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GhostofJohnMuir posted:It was the Civil War version of "Let us march into this desert land, we will be greeted as liberators," with even worse success. If there's one thing history has taught me it's that the proper answer to desert adventurism is "gently caress that." EDIT: This aslo goes for any country that has tundra which is just "Cold Desert."
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Nov 4, 2014 21:37
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Rhymenoserous posted:From my understanding the general rule of Tank Warfare was whoever sees the other guy first generally wins. But then one needs to keep in mind that tank warfare, as warfare in general, mostly does not consist of mano a mano duels. When you have tank battalions at play a lot of other things play a much bigger role: numbers, command & control, experience, doctrine etc. Example: many early war tanks had no radios, making platoon level communication nigh impossible during combat. Worse, few early tanks had three man turrets where commanders could focus on their job, or cupolas that gave them a 360º view while buttoned up. Not that such things deliver well onto silver screen, just like movie soldiers really detest wearing helmets and proper uniforms in general because it's against the rules for all heroes to wear the identical costumes and even similar haircuts.
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Nov 4, 2014 21:41
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Nenonen posted:But then one needs to keep in mind that tank warfare, as warfare in general, mostly does not consist of mano a mano duels. When you have tank battalions at play a lot of other things play a much bigger role: numbers, command & control, experience, doctrine etc. Example: many early war tanks had no radios, making platoon level communication nigh impossible during combat. Worse, few early tanks had three man turrets where commanders could focus on their job, or cupolas that gave them a 360º view while buttoned up. Not that such things deliver well onto silver screen, just like movie soldiers really detest wearing helmets and proper uniforms in general because it's against the rules for all heroes to wear the identical costumes and even similar haircuts. All that are things that helps you mantain situational awareness, that helps you spot the other guys first, and Rhymenoserous posted:From my understanding the general rule of Tank Warfare was whoever sees the other guy first generally wins.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:02
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Also, planes beat tanks as the Germans found out a lot.wdarkk posted:Maximilian is kind of weird. According to the wikipedia page on him, the one about his execution is accurate I love Emperor Maximilian, he is literally one of my favorite historical oddities.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:11
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Frankly that applies to any kind of fighting. Whether you're armed with your bare hands, a sword, a gun, or a tank if you can manage to place your enemy inside your engagement envelope without him knowing you're there, he's hosed. The first caveman to try sneaking up behind a guy before whacking him on the head with a rock figured that fucker out.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:12
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Don Gato posted:Also, planes beat tanks as the Germans found out a lot. Technically empty fuel tanks beats tanks, cause planes have interdicted your supply lines. Planes really didnt hit tanks that much.
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Nov 4, 2014 22:24
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I wonder what a meeting between the Emperors Maximilian and Norton would have been like...
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Nov 4, 2014 22:34
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vuk83 posted:Technically empty fuel tanks beats tanks, cause planes have interdicted your supply lines. Planes really didnt hit tanks that much. From wikipedia, talking about Operation Goodwood; quote:The bombing put the 22nd Panzer Regiment and the III/503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion temporarily out of action, causing varying degrees of damage to their tanks. Some were overturned, some were destroyed and twenty were later found abandoned in bomb craters Yup. When B-24s and B-17s drop 1340 long tons of bombs on your tanks, you're gonna have a bad time.  I remember reading about this when I was a kid in Hans von Luck's book, "Panzer Commander". It's a rather romanticized view of the war, but still enjoyable. MA-Horus fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 01:04
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vuk83 posted:All that are things that helps you mantain situational awareness, that helps you spot the other guys first, and When isolated from friendly forces, yes. The crucial point about letting tank commanders do commanding stuff and having radios is not that they help their individual tank win tank duels. It's that they can act as an element of the general formation consisting of other tanks and, in best case, supporting infantry trained to fight alongside tanks and also able to communicate with them (compatible radios, field telephone lines attached to tank rear etc.). When a battalion or regiment attacks it doesn't matter who fires the first shot, it's who fires the last shot.
