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my dad posted:"could have won WW2 for the Nazis" And if the nazis had nuclear weapons. And if continental drift moved Washington much closer to Europe.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:52
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If black gay Hitler won't come to the city, then the city must go to black gay Hitler.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:57
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JcDent posted:Pistol caliber, as in SMG bullets, one of the more worrisome things in urban fighting! Implies Germany, which had eliminated graphite as a neutron moderator and boiled off and or lost too much heavy water to actually achieve a working reactor could build a nuclear bomb. Implies Germany which was sending out merchant raiders for copper and had used all its currency reserves prewar on foreign trade could do what took the US something like 30% the entire electricity production of the Third Reich over its lifetime and nearly 15,000 tons of silver in order to separate isotopes or could get centrifuges working. Implies Germany could build a 1,000 kg or lower nuclear bomb. Fails to mention Northrop's flying wing bomber, which had the exact same wingspan of the B-2 and the payload and range to actually do an intercontinental nuke run. If WWII were fought with nuclear armed jet flying wings, it would end with B-49s and mushroom clouds over Berlin.
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Mar 4, 2015 17:59
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JcDent posted:Also: can anyone tell me if this is BS? Looking the article over, the biggest issue that stands out to a layman is that it assumes this Wunderwaffen had a pair of nukes to drop on Washington DC, which was just plain not happening (and if the Nazis had nukes, bombers capable of making it across the Atlantic would be the least of Allied worries). Without nukes, all Germany really has is a handful of fancy strategic bombers with relatively light bomb loads which wasn't going to make a difference at that point even if they were the absolute best and most unstoppable strategic bombers in the world and weren't plagued with unforeseen design issues like most German Wunderwaffen. edit: beaten like Nazi Germany my dad posted:But, if the pilot was gay, black, and named Adolf Hitler... The idea of Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Reich, awarding the gay, black pilot who named himself Adolf Hitler in honor of his beloved leader a medal for nuking Washington DC makes me giggle for reasons I cannot adequately explain.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:00
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Even successfully dropping two nukes on Washington DC would not have won the war for Nazi Germany, and certainly not in 1945. "Oh no they bombed America, everyone surrender! Yes that includes you, Stalin!"
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Mar 4, 2015 18:05
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JcDent posted:Pistol caliber, as in SMG bullets, one of the more worrisome things in urban fighting! Do you really need to ask? There is one sentence in this atrocious article that really stood out to me. quote:Though all but one of the 229 prototypes were destroyed before being completed, Operation Paperclip (which sought to spirit German scientists away to America at the end of the war) ensured that the technology was not lost. I can't tell if the writer is doing this on loving purpose. It's just so pointlessly misleading to use the plane's ID number here, I almost have to commend his dedication to clickbait bs. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 18:05
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Fangz posted:Even successfully dropping two nukes on Washington DC would not have won the war for Nazi Germany, and certainly not in 1945. Man, Churchill and Patton would have needed a change of pants if WW2 had ended with Germany nuking Moscow as its last gasp.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:09
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Fangz posted:Even successfully dropping two nukes on Washington DC would not have won the war for Nazi Germany, and certainly not in 1945. At least in 1945 it would have been easy to nuke Soviet occupied territory from Berlin. Hell, they wouldn't even have needed airplanes, just a big trebuchet.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:16
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Hogge Wild posted:At least in 1945 it would have been easy to nuke Soviet occupied territory from Berlin. Hell, they wouldn't even have needed airplanes, just a big trebuchet. A timed fuze and patience would suffice to be honest.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:23
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Azran posted:Out of curiosity, and I'm still 395 posts behind, but can anyone tell me if (and for how long in case they did) plate armor and gunpowder weapons co-existed? I have this weird memory of "bulletproof" coming from armorers shooting a suit of armor at point blank as a proof of it being resistant to bullets, but it may be another pop culture thing. French cuirassiers in plate armour, 1914:  The pop culture myth is that guns made armour obsolete, when in fact they coexisted on the battlefield. The big factor that led to plate armour's decline was the use of pike and shot. When the socket bayonet was invented in the late 17th century, it led to the decline of pikes because now everyone had a miniature pike on his musket. Napoleon used cuirassiers as elite troops because the round musket balls of his time couldn't reliably penetrate a breastplate and sword bayonets weren't effective either. By World War I, everyone was using cylindrical jacketed ammunition with far more penetrating power, so the French quickly learned that breastplates were no longer bulletproof.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:25
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Why did people not know this though? And other things too, like the failure of artillery to cut barbed wire? Couldn't they do some experiments, shoot some breastplates with bullets and barbed wire with artillery?
