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I can see the two missile components of Safeguard (Spartan and Sprint) from my office window. They were the counterparts to the Soviet A-35/135 system and they were probably the biggest waste of DoD dollars...ever. The system cost as much as a small country and was operational for all of 9 months. Sprint launching is one of the more unnatural looking things that there is. I'm not positive but I think it is the fastest accelerating (atmospheric) rocket/missile object ever created.
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Aug 5, 2014 19:54
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Don Gato posted:And apparently Burlington is important enough to wipe off the face of the Earth? Never guessed that the Soviets hated hippies that much. FEMA has to have a target in each state so every state feels sufficiently important and entitled to emergency preparedness funds. Phanatic posted:I thought that as well, but checking the map closer I see a lot of countervalue targets in the 2000-warhead scenario as well. Granted, there are military targets there as well, but it's still hitting every population center east of the Mississippi. I don't think it's a clear counterforce vs. countervalue split. It looks like nuclear and hydro power plants, primarily.
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Aug 5, 2014 19:54
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Lichtenstein posted:If I rammed a T-34 into a tree (a typical forest tree, not some humonguous sequoia), would it stop me? Back when I did my mandatory service in the Swedish army we were told that a tank would have no troubles with a tree so long as the tree's diameter in centimetres was equal or less then the tank's weight in tons. So our 14 tonnes Pbv 302B's could drive through 14 centimetres thick trees. No idea if there was any science behind this, but it seemed to work. 
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Aug 5, 2014 19:55
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The term you're looking for is "dick-hardeningly amazing." We should be firing one of those off during every meeting of the UN general assembly, just to emphasize that we've given the bird to physics itself, and that we can't be bothered with their piddling bullshit.
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Aug 5, 2014 20:03
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If you can get the BBC iPlayer stuff there is a really good radio documentary about Commonwealth Indian soldiers serving in the Great War.
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Aug 5, 2014 20:09
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Argas posted:It tends to get brought up that they still used repeating crossbows but the only repeating crossbows I've ever seen are those incredibly crappy ones that'd need to be poison-tipped to cause any appreciable amount of harm. On that note, does anyone know anything about Chinese repeating crossbows? A friend of mine can make them  It gets weirder. You know there are pellet bows and crossbows? There's also pellet repeating crossbows   According to Stephen Selby they were just toys for kids Stephen Selby posted:They are quite unusual. In the 1960s, Ju Yuan Hao said, there was a 'destroy all pests' campaign, where people bashed kettles continuously untill sparrows got tired and dropped to the ground exhausted. (Nothing said about what happened to the pot-bashers.) At that time, there was a huge demand for repeating crossbows and pellet corssbows to shoot rats. It is probably possible to find them in villages. Bede Dwyer posted:I wrote an article on an excavated Warring States repeating crossbow from the state of Chu. It was published in the Journal of the Society of Archer-Antiquaries. It had a magazine for 14 small arrows and shot two at a time. The mechanism was different from the more modern Zhuge Nu. It used a reciprocating rod rather than a cranked lever. Both it and the Zhuge Nu crossbows had an automatic shooting mechanism. Oh wait, here's my friend making one. Maybe there's some more worthwhile info for you? http://atarn.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=1860 Not related, but the chinese thought up a relatively easy cast bronze mechanism for their crossbows. Worth googling. http://www.atarn.org/chinese/bjng_xbow/bjng_xbow.htm I know the site gives you eyecancer, but where else can you find good stuff like that?
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Aug 5, 2014 20:47
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StashAugustine posted:Nice to see the Ruskies would take the time to nuke Lafayette, Indiana of all places. Idaho: Too Boring for Nuclear War
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Aug 5, 2014 20:56
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Idaho: Too Boring for Nuclear War Used to be lowly flyover country, now it is prestigious fallout country!
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Aug 5, 2014 21:16
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JaucheCharly posted:Oh wait, here's my friend making one. Maybe there's some more worthwhile info for you?  this one looks nice I want it. Wikipedia seems to think they were military but I can fully believe it's wrong on this. It did have this though:  Korean, from the Imjin War. In any case I could still fully expect Chinese peasants to use them. They might not be as intimidating as... well, much of anything, but I still can't say I'd want to get shot by one.
