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Tomn posted:(For that matter, imagine what a headache most modern art is going to be to future archaeologists.) Knowing historians and archaeologists, they're probably going to decide it had a religious function.
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May 11, 2015 17:20
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Cythereal posted:Knowing historians and archaeologists, they're probably going to decide it had a religious function. If they feel that they are far more evolved than us, then, knowing biologists, it had to do with courtship.
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May 11, 2015 17:23
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Cythereal posted:Knowing historians and archaeologists, they're probably going to decide it had a religious function. Nah, religious is too narrow and you have to fit it into a system. We just call it ritual, which is far less specific.
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May 11, 2015 17:23
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esn2500 posted:Hey errybody, Lee's biggest failing as a strategist was his belief that, by decisively defeating the Army of the Potomac in the field, that he could then march right up to the White House and negotiate the terms of the south's independence. I believe, in fact, he carried with him such a instrument on the Gettysburg campaign. He never understood that conscription/industrialization had killed off the decisive battle as a thing. To that end, the campaign that turned into Gettysburg could have been a great idea. It got the ANV out of Virginia, which was running low on food and whatnot, and it put a big scare into everybody in Washington. Had he set a goal of "get between the AOTP and Washington in a good defensive position", Washington probably would have forced Meade to attack, and give the state of disarray that force was in, it likely would have gone very badly. Had Gettysburg been another defensive victory ala Fredricksburg, politics in the north may well have seriously shifted towards peace. Instead, Lee wanted to attack, he did attack, and he didn't stop attacking when he should have. All this was in the belief that he was just about to win the war with just one more push.
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May 11, 2015 17:33
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Klaus88 posted:[Virtual gun chat] Oh god this game what you done to me.
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May 11, 2015 17:38
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Nenonen posted:If they feel that they are far more evolved than us, then, knowing biologists, it had to do with courtship. The male who smashes the biggest swastika is seen as the most desirable mate.
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May 11, 2015 17:50
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SeanBeansShako posted:Oh god this game what you done to me. Man, the Liberator was a seriously silly piece of work. Was it really necessary to make a WWII gun require a wooden stick to reload?
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May 11, 2015 18:03
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bewbies posted:Lee's biggest failing as a strategist was his belief that, by decisively defeating the Army of the Potomac in the field, that he could then march right up to the White House and negotiate the terms of the south's independence. I believe, in fact, he carried with him such a instrument on the Gettysburg campaign. He never understood that conscription/industrialization had killed off the decisive battle as a thing. I see. So is it agreed upon that if Lee had not attacked that day, the Union would have waited them out and not attempt any assault of their own?
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May 11, 2015 18:04
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On the topic of odd incidents at the tail end of WW2. The little danish island of Bornholm (you know the one, it sits in the Baltic sea south-east of Sweden) came under Soviet occupation for a while. quote:Bornholm was heavily bombarded by the Soviet Air Force in May 1945. German garrison commander, German Navy Captain Gerhard von Kamptz, refused to surrender to the Soviets, as his orders were to surrender to the Western Allies. The Germans sent several telegrams to Copenhagen requesting that at least one British soldier should be transferred to Bornholm, so that the Germans could surrender to the western allied forces instead of the Russians. When von Kamptz failed to provide a written capitulation as demanded by the Soviet commanders, Soviet aircraft relentlessly bombed and destroyed more than 800 civilian houses in Rønne and Nexø and seriously damaged roughly 3,000 more on 7–8 May 1945. As you can tell from that last line, during WW2 and the early parts of the cold war it had a fairly significant strategic value and the russians really didn't appreciate anyone trying to figure out what they were doing.
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May 11, 2015 18:05
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esn2500 posted:I see. So is it agreed upon that if Lee had not attacked that day, the Union would have waited them out and not attempt any assault of their own? Nobody can be sure of what Lincoln would have pressured Meade to do, but certainly none of the union corps commanders were enthusiastic to attack.
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May 11, 2015 18:08
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HEY GAL posted:Epitaph for Mariana Gryphius, The Poet's Brother Paul's Little Daughter I'm amazed if some Scandinavian metal band has never set that to music.
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May 11, 2015 18:09
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HEY GAL posted:Meanwhile, in the Thirty Years' War, things go on much as they usually do: Should have dropped in some silver to whack the mother in law.
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May 11, 2015 18:12
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Fangz posted:Man, the Liberator was a seriously silly piece of work. Was it really necessary to make a WWII gun require a wooden stick to reload? I really need to read up on the names of a lot of tiny parts of most of these guns, I've degenrated to Pratchett-esqe mumbling for their names.
