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Kaal posted:But the Romans and the ancient Chinese did know that, and in fact used them all the time. The fact is that there's actually a limited number of places that have high salinity saltwater as well as low humidity, the two things that are required for productive salt ponds. Why is salt so cheap now? Yeah, this is reaching a bit beyond our scope but this thread is full of history types; hoping one of you will know. Industrial revolution and the advent of cheap carbon energy?
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Jul 23, 2015 08:04
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Well that, better knowledge of chemistry, and safer and more efficient mining techniques (salt mines are nasty). Politically speaking, having to rely on a state monopoly for government revenue means that the government is weak and unable to curb the influence of the aristocracy, and is therefore forced to regressively tax the citizens.
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Jul 23, 2015 08:17
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Thanks! So is the historical price of salt (and I know that's a very broad topic) more a result of regressive taxation or of the way it was gathered back in the day? This is probably one of those things where it's impossible to generalize, so generalize anyway, pretty please.
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Jul 23, 2015 08:20
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It seems to come across as a situation where the government had enough control over commerce to enforce a monopoly, but not enough control to tax progressively. China could do that. Salt production in the west was more laissez faire, but even that doesn't cut out the possibility of local monopolies forming, or the costs of production. Salt from evaporation is time consuming. Salt from mines requires either a supply of expendably labour or slaves. These things weren't always cheap, and it you only get around that with technology and non-biological energy sources. http://www.saltworks.us/salt_info/si_HistoryOfSalt.asp
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Jul 23, 2015 08:42
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Industrial revolution and the advent of cheap carbon energy? Also hugely improved transport, allowing it to be made in the places that it is easily made.
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Jul 23, 2015 10:14
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Why is salt so cheap now? Yeah, this is reaching a bit beyond our scope but this thread is full of history types; hoping one of you will know. The short answer to this question is yes. The plentiful and ready availability of salt today is due to vastly increased food production, superior methods of preservation (remember, basically the #1 use of salt before cans and fridges was preserving food, which is something you HAD to do since there was no urban supermarket supply chain) and great ease of transportation. In the past, there was less food, it wasn't as fresh, and salt was the quickest, most effortless way to preserve it. Certainly much easier than smoking meat for weeks at a time. Since transportation was slower, salt was needed if you wanted to sell certain food products (meat, fish) to places you couldn't walk to in a day. I read Salt: A World History and found it very pleasant reading. A real nice piece of popular science/history. I doubt it's too authentic, but I think its still worth reading.
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Jul 23, 2015 10:42
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11 months! 100 Years Ago The Russians in Van Province are bravely running away, on the Carso it's now hot enough for bare skin to be scalded by touching rock, IEF "D" is nearly ready to attack Nasiriya in Mesopotamia, and Sergeant Rule of the 4th Gordons is swimming around the new mine crater at Hooge; just because it's midsummer doesn't mean it's not raining in Flanders.
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Jul 23, 2015 13:42
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Phobophilia posted:Salt from evaporation is time consuming. There is also the alternative of boiling the sea water to speed up evaporation, as Russians did at White Sea. The drawback is that this consumes a lot of fuel, but there's no shortage of firewood there.
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Jul 23, 2015 14:47
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Keldoclock posted:Since transportation was slower, salt was needed if you wanted to sell certain food products (meat, fish) to places you couldn't walk to in a day. Meat walks dude. That's the whole reason droving existed as a profession. Live fish are more difficult to transport but still clearly were, given the number of stockponds in the Middle Ages.
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Jul 23, 2015 15:24
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yo if all the bajillion northern germans want to hang out, i'll be in stralsund this weekend for a thing
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Jul 23, 2015 17:46
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I thought that things were more Scandinavian than German.
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Jul 23, 2015 17:53
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Hogge Wild posted:I thought that things were more Scandinavian than German. Stralsund used to be Swedish.
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Jul 23, 2015 18:17
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Interesting thing I learned about Bill Sherman from his memoirs: he spent several years as a bank manager in Gold Rush California. I knew he was there for the Gold Rush (he was on hand when Sutter's famous sample came in to the Army HQ at Monterrey) and that he had done some financial work before 1861 but I didn't realize he had done so much of it. Kind of explains his later actions in the South.