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Nov 5, 2014 01:28
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brb, going to war so stoked to go to war right now  (On display: both kinds of infantryman and all three kinds of cav. Check out the little shelters for the common soldiers, with some muskets before each one, or pikes stuck upright in the ground.  I love this painting, the camp is so dang calm. Everything is as it should be, all is in its place, everyone is sedately enjoying the afternoon. Based on my research though, I just know the musketeer's all "Hey, you wanna go do something incredibly ill-advised?" and the pikeman's all "yeah")
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 01:37
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So why is there not more popular interest in the period during which dudes on horseback in full plate armor wielded guns in both hands?
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Nov 5, 2014 03:24
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P-Mack posted:So why is there not more popular interest in the period during which dudes on horseback in full plate armor wielded guns in both hands? As Hegel's posts often prove, a dearth of translated, legible and trustworthy primary sources. Sadly, there are few scholarly outlets for tales of people named "Euphronius" getting drunk off their hose and fighting horses. It really depresses me when I think about how much stuff is never, ever going to be translated into my language or out of it.
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Nov 5, 2014 03:59
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Yeah, it's very depressing to look at the wealth of Soviet archives unveiled in the 90s and realise that it will be decades before any meaningful amount of this information is available in English.
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Nov 5, 2014 04:38
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Don Gato posted:Also, planes beat tanks as the Germans found out a lot. Max is really interesting, he comes from a long line of insulated european hereditary aristocrats, in a time when hereditary aristocrats are rapidly becoming obsolete in the face of capitalism and liberalism. He saw that he was part of an oppressive system, and genuinely wanted to reform it for the better. Unfortunately, he failed, and as a symbol of the monarchy he was killed, even if on some level he agreed with his killers. It's one of those enlightened prince stories taken to its logical conclusion.
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Nov 5, 2014 06:14
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Ensign Expendable posted:Yes. A lot of people focus on gun caliber and armour thicknesses, but ignore the immense advantage that the first shot gives you. For instance, the Panther's nearly blind gunner would take as long as 30 seconds to dial in on a target, and this is after receiving its location from the commander. This is a crippling weakness, since at AT gun will always have the first shot on you. Carius wrote that if a tank fails to find and knock out that gun before the second shot, that tank is toast. He estimated that knocking out an AT gun was twice as hard as knocking out an enemy tank. AT guns are why not having infantry accompany your tanks is loving Retarded. Also does this mean that Kursk is even more unusual than I already think of it being, because the tanks engaged each other en masse? The way some pre-war theorists thought tank combat would be, and then it turned out not to be.
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Nov 5, 2014 08:17
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quote:both kinds of infantryman and all three kinds of cav. What were the three kinds of cav in your era? Lancers, ritters, and dragoons? Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 09:05
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Was Kursk even en masse as is often portrayed? It's often shown as such and there certainly were large numbers of tanks there on both sides, but wasn't the actual front a pretty big one as well?
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Nov 5, 2014 09:05
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MA-Horus posted:Yup. When B-24s and B-17s drop 1340 long tons of bombs on your tanks, you're gonna have a bad time. Slavvy posted:Also does this mean that Kursk is even more unusual than I already think of it being, because the tanks engaged each other en masse? The way some pre-war theorists thought tank combat would be, and then it turned out not to be. I would say yes, Kursk is a bit of an oddity in terms of both sides deliberately walking into it. The thing about American TDs, or "infantry support" tanks, or German "heavy breakthrough" tanks and other specialized tanks is that you make a tank that's really good at A Thing, then you deploy it to where you need it to do that thing - except wars and engagements never turn out that way so it turns out a more generalized "medium" tank that would eventually turn into the "main battle" tank was better because you can't count on your special tank being in the right place at the right time. For Kursk, the Germans knew exactly where they wanted to attack and prepared for it for months, while the Russians knew exactly where the Germans were about to attack them and prepared for it for months, and you get these pitched battles between large amounts of tanks because all that prep time means both sides can commit their tanks to where they want to, when they want to.
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Nov 5, 2014 09:09
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Taerkar posted:Was Kursk even en masse as is often portrayed? It's often shown as such and there certainly were large numbers of tanks there on both sides, but wasn't the actual front a pretty big one as well?  I did a google maps directions from Kirov at the top of that map to kharkov at the bottom and it is right about at 600 km apart and according to wikipedia between both sides you have almost 3 million men and 8,000 tanks participating in the battle.
