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Jobbo_Fett posted:
Mad minute chat: keep in mind that they started with five rounds in the gun (four in the mag and one in the pipe), and the record is 36 or 38 aimed shots in a minute. That's a respectable number even before you factor in the pauses to slam seven 5-round clips into it. Of course, the Brits had been famous for their clockwork musketry for at least a couple centuries before they adopted repeating rifles, getting up to 5 rounds a minute from a muzzleloading flintlock musket; they kept up the drill well into the SMLE era. Cyrano4747 posted:It pains me to say this, but I don't think the Enfield was inferior. Really it was more or less the equal to anything else given the conditions by the middle of the war. All things considered the war doesn't really change one bit if you give the Germans Enfields, the French Mosins, the British Lebels, and the Russians Mausers. gently caress, of all the major arms the Lebel was by far and away the most out of date but it served well enough.  (disclaimer: I own a Great-War era SMLE -- I always forget, of it and the Webley revolver, which is '15 and which is '16 -- and it's smoother than any other bolt gun I've fired.) Speaking of which, is the Mosin-Nagant's reputation for needing a hammer to cycle the bolt due to long storage, or were they like that when new? MikeCrotch posted:However there were plenty of reasons guys could survive an artillery barrage. Firstly, in the early war artillery was overwhelmingly firing shrapnel shells. One of the unique properties of shrapnel shells is that they fire a spray of pellets like a shotgun in front of the shell, so depending on the angle, fusing and speed of the incoming shell the guy in front of you might get minced by ball bearings while you are untouched. Even with HE shells you might get missed by all the fragments. There is also a reason everyone built all those trenches - they are really good for protecting you from artillery. Most attacks would consist of leaving your trench, taking the other guy's trench (if you can) and then hunkering down like gently caress to avoid getting smashed by the inevitable artillery strike.  Obviously if you're down in a trench and they don't manage to get a shell in the trench, you're safe, but as Mike said, arty shrapnel is surprisingly easy to be in the right place to avoid. Also he left out one important scenario for WWI: the mud is so soft and thick and goopy that the shell just blurps into it and bounces off the bedrock without the contact fuse triggering, only to ruin some French farmer's day some decades later.
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Oct 2, 2015 09:28
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Delivery McGee posted:Mad minute chat: keep in mind that they started with five rounds in the gun (four in the mag and one in the pipe), and the record is 36 or 38 aimed shots in a minute. That's a respectable number even before you factor in the pauses to slam seven 5-round clips into it. Of course, the Brits had been famous for their clockwork musketry for at least a couple centuries before they adopted repeating rifles, getting up to 5 rounds a minute from a muzzleloading flintlock musket; they kept up the drill well into the SMLE era. British SMLE had a capacity of 10 rounds so they were not having to reload as much. Delivery McGee posted:Illo from an old book I have, titled "How weapons Work": One other thing I forgot to mention - dud shells. The massive expansion of the armaments industry and the influx of unskilled labour meant a big proportion of shells early in the war were defective. This was particularly a problem for the British, where there was a huge scandal involving several ministers losing their jobs.
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Oct 2, 2015 11:58
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MikeCrotch posted:British SMLE had a capacity of 10 rounds so they were not having to reload as much.  Two clips = one magazine, as shown. Put your thumb on top and press down, it's half-loaded (don't worry about pulling out the clip, it'll kick it away when you close the bolt). I'll debate Cyrano on the relative merits/shittiness of the SMLE, but the quoted comment, I will not abide. (Also now that you've made me go and get it, the rifle was made by the Enfield factory in 1916, so the Service Revolver is an even hundred years old. The bayonet we have for the rifle is not original -- dated March 1918, we bought it on eBay from an American soldier who dug up a crate of 'em in Iraq circa 2004 -- but pretty sure all three have put a hole in a German at some time). Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 12:40 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 12:14
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MikeCrotch posted:British SMLE had a capacity of 10 rounds so they were not having to reload as much. http://firearmshistory.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-mad-minute.html posted:
I think with a sufficiently short, light bolt, positive extraction and a well trained operator, 300 yard minute of man at one shot per second should be possible, although I doubt it could be sustained for 60 seconds, or even 30 seconds. Speaking of dumb poo poo you can get up to with bolt action rifles, did you guys know about these?  It's a rifle on a periscope, so the gun can be above the trench while your head is below it. Some were as crude as 2 mirrors and a wire+pulleys to pull the trigger, some had rube-goldberg like levers to cycle the bolt without losing sight picture.
