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Good ol' Russian ingenuity.
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Oct 28, 2014 03:18
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Mustang posted:Good ol' Russian ingenuity. I'm reminded of the following passage from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, describing the protagonist's unboxing and setup of a WWII-era Soviet infantry mortar system: quote:A series of parabolas is plotted out, the mortar supporting one leg and exploding Germans supporting the opposite. Ask a Russian engineer to design you a shoe, and he'll give you something that looks like the box the shoe came in. Ask him to design something that will slaughter Germans, and he turns into Thomas loving Edison. It's a book I grudgingly enjoy. Mainly for brief, dim shimmers of Thompsonesque vividness buried within.
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Oct 28, 2014 03:36
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Why were the Germans able to advance to much after the initial battles that checked their advance? Larger army?
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Oct 28, 2014 04:28
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Ensign Expendable posted:There was an Imperial Russian proposal for 70 cm of tightly wound rope backed with steel to be used as fortress armour, but it never made it into production. Although, my favourite was the one that proposed to surround armoured cars with pipes that would spray gasoline and then ignite it. Flamethrowers in every direction! How do you mean 'backed'? That actually sounds like a really cool design.
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Oct 28, 2014 05:59
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HEY GAL posted:Well, everyone's infantry. He's Maurice of Nassau's namesake, appropriately. Ask Us About Military History: Whoring, Drinking, And A Halberd
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Oct 28, 2014 06:53
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago You might be one king off there. I assume you mean Edward VII, who had German parents, but George V had an English father and a Danish mother  (Although almost all royals had at least a german grandparent apparently)
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Oct 28, 2014 11:07
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Theres only 1 royal family in france and a couple in iberia but Germany has a bajillion handy when you got loads of kids to get married. Germany, single handedly saving the European monarchies from (too much) interbreeding. Hapsburgs aside.
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Oct 28, 2014 12:49
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Well that's a uniquely Russian solution Uniquely? Naw. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(flamethrower) Phanatic fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 12:56
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Cast_No_Shadow posted:Theres only 1 royal family in france and a couple in iberia but Germany has a bajillion handy when you got loads of kids to get married. Ask Us About Military History: Hapsperging Out
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Oct 28, 2014 13:01
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HEY GAL posted:Ask Us About Military History: Hapsperging Out If there is ever a 3rd thread, I nominate that being the title.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:16
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:How do you mean 'backed'? That actually sounds like a really cool design. A layer of tightly coiled rope in front of a steel plate. There are actually a lot of really cool designs proposed to the Russian Empire and the USSR that were ahead of their time, such as reactive armour, APDS, body armour, compressed air starters, etc that were discarded because the invention they were a part of was completely insane and infeasible or the technology to implement them did not exist. Also, on a milhist forum I go to, someone made an amusing typo. >"It is on the Navy, under >the goon providence of God, >that our wealth and peace >depend." >Charles II.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:17
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Well, from what I recall the Stuarts were pretty goony when they weren't partying or getting down with the G-man. Unless this is the other King called Charles. In advance, stupid monarchies with their limited name pool.
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Oct 28, 2014 15:20
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SeanBeansShako posted:Well, from what I recall the Stuarts were pretty goony when they weren't partying or getting down with the G-man. Charles II was all of the stuff Cromwell repressed given human form.
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Oct 28, 2014 16:38
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100 Years Ago Our old friends Emden pop up again at Penang, and Captain Muller has another great trick up his sleeve. Meanwhile, the British put a spectacularly brave face on another hideous and bloody French failure at Poelcappelle, and the Belgians succeed in flooding the Yser properly. Comstar posted:Why were the Germans able to advance to much after the initial battles that checked their advance? Larger army? They didn't advance to the front, they and the French kept trying to flank each other over unoccupied territory and kept going like that all the way to the sea. Once that process was complete, we ended up with a bunch of bloody battles that nearly broke the line in various places, about a hundred times over; but looked at in hindsight you could characterise it as just the line settling down. Certainly the days when an army could reasonably hope for a mile or more of advance per day are over, although nobody knows it yet. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Oct 28, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 18:25
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Eagerly looking forward to the first post that's simply 'All quiet on the western front'.
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Oct 28, 2014 19:27
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I've got two weird hypothetical questions about submarines: What would happen if one of the torpedoes in the torpedo bay went off inside the sub? and What would happen if a nuclear warhead that a submarine was carrying detonated while the sub was underwater?
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Oct 29, 2014 00:35
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SeanBeansShako posted:Well, from what I recall the Stuarts were pretty goony when they weren't partying or getting down with the G-man. The Winter Queen, James I/VI's daughter, was not particularly goony, but her husband was a real nebbish. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 00:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've got two weird hypothetical questions about submarines: The submarine explodes and sinks. Everybody dies. Subs are good at withstanding outside water pressure, not internal explosions.
