Cyrano4747 posted:Only fatties I saw in that album were Russians. In those pictures most of them were normal looking, albeit too healthy tall and well fed for the eras they were repping. Quite a few butter faced dudes though. But it wasn't that bad. And I learned too that Russians didn't do WW1 large scale era stuff until quite recently too and an entire region of Spain does it. I suspect the British D-Day guys might even be TA guys or British Army dudes just interested in the History. Interesting link thanks for sharing.
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Jul 11, 2014 14:46
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Chillyrabbit posted:I thought it was possible to disassemble and reassemble the rifle and make it fire with the bolt backwards that meant the bolt can fly back and knock you in the face. Only if you're not paying any attention at all. There is a huge visual difference between a properly assembled and an improperly assembled Ross.
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Jul 11, 2014 14:59
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I wonder, given that there is so much penetration table talk, is there any way to compare the HE shells used by the various parties in WWII? The sense is that bigger numbers are better, but by how much? Is a 152mm basically twice as effective than a 76mm? How do German shells compare to Soviets and the other allies? Was there any innovation over the course of the war? Did it make any difference, really?
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Jul 11, 2014 15:16
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From what I remember when I was reading shell arguments in World of Tanks a long long time ago, basically high velocity guns (like the Panther's 75mm) will have less explosive power than lower velocity guns of a similar caliber (like the early Sherman's 75mm, or the Panzer IV's 75mm) because the shell needs a thicker casing to withstand the stronger forces acting on it, leaving less room for explosive filler even in High Explosive shells. Incidentally this also means that when the Sherman got upgunned from 75mm to 76mm, it actually lost effectiveness against infantry since the new gun required a new shell that could pack in less explosive filler. Somebody else can probably talk more about how a bigger shell relates to a smaller shell, though.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:33
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Question for reenactors: What do you do when reenacting Glorious Battle of Random Rock and some guys on The Losing SideTM decide to keep 'fighting' instead of going down like chumps the way they're supposed to?
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Jul 11, 2014 15:45
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Tank projectiles mainly act on a formula involving amount of force applied over an area, until you run into the explosive-formed-penetrator rounds that blast molten metal through the armor like a plasma torch. HE rounds explode outside the tank and most of the effectiveness is just rebounded sideways without doing much more than rattling the gently caress out of the crew. Examples exist where an HE round straight up caved in the side of the tank but mainly HE was used against non-tank targets unless it was something like a 152mm round against a light tank. Force is deflected laterally from the point of impact APHE rounds are supposed to blow up after penetrating some or all of the tank's armor. You can naturally imagine how much uncertainty there would be in that process. If the round explodes outside the tank it's basically as effective as an HE round. If it passes all the way through the tank it's a useless holepuncher. APCR (Composite-Rigid) rounds just poke holes in armor, little if any explosive payload. Great if you hit something/one inside the tank or if the round fragments and becomes a bunch of shrapnel inside the enclosed area of the tank. Bad if you just poke a hole through the tank without hitting anything.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:47
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my dad posted:Question for reenactors: What do you do when reenacting Glorious Battle of Random Rock and some guys on The Losing SideTM decide to keep 'fighting' instead of going down like chumps the way they're supposed to? Edit: Or you "die" when you run out of ammunition, you get tired, or if you're pretending to swordfight and your opponent looks like they did something really cool and the tourists wouldn't believe it if it didn't "kill you." So if some god damned twink with an earring another woman in disguise who works for Wallenstein lands a lucky hit on me, I had better lie down. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 15:53
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Fangz posted:I wonder, given that there is so much penetration table talk, is there any way to compare the HE shells used by the various parties in WWII? You're dealing with a roughly stretched egg-shaped explosive filler inside of the shell, how much is determined by the thickness of the shell wall (Which has to endure being fired. This is why mortar rounds have more explosive filler for their size than an artillery round of the same caliber. And bombs, of course) so you're dealing with the volume of a cylinder, roughly, so the math is A=2πrh+2πr2. Again, the explosive charge in the 152mm HE round may or may not be twice as wide as the 76mm one (lots of factors into this), but it's likely going to be a good bit more than twice as big.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:53
