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Keldoclock posted:Perhaps in future wars we can stop killing all the top generals, and instead put them in jail and let the press visit them over the course of their natural lifetimes. I wish so much the Qing had done this. And also not actively destroyed every Taiping document they could find. For some odd reason stamping out any possible ember of rebellion took priority over making life easier for future historians.
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Jun 28, 2015 13:45
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P-Mack posted:A Bad Dude Thanks for these posts, I'm enjoying them. Just wondering what this councillor means when he says Zeng has "no more official power than a commoner". Surely that warrant from the empire meant he was given pretty wide-ranging official powers? Or is this just hyperbole?
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Jun 28, 2015 14:37
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Yeah, I'm gonna heavily disagree with that. It was an expensive program, to be sure, but the end result was a groundbreaking aircraft with capabilities that far surpassed those of any other existing aircraft, and would go on to serve for nearly two decades, with dozens of different variations and direct descendants. Even during the War itself the B-29 was an extremely important weapon for the US, since it meant that we could start hitting Japan directly from the Marianas as opposed to waiting for the closer bases that would have been required for the Forts' and Libs'. Hell, it was such an important project that there was an entire back-up plane designed and put into production in case it failed. If you want to call out expensive boondoggles, there are plenty of options from both the Axis and the Allies, but it's extremely disingenuous to call out something that actually worked. I suppose I could have expounded on that statement a bit. I'm basing it on three main points: 1) Strategic bombers in general were very poor investments during WWII. They were extremely expensive to build, crew, and operate, and their impact on the war at large was pretty limited compared to most other major weapon types. Compare, for example, to submarines: the entirety of acquisition costs for America's submarine fleet during the war amounts to around 1/10th that of the B-29, and I'd argue they had a far more significant impact on the war, especially during the periods where the outcome was still in some doubt. The B-29 wasn't an exception to this; the raids from China were almost completely useless, and the raids from the Pacific didn't have much effect at all until the summer of 1945 when we abandoned attempts at precision bombing and started firebombing everything. By that point, we had several bases that could have supported attacks by older generation aircraft; the B-29's capabilities were never a necessity. Ironically enough I also think that the B-29's biggest impact on the war, outside of the atomic attacks, was when they were used as proxy submarines. 2) The B-29 was, in large part, a huge investment in a number of technological dead ends. By the time the B-29's prototypes were being tested it was pretty clear that jets were the future of military aviation; the huge amount of resources put towards developing and then troubleshooting the B-29s engines paid little dividend after the war. The same can be said for the defensive armament: it should have been clear that speed and altitude were far better defenses than machine guns, but a ton of time and money was spent implementing a technically brilliant but almost useless gun system. The result was a bomber that was obsolete only a few years after the war. As Korea showed, B-29s couldn't operate against the MiG-15 nor any other jet interceptor. 3) Most of the hard-earned capability advantages of the B-29 evaporated almost immediately after the end of the war thanks to the Tu-4 program. This isn't a fault of the B-29 program of course, but it does further detract from the return on the B-29 investment. All that being said, the B-29 looks like a masterpiece of economic efficiency when compared to the B-36. It cost six times what a B-29 did and was nearly as much a sitting duck to any of the postwar jet fighters as the B-29 was. The truly groundbreaking bomber from that era was the B-47, which I feel is a pretty underrated aircraft historically.
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Jun 28, 2015 14:45
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I thought the B-36 had a safety margin for a while after featherweighting and before the rise of AAMs.
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Jun 28, 2015 15:46
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House Louse posted:Thanks for these posts, I'm enjoying them. Just wondering what this councillor means when he says Zeng has "no more official power than a commoner". Surely that warrant from the empire meant he was given pretty wide-ranging official powers? Or is this just hyperbole? My understanding is that the warrant gave him access to funding (in theory; in practice he'll beg borrow and steal the money he needs) and the power to legally raise his private army outside the formal power structures. It's very vague, and doesn't give him clear authority to compel cooperation from other officials or to conscript the common people. So while it's an exaggeration to say he had no power, but the underlying point about how weak the capital's control is is valid.
