie in the top 15 is 1995's Waterworld, followed by Titanic (1997) and Wild Wild West (1999). #16 is Cleopatra (1963) and after that you have Armageddon (1998) at #39 and Superman (1973) down in the bottom of the list. While surplus was possibly more plentiful the shorter the post-war interval, the budget needed to wrangle a bunch of historically appropriate tanks was likely out of the question. The Cold War meant making a movie about anything in the Eastern Front was a big hell no unless they faked it on a soundstage, and by 1991 things like the 1940 model of the T-34 were graffiti-clad playground pieces and tanksidermied (  ) gate sentries. Budgets big enough to entertain the idea of getting the right vehicles came along too late for it to be more feasible than CGI.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:11
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A Bridge Too Far had excellent props. Actual Sherman Fireflies (even if they ought to make only a quarter of the force, but c'mon) instead of Pattons or such. And even the use of Leopard I's as German MBTs is excusable, it's still a German tank and has much of the same feel as Panther (I'd even call Leo a logical evolutionary step of German WW2 designs [let's ignore all the crazy Hitlerwagens, 'kay?] - but I could be mislead in my belief). Enemy At Gates wasn't too bad in this specific department either, although I recall they had some CGI scenes of dozens of Pz III's that seemed so obviously fake. It's been a while since I watched it, so... Finnish war flicks have a tendency of having really nice props, probably because there's so much of the stuff from both sides still lying around. Talvisota/The Winter War (1989) had a bunch of T-26's, including a flame tank. Tuntematon Sotilas/The Unknown Soldier is these days considered something of a national epic with two versions. The 1955 version is notable for its use of a real PzKpfw IV in lieu of KV-1 - however the 1985 version uses a KV replica. Look like a T-34/76 underneath?  Then there's Tali-Ihantala 1944, a very dry, almost documentary like depiction of historical events but full of original tanks, artillery and even a brand new reproduction FW 190. The funny thing is, in this film they use an honest-to-Voroshilov KV-1, and they use it... in lieu of a T-28 At any rate, a far more credible choice.
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Jun 2, 2014 18:14
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HEY GAL posted:You can tell the difference between a wound from powder and a wound from a white weapon because you can still see the effects of gas expansion, even during this period.
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Jun 2, 2014 19:57
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Nenonen posted:A Bridge Too Far had excellent props. Actual Sherman Fireflies (even if they ought to make only a quarter of the force, but c'mon)
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Jun 2, 2014 20:50
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Kemper Boyd posted:Most of his work is only available in Swedish. Good books, I use them for game design research a lot. I suspected as much. I was mostly interested in seeing if he had made any impact outside of Sweden. But yeah, they are good and is written in a similar style to Beevor. Also the Swedish king Karl the 10 is hilarious. During one time of his reign he had been in war with all of his neighbors except one, which is Brandenburg. Guess what he does.
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Jun 2, 2014 20:52
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Peter Englund's Poltava is a classic. I haven't read much of his other works, the short Queen Kristina biography most lately. That was pretty awesome too.
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Jun 2, 2014 21:01
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HEY GAL posted:Also, the word for maximum range is "greatest random." HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Ok, you got me there. The greatest random indeed.
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Jun 2, 2014 21:10
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[edit] Nevermind, I'm dumb
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Jun 2, 2014 23:34
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