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Pornographic Memory posted:From what I remember when I was reading shell arguments in World of Tanks a long long time ago, basically high velocity guns (like the Panther's 75mm) will have less explosive power than lower velocity guns of a similar caliber (like the early Sherman's 75mm, or the Panzer IV's 75mm) because the shell needs a thicker casing to withstand the stronger forces acting on it, leaving less room for explosive filler even in High Explosive shells. Incidentally this also means that when the Sherman got upgunned from 75mm to 76mm, it actually lost effectiveness against infantry since the new gun required a new shell that could pack in less explosive filler. Can't you just put less propelling charge into shell, thereby reducing it's velocity? It's not like HE shell needs to travel fast or have high kinetic energy after flying 2km. e: did some quick math to check volume difference between 152mm and 76mm shell, with same height. Let's assume shell is 100% explosive cylinder: 76mm cylinder has exactly 1/4 volume of 152mm one. Double the caliber ~quadruple the mass. alex314 fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 16:01
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FAUXTON posted:HE rounds explode outside the tank and most of the effectiveness is just rebounded sideways without doing much more than rattling the gently caress out of the crew. Examples exist where an HE round straight up caved in the side of the tank but mainly HE was used against non-tank targets unless it was something like a 152mm round against a light tank. Force is deflected laterally from the point of impact 152mm rounds were highly effective against more than just light tanks.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:27
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I shouldn't have chosen the 152mm  out of all diameters I chose the one where they used HE to just crush enemy supertanks like beer cans.
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Jul 11, 2014 16:55
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Fangz posted:I wonder, given that there is so much penetration table talk, is there any way to compare the HE shells used by the various parties in WWII? Way more than twice You can also find lots of good technical data on DTIC, this one compares Soviet HE-frag to American: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/011426.pdf
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Jul 11, 2014 17:01
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Any particular reason that 76mm cannons were so much more effective at the AP job than 75mm cannons? Obviously even similarly sized cannons can have different performance (just look at all those 20mm airplane cannons) but that +1mm seems like a weird detail.
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Jul 11, 2014 17:02
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Pimpmust posted:Any particular reason that 76mm cannons were so much more effective at the AP job than 75mm cannons? Obviously even similarly sized cannons can have different performance (just look at all those 20mm airplane cannons) but that +1mm seems like a weird detail. Was it higher velocity?
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Jul 11, 2014 17:05
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Pimpmust posted:Any particular reason that 76mm cannons were so much more effective at the AP job than 75mm cannons? Obviously even similarly sized cannons can have different performance (just look at all those 20mm airplane cannons) but that +1mm seems like a weird detail. Caliber is only one part of the equation, muzzle velocity and shell design also affect penetration.
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Jul 11, 2014 17:09
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alex314 posted:Can't you just put less propelling charge into shell, thereby reducing it's velocity? It's not like HE shell needs to travel fast or have high kinetic energy after flying 2km. Yeah, why couldn't they do that? Did it have something to do with the shape of the gun or something?
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Jul 11, 2014 17:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:True technological overmatch in wars is damned rare. What few examples I can think of are generally either naval in nature - probably due to the relatively low number of fielded units magnifying tech related advantages - or in really unique situations like the Spanish conquest of the Americas. In the latter case it's honestly probably more about lack of horses than it is the flashy stuff like steel and gunpowder. I think most of the examples of complete technological overmatch happened during the Victorian era - we have got the Maxim gun and they have not, and all that. As far as I know, before that point military technology was never really enough to allow land-based armies to reliably defeat much larger armies (even in the case of the Aztecs, native allies and disease had more to do with their defeat than military technology by itself.)