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Oct 2, 2015 12:21
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JcDent posted:The room also had polearms, but I didn't look at them 'cos girlfriend was getting tired/angry (she liked military tech museum, must be the driver thing working)
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Oct 2, 2015 12:45
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It's almost cheating to have the target bisected top/bottom with a dark colored section at the bottom. It makes it trivially easy to aim for the center of the target. Was the trial conducted from a specific position? I.e. Prone, sitting, kneeling, offhand supported, offhand unsupported etc...?
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Oct 2, 2015 12:47
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Keldoclock posted:Yes, but their stripper clips were 5-round capacity. Let me repost this: quote:I think with a sufficiently short, light bolt, positive extraction and a well trained operator, 300 yard minute of man at one shot per second should be possible, although I doubt it could be sustained for 60 seconds, or even 30 seconds. That's the beauty of the SMLE, it cocks on closing, as opposed to the Mauser and its many knockoffs which cocks on opening. If it's not full of mud, you can open it with a fingertip, if it is jammed, you're not fighting a spring while you're ripping the case out, and you're slapping it closed anyway, so the mainspring isn't that much an additional hurdle. Murgos posted:Was the trial conducted from a specific position? I.e. Prone, sitting, kneeling, offhand supported, offhand unsupported etc...? Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 12:53
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This site has some images of it: http://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/43102565094/the-mad-minute-marksmanship-training-in-the
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Oct 2, 2015 13:02
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FAUXTON posted:He probably means it's placed in such an inconvenient area that it might as well be invisible when the tank is filled with clouds of smoke. By cloudy I meant that there are clouds outside in the sky, not smoke inside. Yes, unless it's a sunny day, the loader can't see the bulk of his ammunition.
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Oct 2, 2015 13:54
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MikeCrotch posted:Chuikov broke out in horrible rashes during the battle of Stalingrad due to stress (pretty understandable) but i'm pretty sure he made a recovery and was fully involved in later campaigns. An uncontrollable tic in the eye. Oh god, how do I remember this but I forgot long division?  Also, I swear reading recently that Hitler had bull semen injected because his doctors were new age quacks. C/d?
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Oct 2, 2015 14:08
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Ensign Expendable posted:By cloudy I meant that there are clouds outside in the sky, not smoke inside. Yes, unless it's a sunny day, the loader can't see the bulk of his ammunition. How the gently caress does that work? Shouldn't the overengineered German tanks have a lil' electric light bulb inside?
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Oct 2, 2015 14:09
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Phobophilia posted:How the gently caress does that work? Shouldn't all tanks have internal light sources, considering that they're kind of closed-off metal boxes and that the point of tanks?
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Oct 2, 2015 14:16
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Ensign Expendable posted:I just got my hands on a British ergonomics evaluation of some German tanks. Turns out there are some fun drawbacks to the Tiger, like the clinometer that slices the gunner when he traverses the turret, a shell clip that injures the loader's hands, and also the ammo rack that is rendered invisible when it's cloudy. Does it mention which version of the Tiger (Early, Late, etc) and which turret type (Since there are 6 different turrets used) they evaluated?
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Oct 2, 2015 14:27
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Arquinsiel posted:This site has some images of it: http://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/43102565094/the-mad-minute-marksmanship-training-in-the Prone then. Yeah, 300 yards at a 2ft circle in the center of a 4ft square bisected by horizontal solid color change. That's pretty much the optimal conditions for pulling off that feat. Don't get me wrong, 15 well placed shots in 1 minutes with a bolt action is pretty great but I think you could have taken any well trained infantryman at that time and most would have qualified under those conditions.