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Nov 5, 2014 11:11
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Grand Prize Winner posted:What were the three kinds of cav in your era? Lancers, ritters, and dragoons? well, a carabiner. Would you look at that. Slim Jim Pickens posted:As Hegel's posts often prove, a dearth of translated, legible and trustworthy primary sources. Sadly, there are few scholarly outlets for tales of people named "Euphronius" getting drunk off their hose and fighting horses. Most of it, I think, is that Americans feel little connection to the 17th century in the Empire. Which reminds me of another reason I'm lucky to be working when I am: since the Iraq war, everyone cares about mercenaries again, and we've begun thinking about privatized force as something more than a step on the way to the standing state army which was obviously the goal toward which all of this tended. And have you guys never read the great works of military social history? There is a scholarly place for this--Daily Life of Johnny Reb/Billy Yank are full of the 19th century version of this poo poo. (So, still guys named "Euphronius," I guess. Which reminds me: one of my favorite anecdotes related to names is the time I found a dude named Mattheus, not because of the name itself, but because everyone, including official records, called him Maz. Only civilian testimony used his full given name.) Edit: P-Mack posted:So why is there not more popular interest in the period during which dudes on horseback in full plate armor wielded guns in both hands? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 12:56
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Branis posted:I did a google maps directions from Kirov at the top of that map to kharkov at the bottom and it is right about at 600 km apart and according to wikipedia between both sides you have almost 3 million men and 8,000 tanks participating in the battle. For comparison, Nieuport (the Belgian town at the mouth of the Yser) and Basel (the major Swiss town at the Franco/German/Swiss border) are about 600km apart, as the crow flies... (I can't say things like this enough times; it's impossible to overstate how just how much loving land there is east of Berlin and Vienna, and how utterly different it makes trying to move armies around in the east compared to the west.)
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Nov 5, 2014 13:22
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HEY GAL posted:
Aren't pistols still kind if expensive at this point? Plus, isn't there the whole risk of you've just thrown a bunch of weapons at the enemy they can at some point reload and shoot you with?
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Nov 5, 2014 13:43
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Aren't pistols still kind if expensive at this point? Plus, isn't there the whole risk of you've just thrown a bunch of weapons at the enemy they can at some point reload and shoot you with? But I doubt people will reload them during the battle itself. Like, you are in a batallion/escuadron and the goddamned cav has just ridden up to you and shot at some of you to open gaps in your formation in the hopes that at some future time there will be too much space for the surviving pikemen to cover. Then someone throws a pistol in your direction. At what point are you going to pick it up, find bullets that fit, and drop your own weapon to reload the thing?
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Nov 5, 2014 13:48
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Nenonen posted:When isolated from friendly forces, yes. The crucial point about letting tank commanders do commanding stuff and having radios is not that they help their individual tank win tank duels. It's that they can act as an element of the general formation consisting of other tanks and, in best case, supporting infantry trained to fight alongside tanks and also able to communicate with them (compatible radios, field telephone lines attached to tank rear etc.). When a battalion or regiment attacks it doesn't matter who fires the first shot, it's who fires the last shot. Like 90% of warfare even at the battalion level is "where is the other guys poo poo"
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Nov 5, 2014 13:53
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Trin Tragula posted:Nieuport Or rather Nieuwpoort (, Battle of)
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Nov 5, 2014 14:41
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so what are some hilarious examples of military forces being unable to find each other's asses with both hands?
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Nov 5, 2014 14:48
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MrYenko posted:
Another nice peace of German engineering is the G11-rifle. It's really great: Caseless bullets, extreme high precision, extreme high firing rate, a variant comes with a 300 shot magazine, everyone loves it! There's just a small problem the German Bundeswehr noted while testing it: If it comes into contact with anything from the real world (dust, mud, dirt), it tends to stop working immediately. It is somehow even more prone to failure then the G36-rifle, which became the new standard weapon instead. But in an environment where neither dust nor mud are a problem (translation: in the world of dreams, it works fine), it is the best rifle.
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Nov 5, 2014 15:32
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Didn't it have critical parts made by a clockmaker or a similar profession making very very tiny things?