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Oct 29, 2014 00:42
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SlothfulCobra posted:What would happen if one of the torpedoes in the torpedo bay went off inside the sub? In short: bad things. Keep in mind that the initial explosion that blew up the torpedo room on the Kursk was caused by a propellant leak in a practice torpedo, which didn't have an explosive warhead. Had an actual live warhead detonated while loaded in the tube, she probably would've gone down even faster. As it stands, the secondary explosions from the other warheads going off after she hit bottom pretty much hosed her up completely. 3 fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 00:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:
Short answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RvOnAMdr_s We've done poo poo loads of under-water nuclear testing. The above was the Operation Hardtack blast. Basically a fuckoff huge splash, big cloud of steam, maybe a mushroom cloud if it's close enough to the surface, and a mini-tsunami from all that rapidly displaced water. Really mini though all things considered.
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Oct 29, 2014 00:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:Short answer: Depends on the depth. If it was in shallow water, you get something like the Baker test, which is pretty bad news for everyone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads#Test_Baker
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Oct 29, 2014 00:56
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That's the Wahoo shot right? Fangz posted:Depends on the depth. If it was in shallow water, you get something like the Baker test, which is pretty bad news for everyone. I recently posted the Soviet version in the Cold War TFR thread. Apparently it's a Novaya Zemlya test which I'd never seen before! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3RmFHYxfbA&t=83s
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Oct 29, 2014 06:21
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A while ago I learned that Tilly was not only so nervous about his German he had someone else do his pre-battle speeches, but he also didn't want to admit that he was nervous about his German so he had the bad habit of signing his name to letters he may not have fully understood. This makes any close reading of his correspondence problematic for historians. Poor fellow!
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Oct 29, 2014 12:41
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100 Years Ago A new challenger appears! The Ottoman navy attacks several of Russia's Black Sea ports. A formal declaration of war will take a few days, but they're in it now, up to their eyeballs. The French launch another useless attack on Poelcappelle, there's trouble brewing elsewhere in the Ypres salient; and on the Aisne, the Germans attack with colourful language and a stray horse. No, really. Hunterhr posted:Eagerly looking forward to the first post that's simply 'All quiet on the western front'. Don't hold your breath.
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Oct 29, 2014 15:02
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Point of order: the Goeben is a battle cruiser, the Breslau is a light cruiser. You describe both as battle cruisers, which makes me assume you have a lucrative sidejob writing propaganda for the Ottoman Empire.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:20
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I'm just trying to counterbalance all the blanco and bullshit I'm reading every day in the Telegraph 
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Oct 29, 2014 16:25
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've got two weird hypothetical questions about submarines: The submarine sinks. You probably get sympathetic detonations of the rest of the weapons in the room so the sub's really, really dead. quote:What would happen if a nuclear warhead that a submarine was carrying detonated while the sub was underwater? The submarine is vaporized or pulverized down to tiny little bits, and is really, really, really, really dead.
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Oct 29, 2014 16:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:What would happen if one of the torpedoes in the torpedo bay went off inside the sub? It would have to be a major electrical fault, since torpedoes are not armed until they are a minimum distance from the submarine.
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Oct 29, 2014 17:36
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Or in the case of one Mk 14 back in WW2, fail to eject from tube. Standard practice was to let them sit until they could be removed in port. Problem was, the mk 14 had problems with circular running, so they'd been fitted with gyroscopes set to destruct the torpedo if it was circling (thus likely to hit the sub that launched it) The gyroscope had no idea that they torpedo was still inside the sub, it just thought it had been fired. When the sub started making some maneuvers... boom.
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Oct 29, 2014 18:24
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Arrath posted:Or in the case of one Mk 14 back in WW2, fail to eject from tube. Standard practice was to let them sit until they could be removed in port. Problem was, the mk 14 had problems with circular running, so they'd been fitted with gyroscopes set to destruct the torpedo if it was circling (thus likely to hit the sub that launched it) That's slightly inaccurate, the MK 14 didn't have problems with circular running, it had problems with loving everything. Every time one problem was fixed, two more appeared in it's place. There's an effortpost about them either earlier in this thread or way back in the first thread that spells it out, but seriously they were terrible.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:00
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I'm also reasonably sure that the anti-circular-run gyro disarmed the torpedo, not detonated it. I know standard practice for a hot run (in the tube) is to immediately turn the boat 180° to disable the torpedo. There is evidence that Scorpion was making such a turn just before she was lost in 1968. Early MkXIVs didn't have this, of course, and at least one boat was lost to a circular run (Tullibee,) with three more possible (Grunion, Tang, and Triton,) before anything was done. In fact, I can't find anything to indicate that the MkXIV was EVER altered to reduce the possibility of a circular run. The post war MkXVI had it, and was the primary anti-shipping submarine weapon of the immediate post-war, despite large stocks of wartime-production MkXIVs.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:15
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Don Gato posted:That's slightly inaccurate, the MK 14 didn't have problems with circular running, it had problems with loving everything. Every time one problem was fixed, two more appeared in it's place. There's an effortpost about them either earlier in this thread or way back in the first thread that spells it out, but seriously they were terrible. Quoting from the old, old GBS History thread: gradenko_2000 posted:I could write a book on faulty WW2 torpedoes. Phanatic posted:It's amazing to me that nobody went to jail over how awful American torpedoes were in WWII. The air-dropped Mark 13 mentioned above was consistently miserable until late in the war; one exercise in 1941 dropped 10 torpedoes, only one of which worked properly (four out of the ten just sank). A survey done in 1943 found that of 105 dropped at speeds > 150 knots, only 31% worked properly; 36% of them didn't even run. And the Mark 13 wasn't the worst torpedo.