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Jun 28, 2015 16:04
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bewbies posted:I suppose I could have expounded on that statement a bit. Eh, I'm going to disagree with this. While it is true that their economic impact is highly contentious, they served a very important strategic goal. The complete air superiority that the Allies enjoyed on both the West Front in Europe and the Pacific after ~1944 wouldn't have been possible without the bomber raids. They put an incredible pressure on the opposing airforces and drew up lots of aircraft and aircrew to be destroyed that would otherwise have been able to oppose tactical air operations. Then there's also the huge manpower sink that having all the pressure on your industrial heartland produced. I forget the exact numbers right now, but the Germans had something like half a million men in service on AAA crews alone. 500,000 more infantrymen doesn't win the war, but it sure as poo poo helps delay the inevitable. There is also the industrial investment in fighting off the bombers. All those AAA pieces don't build themselves and that's a lot of industrial production that could have been making anything else. poo poo, even if you assume that the factories coudln't retool for something radically different that's still a TON of land artillery pieces that aren't being deployed. The US had a truly obscene advantage in economic terms. The deployment of the heavy bombers required much more constrained economies to build poo poo to oppose them, and it really didn't come at much opportunity cost to the Allies. We were already outpacing them handily in small arms, equipment, tanks, boats, fighters etc. They didn't work in the way that their advocates thought they would, but they were still a vital component of the war effort.
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Jun 28, 2015 18:22
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bewbies posted:I suppose I could have expounded on that statement a bit. Was there some sort of system in place that evaluated the impact of these different weapon systems?
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Jun 28, 2015 18:30
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JaucheCharly posted:Was there some sort of system in place that evaluated the impact of these different weapon systems? Hypothetically yes, but a lot of that went by the wayside during the war. Most of the real evaluations of the effectiveness of things took place in the decades after as militaries tried to learn lessons from the conflict to apply to the next one. It was a pretty strong article of faith that strategic bombing was crippling the German economy, for example* *This is still highly debated but it isn't nearly as cut and dry as the loudest proponents or opponents of it would claim. It's still a very unsettled issue. German production increased, but would it have increased more if we hadn't bombed? If production was unchanged was the quality of the product affected? Did it mess up their ability to engage in complex projects? What about bombing aimed at resources, such as the efforts against oil production? Then, as I said before, there are all the secondary effects which I personally think contributed significantly even if the industrial damage wasn't as much as the future leaders of SAC held.
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Jun 28, 2015 18:41
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sullat posted:Wasn't the other part of the story that Truman had no idea that there was this project until they were ready to go? I can't imagine that he was too well informed about the precise nature of the superweapon. No, Truman wasn't informed about the atomic bomb until he became president, but that was three months before the Potsdam conference. He became aware of the existence of a secret project when he was still a senator in 1943, and got warned to stop looking into it. As vice-president he learned that there was a secret weapon, and that he didn't need to know about it. He was briefed about the atomic bomb two weeks after becoming president, and after talking about the possibility of its use on Japan, loved its potential for intimidating the Russians. "If this explodes as I think it will, I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys."
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Jun 28, 2015 18:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:The complete air superiority that the Allies enjoyed on both the West Front in Europe and the Pacific after ~1944 wouldn't have been possible without the bomber raids. Yes and no. Offensive counter air operations were necessary, but the heavy raids were not a very efficient way of going about it. The Luftwaffe wasn't really under intense pressure in the west until Doolittle freed the long range fighters to actively interdict versus strict escorting, which basically means that the bombers' contribution to this was little more than bait. A dedicated tactical counter-air campaign that employed tactical bombers targeting airfields, supply depots and the like would have been a far more efficient use of production and manpower than the heavies' largely ineffective attempts to drop high explosives on industrial targets from the stratosphere. quote:Then there's also the huge manpower sink that having all the pressure on your industrial heartland produced. I forget the exact numbers right now, but the Germans had something like half a million men in service on AAA crews alone. 