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If it burns a partial hole through the ablative material, reentry may just do the rest for you.
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Jan 21, 2015 04:52
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There's a bit in one of the Call of Duty games where you can ineffectively try to stop an ICBM launch by shooting at the missile with a machine gun. Considering the damage caused by a dropped wrench in the 1980 Damascus Accident, I think you could actually stop a missile launch if you have a guy on the ground shoot at it at the right time. The boost phase is a much better time to stop it than the terminal phase, although the best defense is not letting it launch at all.
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Jan 21, 2015 05:00
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Didn't Tom Clancy's Bear and the Dragon have some spetsnaz shooting at chinese ICBMs as they launched from thier silos?
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Jan 21, 2015 05:28
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Xerxes17 posted:Didn't Tom Clancy's Bear and the Dragon have some spetsnaz shooting at chinese ICBMs as they launched from thier silos? It was Rainbow 6, but yeah. IIRC they even got one! Only for the last missile to be destroyed in the terminal phase by an AGEIS Cruiser docked in DC with the President standing on board. Tom Clancy was exceptionally silly and I miss him.
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Jan 21, 2015 05:53
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Acebuckeye13 posted:It was Rainbow 6, but yeah. IIRC they even got one! Only for the last missile to be destroyed in the terminal phase by an AGEIS Cruiser docked in DC with the President standing on board. Rainbow 6 was the one with the ebola spread around the world by umbrella... I mean horizon corporation.
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Jan 21, 2015 06:02
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Phobophilia posted:Zapping a MIRV with a laser is extremely unlikely to set off a nuke, because it's going to gently caress up the detonation sequence of the explosives around the warhead, and you're not going to get the critical mass you need for an actual nuclear reaction. Just about anything used to stop a nuke won't inadvertently detonate it. Nuclear weapons require an extremely precise set of events to cause the chain reaction that results in an atomic detonation, and disrupting it will simply disable the warhead rather than prematurely set it off.
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Jan 21, 2015 06:43
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Chillyrabbit posted:Rainbow 6 was the one with the ebola spread around the world by umbrella... I mean horizon corporation. Sorry for the confusion, I meant the special ops group within the Tom Clancy universe named Rainbow Six performed the actions described above in The Bear and the Dragon, as opposed to the actions taking place in the book called Rainbow 6.  I... read a lot of Clancy in middle school.
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Jan 21, 2015 07:06
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Sorry for the confusion, I meant the special ops group within the Tom Clancy universe named Rainbow Six performed the actions described above in The Bear and the Dragon, as opposed to the actions taking place in the book called Rainbow 6.  Clancy bro. I read pretty much everything up to Bear and Dragon back then, and caught up in the weeks leading up to his death through sheer coincidence of finding one in a local supermarket. As an adult the   of it all is just amazing fun to read.The week after he died I was talking to a friend at a convention, and we decided we needed to run a two-room LARP based vaguely in the Clancyverse, with "totally not Reagan" in the whitehouse, and the Russians just being the Russians because "gently caress those evil commies". The basic idea was a loss of power in West Berlin and both sides reacting to that. We had all kinds of insane plot points and jingoistic weirdness in there, and through sheer luck the dude who randomly was assigned Andropov's role ended up having lived through it in Moscow, starting off the game with a ten-minute rant about Marxism–Leninism and how it related to the west being envious of the glorious USSR blah blah etc. Then both rooms ended up spending three hours ignoring blatant provocation and managed to organise a peace conference via passed notes, despite significant GM-induced "translation errors" and other shenanigans  In true 1984 style if they did nuke each other the root cause of the problems in Berlin would have been Megatron.
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Jan 21, 2015 07:48
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The Bear and The Dragon was amazing. PRC invades the rear end end of Russia for vaguely stated natural resource reasons but mostly MIDDLE KINGDOM PRIDE. The ever-alert Americans need to step in and help out the Russians (who are totally a respected former adversary and not evil like those chinese) with their air force and the climax of the plot is when literally the entire PRC ground army is utterly annihilated by American jets alone. Then they decide to launch a handful of ICBM's which presciently-positioned rainbow six cameo team destroys most of with frag grenades and small arms. Then the AGEIS president thing happens.