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May 11, 2015 18:19
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esn2500 posted:I see. So is it agreed upon that if Lee had not attacked that day, the Union would have waited them out and not attempt any assault of their own? Well, it is all speculation so I'm not sure "agreement" is the right word, but what we do know is that the corps commanders all said they weren't in any position to attack. This makes sense; they'd lost one corps commander KIA and two others were wounded, five corps had been fighting for their lives for two days, and the other two had been marching for almost a week straight. The Confederate position was almost as strong as the Union one and the army in general was in really bad shape. If we're talking about a hypothetical engagement some other time that's sort of a different issue.
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May 11, 2015 18:27
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Mojo Threepwood posted:My relative also reported that a major priority in the POW camps for Germans was sorting the troops out between regular army and SS, which could be distinguished because of their tattoos with the lightning bolts. Wait, what? Did SS troops get lightning bolt tattoos? I've never heard of this before.
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May 11, 2015 18:47
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Eej posted:From one of the comments to that entry/ This was apparently pages ago, but I'm absolutely loving that someone put a crosshair on that thing.
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May 11, 2015 18:53
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Tias posted:Wait, what? Did SS troops get lightning bolt tattoos? I've never heard of this before. They had their blood type tattooed under their arms. Like the Tier One Operators of today, only more permanent. Never heard about lightning bolts.
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May 11, 2015 20:06
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Klaus88 posted:[Virtual gun chat] The MP5 is far better than the preceding German guns. The MG 34 has 206 parts and the bipod alone is so ridiculous that when you remove the legs, the game disassembles them by itself instead of forcing you to pull out every pin and lever and spring. It's overengineered to a degree that I thought impossible. Amazingly, the Mauser C96 only has something like 34 parts; the trigger and hammer mechanism is a little more convoluted than it needs to be, but the action is a very simple recoiling bolt. I think Eugene Stoner took the idea for the AR-10 and AR-15 field stripping (two pins that hold the upper and lower receiver together) from the StG 44 wholesale, but the StG is a mess of bad decisions. Most of the internal parts have to sit on removable cylindrical inserts placed in the receiver, and losing one means that part's not going back in. quote:Man, the Liberator was a seriously silly piece of work. Was it really necessary to make a WWII gun require a wooden stick to reload? The FP-45 Liberator was an ultra-cheap assassination gun meant to be dropped en masse in Nazi-occupied areas for resistance fighters. They're totally disposable pieces of junk that were meant to be used to pop a German soldier in the back of the head so you could steal his gear; reloading was something to be done back at the safehouse, assuming you didn't just drop the thing and run. They cost about $34.56 in modern money per unit to make, and the idea was that the Nazis would be paranoid about literally millions of pistols being dropped into partisan hands that they could never hope to totally confiscate. In practice, all of the generals in charge of Europe looked at them and thought they were a stupid idea and canceled the mass drop idea. Only a few got distributed around the world and they're valuable collector's items now. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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May 11, 2015 20:23
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JaucheCharly posted:Should have dropped in some silver to whack the mother in law.
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May 11, 2015 20:25
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Fangz posted:Man, the Liberator was a seriously silly piece of work. Was it really necessary to make a WWII gun require a wooden stick to reload? The absolute foremost quality that was designed for with the Liberator was low cost of manufacture, immediately after "Will go bang." It didn't even have a rifled barrel, and was essentially a chamber for a .45ACP cartridge, with a trigger attached. If you have a Liberator, and Germans around, a more refined pistol at the very least, and more likely a K98 or MP40, is only a single close-range gunshot away. ...Or at least that was the theory.
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May 11, 2015 20:29
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esn2500 posted:I see. So is it agreed upon that if Lee had not attacked that day, the Union would have waited them out and not attempt any assault of their own? Lee's problem, if he takes a position and waits to be attacked, is what to do if the Union just takes a position and stares at him. They're getting supplies and reinforcements, he isn't. Meade was a pretty cautious general and had gotten the army command only three days before. It's hard to imagine him rushing to a decision.
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May 11, 2015 20:31
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And Gettysburg wasn't planned by any measure. Lee probably thought he was facing only a portion of the union army on day 2, so attacking the smaller portion makes sense. Of course, too bad Stuart was too busy stealing cattle to be out scouting.
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May 11, 2015 20:34
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#justcavalrythings
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May 11, 2015 20:35
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MrYenko posted:The absolute foremost quality that was designed for with the Liberator was low cost of manufacture, immediately after "Will go bang." It didn't even have a rifled barrel, and was essentially a chamber for a .45ACP cartridge, with a trigger attached. There's at least one firing replica manufactured today, which Hickok45 tested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ERSQo6cmTQ
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May 11, 2015 20:37
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sullat posted:And Gettysburg wasn't planned by any measure. Lee probably thought he was facing only a portion of the union army on day 2, so attacking the smaller portion makes sense. Of course, too bad Stuart was too busy stealing cattle to be out scouting. Right, the "eyes of the army" were missing. It's interesting to wonder how things would have played out otherwise.