500,000 more infantrymen doesn't win the war, but it sure as poo poo helps delay the inevitable. There is also the industrial investment in fighting off the bombers. All those AAA pieces don't build themselves and that's a lot of industrial production that could have been making anything else. poo poo, even if you assume that the factories coudln't retool for something radically different that's still a TON of land artillery pieces that aren't being deployed. I'd argue that was more of a mistake the Germans made (their AAA was never terribly effective) than a real notch in favor of strategic bombing, but even then, had the western allies focused more on tactical level counterair the pressures would have been much the same, if not worse. To be clear, I'm not saying that the strategic bombing campaign, or the B-29 for that matter, were worthless or ineffective, just that they were extremely inefficient. It was fortunate that the US had the resources it had, as such expensive programs producing only limited results would have been a huge problem for a smaller economy. wdarkk posted:I thought the B-36 had a safety margin for a while after featherweighting and before the rise of AAMs. I researched this a little bit a while back, this what I came up with. My thoughts are by no means conclusive. The B-36 was one of the biggest-budget programs in US history, and it was at its biggest at a moment where inter-service rivalry in the US military was probably at the highest it has ever been or ever will be (the early Cold War). The USAF argued the B-36 should be the primary nuclear delivery platform while the Navy wanted supercarriers armed with large carrier based strike aircraft do to this job. This is what led to the "bomber gap" nonsense, and some weird internal Pentagon mini-rebellion by the Navy, among other things. In any case it was pretty clear by the early 1950s that the vanilla B-36s were sitting ducks for the F-86A/MiG-15 generation of fighters, so it made sense to look at the RB-36 (the recon variant) as a possible basis for developing a high performance strike variant. This is where the "featherweight" variant came from. The USAF said that it was immune to interception, the Navy said lol no its not let's test it, the JCS told everyone to sit down and shut up because we don't want the Russians to figure out our giant flagship superplane is a big silver target. So, no tests were ever done, the B-52 hit the streets a few years later, and we all moved on with our lives. The internet discovered the featherweight B-36 a few years ago, and it being a pretty cool big airplane, the discussions usually started with "it flew so high that no interceptor of the time could get to it". There are two problems with this: first, if it was going to fly at that altitude, the B-36 couldn't carry the giant h-bomb that it was intended to carry (which was the USAF's primary justification for the entire program), second the featherweight planes didn't start flying until 1954, by which time the F-100 and MiG-17 generation of fighters were in the field. These were a big upgrade performance-wise and would have been able to intercept a B-36 above 50k without too much trouble. bewbies fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 19:10
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One of the difficulties with (especially amateur internet) analysis of the bombing campaigns is that they changed objectives, methods, technology and scale repeatedly during the war. Precision bombing failed utterly. Area bombing of cities had a couple of spectacular successes but many more mediocre results. Bombing of logistical infrastructure seems to have had the greatest discernible impact. The couple of instances where the bomber force was used as a battlefield weapon writ large were certainly effective but not remotely efficient as a use of resources.
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Jun 28, 2015 20:24
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P-Mack posted:I wish so much the Qing had done this. And also not actively destroyed every Taiping document they could find. For some odd reason stamping out any possible ember of rebellion took priority over making life easier for future historians. I thought about the logistics of holding these smart, politically dangerous people and convincing them to talk about what happened. I came to the conclusion that your best bet was a lengthy interview before the trial, the actual trial proceedings, and making a copy of their brain before death in the hopes that you could extract more information from it later. Hopefully future technology permits the reading of memories from a brain, but failing that I think just slicing the brain up and preserving it, Einstein-style, could be useful. I don't think you could keep them in detention indefinitely, as they would either convince you to release them, or escape.
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Jun 28, 2015 21:03
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Keldoclock posted:Perhaps in future wars we can stop killing all the top generals, and instead put them in jail and let the press visit them over the course of their natural lifetimes. Reminds me of the Panama revolution, described by, I believe, Mark Hanna (or was it Roosevelt himself? Not sure.) as "the most remarkable revolution of all times". Unfortunately it seems fairly clear that such a bloodless war that preserves the defeated leaders is only possible under very specific circumstances, and - perhaps most importantly - when there's not an ideological motive to the war. In Panama the motive for the war of independence was purely economic, and so the "defeated" generals often came out of it with newly made fortunes. Had the rebellion been properly nationalist, rather than led by financial elites, the result would have likely been a wholesale slaughter of the leaders of whichever side would have ended losing.
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Jun 28, 2015 21:09
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100 Years Ago It's a two-for-one day. Here we look at the Battle of Gully Ravine, with a focus on "battle through the eyes of the wounded". Warning, also includes thoroughly disgusting story about what might happen to the bodies of the dead, which is horrific in every possible way. Elsewhere: the German Empire has a poke at Saisi in Rhodesia, Louis Barthas goes up the line with some rookie soldiers in his squad, Herbert Sulzbach is musing about how nice life is, Kenneth Best sees the wounded come back from Gully Ravine, and JRR Tolkien joins the Army.
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Jun 28, 2015 22:07
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 Military intelligence during the 30yw was weird.