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Mar 4, 2015 18:32
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Fangz posted:Why did people not know this though? And other things too, like the failure of artillery to cut barbed wire? Couldn't they do some experiments, shoot some breastplates with bullets and barbed wire with artillery? I'd make a post on why the military leaders of World War I didn't put thought into protecting the lives of their men, but I'm not very good at expressing contempt.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:34
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Fangz posted:Why did people not know this though? And other things too, like the failure of artillery to cut barbed wire? Couldn't they do some experiments, shoot some breastplates with bullets and barbed wire with artillery? It probably didn't occur to them to do independent tests, as they thought they were fine. They thought they were fine until guys started dropping dead on the battlefield. Similarly, they had seen that artillery tended to blast everything to pieces, so they assumed it would take care of barbed wire like it did everything else. It was not obvious to them that it was something they needed to test.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:39
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Libluini posted:Not only in the East. My home city in the North of Germany gets randomly every odd year or so an urban district evacuated because yet another bomb from WWII has been found in the ground. The rate at which that poo poo happens is way dependent on the local geology too. The last time that I was in Berlin on research I saw a great show on TV that explained how Berlin's local geology made it perfect for trapping air-dropped bombs which is why the place is still such a delightful gently caress you to UXO specialists. I think it was right around when the guy who had been heading Berlin's in-house UXO team retired after a half-century career. Anyways, I'm sure I've got some of the details wrong, but from memory the tl;dr is that since the city is basically sitting in a giant low, flat spot on a river plane it's essentially a giant, sodden layer of mud and silt on top of bedrock (this also explains why Berlin's subway is so relatively near the surface compared to a lot of other cities). The mud and clay that's under most of the city was soft enough to trap a lot of the bombs that were dropped on the city, and a great many loving bombs were dropped on Berlin. Since a lot of the triggers used on the air dropped bombs were inertial this also raised the dud percentages way more than the allies predicted. The real gently caress you though is that a lot of the WW2 era bombs (well, that the USAAF dropped - I remember the article specifically mentioned this guy was a bit of a specialist in American ordinance) had a secondary, timed fuse that was designed to blow it later if the inertial fuse failed to go off. Or, alternatively, just a timed fuse as a general "go gently caress yourself" to the fire and emergency crews that responded to all the destruction the bombers just caused. Again, here is where the geology gets important. Remember how I said there is bedrock under that silt? It's close enough to the surface that the bombs would actually go through the silt, slowing as they went, then ricochet off the goddamned bedrock and end up back in the silt pointed nose up. This caused all sorts of havoc with the timed fuzes, which were pretty crude chemical designs based around a vial of something or other breaking and eating a bunch of early plastic something else that was holding the important bits of the detonators apart. Anyways, like I said, I'm sure the specifics are off here and there because I'm not a geologist or a UXO expert, but the really important bits were mud + bedrock = bad and WW2 timed explosives ending up nose in the air = bad, and that you put it all together and Berlin is basically the worst case scenario for trapping air-dropped ordinance of the kind in common use in the 40s.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:44
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Weren't cuirassiers breastplates mostly for the look of the thing and tradition by that point, though? I kinda doubt anybody was seriously thinking "Hurr hurr breastplates make us invincible against bullets now!" by WW1, and even in Napoleon's time it wasn't like the Imperial Guard was getting breastplated up the wazoo. Seems more like breastplates even then were considered more of a "might help a few guys get lucky" deal than an "brilliant protection, stops all bullets" thing that was worth putting on a small minority of elite troops but not on anyone else.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:46