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Oct 2, 2015 14:31
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Delivery McGee posted:
I'm pretty sure it's a little of column A, a little of column B. Most of the ones I've seen that have had really bad extraction problems either had a lot of cosmolene still on the inside of the chamber (and that poo poo can be hard to get off without some serious scrubbing) or they were from the worst of the war production years, '42-'43. Chambers from those years have a tendency to be a bit over-sized but they also tend to be rough as poo poo because they were made quickly and tooling wasn't being tossed as soon as it should have been. On the flip side I've got a m91/30 sniper (and I've shot three others) and every one I've handled has been exceptional. They were made on totally different production lines with completely different sets of tooling and are of really high quality. I've never seen a stuck case with one of those. They're a great example of what that rifle is capable of being when it isn't being churned out by the millions for conscripts in an existential conflict that the country is losing. As for enfield chat - one of the things to remember is that the action on them is so slick because it's an inherently weak lockup. The American Krag was much the same and has a similarly smooth action. Having the lugs at the rear also leads to receiver stretch and headspacing issues over time. The enfield addresses this by having removable bolt heads, but factoring in that your gun is going to shoot itself out of spec relatively quickly isn't exactly a great solution. Again, it's not a terrible rifle, but it's an adequate one at best. It did the job they needed it to do and it's a neat historical curiosity but there are good reasons why the British Army wanted to replace it with something based on a Mauser action. Ideally they were looking to do the same trick the US did twelve years earlier when we abandoned the Krag for the 1903 but WW1 got in the way of that. Instead the P14 (which was being produced in the US due to a lack of production capability in Britain) was rechambered to .30-06, christened the m1917, and used by the US military to equip soldiers as fast as we could once we got in the war. More Americans ended up carrying that into battle than the 1903 and it was arguably a far superior combat arm. Of course procurement politics being what they are we abandoned the foreign designed gun after the war and went back to the 1903, although a lot of the good bits of the 1917 (e.g. the sights) were carried over in the 10903A3 revision.
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Oct 2, 2015 14:53
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Phobophilia posted:How the gently caress does that work? Prof. Porsche got ahold of the request and decided it'd be maximally efficient to use a single light bulb, and then use a complex series of mirrors in para-scopes to shine the light from it all over the tank While that was under development, the first two iterations had no lights, and later versions had light bulbs.
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Oct 2, 2015 16:17
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It's pretty telling that I read that and gave it a 40% chance of being true
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Oct 2, 2015 17:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:Prof. Porsche got ahold of the request and decided it'd be maximally efficient to use a single light bulb, and then use a complex series of mirrors in para-scopes to shine the light from it all over the tank Nothing like getting hit and having shards of glass fly around the inside of your metal box.
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Oct 2, 2015 17:30
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JcDent posted:Shouldn't all tanks have internal light sources, considering that they're kind of closed-off metal boxes and that the point of tanks? They should, and usually do. There was a comment in the report saying that two lightbulbs would solve this issue completely.
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Oct 2, 2015 17:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:They should, and usually do. There was a comment in the report saying that two lightbulbs would solve this issue completely. They also could have improved it by putting checklists on the side for the guys building it to remember how much they've done.
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Oct 2, 2015 17:40
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Wait, so that lightbulb thing was actually true, or did I just show how gullible I am?
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Oct 2, 2015 18:40
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The Schneider CA1, the first (and legendarily awful) French tank did not have such a feature, which at least allowed the crew an easy way to judge how good the workmanship was. The British rhomboid tanks were lit by a series of festoon lamps running round the top; sadly in this context a "festoon lamp" is a tubey-shaped thing that you stick in your motor-car dashboard to see the instruments by at night, and not the oversized fairy lights that Google sends back as the first few picture results. The lamps themselves were, as you might expect, rather weedy, which is exactly what you need while riding in a gigantic 50 celsius metal coffin that's slowly gassing you with exhaust, whose armour is thin enough to be worried by sustained rifle fire in the right place, and where you're stumbling around trying not to fall into the engine or the exhaust pipe or the entirely exposed flywheel. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 18:59
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Well, drat, now I have to double-post. I feel so gauche. 100 Years Ago The German tactics now being used against the Hohenzollern Redoubt are more crude and unsophisticated than Benny Hill doing a Lady Godiva-themed chase sequence, but much like most of M. Hill's oeuvre, it's a firm hit with the target audience. Louis Barthas finally gets a break after seven consecutive nights up the line, and Kenneth Best's diary has taken a turn for the boring.