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Jan 21, 2015 08:14
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Slavvy posted:The Bear and The Dragon was amazing. PRC invades the rear end end of Russia for vaguely stated natural resource reasons but mostly MIDDLE KINGDOM PRIDE. The ever-alert Americans need to step in and help out the Russians (who are totally a respected former adversary and not evil like those chinese) with their air force and the climax of the plot is when literally the entire PRC ground army is utterly annihilated by American jets alone. Kojima and Clancy were separated at birth and while Kojima grew up in a weed orchard it's pretty clear Clancy grew up in a meth kitchen.
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Jan 21, 2015 08:18
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Slavvy posted:The Bear and The Dragon was amazing. PRC invades the rear end end of Russia for vaguely stated natural resource reasons but mostly MIDDLE KINGDOM PRIDE. The ever-alert Americans need to step in and help out the Russians (who are totally a respected former adversary and not evil like those chinese) with their air force and the climax of the plot is when literally the entire PRC ground army is utterly annihilated by American jets alone. The air raids are pretty crazy indeed, the Americans just cruise around firing CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapons at everything. Which I find amusing in retrospect, having watched the promo video Textron actually made to promote it. It seemed like the ultimate in cold warrior fantasy weapons, and lo and behold when I stopped in at the Air Force Armaments Museum at Eglin AFB, that same video was playing on a screen. 
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Jan 21, 2015 08:25
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I, too, read all the Jack Ryan books in middle school. I bought Teeth of the Tiger new, was glad it was over because the quality went way downhill, and donated it to my library's secondhand bookstore. ...It's still there.
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Jan 21, 2015 08:28
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FAUXTON posted:Kojima and Clancy were separated at birth and while Kojima grew up in a weed orchard it's pretty clear Clancy grew up in a meth kitchen. This is... huh. Yeah I'd say that's about right.
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Jan 21, 2015 08:34
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PittTheElder posted:The air raids are pretty crazy indeed, the Americans just cruise around firing CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapons at everything. Which I find amusing in retrospect, having watched the promo video Textron actually made to promote it. It seemed like the ultimate in cold warrior fantasy weapons, and lo and behold when I stopped in at the Air Force Armaments Museum at Eglin AFB, that same video was playing on a screen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmFwPyfEAWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myuZUxS3Uww Is either of these the video that you saw? It certainly looks like quite the weapon. Kaal fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 08:51
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No, it was this much goofier one: BLU-108 'Commercial' ( with Live Footage from Egl…: http://youtu.be/myuZUxS3Uww It's been posted a few times in the AIRPOWER thread, and has much more visceral live fire test video. e:f;b. The second one. Until you posted that other one though I wasn't aware they'd ever actually used them in combat.
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Jan 21, 2015 09:10
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Slavvy posted:The Bear and The Dragon was amazing. PRC invades the rear end end of Russia for vaguely stated natural resource reasons but mostly MIDDLE KINGDOM PRIDE. The ever-alert Americans need to step in and help out the Russians (who are totally a respected former adversary and not evil like those chinese) with their air force and the climax of the plot is when literally the entire PRC ground army is utterly annihilated by American jets alone. I also liked the literal Chekov's Mosin-Nagant that the old Siberian huntsman/GPW Sniper had hanging at the start of the novel, to shoot a Chinese General with at the end of the book. I did not like the "Japanese Sausage" chapters though 
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Jan 21, 2015 09:24
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Arquinsiel posted:Then both rooms ended up spending three hours ignoring blatant provocation and managed to organise a peace conference via passed notes, despite significant GM-induced "translation errors" and other shenanigans To be fair, you were at a convention, and you and your opponent probably had similar interests in nerdy stuff. So there was a preconception that your opponent wanted fair dealings. I suspect the real leaders of the US and USSR had barely any common cultural ground with one another, and to them it would be difficult to tell if a provocation was a misunderstanding or your opponent trying to snap up a juicy bit of territory or a key ally or encircle you. I think you need a broader game space to simulate these kinds of diplomatic situations, such as Risk, or Diplomacy, or Civ.