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Jul 11, 2014 17:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:Short answer, not really. Here and there maybe some localized advantages that shifted a close battle just enough, but nothing truly decisive. There were a few early battles where superior recon was a big help for example. What about machine guns, in terms of sheer weight of numbers at the outbreak? All right, Germany having over 10,000 while the BEF and France had a few hundred each is less of a direct disparity than it seems when you consider that the machine gun at the time was bulky enough for it to be pretty much an exclusively defensive weapon; but then, most of the battles fought in 1914 saw the Allies on the defensive. In the opening exchanges the Allies did plenty of damage with two machine guns per battalion and the BEF firing rifles at 15 rounds per minute at Germans advancing in close order; surely with more machine guns they could at least have made the retreat from Mons a considerably more casual affair than it turned out to be? Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 17:48
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I remember reading a guy's memoirs somewhere where he talks about using a SU-152 to block a road against a Panther column supported by infantry, and it ends up knocking out the lot of them while the supporting Russian infantry kept their German counterparts suppressed. He also mentions that the only casualties his unit sustained were from broken glass caused by the shockwave of the gun firing smashing the windows in some of the buildings his infantry were hiding in. ETA: On the subject of bigger HE shells remember these three words: "square-cube law".
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Jul 11, 2014 17:59
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Length of the barrel and a larger propellant charge makes for a higher-velocity shell. Case in point: As you can see labeled in the picture, this is a late-model Sherman with an M3 75mm tank gun. The 75mm had debuted a few years earlier in 1942, and at the time was an excellent dual-purpose (DP) gun that could be used against both tanks and infantry with great effect. By the time D-Day came around, however, German tanks had been increasingly up-armored, and the 75mm could only penetrate the infamous Panther tank from the front with a very precise and lucky shot into the base of the Panther's turret, which (Due to the design of the Panther's gun mantlet) would actually ricochet the rounds back down into the Panther's thin top armor. It still had great anti-infantry performance, and still did well against the more common Panzer IVs and StuG IIIs, but the lack of effectiveness against heavier German armor caused the US to rush to deploy more potently armed Shermans with a 76mm gun.  As you can see, the barrel length of the M4A1(76) is much greater than that of the M4A3, which enabled the larger and longer shells to reach a much greater velocity and (Potentially) enable them to penetrate German armor. As it turned out, however, the 76 was an improvement but its anti-armor performance was still lacking, and the cost of increasing the shell's velocity had the side effect of (As previously mentioned) reducing the amount of HE in the shell itself, reducing its performance against infantry. In addition, the gun had a tendency to kick up a tremendous amount of dust and smoke after firing, preventing the crew from determining the effect of their shot until the smoke cleared. As a result, some units, such as the 4th Armored Division, actually refused to upgrade to the 76mm Sherman for several months after it was introduced, preferring to stick with their older 75mm equipped tanks until they were ordered to accept them. Nevertheless, a huge number of 76mm Shermans were sent to Europe, and by the end of the war roughly half of all Shermans in the US Army were equipped with 76mm guns.  The British were much more aware of the German tendency to upgrade their tanks with better armor and guns than the Americans, and as such in preparation for the Normandy landings set about mounting their exceptionally potent 17 pounder Anti-Tank gun to their Lend-Lease Shermans, creating a platform that could duel with even the most heavily armored German tanks at range and come out ahead. Despite being the same caliber as the Sherman 76, the "Firefly" featured a much longer barrel and a huge shell, which enabled their guns to reach such a high velocity that they were able to punch through nearly any German armor at range. The downside, however, was that the Firefly had practically zero anti-infantry performance, as the shell carried relatively little HE and its anti-infantry bow machine-gun had to be replaced in order to carry more ammunition. In many cases, British Commanders would actually leave their Fireflies behind as they engaged German positions, only bringing them up if a suitable target (Such as a tank or a bunker) arrived.  (Sorry for the watermark, was too lazy to find an actual side-profile view of a 105) The opposite side of the coin were tanks like the M4A3(105), which mounted a 105mm howitzer shell. With a shorter barrel and shells built with a lower propellant charge, the 105 had a relatively low velocity that enabled the shells to carry a MUCH greater amount of HE than the 76mm or 75mm. As such, 105mm Shermans were in great demand throughout the war as they could blast through German positions other tanks would have a great deal of trouble going through, even as their anti-armor performance was comparatively weak. The Soviet ISU-152 was pretty much the end extent of this, mounting a 152mm howitzer that carried enough HE that it could simply blast tanks apart in lieu of actually penetrating them.