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Oct 2, 2015 20:50
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Trin Tragula posted:The Schneider CA1, the first (and legendarily awful) French tank did not have such a feature, which at least allowed the crew an easy way to judge how good the workmanship was. The British rhomboid tanks were lit by a series of festoon lamps running round the top; sadly in this context a "festoon lamp" is a tubey-shaped thing that you stick in your motor-car dashboard to see the instruments by at night, and not the oversized fairy lights that Google sends back as the first few picture results. You forgot 'desperately avoid any liquid mud patches so you don't sink into the quagmire and drown in the box you didn't manage to escape from". And not breaking all your bones when going over a bump since said metal box has no suspension. At least the exhaust problems got solved...by the Mark IV 
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Oct 2, 2015 21:30
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Don't forget that the tank is also gassing you via propellant gasses when you shoot! Awesome!
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Oct 3, 2015 00:41
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I'm going to assume that all American army instructions are delivered via rap.
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Oct 3, 2015 04:07
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Sadly the rest of the thing isn't in rap.
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Oct 3, 2015 04:32
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Sloppy Slovack's I still marvel how you can get any dudes in BTR-50.
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Oct 3, 2015 06:29
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Tomn posted:I think I recall reading that one of the problems the Spanish navy had at the time was divided command - there was a master of the ship, but also a master of the soldiers, and it was the master of the soldiers who was in command in battle. This was the default from the first Navies until the 17th century Netherlands. Ships' Captains were noblemen or upper class citizens who had gotten their comissions from being wealthy and influential, and they often paid at least some of their ship's costs (and Athens used to even have a few Captains per ship to share the monetary burden). Captains didn't receive any formal training and they weren't expected to know their arses from their elbows wrt. naval matters, but because they were from the upper classes they were expected to know how to fight. Ship's masters were the people who were expected to handle the naval matters. And they were of a different breed. They were from the lowest of the free classes and had risen through the sailors' and rowers' ranks. In Athens even the ship's marines held a higher rank than the ship's master. They also didn't receive any formal education, but were apprenticed by other masters. The Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie was the first organization to require their officers to pass a naval examination and this was one of the reasons that made the Dutch Navy the greatest on Earth in the 17th century. The English copied the examination system later and with good results.
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Oct 3, 2015 07:54
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JcDent posted:Sloppy Slovack's 20 dudes even. Must be the size of a bus.
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Oct 3, 2015 08:24
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Tias posted:An uncontrollable tic in the eye. Oh god, how do I remember this but I forgot long division? I dunno specially about the former, but everything I've read confirms the latter. Dude was mainlining Heroin™ and meth, at least, and probably a lot of other poo poo. As my partner (a trans man, who is obviously knowledgeable in such matters) points out, it was probably just poorly refined testosterone supplements, rather than actual bovine jizz. Cyrano4747 posted:(bolt-action rifle chat) Right, the SMLE served its purpose, it was revolutionary when it was introduced in the half-a-step-removed-from-musket era (with twice the magazine capacity as its contemporaries, but still loaded five at a time), good enough in the Great War, and then they left most of 'em on the beach at Dunkirk before they could wear out. And yeah, I know the whole story of the proposed .276 cartridge, which would've been a killer app for its time, but they decided not to got with it for the P14 because they had so much .303 laying around from the colonial wars, and it'd be a waste to throw it all away. Turns out the rimless-case-small-bullet crowd eventually won with 5.56; the P13 was just ahead of its time. On that note: one of the major failings of the SMLE is loading the clips. You have to stack the rounds just so, otherwise the gun jams when the rims catch on each other. But weren't the clips loaded at the ammo factory, and the clips themselves disposable?