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Oct 29, 2014 19:50
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In the all-time ranking of "hilariously useless yet widely-issued weapons", where does the Mk 14 sit? (Other than at the bottom of the sea with bent firing pins.)
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Oct 29, 2014 19:54
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Thanks for pulling up those posts guys, I was just dredging that anecdote up from memory having read those back when they were originally posted.
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Oct 29, 2014 20:03
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MrYenko posted:I'm also reasonably sure that the anti-circular-run gyro disarmed the torpedo, not detonated it. I know standard practice for a hot run (in the tube) is to immediately turn the boat 180° to disable the torpedo. There is evidence that Scorpion was making such a turn just before she was lost in 1968. I didn't know about USS Scorpion so I checked on it, and it gave leads to something having happened on HMS Turbulent during the 2011 Libyan war so I read on that too, and, uh, I'm so glad I have nothing to do with navy and absolutely nothing to do with submarines which are the most suicidal invention in the history of innovation after the suicide jacket: quote:During this deployment, just after sailing from Fujairah on 26 May, Turbulent suffered a catastrophic failure of her air-conditioning systems, while on the surface. Internal temperatures quickly rose to 60 °C with 100° humidity, and caused 26 casualties, mainly from heat exhaustion, eight of which were life-threatening. With ambient temperatures in the Indian Ocean at 42 °C, surface ventilation was ineffective and the submarine was only effectively cooled by diving to 200 metres. The cause was later found to be blockage of water inlet pipes by barnacles during an extended stay at Fujairah. The incident was only made public in 2014.[8][9] A nuclear powered cruise missile armed submarine belonging to country with the 4th largest military budget in the world is almost defeated by barnacles! 
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Oct 29, 2014 20:57
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What was the Italian intelligence service like in WWII? I've been reading a book on Crete and the Greek theater, and it seems that there were a case or two of axis spies actually being useful in the eastern Mediterranean.
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Oct 29, 2014 21:28
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Trin Tragula posted:In the all-time ranking of "hilariously useless yet widely-issued weapons", where does the Mk 14 sit? (Other than at the bottom of the sea with bent firing pins.) Gonna add to the quote pile by quotin' myself from earlier, but in short: it was criminal how completely useless the Mk14 was and how long BuOrd tried to insist there was nothing wrong with their baby. The only possible saving grace about the Mk14's abysmal performance is that there's a chance that the IJN did not take the submarine threat seriously enough before it was too late is partially due to the Mk14 being poo poo. 3 posted:The Mark 14 Torpedoes were hilarious garbage, and I love writing about them.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:04
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Posted in the book barn but thought I would try here as well. sc0tty posted:Having just watched Fury, is anyone able to recommend a good book on tank warfare. I know it was all wrong and full of Hollywood tropes but it would be good to understand what things were really like.
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Oct 29, 2014 22:48
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3 posted:Gonna add to the quote pile by quotin' myself from earlier, but in short: it was criminal how completely useless the Mk14 was and how long BuOrd tried to insist there was nothing wrong with their baby. Yeah, I got that, I'm more wondering "can anyone think of anything more useless than it?" Recently I've spent a bit of time reading about the rifle that the Canadian Corps took to France in 1915. For boring political reasons, they used a comedy lump called a Ross instead of the Lee-Enfield, and the blokes duly rocked up at Ypres in 1915 to find they were armed with a weapon that: Had a pathetic tin bayonet that frequently fell off the rifle if it was fired while the bayonet was fixed Was incredibly prissy about getting dirty; the merest speck of grit, dirt or mud would cause it to jam, including dirt transferred to a spotless rifle by ammunition, because: Had an over-complicated mechanism that took a ridiculous amount of time to clean and was very easy to reassemble the wrong way In particular, had an action that could be taken apart and then put back together in such a way that the rifle would fire the bolt back into the shooter's face Had a bolt that could also incapacitate itself quite easily just from the routine of being whacked into the bolt stop during rapid fire The thing was so completely unsuited to routine service that many Canadians preferred to confiscate buckshee Lee-Enfields from British casualties, or unguarded supply-dumps. (It did retain a niche with snipers; as long as they could keep the drat thing squeaky clean, its accuracy at long range was superior to the Lee-Enfield.) Everyone from gobby privates to General Haig spent about a year yelling at the Canadian goverment to switch; it didn't happen until they sacked the minister responsible for a number of other ridiculous procurement decisions, including (I poo poo ye not) a heavy personal entrenching tool that was designed with a large hole in it.
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Oct 29, 2014 23:01
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Trin Tragula posted:a heavy personal entrenching tool that was designed with a large hole in it.
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Oct 29, 2014 23:27
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