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Jul 11, 2014 18:09
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Where did the figure of 3:1 odds being required in contemporary warfare to be able to reliably overcome a defender, or even 10:1 against a heavily fortified one, come from? I keep hearing it come up in various mil-hist discussions and I even use it as a rule of thumb when gaming, but I don't know the context.
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Jul 11, 2014 18:25
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alex314 posted:Can't you just put less propelling charge into shell, thereby reducing it's velocity? It's not like HE shell needs to travel fast or have high kinetic energy after flying 2km. It's also about the fuse. My old sergeant joked that the modern fuses on artillery make the shell barely scratch the grass, the projectile doesn't make a large crater, although the charge is large. It's the other way around for the old AT ammo, the fuses weren't that sensible, so that the projectile doesn't explode on the armor, but inside. I think that's somewhere in EE's archive about a comparison early russian tanks vs. UK or french tanks. Not related, but check out this picture with shells still sticking in the KV-1's hull 
Power Khan fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 18:25
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Tomn posted:I think most of the examples of complete technological overmatch happened during the Victorian era - we have got the Maxim gun and they have not, and all that. As far as I know, before that point military technology was never really enough to allow land-based armies to reliably defeat much larger armies (even in the case of the Aztecs, native allies and disease had more to do with their defeat than military technology by itself.) Nah, the really bad instances of tech overmatch happen in S. America during the conquest. The Battle of Cajamarca is probably one of the more extreme examples you can find, with a force of about 160 routing a force of ~3,000-10,000 depending on whose numbers you believe. The spanish only had 16 guns and 4 (very small) cannons, but the 60-odd horse played a huge role in terrorizing and routing the Inca, who really didn't have much familiarity with them. The net effect was devastating, yielding a completely lop sided battle. But yes, one could also argue for similar overmatch in some colonial battles in the Victorian era. The larger point remains that tech overmatch is only ever really a thing when either the numbers involved are so small that the individual "unit" and its equipment is magnified in importance to the extreme (a case most often seen in naval warfare due to the expense of boats) or when the opposing sides are operating in fundamentally different military/technological eras in some manner, something usually only seen in colonial conflicts. Once the armies involved come from even nominally peer nations the issue of who has the strictly better gun, tank, airplane, artillery, etc. really recedes into the background behind other factors. Trin Tragula posted:What about machine guns, in terms of sheer weight of numbers at the outbreak? All right, Germany having over 10,000 while the BEF and France had a few hundred each is less of a direct disparity than it seems when you consider that the machine gun at the time was bulky enough for it to be pretty much an exclusively defensive weapon; but then, most of the battles fought in 1914 saw the Allies on the defensive. In the opening exchanges the Allies did plenty of damage with two machine guns per battalion and the BEF firing rifles at 15 rounds per minute at Germans advancing in close order; surely with more machine guns they could at least have made the retreat from Mons a considerably more casual affair than it turned out to be? At that point you're not talking differences between equipment, which was the original question, but raw numbers which is a whole different issue. Of course more of something is better than less of it. The MG ca. 1914 is actually an excellent example of this, as most of the major belligerents were using essentially the same base design thanks to the business acumen of Mr. Maxim.