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Jan 21, 2015 09:33
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I checked, and according to secondary sources, officers do take a share of the plunder passing through the possession of their subordinates. One of the secondary sources (From Criminal To Courtier, with which I disagree quite a bit but which has fantastic art) also gives us these nice little scenes: "I'm on three hours of sleep and I just can't deal with this level of cash. Let's get on with it."  The second one is fantastic, because you wouldn't expect this kind of period-characteristic consumption and display of random crap in such a setting. Which is, of course, the point. I have no idea why anyone would want a nautilus shell on a little pedestal, but this guy has one now. Note also the range of budgets on display here--this regiment''s proto-uniform is grey, more or less, but the lower officer (?) in the center is wearing a coarser cloth while the captain or Oberst in the right foreground's got silk. He also has a complete suit of clothes--the jacket and pants match, as they're supposed to, and he's laced or hooked them together: the inside of a jacket and the waistband of a pair of pants either have little hooks and eyes in them, or holes for laces. You fasten one to the other and that's how your pants stay up. Every set differs from every other set, so if you're clothing yourself by robbing the living or stripping the dead, your pants and jacket won't match. Poorer officers and common soldiers in paintings often have pants and jackets that don't match, which means they can't fasten them, which is why the rank and file (like the pikeman on the far right in the second painting in this post, as well as the child servant) are often distinguished by jackets that ride up. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 09:58
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FAUXTON posted:Kojima and Clancy were separated at birth and while Kojima grew up in a weed orchard it's pretty clear Clancy grew up in a meth kitchen. Can Can I use this analogy? It is simply the best here.
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Jan 21, 2015 15:07
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Clancy's early stuff is kind of decent but he kinda snapped somewhere in the middle of Rainbow Six, and everything is way too long.
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Jan 21, 2015 15:12
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HEY GAL posted:I checked, and according to secondary sources, officers do take a share of the plunder passing through the possession of their subordinates. Officers took probably a large share of the loot. Pirate and Viking Captains got only about a double what a common sailor got, while a Captain in the Royal Navy (of Britain) took 2-3/8 of the whole loot.
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Jan 21, 2015 16:15
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SeanBeansShako posted:Can I'll draw up a use contract and have my people talk with your people. Until then, feel free.
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Jan 21, 2015 16:21
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100 Years Ago I've discovered that the Berliner Tageblatt has its archives online, and I curse British schools' terrible attitude towards language teaching. General Joffre and Sir John French appear to have come to some kind of arrangement about who is to attack and where (the BEF is going to be allowed to go back to the left, but they can't attack out of the Ypres salient, it needs to be somewhere more immediately helpful to the French). Joffre's also issued orders to renew the offensive in Champagne. Meanwhile, the paper pokes fun at German suggestions that the Admiralty is going to disguise gunboats as merchant ships. I mean, really. At least come up with something credible!
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Jan 21, 2015 16:43
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Fury is now on theathers in my country, gonna go watch it today hopefully. Out of curiosity, couldn't the 76mm gun on the Sherman penetrate it from the front at normal engagement range?
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Jan 21, 2015 18:53
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Azran posted:Fury is now on theathers in my country, gonna go watch it today hopefully. Out of curiosity, couldn't the 76mm gun on the Sherman penetrate it from the front at normal engagement range? That is one grim motherfucking movie.