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Chamale posted:French cuirassiers in plate armour, 1914: It wasn't an issue of round shot vs. cylindrical jacketed shot that made bullets go through armor of a thickness that you're going to hang off a human body, it was the development and maturation of smokeless powder. This causes a huge shift away from big, fat, slow moving projectiles to small, fast moving projectiles. This is also why body armor stays effective against pistol rounds while rifle rounds blow right through it. I'm grossly simplifying the issue of course, there's a lot more to it than just what type of powder is being used (true AP small arms ammo uses hardened steel penetrators, for example) but for the thickness and quality of steel that we're talking about for late 19th century cuirassier plate the difference between black powder and smokeless powder is going to far, far outweigh the other considerations. edit: and it's not like those vests would have been 100% proof to BP weaponry either. The switch over and the increased range and velocity of weapons that smokeless ushered in would have vastly increased the range at which they would be vulnerable, though. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 18:54
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Fangz posted:Why did people not know this though? And other things too, like the failure of artillery to cut barbed wire? Couldn't they do some experiments, shoot some breastplates with bullets and barbed wire with artillery? None of the conflicts immediately prior to the war, even those fought with contemporary technology (Balkan War, especially), degraded in the same way. It's tough to extrapolate WWI tactics and operations from the First Balkan war without the benefit of hindsight.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:02
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Couldn't you draw some paralells between the Russo-Japanese war and WWI? I mean, the lesson the Japanese learned was that elan would carry them through, but still, lots of bloody charges into machine guns and artillery-related death.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:12
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quote:http://gizmodo.com/the-first-flying-wing-jet-could-have-won-wwii-for-the-n-1649401748 The Ho 229 was cool, but the article even admits that it ended up being a non-factor because they could never get it to work. The entire history of the Nazis could be summed up in "They could have won if not for these massive, insurmountable flaws." Also, I'm fairly certain the 229 didn't have the range for a round trip to the East Coast and back to Germany. It was designed around a requirement for a 1000 kilometer range, which isn't even enough to fly from Orlando to New York City (I would know exactly how long that is, as I've driven it many times).
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Mar 4, 2015 19:17
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Couldn't you draw some paralells between the Russo-Japanese war and WWI? I mean, the lesson the Japanese learned was that elan would carry them through, but still, lots of bloody charges into machine guns and artillery-related death. Sure, but that was trying to storm a heavily fortified strong point with great terrain and limited access, which was always a bloody loving mess at all eras of history. Everything outside of the siege of Port Arthur was still pretty bloody, but the Japanese were able to carry even entrenched ground. The lesson that's easily learned from the other battles of the war is that with enough concentration of force you can overcome entrenched strong points.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:24
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Fangz posted:Why did people not know this though? And other things too, like the failure of artillery to cut barbed wire? Couldn't they do some experiments, shoot some breastplates with bullets and barbed wire with artillery? Cutting barbed wire with artillery shells was more than possible (as we're going to see in six days). When it failed, it was usually due to some combination of too many dud shells/guns improperly registered/guns themselves inaccurate/not enough ordnance for the actual amount of wire. The basic concept was sound and was proven repeatedly.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:51
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Plate armor was also more of a thing for cavalry because the horses let them more easily deal with the weight of thick breasplates, rather than making them march themselves the whole battle. It just so happens that cavalry happened to be considered an elite unit separate from the infantry, so they also got the bonus of being special.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:08
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Trin Tragula posted:Cutting barbed wire with artillery shells was more than possible (as we're going to see in six days). When it failed, it was usually due to some combination of too many dud shells/guns improperly registered/guns themselves inaccurate/not enough ordnance for the actual amount of wire. The basic concept was sound and was proven repeatedly. Didn't the British also wrongly assume that shrapnel shells would be better than HE at cutting wire, the first few times they tried it?