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Jul 11, 2014 19:42
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JaucheCharly posted:It's also about the fuse. My old sergeant joked that the modern fuses on artillery make the shell barely scratch the grass, the projectile doesn't make a large crater, although the charge is large. It's the other way around for the old AT ammo, the fuses weren't that sensible, so that the projectile doesn't explode on the armor, but inside. I think that's somewhere in EE's archive about a comparison early russian tanks vs. UK or french tanks. Actually in some ways the picture is related, though it's really more a thing of naval warfare than tank warfare, but incomplete penetrations are definitely a thing. If a shell does make it through the armor, but not fully intact, then the bursting charge may not go off, which would result in reduced fragmentation and damage inside of the tank. Of course shells without a bursting charge didn't have this issue (and penned better typically due to increased structural rigidity), but it was felt that solid shot didn't do as much when it penetrated. For naval vessels this was one of the things that made the US armor schemes of WWII so tough as while an enemy shell might get through the belt armor, it likely would have shattered and thus not done much to the softer inner bits of the vessel. Later on they realized that with the thickening of armor, a solid shot shell that penetrates into a tank is going to be bringing along bits of that tank's armor as spalling. That combined with subcaliber rounds resulted in the bursting charges going away. (Oh and premature detonations of the bursting charge was a thing too. The US AT shells were plagued by that for while. The US really had some serious fusing issues during WWII.) Taerkar fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 21:35
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Pimpmust posted:Any particular reason that 76mm cannons were so much more effective at the AP job than 75mm cannons? Obviously even similarly sized cannons can have different performance (just look at all those 20mm airplane cannons) but that +1mm seems like a weird detail. It is just coincidental that the calibers were so close. The shells themselves were completely different, the 76mm shell casing was much larger and carried a lot more propellant.  These are German shells (I think) but you get the idea. The 75x243 round is comparable to the US 75mm round, 75x495 round is comparable to the US 76mm round. Much larger charge = much higher MV = much more penetration, but as has been mentioned the shell couldn't hold as much HE and so lost some HE performance as a result.
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Jul 11, 2014 21:42
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Austria would have lost anyways the Austro-Prussian war even if they had the same rifles, but didn't the Dreyse needle gun have a meaningful impact on battles?
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Jul 11, 2014 22:09
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The 75x350R on the right side is the US 75mm gun round. The 75x243 was for the German 75L24 used as a support howitzer (Early PZ IV's and StuGs, late-war Pz IIIs)
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Jul 11, 2014 22:10
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Pimpmust posted:Any particular reason that 76mm cannons were so much more effective at the AP job than 75mm cannons? Obviously even similarly sized cannons can have different performance (just look at all those 20mm airplane cannons) but that +1mm seems like a weird detail. The US 75mm was a gun designed to have a good mix of HE performance and penetration, using a shell originally designed to be used with the M1897 field gun. The UK OQF 75mm was a 6-pounder bored out to fire the US 75mm shell to get a better HE shell. So the 75mms are based on shells for the good old Canon de 75 modele 1897, designed for its HE shell. The US had two major 76mm AFV guns. The M10 had a 3-inch gun, dating back to the 3-inch M1918 AA gun, which had a higher velocity from its 50 caliber barrel, since its design lineage went back to coastal defense guns and velocity makes it easier to hit planes. The other 76mm was the 76mm gun M1, which was a new design intended for tank use firing the same shell as the M10's 3-inch gun from a different case. So for the US' case it's just an accident of history that 75mm shells went back to field guns and the 76mm shells went back to coastal defense guns. For the UK, as mentioned before the 75mm gun was a 6-pounder bored out for a US 75mm shell, so again it's a field gun shell, not a high velocity shell design. Their big 76mm design was the 17-pounder, which was a purpose built anti-tank gun, and fired a 76.2 mm projectile with a ridiculous amount of propellant behind it. This was a very high velocity design. They also had the 77mm HV gun, which was a weird thing that was actually 76.2 mm (using the 17-pounder's projectile and their 3-inch AA gun's cartridge) but named differently to avoid confusion that got used in the Comet tank. So basically the UK and US both used metric french shells for their lower velocity guns and imperial measurements for their higher velocity stuff that they did themselves.