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Jan 21, 2015 18:54
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Azran posted:Fury is now on theathers in my country, gonna go watch it today hopefully. Out of curiosity, couldn't the 76mm gun on the Sherman penetrate it from the front at normal engagement range? It sure could! Also note that every single tank burns after being penetrated, which was a problem that they'd fixed months before the movie takes place. Still, if you don't go into it expecting absolute realism it's enjoyable enough (Also grimdark as gently caress, as the poster above me noted) and I certainly enjoyed it.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:11
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Azran posted:Fury is now on theathers in my country, gonna go watch it today hopefully. Out of curiosity, couldn't the 76mm gun on the Sherman penetrate it from the front at normal engagement range? Yes, it was basically up to whoever fired the first shot. Also the firing at the rear on a Tiger is actually counterproductive, since the rear is uniformly thick at 82 mm, and the lower sides are only 62 mm thick.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:22
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PittTheElder posted:I don't think zapping a MIRV really makes any sense, it's going to have a big ablative shield on it. No, that's how the x-ray laser was supposed to work. This was one of the goofier ideas from SDI. Wrap a nuclear bomb in a jacket of independently-aimable lasers, each laser aims at an inbound, you set the bomb off to pump the lasers, and shoot down 50 inbound warheads. The expected kill mechanism was that the laser sets up an ablative shockwave in the target, and as that material explosively ablates outward, the equal-and-opposite force knocks the inbound off its course and down into the atmosphere. And of course since treaty forbid deploying nuclear weapons in space, this device would be the payload on a sub-launched missile. Okay, so the laser didn't work at all, they never got any measurable lasing, and on top of that there were a surfeit of engineering challenges to actually build and deploy such a thing. But the physics at the target end are sound, it's basically the same way the fusion stage in a hydrogen bomb works: it's not the photon pressure of the incoming x-rays that squeeze the fusion stage enough to start it fusing, it's the counterforce from the surface of the fusion stage exploding outward violently from all the x-rays being dumped into it that does the squeezing. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 19:25
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Alright, thanks for the answers. Good to know I wasn't far off the mark. As a funny aside, a local library put Belton Cooper's 'Death Traps' on sale to commemorate the movie's conflict. 
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Jan 21, 2015 19:26
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Yeah Fury is loving grim. It really comes off like someone wrote up a fairly thoughtful film about how war fucks up the people involved by lifting the whole "OORAH ARE TROOPS" curtain and showing the audience that war involves seeing a burning tank commander's horribly disfigured face as he's blowing his own brains out with his sidearm because his tank got hit by a panzerfaust because the bow gunner of the next tank down the line hesitated to fill a literal child full of lead, but when the writer brought it to the studio they were like "hey this could be a great movie with some minor adjustments, do you think we could put in some tank combat to frame some of the plot" and the writer trusted them.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:27
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Guildencrantz posted:Got any interesting examples? I know the French side pretty well, but I'm admittedly kinda ignorant about the inner workings of the other combatants. Probably because I read about it mainly in Polish books, which tend to have a strong pro-French slant for obvious reasons. Well, Lew Tolsoi in War and Peace posted: "My dear Count Bolkonski, you know that I did not leave the General Staffafter our great success at Austerlitz. I have found my taste for war and will of course stick with it. What I have seen in the last 3 months is incredible. But let me start at the beginning. As you know, the enemy of mankind is attacking Prussia. Prussia has always been our most valued ally and has only betrayed us 3 times in the last 3 years! We thus make their cause our own! But it becames apperant that the enemy of mankind is not particularly impressed by our glorious speeches, and rather, in a most uncivilized and non verbal manner, assaults the poor misbegotten Prussians, without allowing the Prussians any time to end the parade which they just started. Very quickly he most unculturaly beats the crap out of them and moves into Potsdam. The King of Prussia thus writes to Napoleon: "It is my utmost desire that your majesty will by as treated and received in Potsdam as your majesties high station and noble wishes demand, and I was vigorously laboring to make a reality under these trying circumstances. I sincerly hope that my attempts were successfull." The Prussian Generals meanwhile hold a vigorous competition aiming for true excellence in politeness concerning their French guests, and eagerly follow french requests concerning the disposition of their weaponry. The commander of Glogau, with a 10.000 men strong garrison, requests guidance from the King of Prussia on what to do if the French would demand his surrender. In Short, while we were attempting to impress the French with our martial behavior, we (Russians) accidentaly ended up in a real war, and, what is