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Jul 23, 2015 18:54
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Can someone tell me about defensive grenades? I've only ever seen them mentioned once or twice, but I've never read about them being used (granted, I haven't read that much)
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Jul 23, 2015 19:17
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JcDent posted:Can someone tell me about defensive grenades? I've only ever seen them mentioned once or twice, but I've never read about them being used (granted, I haven't read that much) Slightly heavier, larger shrapnel radius than an 'offensive' grenade. The idea is you can chuck it from your trench/foxhole and then duck down behind your cover so you don't get hurt, while being more likely to inflict damage on infantry attacking you in a dispersed formation.
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Jul 23, 2015 19:31
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JcDent posted:Can someone tell me about defensive grenades? I've only ever seen them mentioned once or twice, but I've never read about them being used (granted, I haven't read that much) Defensive grenade's fragments fly for a longer range than the grenade can be thrown. They're meant to be thrown only from a cover.
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Jul 23, 2015 19:31
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That's basically all that I knew. Sit in a hole, throw. Do they use them these days? Would seem to be useful in those "taliban overrunning positions" scenarios. Who came up with them, anyways?
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Jul 23, 2015 20:02
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JcDent posted:That's basically all that I knew. Sit in a hole, throw. Do they use them these days? Would seem to be useful in those "taliban overrunning positions" scenarios. Who came up with them, anyways? Yeah, they're grenades like the Soviet F1 that you see all over guerrilla weapon stocks. The difference between offensive and defensive grenades seems to have been thought up in a time when battles were still likely to involve charging down a field of battle, hurling grenades ahead of you. In practice you should always be throwing grenades from cover, as even the best frag grenades still have tons of randomness and a chance fragment could fly dozens of yards and land in your eye.
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Jul 23, 2015 20:17
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Thanks to everyone for the salt posts. The Huai river runs into a bunch of salt marshes in Jiangsu, which is where the Nian will either buy it under the counter for cheap, or straight up steal it. The official in charge of salt production asks for more money for security but gets shut down.Frostwerks posted:Also, Taiping rebellion guy, you know anything about the Chinese civil war/second sino-japanese war? That seems almost as confusing a clusterfuck as any conflict in history and my god I want an in-depth writeup as well. Civil war, not really. Second Sino-Japanese war I read a book on a little while back, but it's still mostly a clusterfuck in my mind as well. The war (assuming we aren't counting the seizure of Manchuria six years earlier as the start) begins in 1937 following an outbreak of fighting in Wanping, a town near Beijing. The Japanese had a garrison nearby, an extraterritorial privilege dating back to the Boxer rebellion. The Japanese had been building up forces and generally being more aggressive, and it eventually breaks into open combat. The proximate cause is a Japanese soldier who goes missing, and the Japanese demand entry into the town to look for him. He was most likely just visiting the brothel, as he turns up unharmed a few hours later. By that point, fighting has already started, and reinforcements are rushing in on both sides. The Japanese try to seize the nearby Marco Polo bridge after which the incident will be named. They are stopped by, among others, the Big Sword Unit, who drive the Japanese back but take the sort of casualties you'd expect when you bring a sword to WWII.  Here's a contemporary bubble gum card showing the Big Sword Unit in combat with the Japanese. The Japanese leadership back their subordinates and decide to escalate things from there, probably looking to slice off a few more parts of North China and call it a day without formally declaring war. Instead, additional fighting breaks out in Shanghai, they reinforce their troops there, and pretty soon get carried away into a major two front offensive- one descending from Manchuria into North China, the other advancing up the Yangtze valley from Shanghai. One weird thing I recall reading is that apparently their troops in the north were relatively civilized for the first few battles of the war, being veterans that had been in China for some time and were used to dealing with the local civilians. Once more reinforcements start pouring in and the fighting heats up, things go downhill pretty quick. I don't have time at the moment to really get into it, but if anyone in this thread wants to stake a claim to the topic feel free. Otherwise maybe I'll put a real effort post together when I need a break from the Taiping. One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an
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Jul 24, 2015 02:38
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So who manufactured bubblegum in ww2 era china? With that whole era being such a cluster gently caress; bubblegum, complete with patriotic cards, seems like such a weird thing have.