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Jul 11, 2014 22:58
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Hogge Wild posted:Austria would have lost anyways the Austro-Prussian war even if they had the same rifles, but didn't the Dreyse needle gun have a meaningful impact on battles? Well, yes, it did... That's fairly non-debatable. A fun fact about that war is that because it ended just as the Prussian vanguard was entering souther Bohemia, which was mobilizing its militias, there was for several following decades a sentiment that the Prussians would have been defeated if only the cowardly Habsburgs would have lasted long enough to let the Prussian advance be shattered against the steel wall of the Bohemian heartland. It became a major factor in local patriotism and in nationalist literature during the final years of the Austrian monarchy.
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Jul 11, 2014 23:27
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It's important to understand that the technical differences between tanks did not really manifest as significant factors in the operational sense in WW2. Most tank battles were decided by who shot first, because whoever did shoot first gained a significant advantage and tended to put the victim in a reactive death-spiral because buttoned tanks don't see all that well. As a general rule, the defender in tank battles tended to be the one to shoot first so they had a significant advantage. This bears out in AFV losses through various phases of the campaign in the west.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:08
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Speaking of tank-chat, I've always wondered about the accuracy of fixed-weapon assault vehicles like the StuG. It seems like having to physically move the vehicle to travere the barrel horizontally would be a huge hassle but in a lot of cases (and in a lot of tabletop games) they function almost as well as tanks but cheaper. It seems like any situation where you're not sitting in a fixed position or firing on one, the static gun would be a huge liability. How did they really do against enemy tanks? I just have this image of the tank just displacing and rotating the turret to hit faster than the StuG could move, line up, and fire.
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Jul 12, 2014 01:46
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I imagine that they'd rather only engage tanks from a defended and likely camouflaged hull down position, enabling them to get that crucial first shot off. Then the enemy tank with the rattled crew would have to recover from the panic, wait for any smoke or other airborne detritus to settle, find what was shooting at them, calculate a targeting solution, fire, blah blah blah. I imagine that they weren't used much offensively for anything other than stationary targets.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:00
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vintagepurple posted:Speaking of tank-chat, I've always wondered about the accuracy of fixed-weapon assault vehicles like the StuG. It seems like having to physically move the vehicle to travere the barrel horizontally would be a huge hassle but in a lot of cases (and in a lot of tabletop games) they function almost as well as tanks but cheaper. It seems like any situation where you're not sitting in a fixed position or firing on one, the static gun would be a huge liability. How did they really do against enemy tanks? I just have this image of the tank just displacing and rotating the turret to hit faster than the StuG could move, line up, and fire. While hull-mounted guns are a bit of a disadvantage(any time they had to turn to traverse the gun, the gun would shake and be unusable for some time), the fact of having AFVs available to support infantry was a big boon. There's a reason every country tried to find ways to stick tanks/tank-like vehicles in with their infantry formations with varying degrees of success.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:02
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vintagepurple posted:Speaking of tank-chat, I've always wondered about the accuracy of fixed-weapon assault vehicles like the StuG. It seems like having to physically move the vehicle to travere the barrel horizontally would be a huge hassle but in a lot of cases (and in a lot of tabletop games) they function almost as well as tanks but cheaper. It seems like any situation where you're not sitting in a fixed position or firing on one, the static gun would be a huge liability. How did they really do against enemy tanks? I just have this image of the tank just displacing and rotating the turret to hit faster than the StuG could move, line up, and fire. Those vehicles fight as mobile AT artillery. They pick a nice spot, fire, and then move before the enemy finds them. Originally turretless tanks (StuG, AT-1, etc) were supposed to reinforce infantry, so the target wouldn't move much. Also the guns weren't completely fixed, they had some leeway horizontally. The only one that I know of that was fully fixed was the hull gun on the B1, and the driver had a special turning gear to finely turn the tank.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:08
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Soviet doctrine was indeed to use limited traverse tank destroyers exclusively on the defense, especially to cover flanks from counterattack. I know the Germans tried to use Ferdinands offensively at Kursk... resulting in a dismal failure.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:50
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Ensign Expendable posted:Also the guns weren't completely fixed, they had some leeway horizontally. The STuG as an example. quote:Military Intelligence Service, Artillery in the Desert (Department of War, 25 November 1942), p.19, says depression 5°, elevation 20°, traverse only 20° on a captured sample.
