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JaucheCharly posted:A friend on mine posted this a while ago, it's a list of ordnance, weapons and tools left by the Ottomans after the defeat near Vienna in 1683. Taken from Fire bullets?
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Sep 22, 2014 20:49
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Azran posted:Fire bullets? Maybe this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heated_shot
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Sep 22, 2014 20:53
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JaucheCharly posted:A friend on mine posted this a while ago, it's a list of ordnance, weapons and tools left by the Ottomans after the defeat near Vienna in 1683. Taken from 200 000 grenade launching muskets? 
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Sep 22, 2014 20:53
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They probably mean ammo for these. Also featuring: 10 tons of grease and tallow. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 21:02
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It's pre-industrial era so it could simply be that there was a pasha who manufactured hand grenades of brass or bronze instead of iron, not because it was better but because he could get copper and zinc or tin on a discount. Then again it's an Austrian inventory saying they were brass but maybe they were bronze or copper or unobtainium? It could also be propaganda. What were 17th century hand grenades like, anyway? Even with the range of the muskets of the day wouldn't you get shot as you got to throwing distance and started to light the fuse? Or were they just firecrackers?
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Sep 22, 2014 21:03
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We got some here in the military museum. About the size of a pomegranate (that's probably no accident with the name, one way or another?), but made of glass. Nasty, thick glass
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Sep 22, 2014 21:09
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meatbag posted:200 000 grenade launching muskets? That's the weight in quintals, not the number. So, 20,000,000 kg or 20,000 tons worth of grenade launching muskets. Maybe they are just very heavy? 
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Sep 22, 2014 21:12
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Can't be. What would you do with 100 tons of empty wool sacks? Oo
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Sep 22, 2014 21:17
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JaucheCharly posted:Can't be. What would you do with 100 tons of empty wool sacks? Oo
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Sep 22, 2014 21:48
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Probably baskets of wool
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Sep 22, 2014 21:50
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100 Years Ago On the west of the Western Front, the French and Germans both try to outflank each other at the same time over the same ground, and the First Battle of Picardy ensues, with mutually unsatisfactory results as the East-going Zax meets the West-going Zax. The old French Second Army (last seen scrabbling around south of Verdun) has already been split up; some elements are distributed between the First and Third Armies, who have both shuffled over a bit, and the remainder (along with General Castelnau and his staff) have headed west to join up with fresh reserve troops and form a new Second Army. They attack together with General Manoury's Sixth Army; annoyingly, General von Falkenhayn has created his own 6th Army and sent it to the same place, just to annoy poor schmucks 100 years later who are trying to work out exactly who was where and doing what to who. This is also another interesting day for the German navy; Scharnhost and Gneisenau appear in Tahiti, seeking to confiscate the coal stockpile in the port of Papeete. They sink an ancient French gunboat, some local ships, and then give the town a good shoeing, but the French gendarmes quickly set fire to the coal and deny it to them; Admiral von Spee exits stage left as soon as the situation becomes apparent. It's done his men's morale some good, but he's also let the Allies know where he is and where he might be going next. Meanwhile, Emden pays a stealthy visit to Madras, quickly and effectively shelling a number of petrol tanks and then leaving soon after the shore batteries start to answer back. This is all mildly annoying; however, something rather more serious has happened in the North Sea. Three older cruisers are out on patrol early in the morning, looking for trouble, when they happen to cross paths with a German ship. Unfortunately for them, the ship is U-9, which immediately dives to stalk the patrol. When its first torpedo hits, the assumption is that the ship has hit a mine, and its fellows close to give assistance. U-9 quickly corrects this impression, and very soon after that all three ships are confusing fish on the seabed. (In the category of "you couldn't make it up if you tried", one midshipman has managed to get himself torpedoed three times in the same day; he abandoned the first ship and narrowly avoided being drowned by the suction as she went down, then was just boarding the second when that one was torpedoed, so swam to the third and this verse was the same as the first. He was eventually pulled out of the sea, unconscious and draped over a large piece of driftwood, by a Dutch trawler.)