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Aug 5, 2014 21:19
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Koramei posted:In any case I could still fully expect Chinese peasants to use them. They might not be as intimidating as... well, much of anything, but I still can't say I'd want to get shot by one. 
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Aug 5, 2014 21:34
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You know how to treat illustrations. This one looks like the prod is about as thick as the man's wrist. Estimating the size, it's about man high from nock to nock. A larger composite bow like a crimean tartar bow is about ~137cm ntn and has 15mm thickness midlimb and about little more than 30mm width. This will yield about 160#. I don't know how thick your wrist is, but this looks like a loving strong prod. What kind of device could make the guy cock this with one arm and especially this weird posture? Fairbows sells one like these with up to 800#. When I spoke to a guy who know his crossbows, he meant that even 1200# wouldn't be unusual. Why so much? Their cast is awfully slow. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 21:36
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Oh yeah of course it's not a perfect representation; I actually passed over the image on first glance 'cause I thought they were mounted to the ship- but it's still representing them in use in a military context rather than just as a tool for killing vermin. HEY GAL posted:Not intimidating? This thing is the business, dude. yeah but these are more like:  my toy crossbow from when I was 8 looked more lethal than that. JaucheCharly posted:Fairbows sells one like these with up to 800#. When I spoke to a guy who know his crossbows, he meant that even 1200# wouldn't be unusual. Why so much? Their cast is awfully slow.  maybe it's those that the Chinese rebels were using, and they were using them to pierce tanks.
Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Aug 5, 2014 |
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Aug 5, 2014 21:41
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Koramei posted:
Japanese tanks only had like 30mm of armor so maybe!
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Aug 5, 2014 22:22
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A tank is kind of like a horse, horses are used as cavalry, the Mongols used cavalry, crossbows kill Mongols QED crossbows can kill tanks 
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Aug 5, 2014 22:29
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The shittiest of tanks only had 5-10 mm of armour, meant to protect against machinegun bullets, but I can't see a crossbow bolt piercing that. Maybe if you climb up on a tree and shoot a tank through a cooling vent, then it might cause some problems.
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Aug 5, 2014 23:14
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Don Gato posted:A tank is kind of like a horse, horses are used as cavalry, the Mongols used cavalry, crossbows kill Mongols QED crossbows can kill tanks I propose a tank destroyer doctrine with giant self-propelled crossbows.
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Aug 5, 2014 23:15
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Hypha posted:I propose a tank destroyer doctrine with giant self-propelled crossbows. Good old Da Vinci: 
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Aug 5, 2014 23:19
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I've heard that Chinese police have actually started to implement crossbows, either as less-than-lethal weapons for riots or for taking out suicide bombers with less risk of causing an explosion, or something. edit: here's a Telegraph article. That's a pretty legit rag, right? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...r-crossbow.html
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Aug 5, 2014 23:49
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Ensign Expendable posted:The shittiest of tanks only had 5-10 mm of armour, meant to protect against machinegun bullets, but I can't see a crossbow bolt piercing that. Maybe if you climb up on a tree and shoot a tank through a cooling vent, then it might cause some problems. Hmmm. I don't know though. The steel used in bolts is a lot harder than the lead used in most bullets, and the projectile itself is longer. And sufficiently heavy crossbows can impart a lot of energy, at least at short range.