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Jul 24, 2015 03:32
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Agean90 posted:So who manufactured bubblegum in ww2 era china? With that whole era being such a cluster gently caress; bubblegum, complete with patriotic cards, seems like such a weird thing have. You want food? Chew on this!
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Jul 24, 2015 03:38
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Agean90 posted:So who manufactured bubblegum in ww2 era china? With that whole era being such a cluster gently caress; bubblegum, complete with patriotic cards, seems like such a weird thing have. Nah, it's American. In 1938 a gum company decided to raise awareness of the "horrors of war" by issuing a set with scenes from current events in China, Spain, and Ethiopia. http://www.cardboardconnection.com/1938-gum-inc-horrors-of-war-trading-cards
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Jul 24, 2015 03:41
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P-Mack posted:Nah, it's American. In 1938 a gum company decided to raise awareness of the "horrors of war" by issuing a set with scenes from current events in China, Spain, and Ethiopia. The idea is laudable but insane. Too bad the Chinese look like the bad guys in that card.
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Jul 24, 2015 03:54
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P-Mack posted:One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an Well, they had fought with the Russians over the same turf before, before they were communists, and a very similar air of inevitable conflict ended up underscoring a lot of their Anglo and American oriented thinking as well. Overall I think it was a general sense of Social Darwinian constant agonism over limited resources. I think this is in part due to the era (the Japanese were taking a crash course in Imperialism with the lessons made particularly sharp because they knew they'd be on the pointy end of things if they hosed up) and partly due to the Japanese really needing those resources badly. They got hosed in WWII due first to the oil embargo and then, you know, trying to take on Mt. America and getting slapped the gently caress down. e: Also helpful to remember is that Japan's 'awakening' to the world very explicitly starts with China, their cultural... hegemons isn't quite the right word but sort of the center of all that was once distant and powerful getting the poo poo beat out of them in the Opium Wars. When this news filters into Tokyo the shogun goes all out fortifying the coasts, and then gets a real bigass shock when the American's roll up and they realize how absolutely pitiful those 12 or whatever cannons they had set up were. So Japan's real basis for dealing with the outside world were from the outset really explicitly 'whoa poo poo these guys could gently caress us up' and 'we need to catch up real quick or they'll gently caress us up.' That sort of attitude tends to lead to some weird poo poo. Like literally the guys most knowledgeable about the West were called together to help sort things out after the Opium Wars and this brain trust is absolutely gobsmacked that the American's can't speak Dutch. the JJ fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 04:22
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JcDent posted:That's basically all that I knew. Sit in a hole, throw. Do they use them these days? Would seem to be useful in those "taliban overrunning positions" scenarios. Who came up with them, anyways? You use Claymore mines for that nowadays. Also offensive grenades could be fitted with a shrapnel sleeve for increased fragmentation.
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Jul 24, 2015 04:51
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P-Mack posted:The Japanese leadership back their subordinates and decide to escalate things from there, probably looking to slice off a few more parts of North China and call it a day without formally declaring war. Instead, additional fighting breaks out in Shanghai, they reinforce their troops there, and pretty soon get carried away into a major two front offensive- one descending from Manchuria into North China, the other advancing up the Yangtze valley from Shanghai. One weird thing I recall reading is that apparently their troops in the north were relatively civilized for the first few battles of the war, being veterans that had been in China for some time and were used to dealing with the local civilians. Once more reinforcements start pouring in and the fighting heats up, things go downhill pretty quick. The whole thing's basically a series of incompetent decisions by subordinates that blow up...and then their superiors double down. IIRC, Shanghai happened because the IJN wanted a piece of the action and figured that Shanghai was a better prize/looked better since there were Japanese interests there. It's just a series of terrible decisions. The Kwantung Army basically acted on its own and the IJA decided to just run with it. P-Mack posted:One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an Imperial Russia was one of the early European powers that opposed Japan. Certainly, tons of them had fingers in the Chinese pie but it was Russia that seems to actually want to grab territory, and that made them Japan's rivals. As far as I can guess, they just assumed the Soviet Union wasn't all that different in their aims. There's also the usual anti-Communism but there weren't a lot of courses that really covered this period in detail so I got nothing.