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Sep 22, 2014 22:32
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JaucheCharly posted:Can't be. What would you do with 100 tons of empty wool sacks? Oo Sandbags?
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Sep 22, 2014 22:35
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AceRimmer posted:Any idea what sacks of wool made of trees (?) are supposed to be? As I'm guessing the original document was in German, I'm going to say it's almost certainly cotton. Cotton in German is Baumwolle which, if you break it down into its constituent parts, literally translates out as "tree wool"
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Sep 22, 2014 22:40
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How valuable was thick cable in the 17th century? Seems tricky to manufacture.
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Sep 22, 2014 22:56
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JaucheCharly posted:We got some here in the military museum. About the size of a pomegranate (that's probably no accident with the name, one way or another?), but made of glass. Nasty, thick glass No accident. (Pomegranate is the descendent of pomum grenatum "fruit with many seeds", cf. French pomme "apple" and other gr- seed words like granular and grain.) Linguist out. :mike drop:
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Sep 22, 2014 23:05
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Pornographic Memory posted:Sandbags? That and they have "sacks of hair" for the sand, too. (Now I really want to see the original document, considering the translator didn't even translate Baumwolle right.) Edit: Also, the army besieging Vienna in 1683 was incredibly huge, the Ottomans under Kara Mustafa numbered over a quarter million soldiers at one point and there were still something like 150 thousand left before the battle at the Kahlenberg. So having tons of stuff of simply everything lying around after the siege was lifted should be expected. I learn something new every day. VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Sep 22, 2014 |
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Sep 22, 2014 23:14
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:How valuable was thick cable in the 17th century? Seems tricky to manufacture. Libluini posted:That and they have "sacks of hair" for the sand, too. (Now I really want to see the original document, considering the translator didn't even translate Baumwolle right.)
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Sep 22, 2014 23:17
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Trin Tragula posted:(In the category of "you couldn't make it up if you tried", one midshipman has managed to get himself torpedoed three times in the same day; he abandoned the first ship and narrowly avoided being drowned by the suction as she went down, then was just boarding the second when that one was torpedoed, so swam to the third and this verse was the same as the first. He was eventually pulled out of the sea, unconscious and draped over a large piece of driftwood, by a Dutch trawler.) Now that's a really bad day! Jeez!
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Sep 22, 2014 23:58
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Libluini posted:That and they have "sacks of hair" for the sand, too. (Now I really want to see the original document, considering the translator didn't even translate Baumwolle right.) I'm going through that list and I think I've found a ton of mistranslations. Either the translator just ran it through google translate or he went with VERY literal translations based just on word parts. First off there are the silly small things. "Great bombs," "great and small ordinance" etc. should probably just be "large" or "big" - "great" for "groß" is OK but contextually you'd probably run with large or big in English. That's nitpicky though. "Bellows for 'red bullets' " made me cock an eyebrow, though. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what "rote Kugeln" might be, but a little imaginative googling turned up the fact that " Rosenkugeln" is the name of a specific type of blown glass ball which is still used in a decorative form today. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that those were bellows for forming glass balls. Perhaps for grenades? Perhaps as containers of some kind? I don't know, but it makes more sense than "red bullets." "Large muskets to shoot grenades" also looked incredibly wrong. I won't go into the details about how I reverse engineered this one (It involved a lot of thinking like a first semester German student and searching for technical firearms terms from that period) but I'm fairly certain it is supposed to either be fuzes for shells or crates for shells or maybe specialized tinderboxes for setting up fuzes for shells. Think all the fuze tools and misc materials that you'd need to fuze an explosive cannon ball in the early 16th century. Muskets is way too french of a term and too advanced for this era, but "Zunder" is a term used to this day for both fuzes and tinder, while Granaten can similarly mean both grenades and artillery shells. Büchsen is both a word for "box" and also a really loving archaic term for hand-held firearms. It's kind of a catch-all for shotguns/pistols/etc. from back when they were still struggling to distinguish between cannons and what