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Jun 28, 2015 22:08
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HEY GAL posted:
Haha is that Wallenstein fishing for astrological dirt on the King of Sweden? Gotta have good intelligence so your sorcery is accurate.
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Jun 28, 2015 22:13
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Pellisworth posted:Haha is that Wallenstein fishing for astrological dirt on the King of Sweden? Edit: He's probably trying to figure out what Gustavus is going to do in the near future, rather than work magic against him. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jun 28, 2015 |
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Jun 28, 2015 22:15
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Hm, was he interested in his place of birth purely due to the horoscope, or is it possible he was just trying to gather intelligence on the "actual nationality" of his enemies to use in propaganda?
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Jun 28, 2015 22:34
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P-Mack posted:...and throwing fireballs. The gently caress? P.S. Never edit down a quoted effort post to three words on a phone. Just spent a good 5-10 minutes holding down the backspace button. What am I doing with my life? P.P.S These posts own, by the way*. Thanks so much! PM me if you ever need help with Old Chinese poo poo. * And also to Trin. Really all the ongoing effort posts own and don't get as much love as they deserve.
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Jun 28, 2015 22:50
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steinrokkan posted:Hm, was he interested in his place of birth purely due to the horoscope, or is it possible he was just trying to gather intelligence on the "actual nationality" of his enemies to use in propaganda? Probably not, that's a bit more modern than these guys would be thinking.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:08
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Freudian posted:Probably not, that's a bit more modern than these guys would be thinking. Incorrect, the Czechs tried to use national and language cleavages to mobilize their forces before the war came about. Most notably the Czech language was proposed quite vigorously as the language of the land congress. It would then make sense for the force replacing the original congress to make use of the present differences (let's ignore the fact the most important Czech commander actually came from an Italian family and spoke Italian, his attempts at speaking Czech leading to awkward results)
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Jun 28, 2015 23:19
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steinrokkan posted:Incorrect, the Czechs tried to use national and language cleavages to mobilize their forces before the war came about. Most notably the Czech language was proposed quite vigorously as the language of the land congress. It would then make sense for the force replacing the original congress to make use of the present differences (let's ignore the fact the most important Czech commander actually came from an Italian family and spoke Italian, his attempts at speaking Czech leading to awkward results) Ok, fair point, but now I'm imagining Wallenstein triumphantly announcing that Gustav is not Czech to general outrage among the betrayed troops.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:26
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HEY GAL posted:Yes, and what he's trying to find out is a state secret, as his own place and time of birth would have been. But why are these things state secrets?
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Jun 28, 2015 23:45
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Boiled Water posted:But why are these things state secrets? Because otherwise sorcerers could use that knowledge to determine their future actions and destiny, duh. Might as well just tell the enemy what you're planning if you don't hide that.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:52
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Boiled Water posted:But why are these things state secrets? Presumably, if you know these things, you can work out their horoscope, and then figure out an unlucky day for them and make if worse by attacking then.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:54
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steinrokkan posted:Hm, was he interested in his place of birth purely due to the horoscope, or is it possible he was just trying to gather intelligence on the "actual nationality" of his enemies to use in propaganda? From my understanding, 'elevatio poli' is basically lattitude, so he wants to know what stars are visible from his birthplace.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:04
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I could totally buy the Reagan administration collecting horoscope data on enemy leaders.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:38
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steinrokkan posted:Reminds me of the Panama revolution, described by, I believe, Mark Hanna (or was it Roosevelt himself? Not sure.) as "the most remarkable revolution of all times". Hahaha, so we return once again to the american civil war.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:The gently caress? "Fireball" is just an overly literal translation of 火球. Probably referring to some form of hand grenade.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:09
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Not killing the other side's leaders seems to be just a trend with modernity. I mean, even Napoleon survived... for a while. EDIT: VVV I think the point is that Confederate military leaders kinda mostly got away with it, with some even regaining a reasonable military career. Fangz fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 01:10