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Oct 3, 2015 09:05
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Why is the SMLE called "short magazine"? Was there a version with a longer magazine that was abandoned due to feed difficulties or something?
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Oct 3, 2015 09:10
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The Lone Badger posted:Why is the SMLE called "short magazine"? Was there a version with a longer magazine that was abandoned due to feed difficulties or something? I think it's a shorter (rifle, not magazine) version of the 'magazine lee enfield', i.e. the first one to have a magazine at all?
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Oct 3, 2015 09:48
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Yeah, "short, magazine", in that it's barely more than carbine-length barrel, and has a magazine. There was a long magazine LE (well, just MLE at the time, having no short version to compare it to) with a more traditionally musket-length barrel before it. Edit: also those abbreviations were pronounced "Emily" and "Smelly" by the soldiers who used them. Edit: The O.G MLE.:  and the various "short" versions:  At bottom is the improved WWII-era No. 4. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Oct 3, 2015 |
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Oct 3, 2015 10:04
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I like the stubby nose SMLEs
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Oct 3, 2015 12:48
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I bought Barthas's memoirs a few days ago. Absolutely worth reading. Cyrano, to add some more stuff to what has been said about people mistaking rifle for machinegun fire: Jünger writes about the intensity of rifle fire a few times, but he never compares it to the sound of machineguns. He says "rollendes Feuer".
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Oct 3, 2015 12:58
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Delivery McGee posted:On that note: one of the major failings of the SMLE is loading the clips. You have to stack the rounds just so, otherwise the gun jams when the rims catch on each other. But weren't the clips loaded at the ammo factory, and the clips themselves disposable? I can't say for certain. What I can say is that I've seen WW2 british .303 issued loaded in clips inside disposable cloth bandoleers and I've also seen WW2 era .303 packaged in cartons not on clips. Same with British and Russian ammo, for what it's worth. I strongly suspect that it came both ways. Pre-loaded ammo is a hell of a lot easier to pass out right before an assault etc, but ammo packaged neatly in boxes is a lot, LOT more efficient to ship. edit: I would flat out assume that soldiers were instructed in how to load stripper clips. That's one of those basic things that would be insane to not sit down and show them, especially since the ammo was standardized (although with different loadings I believe) between the MGs and the rifles.
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Oct 3, 2015 21:57
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100 Years Ago The Germans finish recapturing the Hohenzollern Redoubt, the Greek government officially protests the landings at Salonika, and we get some interesting contrast with Louis Barthas's experience (and also Messieurs Leblanc and Cros-Mayrevielle) in the person of Captain Henri de Lecluse, the Count of Trevodal. (His memoir is extremely annoyingly-formatted from a day-by-day perspective, but there's some good poo poo in there if ever I can work out how to fit it in.) JaucheCharly posted:Cyrano, to add some more stuff to what has been said about people mistaking rifle for machinegun fire: Jünger writes about the intensity of rifle fire a few times, but he never compares it to the sound of machineguns. He says "rollendes Feuer". You have no idea how much I need someone to translate his actual diaries into English 
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Oct 3, 2015 22:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:I can't say for certain. What I can say is that I've seen WW2 british .303 issued loaded in clips inside disposable cloth bandoleers and I've also seen WW2 era .303 packaged in cartons not on clips. Same with British and Russian ammo, for what it's worth. I strongly suspect that it came both ways. Pre-loaded ammo is a hell of a lot easier to pass out right before an assault etc, but ammo packaged neatly in boxes is a lot, LOT more efficient to ship. Fascinating. I don't know how I got the impression, but I thought the clips were loaded with ammo, wrapped in paper and boxed before last-mile. Probably it came from currently available surplus ammo which was presented in that way.
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Oct 3, 2015 23:13
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Like i said I've seen both versions. My guess is they did some of both for different circumstances. Also note that the ammo I have experience with is WW2 vintage.
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Oct 4, 2015 00:38
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