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Mar 4, 2015 20:19
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chitoryu12 posted:Plate armor was also more of a thing for cavalry because the horses let them more easily deal with the weight of thick breasplates, rather than making them march themselves the whole battle. It just so happens that cavalry happened to be considered an elite unit separate from the infantry, so they also got the bonus of being special. Do you think that pikemen didn't wear breastplates?
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Mar 4, 2015 20:45
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JaucheCharly posted:Do you think that pikemen didn't wear breastplates? The cuirass lasted longer for cavalrymen in widespread use than it did for anyone else.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:49
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Disinterested posted:The cuirass lasted longer for cavalrymen in widespread use than it did for anyone else. I've always kind of wondered why this holds true in Europe but not N. America. Look at pictures of European cav units in the 1860s and you'll still find plenty of breastplates, while I don't think I've ever seen a picture of one in use in the ACW. edit: well, not by cav. I've read a few small things about one off instances of body armor for officers or rich guys who got drafted into the infantry, like the one the VMI displays.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:10
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Cyrano4747 posted:I've always kind of wondered why this holds true in Europe but not N. America. Look at pictures of European cav units in the 1860s and you'll still find plenty of breastplates, while I don't think I've ever seen a picture of one in use in the ACW. I suspect armor was associated with knights and chivalry, and thus English aristocracy. Americans weren't real big on that stuff.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:12
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Sometimes an elite unit just wants to wear something to add to the elite status and get more booze/ladies.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:17
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Deteriorata posted:I suspect armor was associated with knights and chivalry, and thus English aristocracy. Americans weren't real big on that stuff. Eh, I'm pretty far from a US history scholar, but what little I know about that period points to the bougie end of American society at that time having a pretty big hard on for emulating the Victorian English.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, I'm pretty far from a US history scholar, but what little I know about that period points to the bougie end of American society at that time having a pretty big hard on for emulating the Victorian English. Privately, yes, but an officer riding about in a steel breastplate would have been the subject of derision, not respect. This link has some steel body armor used in the ACW. It was designed to be covered with cloth resembling the uniform so as to hide it. So soldiers were keen to wear it in most cases, but did not want to be seen wearing it.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:31
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Deteriorata posted:Privately, yes, but an officer riding about in a steel breastplate would have been the subject of derision, not respect. OK, but as I understand it from that article it's about manliness and masculinity, not anti-aristocratic yankee ideals. Even so that doesn't approach the issue of why you have hussar regiments making it issued kit over in Europe while US Cav aren't bothering with it. Making something an issued item goes a long way to bypass the sort of cultural issues and normative ideals of masculinity that you're dealing with when you look at privately purchased bespoke body armor for officers and infantry.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Eh, I'm pretty far from a US history scholar, but what little I know about that period points to the bougie end of American society at that time having a pretty big hard on for emulating the Victorian English. Yeah, but the military seems to have been more consistently American. Looking at the evolution of weapons and uniforms, they represent a separate but similar path from the European standards where they both started. It's like monkeys and chimpanzees. So the cavalry started out as a colonial emulation of the British cavalry from whence they came, and continued on that path from independence instead of developing like the Europeans back in the Old World did. They never went on to breastplates, and in general the US military eschewed body armor except for minor experiments and private enterprises (like private purchases of silk vests and plates in the Civil War) until the 20th century. The cavalry prevalent in the Indian Wars mingled with the styles of the Native Americans and western settlers as well, creating our modern imagery of fringed coats, fur hats, and moccasins combined with the distinctive blue uniform. Edit: Partially sniped? Either way, I think at least part of the European tendency toward plate armor in those times may have been due to the cavalry's lineage to the knights of old. Quite a bit of European military tradition and trends dates back many centuries.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:41
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I went on Twitter, and I found this. https://twitter.com/typejunky/status/573202699254177793/photo/1 If I'd ended up in academia, this is exactly what I'd be researching and writing about. They're so cute 
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Mar 4, 2015 21:46
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Just going to take this opportunity to post my favorite picture of German WW2-ish era cavalry:
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Mar 4, 2015 21:49
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Poor horses. That's a lot of weight to concentrate on their back, rather than spreading it out.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:58
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Spacewolf posted:Poor horses. Warfare.txt. 