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Jul 24, 2015 05:03
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P-Mack posted:One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an I don't think it's strictly speaking limited to the USSR, it seems more like they felt that they needed some way to achieve autarky with some colonies, because otherwise they would at some point find themselves at the mercy of Western powers. China was just the next option after the USSR, and the Navy figured that WWII was their best crack at ABDA holdings in the Pacific and that they were going to end up fighting, particularly with the US/UK. But the absolute number one priority is getting the resources they need to stand up to any arbitrary Western power, because of a feeling that something would come up sooner or later, and it seems like the Anglo-Japanese alliance didn't really survive through WWI with all the chaos in Russia making bottling them up seem less essential to the British. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 05:28
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P-Mack posted:One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an Japan did not see Manchuria as peripheral at all. In fact, it was seen as Japan's "lifeline" in the new turbulent economic era. Manchuria basically became the army's laboratory for experimenting with new command economic models, hopefully to imported to the home islands. Japan's attempt to achieve autarky was built on the assumption that the empire would assuredly collapse if it could only rely on trade, and the army definitely saw Manchuria as the first step. Beyond that, the IJA had an existential fear of the Soviet Union, for they combined communism and atheism, both threats to the institution of the emperor (and the IJA identified very strongly as the Emperor's Army, rather than as Japan's Army). In particular, Araki Sadao talked a lot about the "inevitable" conflict with the Soviets (by 1936 at the latest, according to him initially), largely as an excuse to push for a General Mobilization plan. This might have just been his way to make his existing plans seem more immediately important, though  .So I don't think they ever really had much in the way of specific, laid out strategic aims beyond a general feeling that the clock was ticking towards war with them anyway. But just to prove myself wrong, they did want to also control Mongolia, in part simply because they saw Manchuria and Mongolia to be two halves of a single whole. Also, north Sakhalin, since they discovered oil there. They had bought mining rights from the Soviets, if I recall, but they would view owning it directly is clearly the superior option if given the chance.
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Jul 24, 2015 05:53
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I'd be happy to hear about this stuff as well as the first Sino Japanese war when you are done with the current Taiping stuff yeah.
SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 05:58
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P-Mack posted:One thing I hope this thread can help me with is understanding Japan's strategic thinking with regards to the USSR. It seems a lot of their efforts to secure North China revolved around a belief that a showdown with the Soviet Union was inevitable and they needed an There's also the Soviet-Japanese border conflicts, which gets treated as a complete sideshow given what WWII eventually brought on, but there were tens of thousands of men involved on either side, and >25k casualties at Khalkin Gol in 1939. Relations were not friendly.
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Jul 24, 2015 06:27
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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There were two large camps in Japanese politics at the time, one directed at attacking the soviets, and one directed at attacking the pacific/China. The latter won in no small part because of the blistering rear end-crushing the soviets (led by an, at this point, unknown maverick officer named Zhukov!) gave them at Khalkin Gol.
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Jul 24, 2015 07:38
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May I ask a silly tank question? If you took a mothballed MBT and stripped absolutely everything non-essential (turret, ammo stowage, most of the armor, sensors, communications...) what kind of performance could you get out of it? What if you dumped the tracks as well and ran on the road-wheels?
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Jul 24, 2015 10:13
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The Lone Badger posted:May I ask a silly tank question? You're asking the top speed of a stripped T55? Or an Abrams? First of all, there's no power in the road wheels, its all in the sprocket transfering it to the tracks. And I think the reason for your question is going to be a lot more interesting than the answer (Wich wouldn't differ much from Wikipedia top speed +10kph)
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Jul 24, 2015 11:12
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Also, no tank I've been in had any equipment I thought was non-essential?