we would call guns today. Zunderbüchse is still a term for a tinderbox, so I'm guessing that it was supposed to be some kind of kit for prepping artillery shells and I can kinda half-see how someone might roll with "musket" as a bad mistranslation of "Zunderbüchse" if they were approaching "büchse" from the gun angle. Sorry if that's not quite clear but the logic is kinda convoluted in my own head. What I'm 100% certain of is that "Large muskets to shoot grenades" is a completely hosed translation and I'm strongly suspicious that it's really something about fuzing shells to go boom. was originally Grosser Zunderbüchsen für Granaten or something similar (Badly) translated out super-literally you could get to "large muskets for grenades." Regardless, I think the error was in the fact that Zunder can mean both fuze and tinder, and Büchse is both "box" and a fairly archaic word for hand-held firearms. It's kind of a catch-all for shotguns/pistols/etc. from back when they were still struggling to distinguish between cannons and what we would call guns today. Muskets is a bit too precise (and a bit too french), but it was probably a nod to the age of the term by whoever wrote that dictionary. Regardless, I'm going to guess that "Large muskets to shoot grenades" Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 00:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm going through that list and I think I've found a ton of mistranslations. Either the translator just ran it through google translate or he went with VERY literal translations based just on word parts. I remember reading about an variant on a Brown Bess that could hold a grenade. Light the fuse and fire a blank to send the (small) grenade at the enemy. If my memory is close to accurate, a large musket specifically for firing grenades is not that crazy. Ed: Just looked it up, they did exist: 
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Sep 23, 2014 00:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:"Bellows for 'red bullets' " made me cock an eyebrow, though. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what "rote Kugeln" might be, but a little imaginative googling turned up the fact that "url=http://www.glasmanufaktur-greiner.de/shop/pi3/]Rosenkugeln[/url]" is the name of a specific type of blown glass ball which is still used in a decorative form today. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that those were bellows for forming glass balls. Perhaps for grenades? Perhaps as containers of some kind? I don't know, but it makes more sense than "red bullets." quote:"Large muskets to shoot grenades" also looked incredibly wrong. I won't go into the details about how I reverse engineered this one (It involved a lot of thinking like a first semester German student and searching for technical firearms terms from that period) but I'm fairly certain it is supposed to either be fuzes for shells or crates for shells or maybe specialized tinderboxes for setting up fuzes for shells. http://therifleshoppe.com/catalog_pages/hand_mortar/hand_mortar_(819).htm quote:Think all the fuze tools and misc materials that you'd need to fuze an explosive cannon ball in the early 16th century. quote:Muskets is way too french of a term and too advanced for this era... HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 00:30
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Maybe he thought about the first siege of Vienna? That was a century earlier and I would've been surprised to see "Musket" used there. In the 17th century though? That's slowly aproaching the zenit of French military supremacy, so seeing French terms isn't that weird. Looking up some stuff, apparently the musket had already replaced the older arquebuses to a large degree even back at the end of the 16th century, when Vienna suffered it's first siege by the Ottomans, so that assumption would've been wrong, too.
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Sep 23, 2014 00:38
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Yeah, long day I thought whatever that was from was from the 15th C not the 17th. I'm just going to go to bed before I embarrass myself further.
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Sep 23, 2014 01:04
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Trin Tragula posted:This is also another interesting day for the German navy; Scharnhost and Gneisenau appear in Tahiti, seeking to confiscate the coal stockpile in the port of Papeete. They sink an ancient French gunboat, some local ships, and then give the town a good shoeing, but the French gendarmes quickly set fire to the coal and deny it to them; Admiral von Spee exits stage left as soon as the situation becomes apparent. It's done his men's morale some good, but he's also let the Allies know where he is and where he might be going next. Meanwhile, Emden pays a stealthy visit to Madras, quickly and effectively shelling a number of petrol tanks and then leaving soon after the shore batteries start to answer back. The commander of the French gunboat, incidentally, was ordered back to France to stand trial because his immediate superior got a garbled and inaccurate report of the events at Tahiti. They later gave him the Legion d'honneur, which might've cheered him up if hadn't died before the trial from illness. Also the whole operation was gigantic waste of ammunition by Spee's two cruisers. It turns out they'd need it later on.