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Mar 4, 2015 22:01
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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It's important to remember that most of the US was rough terrain and forest until pretty recently, relatively speaking. It's not that surprising that they didn't develop the same kind of cavalry tactics that Europe did considering most of the action cavalry saw, if any, was fighting natives. In addition to the fact that you're not going to be fighting very many pitched battles against Amerindians, you also don't need armor and a big lance when you have superior weaponry, and there's obviously no tradition of heavy cavalry like you have in Europe either. At the start of the civil war many American cavalry units didn't even carry sabers since they tended to generally be used as scouts or mounted infantry.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:04
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Spacewolf posted:Poor horses. That's a lot of weight to concentrate on their back, rather than spreading it out. I guess I don't see how it's a ton more concentration of weight vs. actually riding in the saddle with your feet in the stirrups. You're still going to be distributing the weight through the saddle. If you're riding at any decent speed most of your weight is going to be transmitted through the stirrups, not over your whole legs and rear end or whatever. You're kind of using your legs as shock absorbers, else you'll have extremely sore rear end and thighs  Those have to exceptionally well-trained horses to stand still enough to take kneeling pot-shots from, though.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:06
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JaucheCharly posted:Do you think that pikemen didn't wear breastplates? Edit: Googled "pike drill" to try to find some nice little pen-and-ink drawings from the 1670s or something that showed what I was talking about, did not find them, did find this:  Whoever it was who asked me if they bent, yes they do. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 22:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:The real gently caress you though is that a lot of the WW2 era bombs (well, that the USAAF dropped - I remember the article specifically mentioned this guy was a bit of a specialist in American ordinance) had a secondary, timed fuse that was designed to blow it later if the inertial fuse failed to go off. Or, alternatively, just a timed fuse as a general "go gently caress yourself" to the fire and emergency crews that responded to all the destruction the bombers just caused. Again, here is where the geology gets important. Remember how I said there is bedrock under that silt? It's close enough to the surface that the bombs would actually go through the silt, slowing as they went, then ricochet off the goddamned bedrock and end up back in the silt pointed nose up. This caused all sorts of havoc with the timed fuzes, which were pretty crude chemical designs based around a vial of something or other breaking and eating a bunch of early plastic something else that was holding the important bits of the detonators apart. The Germans did that poo poo all the time too, and I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else did it. Timed fuzes, in addition to regular contact or simply interspersed with the regularly fuzed bombs, meant wreaking havoc with rescue and repair work. The Allies, from what I understand, used it against German airfields a lot to hamper efforts to bring landing strips to operational status and thus reducing local airpower in an area. chitoryu12 posted:The Ho 229 was cool, but the article even admits that it ended up being a non-factor because they could never get it to work. The entire history of the Nazis could be summed up in "They could have won if not for these massive, insurmountable flaws." I'd say it's more that they experimented too much and had too little time. Wunderwaffen aircraft were designed around a 1,000 x 3 requirement: Carry 1000kg payload 1000km with a speed of 1000km/h. There's a story about how a Ju-290 was able to fly within 20 miles of New York city, once, sometime in 1943 but that story'll probably show up in a few years when people start circle-jerking over new material once the rehashed "HOW THE NAZIS ALMOST WON" stories start getting repetitive, again. Hell, I'm gonna call it now! 24 years from now, at the hundredth year anniversary you'll see plenty of "What if" poo poo. You want a stalemate or German victory? Come up with a scenario where they beat the Russians and still have most of their army, done.
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