important, into a war on our own borders, for the King of Prussian (play with words here, "Le Roy de Prussie" can apperantly be a wordplay meaning the "King of nothing"). We have everything in abundance, but one minor detail is missing. A commander in chief. As it appears, our success in Austerlitz would have been even greater had our commander been even less young, so one diligently assesses the capacities of all 80 year old General and gives the post to Prosorowski. The General reaches the troops in Suvorovs style using a sleigh and is received with much fanfare and applause. On the fourth, the courier from Petersburg arrives. We move everything into the office of the marshall, who likes to do everything by himself. The Marshall watches us sorting through the mail, and waits for the letters adressed to him. We search and sort but dont find any letters for him. Unpatient, he takes matters in his own hands and finds letters of the Emperor to the Duke W, the Count D. and to others. He gets one of his fits of rage, seizes the letters, and reads the Emperors Mail to the other generals. "Ah, such am I treated! The Emperor sends Spies to watch on me! The Emperor does not trust me!". Still fuming, he wrote his famous order to general Benningsen. [...] The Fieldmarshall is thus pissed at the Emperor, and makes all of us suffer because of it which is of course completely natural. This concludes the first act, it is obvious that all further acts are, simultaneously both more interesting and also more amusing. Now that the Fieldmarshall retreated to his quarters, it appears that the enemy has turned up, and that battle has to be given. According to the age of servies, Büxhowden is the commander in chief, but General Bennigsen does not share this view since his corps is furthest to the front and he very much wants to, as the Germans say, "fight his own battle". He thus delivers a battle at Pulutsk, which was viewed as a great victory, an assesment with which I disagree. As you know, the civilians have weird ways of deciding who won a battle. We by contrast believe that whoever retreats lost the battle, and if you look at it this way, we certainly lost at Pulutsk. In short, while retreating from Pulutsk, Bennigsen sends a courier with a victory message to the Czar anyway. Now Benningsen is no longer willing to accept Büxhowden as the commander in chief, because he hopes to become commander in chief himself following his victory at Pulutsk. During this interregnum, we conduct a wide variety of unusual and highly innovative maneuvers. Our goal however is not, as expected, to avoid the French enemy, but rather to avoid the enemy Büxhowden, who would be the commander in chief according to his age of service. We pursue this goal with such vigilance that, after crossing an unfordable river, we burn the single bridge behind us in order to keep our vile enemy, meaning Büxhowden not Bonaparte, away from us. Büxhowden himself got nearly captured by the French due to our maneuvers, but nevertheless relentless pursued us, while being pursued by Bonaparte himself. As soon as Büxhowden appears on "our" side of the river, we immidiatly go back on the other side. Finally, our enemy Büxhowden catches us and attacks. The two Generals clash, Büxhowden áttacks with a formal duel challenge, to which Benningsen reacts with an epileptic seizure. But just in the nick of time a courier from Petersburg arrives and delivers our promotion to commander in chief. With the enemy Büxhowden thus defeated, we were now able to conduct operations against the enemy Bonaparte. But just in this moment, a third enemy appears, the Russian army, which, with much ado, demands things such as Bread, meat, hay and other such frivulous things! The magazines alas are empty, and the ways thoroughly messed up. Undeterred, the Russian army turns to brigandage and massive looting on a scale not seen in the last campaign. Half of the regiments is now made up of marauders, who scourge the lands with fire and sword. The local population is utterly devasted, the hospitals are overflowing and there is famine everywhere. Two times has headquarters been attacked by marauding bands, and it had to call in one of the few remaigning battallions to drive these off. The Emperor wishes to allow all division commanders to order the shootings of all looters, but I am afraid that this would result in one half of the army shooting the other." Inpromptu translation from German (no idea where I left the Russian version) by me.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:46
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There was a post in Cinema Discusso saying "Fury is a great movie as long as you turn it off right before they fight the SS at the crossroads, because after that scene starts it's just a long, generic, unlikely gun battle. I remember at one point, the Wikipedia section on historical inaccuracies in the movie had a quote like "This movie is unrealistic, highly trained German forces would have easily destroyed this poorly armoured American tank[citation needed]" Chamale fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jan 21, 2015 |
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Jan 21, 2015 19:47
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Late war SS? Highly trained? Okay, wiki.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:59
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Phanatic posted:No, that's how the x-ray laser was supposed to work. One of the better parts of Footfall, by noted terrible hacks Niven & Pournelle, is when the human oneshot Orion-drive spaceship goes up and does battle with the aliens, and the latter exclaim something like "how the gently caress did they get x-ray lasers working?" Haha trick question we cribbed it off SDI, hail Reagan!