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Phobophilia posted:Hahaha, so we return once again to the american civil war. Not really, the Panama civil war was literally just a business transaction between the French, represented by P. Buneau-Varilla (who also negotiated to become the Panamian plenipotentary minister to Washington), and the corporate lawyer Cromwell, and the US interests represented by various cautiously committed organizations backing Buneau-Varilla's loans to the Panamian revolutionary movement, the most important of which was the JP Morgan financial company. In short - this was the first war where predominantly liberal concerns of long-term commercial interest played role above usual diplomatic cordiality (at least partially due to Roosevelt's and Hay's mis-assessment of the Colombian political process, which led them to a silent support for preparing the Panamian revolution under Varilla's auspices, and further facilitated independent action by the representatives of the Panama railroad who decisively disrupted Colombian military deployment in Panama). Ultimately it was believed the revolution would herald a new order of the Spanish-American political system, as the Washington elites previously claimed to hope for, but such a programme was arguably without success. Obviously the opponents of the panama route (such as Alabama's John T. Morgan) continued to publish news of South American resentment against the American involvement in Panama, but it seems that Roosevelt was not concerned about the dissenting voice against a policy previously passed by the Senate. In short, the conflict I mentioned was the result of corporate interests, unlike the Civil War, which resulted from broader social differences.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:11
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P-Mack posted:"Fireball" is just an overly literal translation of 火球. Probably referring to some form of hand grenade. Is it possible that they were referring to literal balls of fire? I.E. Large balls of incendiary materials that could be lit on fire and pushed down a slope or a cliff to raise merry hell on anyone below.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:18
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^^^Nah. They mean a throwing thing. Or at least what I read did. P-Mack's period is most of a millennium after I stop caring. P-Mack posted:"Fireball" is just an overly literal translation of 火球. Probably referring to some form of hand grenade. O word. That's actually an old word for something vaguely grenade-like ; I remember reading it pretty far back. I'm a linguist not a historian so I wasn't paying too much attention to content and just kind of waiting for them to say 'isn't'. Also 簡體字 are gross. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 01:24
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There's an article with some info on ancient chinese siege weapons, including grenades here: http://www.grandhistorian.com/chinesesiegewarfare/siegeweapons-earlygrenades.html So yeah, it's a grenade. I kinda wonder why grenades weren't used more often in pike-and-shot battles. Those dense blocks of men seem perfect targets.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:26
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Fangz posted:I kinda wonder why grenades weren't used more often in pike-and-shot battles. Those dense blocks of men seem perfect targets. Reliability would be my first guess. Early explosives generally weren't renowned for consistently going off on demand where you wanted them to go off. Second guess would be problematic delivery mechanisms. Only real options there I can think of are hand mortars and maybe going so far as to use some form of sling.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:34
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P-Mack posted:My understanding is that the warrant gave him access to funding (in theory; in practice he'll beg borrow and steal the money he needs) and the power to legally raise his private army outside the formal power structures. It's very vague, and doesn't give him clear authority to compel cooperation from other officials or to conscript the common people. So while it's an exaggeration to say he had no power, but the underlying point about how weak the capital's control is is valid. Right, obviously the point is that he raised an army in a day or whatever. On the other hand, maybe not giving the guy in charge of defeating the Taiping any more formal powers wasn't a good idea, either. Seems like he could be too busy squabbling for money with local officials to do any effective fighting.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:55
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Fangz posted:There's an article with some info on ancient chinese siege weapons, including grenades here: This is really cool. I like the gradual evolution towards packing just a shitload of rockets and poison into a basket on fire
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Jun 29, 2015 02:36
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Cythereal posted:Reliability would be my first guess. Early explosives generally weren't renowned for consistently going off on demand where you wanted them to go off. I would guess fuse timing was also an issue. Too short and it blows up in your hand. Too long and they pick it up and throw it back at you. Getting it to explode reliably at the right time would probably be an issue.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:01
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House Louse posted:Right, obviously the point is that he raised an army in a day or whatever. On the other hand, maybe not giving the guy in charge of defeating the Taiping any more formal powers wasn't a good idea, either. Seems like he could be too busy squabbling for money with local officials to do any effective fighting. Well, in 1853 he isn't the guy in charge, he's just one of many things they are desperately throwing against the wall to see what sticks. Once his army starts seeing success, governorships and additional powers will follow.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:06
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Deteriorata posted:I would guess fuse timing was also an issue. Too short and it blows up in your hand. Too long and they pick it up and throw it back at you. Getting it to explode reliably at the right time would probably be an issue. Even assuming the fuse works to begin with. I think range and [lack of] delivery mechanism may be the biggest part of it, though. Throwing weapons are necessarily very short-ranged, and pike-and-shot means trying to get close enough to throw grenades is probably extremely hazardous to your health without some form of delivery mechanism like a hand mortar. I know very little about this period of warfare, though, so pure conjecture on my part.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:13
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