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Nov 5, 2014 16:01
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Boiled Water posted:Didn't it have critical parts made by a clockmaker or a similar profession making very very tiny things?   Edit: it was also prone to heat related failures due in large part to the caseless ammo that it used. As a concept gun it was pretty neat but from a practical standpoint it was a nightmare. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 16:24
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Caseless ammunition, if it became common, would be a wonderful throwback to pre-cartridge/paper cartridge days. You'd have to explain to kids why in all those 2D movies guns eject bits of brass to the side.
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Nov 5, 2014 16:36
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Boiled Water posted:Didn't it have critical parts made by a clockmaker or a similar profession making very very tiny things?  Really, really neat mechanism. The rounds are caseless, just a bullet embedded in a block of propellant. Each round is fed vertically into the breech, point-down, from the top, and the breech rotates 90 degrees to orient the round with the barrel. Round fires, barrel, and breech and magazine all recoil together as one unit. Without any ejection cycle to worry about, the breech is able to rotate to accept and load and fire the next round before the the recoiling parts reach the end of their travel, so when firing 3-round bursts all three rounds have left the barrel before the user experiences any felt recoil. I'm not sure how big a problem dirt was; the lack of an ejection cycle would help to prevent crud getting into the internal working parts, but one big problem was heat. The ejected brass casing of a normal cartridge carries away a lot of the heat, and without that heat sink the gun heats up that much faster and the caseless rounds stared cooking off. Eventually a reformulated propellant helped that problem, but I don't think it was ever solved entirely, and it was really expensive. The US Army considered it as an M16 replacement but it didn't deliver sufficient performance over-and-above the existing weapon to justify the cost and the supply-chain issues of the ammunition.
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Nov 5, 2014 16:36
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Is that a wheel-lock inside a G11?
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Nov 5, 2014 16:36
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I'd almost be interested to see what they could do with that concept and modern alloys/composites. Maybe replace some parts with carbon fiber for heat dispersion?
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Nov 5, 2014 18:32
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Rockopolis posted:Is that a wheel-lock inside a G11? i can't stop laughing HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 18:32
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MA-Horus posted:I'd almost be interested to see what they could do with that concept and modern alloys/composites. Maybe replace some parts with carbon fiber for heat dispersion? Carbon fiber makes for a terrible heat sink since the parts that aren't fibrous carbon is epoxy.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:34
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Slavvy posted:AT guns are why not having infantry accompany your tanks is loving Retarded. Kursk had a ton of infantry and artillery, both direct and indirect fire. People go on about The Biggest Tank Battle of All Time (tm) (not true depending on how you define "biggest"), but it wasn't just thousands of tanks driving towards each other. If you look at the list of Ferdinands lost out at Kursk, the majority of them fell to mines or infantry. Very few were destroyed by tanks. Oh, and also mud. Quite a number of vehicles were lost to that, as usual. gradenko_2000 posted:That's sort of a one-off, though. The rest of the time you'd have single/twin-engined Fighters and CAS aircraft dropping smaller bombs or strafing tanks, and in that context it's true that the tanks were defeated by their logistical tails being shot up, or being turned into "mission kills" when forced to button up and/or suffering mechanical failures from strafing damage that doesn't outright kill the tank, but disables it. Tanks are mobile reserves. You can put your tanks (ok, maybe except the ridiculous German ones) anywhere in the battle. The time given to the Red Army was used to make minefields, AT gun belts, and fortifications.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:47
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100 Years Ago Indian Expeditionary Force "B" leaves Tanga today. But first, some of their officers sit down for a polite dinner with the Germans. I wish I was joking. GG, nextmap. (Also, the Telegraph gamely attempts to ignore the first reports of the defeat at Coronel.)
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Nov 5, 2014 18:49
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MA-Horus posted:I'd almost be interested to see what they could do with that concept and modern alloys/composites. Maybe replace some parts with carbon fiber for heat dispersion? A secondary clip containing ejectable heatsinks.
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Nov 5, 2014 18:49
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Have they tried pairing the heatsinks with the bullets themselves? Might kill two birds with one stone that way.Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Why is the Expeditionary Force in such a hurry? Is the command structure not aware of their relative strength compared to the Germans? I'm just shocked as to why they'd leave all their supplies behind, when they could probably just dig in somewhere and take the time to reload it. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 18:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Will there be assault weapons with caseless ammunition on a large scale any time soon?
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Nov 5, 2014 18:55
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