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Sep 23, 2014 01:09
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HEY GAL posted:Nope, it's grenade launchers. Like this but not a flintlock. Still though, isn't 200,000 of the damned things pretty crazy, especially compared to the other numbers? Or is it just something the leader of the Ottomans thought was really fancy and neat and got as many as he could?
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Sep 23, 2014 01:33
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ninjahedgehog posted:Somewhere in this thread there's a couple of effortposts about just how absolutely lovely the early American torpedoes were, to the point where the author is seriously wondering how the designers weren't all tried for treason. Does anyone have links/be willing to repost? The Mark 14 Torpedoes were hilarious garbage, and I love writing about them. In principle, they were the bee's knees: they used a brand-new spiffy magnetic detonator that used the magnetic field of an iron-hulled ship to fuse the explosive, rather than just a contact trigger. This was important, because naval ships were becoming more and more well armored. But what if you could detonate a torpedo directly underneath a ship, rather than by contact with the armor belt? The resulting explosion of expanding gasses would essentially snap the keel in two, "breaking its back" so to speak. Pretty badass, if pulled off properly. The Mark 14 was a loving joke though, and it's very nearly a war crime that the Bureau of Ordnance (BuOrd) protected their golden turd for so long. Let's count the problems: 1.) Premature Detonations - The state-of-the-art Mk.6 Magnetic Detonator was calibrated to ambient magnetic field levels at the Naval Torpedo Station in Newport, Rhode Island; the actual magnetic fields in the Pacific theater were wildly different, causing the Mk.6 Detonator to go off way early, before getting anywhere near a ship. This problem could be circumvented (illegally) by skippers manually disabling the magnetic trigger and using the Mk.14's contact detonator, which led directly to: 2.) Duds - The contact detonator for the Mk.14 was apparently made from the cheapest pot metal possible, as a torpedo impacting a target at a 90-degree angle (which is usually best practice) would instead smash the detonator into a useless, bent heap. Skippers were instead directed to fire their torpedoes at an oblique angle and hope the impact was hard enough to set the trigger off, but not hard enough to bend the trigger out of place. Of course, none of these problems would help with: 3.) Depth Keeping - The Mk.14 would consistently run about 10ft deeper than set. This was because the geniuses testing the thing put a practice warhead on it that weighed much less than the actual explosive warhead. All of these problems could be compensated for eventually, even if BuOrd dug their heels and refused to make modifications to their precious babby. However, regardless of preparation, you really couldn't protect against: 4.) Circulars - The torpedoes were all installed with gyroscopes for station-keeping: when launched, they would immediately correct themselves to the set angle of attack and continue on their merry way. Some Mk.14s had a nasty problem where the gyros would never reset to a neutral angle, and the torpedoes would run a lazy circle after leaving the tube. If the sub was in motion at the time, this generally meant it would smack right back into the boat that fired it. Not a pleasant way to go. Charles Lockwood, COMSUBPAC for the majority of the war, constantly hounded BuOrd to unfuck their torpedoes, which they constantly dragged their feet on. Highly competent sub skippers were coming home empty handed, some having to illegally tweak their torpedoes, some artificially inflating their tonnage numbers to compensate. It wasn't until September 1943 that the final iteration of the Mk.14 with a new contact trigger and fixed depth-keeping equipment that the Mk.14 became an actually decent weapon: 21 months after the Pacific War started. The lax attitude of the IJN toward anti-submarine warfare until it was far too late could potentially be attributed to the fact that the Mk.14 unfairly distorted the performance of otherwise capable submarines.
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Sep 23, 2014 02:16
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It's worth noting that with circulars, they eventually added a second gyro that would detonate the torpedo if it looked like it was on a circular run. Unfortunately that system worked when one didn't leave the sub's tube with predictable results once the sub turned.
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Sep 23, 2014 02:34
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Deteriorata posted:I remember reading about an variant on a Brown Bess that could hold a grenade. Light the fuse and fire a blank to send the (small) grenade at the enemy. I don't care about how useful they were this is my favorite looking weapon from its era.