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Jan 21, 2015 20:07
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I enjoyed Fury's battle scenes, but I found that the actual drama fell flat after the halfway mark. It seemed like it was going to go in a different direction than most American-centric war films: show the German soldiers as decent people no different from the Americans and defending their homes from an invading force, with the Americans including people badly damaged by PTSD to the point of sociopathic behavior. After the first 30 minutes, I thought they were going to depict Wardaddy as effectively being the movie's antagonist, summarily executing captured soldiers and forcing the new guy to do it to "toughen him up". Unfortunately, after the scene with the German women it all went downhill. It's like they wanted to make something unique, but fell victim to all the classic "gritty war movie" tropes. It ends up being nothing really special outside of the awesome battle scenes, which is a drat shame because it started off better.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:16
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 This owns.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:47
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Its always a good thing when reality shows that Looney Toons isnt always unrealistic
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Jan 21, 2015 20:50
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chitoryu12 posted:I enjoyed Fury's battle scenes, but I found that the actual drama fell flat after the halfway mark. It seemed like it was going to go in a different direction than most American-centric war films: show the German soldiers as decent people no different from the Americans and defending their homes from an invading force, with the Americans including people badly damaged by PTSD to the point of sociopathic behavior. After the first 30 minutes, I thought they were going to depict Wardaddy as effectively being the movie's antagonist, summarily executing captured soldiers and forcing the new guy to do it to "toughen him up". It doesn't help that out of nowhere in like April 1945 comes an intact, high-morale, well-fed-and-supplied SS unit with their own little armored car for fire support. You might as well say a flight of Mustangs and Corsairs showed up to fight the Japanese attackers back out of Pearl Harbor after the fleet had gotten sunk in entirety.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:09
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FAUXTON posted:It doesn't help that out of nowhere in like April 1945 comes an intact, high-morale, well-fed-and-supplied SS unit with their own little armored car for fire support. You might as well say a flight of Mustangs and Corsairs showed up to fight the Japanese attackers back out of Pearl Harbor after the fleet had gotten sunk in entirety. To be fair, the movie does make the point that they're not actually too well supplied. At one point it turns out that they only had like one single crate of Panzerfausts to begin with, which is why the protagonists even made it for as long as they did. It could have been a rear-line police unit that was redeployed to the front as a last ditch attempt, explaining their lack of supplies and evidently completely poo poo training and tactics despite their high morale.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:24
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Perestroika posted:To be fair, the movie does make the point that they're not actually too well supplied. At one point it turns out that they only had like one single crate of Panzerfausts to begin with, which is why the protagonists even made it for as long as they did. It could have been a rear-line police unit that was redeployed to the front as a last ditch attempt, explaining their lack of supplies and evidently completely poo poo training and tactics despite their high morale. Ahh good point. Most of their morale must have come from that Bauhaus-looking CO they had.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:27
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