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Aug 5, 2014 23:58
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Fangz posted:Hmmm. I don't know though. The steel used in bolts is a lot harder than the lead used in most bullets, and the projectile itself is longer. And sufficiently heavy crossbows can impart a lot of energy, at least at short range. I can't do the calculations right now but I would bet that a crossbow bolt from the biggest crossbow would need to be about ten times more powerful than it was to penetrate 5 millimeters of modern steel armor
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Aug 6, 2014 00:11
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bewbies posted:I can't do the calculations right now but I would bet that a crossbow bolt from the biggest crossbow would need to be about ten times more powerful than it was to penetrate 5 millimeters of modern steel armor Hmmm. http://historum.com/war-military-history/37754-kinetic-energy-ancient-modern-weapons.html quote:Medieval windlass-pulled arbales - 578.25 [ft-lbs] This other arbalest was tested at 700-800 J... http://www.computer.org.ge/Projects/Gogi/Arbalest.htm Wikipedia says the 7N6M 5.45×39mm cartridge used in the AK74 can penetrate 6mm of St3 steel plate at 300 m. It has an energy of 1328 J. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5.45%C3%9739mm It seems plausible to me that a ballista can be conceivably built to penetrate 5mm. Fangz fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 00:20
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Fangz posted:Hmmm. This is just me guessing but I would bet a giant arbalest bolt to be 4-5 times the diameter of a ~.22 rifle round. So you're delivering a fraction of the penetrative energy to the target and your muzzle energy is a fraction of the rifle. You might have a chance of deforming a modern 5mm RHA plate but there is absolutely no way that bolt is penetrating.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:huh, I'll be damned. I was under the impression that it was introduced post-war. Color me corrected. There was an interesting anecdote in Ken Burns' Baseball where, during a publicity tour by the Yankees in Japan during the '30s, a 19 year old pitcher managed to strike out two of the greatest hitters in baseball history, Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig, in a row. Sadly, the pitcher was later drafted into the armed forces and was killed during the War when his ship was torpedoed.
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Aug 6, 2014 00:48
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Acebuckeye13 posted:There was an interesting anecdote in Ken Burns' Baseball where, during a publicity tour by the Yankees in Japan during the '30s, a 19 year old pitcher managed to strike out two of the greatest hitters in baseball history, Babe Ruth and Lou Gherig, in a row. Sadly, the pitcher was later drafted into the armed forces and was killed during the War when his ship was torpedoed. And then there was Moe Berg, who went on that publicity tour and just "happened" to take a movie camera with him and video taped much of the Tokyo skyline and environs.
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Aug 6, 2014 01:21
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sullat posted:And then there was Moe Berg, who went on that publicity tour and just "happened" to take a movie camera with him and video taped much of the Tokyo skyline and environs. And later he almost shot Heisenberg Are there any good books on him, the scraps of his OSS activities I know of are fascinating.
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Aug 6, 2014 01:27
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Ensign Expendable posted:You might bend the gun barrel, which is why ramming is performed with the gun barrel up (or at least elevated and to the side in an emergency). If you were going fast enough, the crew wouldn't be very happy, but a typical tree can't stop a tank. Reconnaissance reports for armoured units actually include the diameter of the typical tree to see if you can drive straight through a forest without any of this pesky "roads" business. Tanks are certainly pretty powerful, and they can have surprising mobility through woods, and can generally knock down a sapling (i.e. a tree under 10" in diameter), but it should be noted that they're still going to have to drive around most mature trees. And the problems with trees increase as they become more densely congregated. Here in Oregon, 2/3 of trees are larger than that, and they're also quite tall and densely planted - I don't think that even an Abrams would have much luck pushing its way through our woods. Here's a video of what looks like an Abrams pushing its way through a ~10" tree. It has some problems doing it, though it eventually manages it. But if it has problems with that, then there's little chance that it's going to push through a tree that is half-again as wide, and many times heavier, like 1/3 of trees in Oregon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wimFnubzrQ Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 01:39
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what if it shot the tree
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Aug 6, 2014 01:45
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Koramei posted:what if it shot the tree the cameraman is gonna have some bad splinters
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Aug 6, 2014 01:56
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Koramei posted:what if it shot the tree Well if the tree was gay and black then logically speaking
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Aug 6, 2014 02:27
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Koramei posted:what if it shot the tree A while back, someone posted a great transcript of tank communications from the Pacific Theater; at one point an officer criticizes another tank for wasting a shell on an enemy machine gun. You're not going to have enough ammunition to blast through a forest.