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May 11, 2015 20:43
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chitoryu12 posted:There's at least one firing replica manufactured today, which Hickok45 tested. It's one of these: http://vintageordnance.com/products/voco-fp-45-liberator-pistol Note that these reproductions have rifled barrels, unlike the original. That said, I'm amazed anyone would sell a functional firearm while recommending that you not fire it.
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May 11, 2015 21:10
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chitoryu12 posted:The MP5 is far better than the preceding German guns. The MG 34 has 206 parts and the bipod alone is so ridiculous that when you remove the legs, the game disassembles them by itself instead of forcing you to pull out every pin and lever and spring. It's overengineered to a degree that I thought impossibly. Amazingly, the Mauser C96 only has something like 34 parts; the trigger and hammer mechanism is a little more convoluted than it needs to be, but the action is a very simple recoiling bolt. There's browning 30. cal in the game with the tripod and the game makes you take the tripod apart. If the MG34 is a microcosm of the Nazi dominated German armament industry then no wonder their drat tanks broke down all the time. The StG is downright frightening when it's fully disassembled.  Man, it seems like all the German trigger assemblies are just hilariously over-engineered. Could you share a bit about the luger and how it looks like its about to jam, explode, or transform and roll out at any second at the drop of a hat? 
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May 11, 2015 21:11
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HEY GAL posted:I would say "soldiers aren't an instrument for random civilians' personal grievances," but nope, that happened. Apparently leading soldiers to the houses of people you hated was a thing. "Landsknechting" someone just isn't as catchy as "swatting".
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May 11, 2015 21:15
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Klaus88 posted:There's browning 30. cal in the game with the tripod and the game makes you take the tripod apart. If the MG34 is a microcosm of the Nazi dominated German armament industry then no wonder their drat tanks broke down all the time. The StG is downright frightening when it's fully disassembled.  As a non-weapons-enthusiast, this doesn't look too bad.
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May 11, 2015 21:20
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Those are only the major component groups, that's not even close to complete disassembly.
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May 11, 2015 21:28
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Klaus88 posted:Could you share a bit about the luger and how it looks like its about to jam, explode, or transform and roll out at any second at the drop of a hat? When I'm not at work, if you want, I can actually use the game to take detailed screenshots of the inside of guns and how everything fits together. I just paid the $50 for a lifetime pass, which means I get every gun available immediately unlocked and get every future release for free. No need for XP-based unlocking or DLC or anything. What I do remember from the Luger is that the toggle lock has definitely more parts than I would want to deal with. So with semi-automatic guns, virtually all handguns for the past century have had a slide on top of the frame. This acts like a giant bolt separate from the barrel, gripping the empty casing to pull it out and fling it out the ejection port and then rebounding against a recoil spring to push it forward, stripping a new cartridge off the top. John Moses Browning was literally revolutionary for firearm design in the late 19th and early 20th century, and he was the one who created the idea of a slide when most guns copied the toggle lock off the Maxim machine gun (the first known "machine gun" that didn't require a human operating a crank or something to cycle it) or just had a bolt inside the frame, which is what typical semi-auto longarms like rifles, SMGs, or shotguns had. The Luger is one of the guns that used a toggle lock, which was actually a really common engineering mechanism around the turn of the century and popular to shove into things like bridges and engines. In this, recoil causes the barrel and toggle to move backwards a short distance, then then barrel stops and the toggle bends like a knee to pull out and eject the casing, then straightens out again. It's a good deal more complex because it requires a multi-piece articulating joint, whereas the simplest slide-using pistols just require a big slide to fit over the gun with the necessary parts like the extractor and firing pin placed inside. Locked breech designs like virtually everything in 9mm on up also have the barrel connected physically to the slide in some way, but that's it. Even the magazine for the Luger is overcomplicated. If I remember correctly, the follower and baseplate have separate pins holding them in, and the follower separates into two pieces. That also comes with the strangely ornate baseplate with the circular depressions, which doesn't seem to have any special purpose beyond looking fancy and providing more to pull on with your fingers. Funny enough, the Walther P38 has 10 more parts than the Luger but still manages to be more reliable and easier to work with because it drops the toggle lock for a slide, and just uses a tilting block to disconnect the barrel from the slide. Most of the added parts are things like the safety (the Luger safety, if I remember, is just a lever and a metal plate, while the P38 has a plunger and spring inside the lever) and the double-action trigger mechanism in the hammer (a lever and spring held in by three pins). Last night I decided to disassemble the M134D Minigun as far as it would let me. It's not massively difficult, but very tedious because there's many actions that need to be repeated 6 times. I also took apart the Single Action army, Schofield, and Ruger LCR this morning before work. It's neat seeing how even though it's "more advanced", the LCR is mostly just copying the operation of guns made shortly after the Civil War. chitoryu12 fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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May 11, 2015 21:32
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Help settle an office debate that is about to turn violent. How well would the final generation battleships (Vanguard, Iowa, Yamato, Bismarck) stand up to a modern heavyweight torpedo? What do you think would be the mean number required to sink?