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Jul 24, 2015 11:16
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The Lone Badger posted:May I ask a silly tank question? What about putting a laser that can burn something in T-55? T-72? ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Also, no tank I've been in had any equipment I thought was non-essential? Maybe he had in mid a rally-configuration like something.
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Jul 24, 2015 11:17
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OK the idea originally came from dissatisfaction when reading Morgan's Market Forces in which what's basically a lethal demolition derby serves as a form of corporate duelling, and the characters all use modified passenger vehicles. It seemed to me that with the horsepower of a gas turbine behind you if you peeled the mass down enough you should be able to get something that can go bloody fast while still being heavy enough to basically drive through any road vehicle out there. But... I don't know anything about mechanics so I don't know if I'm "why don't they just..." ing on what's actually a bloody stupid idea. Edit: That sounds even stupider now I've written it down. But basically yes, rally-configuration tank. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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Jul 24, 2015 12:06
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:You're asking the top speed of a stripped T55? Or an Abrams? First of all, there's no power in the road wheels, its all in the sprocket transfering it to the tracks. And I think the reason for your question is going to be a lot more interesting than the answer (Wich wouldn't differ much from Wikipedia top speed +10kph) Apparently the Germans tested the Leopard 2 on a closed down Autobahn, with the governor removed. It managed to top 100 kph, but the noise was apparently completely overwhelming to the crew and steering was more wishing really hard the tank would randomly turn into a direction. No information survives about the state of the Autobahn after the test.
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Jul 24, 2015 12:17
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Seconding the recommendation for "Salt: A World History". As an essential nutrient, food preservative, and food flavoring, salt has been a motivator for government controls and conflicts, a strategic resource, and a means of civil disobedience for a long time. As someone mentioned earlier, one of Gandhi's protest acts was to produce salt from evaporating seawater in violation of the British monopoly. The pre-revolutionary French tax on salt, the gabelle, was a motivator (far from the prime motivator, but a factor) for indignant disregard for laws during the lead-up to the revolution. Confederate saltworks were a target for Union armies during the Civil War, because less Confederate salt meant less Confederate preserved foods. Kurlansky's sister book, "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World" is also pretty good. It has a lot of overlap with "Salt", because salt-preserved cod was also a strategic resource as a trade commodity as well as a reliable food for navies, trade fleets, and slaves. Wars and skirmishes have been fought - some rather recently - over access to cod fishing grounds. Preserved fish and salt are pretty commonplace, unremarkable commodities these days but it's interesting how resource-intensive and valuable they were until recently and how much conflict was related to acquiring access to them. http://www.amazon.com/Salt-World-History-Mark-Kurlansky/dp/0142001619 http://www.amazon.com/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World/dp/0140275010
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Jul 24, 2015 13:22
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hogmartin posted:Seconding the recommendation for "Salt: A World History". As an essential nutrient, food preservative, and food flavoring, salt has been a motivator for government controls and conflicts, a strategic resource, and a means of civil disobedience for a long time. As someone mentioned earlier, one of Gandhi's protest acts was to produce salt from evaporating seawater in violation of the British monopoly. The pre-revolutionary French tax on salt, the gabelle, was a motivator (far from the prime motivator, but a factor) for indignant disregard for laws during the lead-up to the revolution. Confederate saltworks were a target for Union armies during the Civil War, because less Confederate salt meant less Confederate preserved foods. And here I was recently listening to a podcast about the latest European Universalis IV expansion where the host joked that yeah, he's totally going to war to corner that strategic cod trade. Shows how much we know. Could we get some excample of recent wars where soldier died over sweet, sweet cod?
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Jul 24, 2015 13:35
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JcDent posted:And here I was recently listening to a podcast about the latest European Universalis IV expansion where the host joked that yeah, he's totally going to war to corner that strategic cod trade. Shows how much we know. Iceland won. E: nobody died though ContinuityNewTimes fucked around with this message at 13:42 on Jul 24, 2015 |
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