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Aug 6, 2014 03:23
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Argas posted:It tends to get brought up that they still used repeating crossbows but the only repeating crossbows I've ever seen are those incredibly crappy ones that'd need to be poison-tipped to cause any appreciable amount of harm. On that note, does anyone know anything about Chinese repeating crossbows? I've asked this question many times myself. And I've never found a convincing answer. And I can't find any good data on the toxicology of the poison. They say it's based on aconite, but all the data on how nasty it is was from oral reports. As is, the CKNs that I've seen bandied around look like they have anaemic draw weights, and are unlikely to do more than break skin, let alone punch through bone and blood the big blood vessels you need to kill a man. I suspect most chinese crossbows were of the more conventional type.
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Aug 6, 2014 04:19
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:A while back, someone posted a great transcript of tank communications from the Pacific Theater; at one point an officer criticizes another tank for wasting a shell on an enemy machine gun. You're not going to have enough ammunition to blast through a forest. Touching on this, were the more experienced units in WWII (or other wars, I suppose) given more ammunition for their tanks? Like, lets say a tank is nominally designed to carry 30 shells. If the combat life expectancy of the tank is measured in minutes, it doesn't make sense to load the thing up with the full thirty when it's only likely to fire a few before being destroyed itself. Was there a policy of deliberately under-loading the vehicles given to inexperienced units? I'm thinking particularly of the USSR because of the sheer number of tanks destroyed during Kursk and the like.
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Aug 6, 2014 05:00
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bewbies posted:I can't do the calculations right now but I would bet that a crossbow bolt from the biggest crossbow would need to be about ten times more powerful than it was to penetrate 5 millimeters of modern steel armor Time to design an APCBC crossbow bolt. Or maybe go HEAT? I wonder if you can have a HEAT warhead small enough to be fired from a crossbow.
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Aug 6, 2014 05:05
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Slavvy posted:Touching on this, were the more experienced units in WWII (or other wars, I suppose) given more ammunition for their tanks? Like, lets say a tank is nominally designed to carry 30 shells. If the combat life expectancy of the tank is measured in minutes, it doesn't make sense to load the thing up with the full thirty when it's only likely to fire a few before being destroyed itself. Was there a policy of deliberately under-loading the vehicles given to inexperienced units? I'm thinking particularly of the USSR because of the sheer number of tanks destroyed during Kursk and the like. I'd think that unless the shortage was really acute, it'd be more problematic to have surviving tanks of those first few minutes run out of ammo than to lose the shells in the knocked out ones.
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Aug 6, 2014 05:25
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I tried to start at the beginning and read my way through, but this thread is a juggernaut of words! I have a request. I've learned about WW1 & 2, the Spanish-American war, and the American Civil War. Despite this, I know NOTHING about the Napoleonic Wars. Why? Where? Who? My knowledge is literally "something something Waterloo." What are some of the cooler stories from the war? What did Napoleon do that made him such a great General, organizationally and tactically? What was some of the general lead up to the whole thing? I'd love some Info from you guys, but a book recommendation or two would be appreciated as well.
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Aug 6, 2014 05:26
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Capoeira Capybara posted:I tried to start at the beginning and read my way through, but this thread is a juggernaut of words! I'm no expert on those wars, but I will say that Waterloo is one of my favourite movies of all time and worth watching to anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars. I can't comment on its accuracy - what do the thread regulars think?
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Aug 6, 2014 05:37
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Capoeira Capybara posted:I tried to start at the beginning and read my way through, but this thread is a juggernaut of words! Good news, this is actually the second iteration! The first one is goldmined and has close to 15,000 posts, so you better get to it.
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Aug 6, 2014 06:07
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JaucheCharly, how would one pronounce the whole "800#" thing? I use metric and kilos instead of silly inches and pounds, if that helps.  Sorry if you mentioned it before and I missed it. 
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Aug 6, 2014 06:19
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Azran posted:JaucheCharly, how would one pronounce the whole "800#" thing? I use metric and kilos instead of silly inches and pounds, if that helps. 800 pounds I presume.
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Aug 6, 2014 06:22
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Yeah, it's 800 pounds, or in real units, 3500 Newtons.
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Aug 6, 2014 06:36
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.