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May 11, 2015 21:42
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1. Modern torpedos are guided and will detonate under your keel. This will gently caress you up in a majorly bad way.
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May 11, 2015 22:03
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bewbies posted:How well would the final generation battleships (Vanguard, Iowa, Yamato, Bismarck) stand up to a modern heavyweight torpedo? What do you think would be the mean number required to sink? Possibly, one. They had torpedo blisters, free-flooding sponsons that extended from the hull a ways, so that an incoming torpedo would detonate against the blister and expend its energy there, but modern heavyweights don't work like that. When you set off an underwater explosion, what you get is an initial shockwave, which is followed by the expanding bubble of superheated gas that used to be a lump of explosive. This expands beyond the point at which it's at equilibrium pressure with the surrounding water, which means the water pressure starts to squeeze it back down again. And again it will overshoot the equilibrium point, since the water that's squeezing it down as so much intertia. So what you have in addition to the initial shock wave is this oscillating bubble that keeps dumping out big amounts of mechanical energy with each cycle. Example, from the shock trial of DDG-81. Intially, you see the surface of the water jump, and that's the shockwave. But then you get the huge plumes of water, which is all the water being pushed out of the path of the bubble, each time it oscillates. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G1IAD0g4cc Here's one that shows some slow-mo of a tiny firework, the oscillation shows up good at 27 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6ucN1Qa-Po This bubble will tend to glom on to anything nearby; I don't know why that is, but I've seen slow-mo footage from one of the test facilities I used to work at (Hey, probably the same test pool as in the next video), just 1 lb of explosive suspended from a line, and the bubble just adhered to the line and pulsed as it ascended. If the object nearby is the well of your test pond, it's like this (start at 3 minutes in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJjMJ48CdY If it's a ship hull, that's bad news for your ship. And finally, when the bubble finally collapses, you get a high-speed jet of water up through the center of the collapsing bubble, and that can literally cut a ship in half. We know a lot more about shock damage and how it affects ships than we do when we built the Iowas. A modern heavyweight isn't going to straight-run like a WWII one would, it's going to go off under the keel and kick the poo poo out of the ship. One wouldn't necessarily sink a BB, but it has real potential to. Mean's going to be higher than that, so I'd WAG a mean of 2. Also, how the hell do you get the URL parser to acknowledge time hacks in Youtube URLs?
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May 11, 2015 22:05
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vuk83 posted:1. Modern torpedos are guided and will detonate under your keel. This will gently caress you up in a majorly bad way. US and German torpedoes both had this feature (proximity detonator) from the get-go during WWII although the mechanism was really, really inconsistent, such that skippers from both sides resorted to impact fusing for the most part. Most battleships that were attacked with torpedoes required quite a few to sink, but I've not been able to find out if any of the battleships or other heavies from WWII ever suffered an under-keel detonation. There also isn't anything I can find open-source that shows what a modern torpedo might do to an armored ship, everything I can find is just empty supply ships and old escorts.
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May 11, 2015 22:17
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Phanatic posted:Also, how the hell do you get the URL parser to acknowledge time hacks in Youtube URLs? bewbies posted:There also isn't anything I can find open-source that shows what a modern torpedo might do to an armored ship, everything I can find is just empty supply ships and old escorts. Rent-A-Cop fucked around with this message at 22:28 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 22:26
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bewbies posted:US and German torpedoes both had this feature (proximity detonator) from the get-go during WWII although the mechanism was really, really inconsistent, such that skippers from both sides resorted to impact fusing for the most part. I was about to suggest the sinking of the Belgrano but it turns out that apparently it was done with older non-guided torpedoes.
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May 11, 2015 22:35
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Feeling super smug right now.
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May 11, 2015 22:42
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Phanatic posted:Those are only the major component groups, that's not even close to complete disassembly. World of Guns has you take out every last bit of spring and screw from every part.
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May 11, 2015 22:53
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Ensign Expendable posted:Feeling super smug right now. Just saw that on the blog earlier, that's rad as hell.
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