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Sep 23, 2014 03:11
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3 posted:Charles Lockwood, COMSUBPAC for the majority of the war, constantly hounded BuOrd to unfuck their torpedoes, which they constantly dragged their feet on. Bonus fact: he then had to repeat the test and forward the whole thing to Admiral King, before BuOrd actually bothered to run their own tests, confirming the issue. AceRimmer fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 03:44
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Frostwerks posted:I don't care about how useful they were this is my favorite looking weapon from its era. Like a prehistoric M79.
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Sep 23, 2014 04:11
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The thing that actually gets me about BluOrd in WWII is how they could possibly do any worse on the Mk14 if they were literal nazi/japan infiltrators trying to hurt the war effort.
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Sep 23, 2014 11:56
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There also the story of sub skippers and quartermasters fashioning new contact triggers from the aluminium hulks of downed Zero fighters, because those'd be more reliable than the steel contact triggers that came with the Mark 14s, as well as the story of a sub crew that strung up a live torpedo on a cherry picker and dropped it right in front of an admiral's car, confident that the drat thing wouldn't detonate because it hit the pavement at a 90 degree angle. I wrote many other words about torpedoes here, farther up the thread. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Sep 23, 2014 |
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Sep 23, 2014 12:07
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Frostwerks posted:I don't care about how useful they were this is my favorite looking weapon from its era.
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Sep 23, 2014 12:22
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Taerkar posted:Still though, isn't 200,000 of the damned things pretty crazy, especially compared to the other numbers? Or is it just something the leader of the Ottomans thought was really fancy and neat and got as many as he could? JaucheCharly posted:
200,000 Quintal would be 20 Million kg, so if you assume the things to weigh a few kg each, you get a shitload more then just 200,000. Let's be generous and say they weigh 20 kg each: Still about a million of those things. At this point I would guess either a typo added 1-2 more zeroes, or the large grenade launching muskets were brought along en mass for the siege. Or maybe other types of muskets were just thrown in there for good measure. I mean I sure would grow tired of weighing different types of muskets pretty drat fast. I could see them just go "gently caress it" and stop differentiating between them at some point, just to get done faster.
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Sep 23, 2014 12:34
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Libluini posted:200,000 Quintal would be 20 Million kg, so if you assume the things to weigh a few kg each, you get a shitload more then just 200,000. Let's be generous and say they weigh 20 kg each: Still about a million of those things. At this point I would guess either a typo added 1-2 more zeroes, or the large grenade launching muskets were brought along en mass for the siege. Or maybe other types of muskets were just thrown in there for good measure. And if you're expecting to storm a breach or a trench or two, I imagine you'd bring a bunch of grenade launchers, which is what they're for.
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Sep 23, 2014 12:44
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I find Cyrano's idea more plausible. It's most likely a problem with translation. Büchse = Box = Musket. It seems that the items are more or less listed systematically, so what comes before and after might give a hint what it is. Both seem to point to something that's launched from a larger device. Maybe it's smaller explosive anti infantry ammo for these catapults/mortars that were mentioned. Many small explosives that can be used with one shot to saturate an area. werfen = shoot, throw ; wurf = shot Modern example: Werfergranate is ammo for a mortar. Wurfgranate 15, etc.
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Sep 23, 2014 13:16
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Taerkar posted:Still though, isn't 200,000 of the damned things pretty crazy, especially compared to the other numbers? Or is it just something the leader of the Ottomans thought was really fancy and neat and got as many as he could? It was the Turkish clan's overuse of rocket jump to get over Austrian walls that led to them being banned from Gruppefestung 2 servers.
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Sep 23, 2014 13:24
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HEY GAL posted:If you buy one ($795 the kit!), you can shoot tennis balls out of it. Look you, I already have an rear end in a top hat.
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Sep 23, 2014 13:39
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I really hope you don't shoot at people. Or animals.
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Sep 23, 2014 14:18
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What was the benefit to BuOrd to completely ignore all the complaints about the Mk 14? And why did it take so long for the top brass to get on their asses to unfuck their poo poo? Was the sub campaign just not seen as particularly worth keeping tabs on by the higher ups?
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Sep 23, 2014 14:22
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