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Jul 12, 2014 02:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:The Battle of Cajamarca is probably one of the more extreme examples you can find, with a force of about 160 routing a force of ~3,000-10,000 depending on whose numbers you believe. The spanish only had 16 guns and 4 (very small) cannons, but the 60-odd horse played a huge role in terrorizing and routing the Inca, who really didn't have much familiarity with them. The net effect was devastating, yielding a completely lop sided battle. Spanish success at Cajamarca was due partly to their cavalry and arms, but mostly to the Inca believing they were going to a peaceful meeting. Atahualpa met Pizarro within the narrow confines of the city with only a fraction of his army, and he instructed those retainers to leave their weapons outside. Contemporary Spanish sources state pretty openly that Pizarro knew that he couldn't hope to defeat the Inca in an actual battle, so he hoped to replicate what Cortez had done with Montezuma by betraying the Inca and seizing Atahualpa by coup de main. The Spanish attack took the Inca completely by surprise and Atahualpa was captured immediately, and his chief councilors were all killed defending him or captured with him, and his leaderless army fled in disarray. The vast majority of his army wasn't even in the city and didn't so much as see a Spaniard before taking flight.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:51
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EvanSchenck posted:Spanish success at Cajamarca was due partly to their cavalry and arms, but mostly to the Inca believing they were going to a peaceful meeting. Atahualpa met Pizarro within the narrow confines of the city with only a fraction of his army, and he instructed those retainers to leave their weapons outside. Contemporary Spanish sources state pretty openly that Pizarro knew that he couldn't hope to defeat the Inca in an actual battle, so he hoped to replicate what Cortez had done with Montezuma by betraying the Inca and seizing Atahualpa by coup de main. The Spanish attack took the Inca completely by surprise and Atahualpa was captured immediately, and his chief councilors were all killed defending him or captured with him, and his leaderless army fled in disarray. The vast majority of his army wasn't even in the city and didn't so much as see a Spaniard before taking flight. They still killed a few thousand people with a few hundred. No matter the circumstances that's an ugly piece of work, especially within the limitations of the arms they had. Either way it was just an example of how rare true technological overmatch is.
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Jul 12, 2014 05:12
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Panzeh posted:It's important to understand that the technical differences between tanks did not really manifest as significant factors in the operational sense in WW2. Most tank battles were decided by who shot first, because whoever did shoot first gained a significant advantage and tended to put the victim in a reactive death-spiral because buttoned tanks don't see all that well. As a general rule, the defender in tank battles tended to be the one to shoot first so they had a significant advantage. This bears out in AFV losses through various phases of the campaign in the west. Arguably that about limited sight still holds true, with "superior optics" playing a huge part in more recent tank battles (well that and massive air superiority  ).
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Jul 12, 2014 07:45
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Frostwerks posted:I imagine that they'd rather only engage tanks from a defended and likely camouflaged hull down position, enabling them to get that crucial first shot off. Then the enemy tank with the rattled crew would have to recover from the panic, wait for any smoke or other airborne detritus to settle, find what was shooting at them, calculate a targeting solution, fire, blah blah blah. I imagine that they weren't used much offensively for anything other than stationary targets. The best example of this are the Swedish Cold War tanks built basically only for defense. Sticking the gun in the hull means that can get away with not needing a turret so it's got a super low profile perfect for ambushes and hull down defenses. (I allow to join tank chat if it's one of my :tearflag: countries)
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Jul 12, 2014 07:46
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